No, no. It's Tinkerbell's Giant Grasping Claw.?

Sorry @jmabbott; didn't intend to make it look like I'd ignored your Oct 7 reply to me, but for some reason (and I think Sue's raised the point previously), it didn't show up when I visited the Forum yesterday, and indeed I only discovered it today because there was a new Notification about it which weirdly wasn't there yesterday, or when I first came to the Forum today! Oddly, the bitmap discussion posts, including that with your grey-dot PNG WERE there though then!

The early D&D maps everywhere were a real mish-mash. The very first one I ever saw, before I even saw the rules, was published in the May '76 issue of Games & Puzzles magazine, part of an article on D&D by Steve Jackson (of the original Games Workshop). That was beautifully hand-drawn, with nice scribble-sketched filling for the solid rock, but there wasn't even a scale on it, let alone a grid! The sample dungeon level on page 5 of "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures", Vol.3 of the original three 1974 booklets (white box for me, in '76!), was sketchily hand-drawn with solid black for the rock, and plain white passages and rooms, but again, neither scale nor grid. Then the maps in Dave Arneson's extensive "The Temple of the Frog" wilderness and dungeon adventure in Blackmoor Supplement II (1975 - mine's the '78 5th reprint!) each have a hugely invasive square grid across all parts of every map - to the point where some parts of the map become more or less illegible, because even the parts with squared walls are slightly offset to the grid, and the grid's just so dominant. Yet even there, none have a scale! There are a few corridor and room sizes mentioned in the text details, though the place-names mentioned in the text aren't always shown on the maps either. I think I came to the decision the squares had to be 10 feet across when I ran part of it. Seems incredible looking back though - and can you imagine the uproar online if WotC did that now?!

On the black-background PNG, I've noticed for some time that the default Win 10 image viewer, "Photos" currently, I think, has an irritating tendency to add a black background to any transparent background PNGs that are fairly light-coloured. While this is handy for white-on-white images, it's off-putting when you see the thumbnails in File Explorer suddenly with black backgrounds you know you didn't put there. I wonder if something like that's happened here?

You could use the map divisions as your scale, though as the map's rectangular, you'd need to pick the one that works best only for that, and just add a note on the outside edge of the map border to say what the scale is. Adding a scale bar - it's easy enough to draw your own if the symbol option for the style doesn't appeal, for instance - might be a better alternative here though.

Are the different land colours intended to show approximate contour levels? Or are they for vegetation background effect? If the former, maybe think of adding a height key. If the latter, then I'd agree with Sue that the trees may need adjusting, as they seem too sparsely scattered for clarity otherwise.

Finally got round to watching this on catch-up tonight, and very good it was too!

Nothing particularly new there for me for once, but as Sue said in the chat, it's an excellent resource now to point out for other people regarding importing fills and symbols into a different style map, for example.

And I never cease to be impressed by how much you and Ralf are able to suppress yourselves when something goes awry! There's a lesson for the rest of us there too, perhaps ?

During some discussions on another Forum in the last couple of days regarding options for computerised mapping, the subject of Joe Sweeney's excellent videos for CC3 came up, and I made the point about them being for CC3, not CC3+, which has come up here repeatedly, even relatively recently.

Then another commentator said there was actually a whole series for CC3+, posted about three years ago. And when I checked, lo and behold, yes there IS indeed an entire set for CC3+, overland mapping, and another set for city mapping with CD3 added a year ago.

They're all on this YouTube page, with the first overland video here.

However, the ProFantasy tutorials page still links just to the older CC3 videos. I don't think there are any newer dungeon/battlemap video tutorials, certainly, but the links maybe need updating now for the CC3+ tutorials (and perhaps also the zipped download set needs changing?).

I think the newer videos have come up on the Forum before, because I'm sure I watched the overland series for CC3+, but I tend to use the PF tutorials page when I'm quickly trying to find links to pass to someone else, and I know the last time I checked the link for Joe Sweeney's videos I had saved separately, the CC3+ videos DIDN'T appear on whatever that link went to.