I just don't know when to stop sometimes ?. Lifetime of designing RPG scenarios, I suspect, coupled with a desire to explore many avenues. All the time...

I second Sue's comments; this was an extremely difficult vote, as there are just so many fascinating maps produced in such different styles.

Hopefully, everyone contributing enjoyed their mapping, and perhaps learnt something fresh along the way.

It's certainly been a delight reviewing them all again now!

Get voting folks!

Reading contour maps like this is something of a specialist skill. It often benefits from field experience of walking over the terrain using a suitable map, or looking at an area and picking out features from the map as comparisons. Sometimes, it's very obvious what's too steep because of how close the contour lines are together - closer = steeper, basically.

Some folks are able to look at a contour map and visualise the terrain, and this is something you can teach yourself with practice, though not everyone finds it either possible or very easy to do.

You might find plotting out scale drawings, cross-sections at a right-angle to the contour lines, gives you a better idea of what the topography will really be like.

You might also examine real-world contour maps at an appropriate kind of scale to what you're planning, and look at where, and how, water flows over the landscape. Water always flows downhill, and goes for the easiest route, which often means where there's a steeper gradient.

However, you'd probably find more useful advice by searching online for "interpreting topographic maps", as there are a lot of suitable sites and videos regarding this topic. Good luck!

As suggested when I requested this part of Kentoria a few days ago, this is the WIP thread to try to show something of how this mapping project's been developing, and where I'm up to with it.

It all began in 2020 July, when Quenten suggested a series of potential mapping projects for various Forum "regulars" from an area in western Kentoria he'd just been mapping, called Shoenia. While I had no time then to do any mapping for "my" bit, Wyvern Citadel, I did some basic exploration of the area and made a few notes even then. Not much has been said about Kentoria, but what there is suggested to me a high magic-use continent, now threatened (if presumably only to an extent) by barbarians. I also discovered that this Citadel was the sole structure shown near the western shores of Kentoria on the continent map:

That suggested it was of considerable significance, and being next to the Barbarian Ocean (despite the considerable separation from the nearest land on that side of Kentoria) started suggesting reasons why, particularly seeing that Quenten's Shoenia map had provided a lot of obviously high-yielding agricultural land in the region, stretching for several hundred miles into the surrounding valleys (told by the numbers of settlements, as well as the extent of the farmed lands).

I toyed with a few ideas around all of this at different times, but it's only been this past week or so that ideas have really firmed-up. The orange boxed area on the Shoenia map here shows the area I decided would be useful to map in a little more detail around the Citadel itself, because that large, swampy, river delta seemed a likely place for barbarian sea-raiders to be able to strike unseen, tempted in by the obvious agricultural richness of its surroundings, ones likely equally rich in other resources, like gold, say!

What I've come up with is that the delta vicinity was attacked by barbarians last year, when an unusual sickness in Kentoria laid low much of the population, and prevented the folks hereabouts being as vigilant as normal. The raid also happened in the winter - or as much of winter as Nibirum's southern tropics ever get - during a spell of abnormally severe weather. It was so bad, the snowy remnants can still be seen on the south-facing slopes of many of the mountains hereabouts. It appears the weather was magically augmented by one or more powerful druids/shamans that accompanied the raiders. Some of the raiding ships were driven-off, though one larger fleet especially managed to land in the southernmost estuary of the delta, nearest Monseignor, which city was raided particularly heavily, losing much treasure, and having its Forum destroyed. While the Forum was quickly rebuilt, as the political leaders locally say, "bigger and better than before", the population remains very nervous, and has demanded further action, especially as the sickness seems to be dragging on in places into another year.

The area has been long known for its colourful wyverns. Indeed, some say the smallest kinds outnumber the birds in these parts, and are of comparable sizes. The region is sometimes called the Wyvern Coast elsewhere in Kentoria as a result.

So, wyverns. Wyverns in defence. Wyverns and their riders. Squadrons of wyvern-riders. Thinking here something on the lines of Anne McCaffrey's Pernese dragon-riders, with mentally-bonded wyvern and rider pairs. Aerial defenders made me think of the Battle of Britain in 1940, particularly because of KENToria, Kent being the English county above and near which much of the aerial combats then took place. Thus came about the recently-constructed Wyvern Citadel Defence Zone:

The perceptive may notice a certain - familiarity, shall we say - about some of the new place names. And some are just... well, why not?! I had to name the river and its delta, and The Great Stone Wall mountains conjured up for me the famous American Civil War general "Stonewall" Jackson. There'll be PDF and text-file notes to add more flavour to all this eventually in the Atlas.

There are four main colours of wyvern, as illustrated here by the four wyvern seals from Sue's brilliant new symbols pack with this month's Annual issue. Couldn't resist! Each colour has its own particular powers. The blue wyverns, for example, are extraordinarily powerful flyers, able to fly higher and for far longer than any other type of wyvern hereabouts. They also have the greatest wingspan of any of the wyverns. Or big wings, if you prefer. So, their primary training ground is the drome nearer the mountains where they're often found wild, at Duck's Ford. Obvious, if you know your Battle of Britain history, of course!

As for the Scrying Detection Finders, I'm sure someone will eventually start calling this system "Scrydar"...

The mapping was done using the CA128 Parchment Maps style from 2017 August, including the font, plus Sue's seals, as mentioned.

I'll add a copy of the Defence Zone map to my Gallery shortly, with more to follow on the area later!

I keep an eye on a few other places online than this Forum from time to time, and today came across this recent posting on Dyson Logos' blog. It concerns a very long, thin, detailed dungeon map, and you can download a free copy of it from the blog page in its coloured version, as well as a zip file in black-and-white with and without a grid. I've not come across anything quite like this previously.

What occurred to me was that this might be an interesting idea to try using the strip-map technique, highlighted back in May 2009's Cartographer's Annual issue. The nature of the map on Dyson's website would make it difficult to draw something similar using CC3+ as-is, as just being so long, but a chopped-up version like the classic strip map could work quite well.

Long walk for the player characters if the entrance and exit are at the same end, and the big treasure room's at the other, of course!