Returning to Doriant for my next Atlas maps, this time I was heading for somewhere on Ethra, the huge island in the great, almost-landlocked, southwestern sea there:

Examining the notes for Ethra indicated the island was split into a series of provinces, although much of those descriptions centred only on the major settlements, so it seemed there'd be plenty of options to slide-in a small dungeon map somewhere unobtrusively, even when surrounded by one of the typical 20-mile-square area maps I've favoured for much of this project. The Inkwell dice-map dungeon layout had already sparked vague thoughts of something alchemical, so a quiet spot might be useful, and while there are plenty of such potential places in the vast, volcanic barrens on Ethra, my eye kept being drawn to a small, labelled area, Kara's Vale;

The way this area was mapped intrigued, as the Vale's woodland looked to be sunken compared with the woods to either side, yet had no major river shown flowing through it. With the volcanic nature of the whole island, this made me think of a small rift valley, so that's what it became:

In an effort to persist with using linked mapping styles for this area, I decided on the Mike Schley styles (SS4 for the dungeon and the surface entrance site), something I've not really used much for overland mapping before. While the original Ethra maps showed deciduous and conifer woodland symbols, because the site is in the tropics, around 23°S latitude, here I went with "jungle" style trees instead. As I wanted to suggest higher plateaus to either side of the Vale, there was a bit of a battle to show the north-facing cliffs, as such options aren't available in this style, so I had to use the normal cliffs, and then hide everything except the upper parts with a suitable land-textured mat, something adding a second, lower, cliffline in the northeastern corner, greatly complicated! However, the jungle helps hide most things, one way or another...

The general map design was set by how the shadowed valley and unshadowed woods were shown on the Ethra map, and where the major river, just on the northern edge here, lay, while the specific features were all placed randomly, using my usual grid and dice method, with a one-mile grid spacing. What those places were was determined using or interpreting cards from various prompt decks produced by The Story Engine, a little like last time's for the Selenos maps in Artemisia, except this time also drawing from their "Deck of Worlds" as well as the "Loremaster's Deck" main sets, plus the "Worlds of Myth & Magic", "Loremastery" and "World & Lore Bridge" expansion sets. That's where pretty well all the on-map names came from too.

Map notes expanding on some of the place-names, again largely based on what the cards came up with, will be in the final Atlas version of the map, and also much as last time, the cards inspired thoughts and details beyond what I'd expected, which of course is their whole point. As for where the dungeon layout might be placed, there wasn't a shortage of possibilities. Ultimately, Windy Tower, northwest of the map's centre, won out, as we'll see next time.

Glad you got that sorted. Those are nice-looking floorplans!

Ellipses are fairly straightforward in CC3+. Just right-click on the Circle drawing tool icon - |CC2CIRP| - to call up the options list, and there's an Ellipse tool right there.

Spirals are a lot trickier though. Remy Monsen wrote a blog post about creating a macro to draw a spiral here, and although writing macros like this is pretty advanced stuff compared to simply drawing things and placing symbols using the program, they will let you automate much more sophisticated tasks with elegance. That blog post is the third in a short series of three on using macros, and you may find it useful to read through all of them (there are links at the end of that "spiral" post) if you're unfamiliar with how they're written before embarking on spiral design tests. And as usual, if you get stuck, just ask again here!

Seeing the maps appearing on the Forum using this new style already, it's perhaps unsurprising I've felt the need to join in, as much as anything because the main sample map that comes with the Handdrawn Fantasy Annual style included The Wyvern's Wood!

In a break with my usual mapping too, this one isn't intended for the Community Atlas (although it's possible it may eventually feature there, probably in a variant form). That orange outlining square shows the region I picked to illustrate from the sample map.

Having had a long fascination with woodlands for fantasy mapping and scenario designing, I was somewhat spoilt for choice as to which of my previous RPG-related settings to draw upon in creating this map. What I went with was a selection of items from a storyline drafted in 1993. I'd intended it originally as a one-off scenario, run using the Call of Cthulhu rules, for a twice-yearly gaming convention I attended for much of the 1990s. The design though grew into something that needed a longer timescale as a short campaign instead, and ultimately, it was never run at all.

That scenario was a modern-day one, set initially on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, England, and which included various loosely Arthurian and mythological items, then increasingly introducing horror and surreal elements, rising to a chaotic finale. What I've extracted from it here are specific significant locations, adding them to the new map in no strong order, since the originals were designed to be encountered in only a rough order anyway - and in some cases repeatedly. Most of that detail and pathway structure has naturally been omitted here.

So this is what I came up with:

As is obvious though, I had to draw on other handdrawn styles from SS1 in identifying the various features, to highlight them sufficiently, and their sizing is of course hopelessly out of scale, as so often happens with this kind of pictorial map. Maybe though some of these added symbols might give some ideas for future expansions of the new style!

You can use Ctrl+C or the drop-down Edit menu's Copy command, select the items you want to copy over, and then click "Do it", picking a suitable point to copy them from.

You will need to prepare a new map file first (just set up a blank map in the correct style, and of a suitable size), and have both it and your existing map open together to do this more easily. Providing you open each map separately, that won't be a problem (just use Windows Explorer to find the files you need, for instance).

This style follows the original Hobbs's Architecture book from 1876 (a free PDF of which comes with this Annual issue), and that indeed just leaves gaps for the doorways, which the style mimics.

For advice on using this issue, or indeed any Annual issues, see the accompanying PDF Mapping Guide. You can find this Guide, and any sample maps, images or other associated information files, wherever you've told the program to install the Annuals. On a standard default Windows installation, this will be in the C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus\Annual folder, after which you need just look for either the number or the name (the first year's Annuals only have a number) to find the correct sub-folder with all those details.

If you can't find, or remember, the issue you're after, check Sue's image wall of all the Annuals elsewhere on the Forum here, which covers up to the middle of 2o24 currently.