I know some folks here are keen Cthulhu-esque fans, and some may already know that Chaosium has just released a new "Arkham" supplement for their Call of Cthulhu RPG. When checking the webpage for more details on the book today, I spotted that as quite often, they've made some elements available for free online viewing and downloading (as PDFs), including four new maps, two of Arkham, one of the city's surrounds, and - still more interestingly to me at least - a new map of Massachusetts for 1922 which has on all the main Lovecraftian additional settlements! All these are beautifully done in period style, and you can find the download links here, by scrolling down to almost the end of the page.

There's also a four-page PDF copy of the Arkham Advertiser newspaper available there too, again prepared in period style by the two leading lights of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, Andrew Leman and Sean Branney, long noted for the excellence of their facsimile period physical products!

Two places I haven't seen mentioned here yet are Chaosium's Glorantha (which has so much lore it's effectively a real place for many who RPG there; plus avoid all those silly mapping projection problems in a world which is on the upper face (only) of a cube!), and of course out own Community Atlas world of Nibirum. Not everyone provides detailed descriptions for their maps there, but some do (I've been adapting bits and pieces from my own nearly 50 years of RPGing to what I've added there, for instance), and even without that, those maps are always worth exploring.

There's a possibility your system's showing "frames" (white lines connecting the nodes on a line or polygon). You can clear those from view using Ctrl + F, if memory serves (and if that's what was happening). It can be useful to show frames, as it makes picking out the nodes easier if you're trying to adjust them individually, but it quickly gets irritating when you're not doing that!

Nice-looking map, certainly!

If you're thinking of further tweaking beyond the point about the mountains (it's never easy deciding how much or how little you can cluster these things; it often depends on the style too, as some flow together better than others, and some styles won't overlap symbols properly), it might be worth adjusting the bitmap fill scaling for the woods and fields a little, to stop the repetition creeping in so much (most obvious in Evenwood), although that's quite a minor distraction once it catches your eye - so, sorry for mentioning it 😏😉...

I'd probably want to tweak the effect settings on the text too, especially the regional red labels that are fading into the terrain a little too much for my eye presently. Text tweaking is always one of the more difficult aspects of CC3+ mapping, as text is something the program doesn't handle as well as it might. It helps if you remember to set the fixed point before placing the text (albeit that gets a bit tedious if you need to change it every time), knowing the text may expand away from that point for different zoom and saved-image settings, or moving it about a little after placement, so that things like text on a curved line avoid having a letter over some key terrain element (always seems to happen for me...). I'd also be inclined to reduce the drop-shadow on the title text, and give that a somewhat broader outlining glow effect, just to help it stand out more than the "normal" text labels.

None of this is essential, or even all that significant, but you did invite comments!

You'll find there's a lot of catching-up to do, I suspect, so good luck with that!

With the poll, I've never constructed actual languages for RPGs/mapping, though I've used bits of those others have done (or adapted them; Tolkien's the obvious, though not the only, one). What I have done more frequently is generate random names from tables, and then adapt those, tweaking the spelling/pronunciation quite often, and then giving the names a supposed meaning sometimes. Or sometimes just making up interesting-sounding words.

As for the Annuals, while I have all of them, I've used only a fraction of them for actual mapping so far, though I do try to go with new styles when I'm doing maps for the Community Atlas especially. I agree with Sue though, that they all have their uses under different conditions and settings, and deciding which one(s) to use for each specific map is an interesting challenge in itself. Not found one I deliberately keep going back to repeatedly, as I'm always a bit concerned I'll get stale doing that (likely that's just me though😉!).

Thanks Jim!

Yeah, the Inkwell City dice are a bit trickier to use than some of the other sets. They work quite well for focal points within a town or a city, less well to not at all for defining the whole settlement. It's possible to tinker around with the Villages set too to get a kind of "fading edge" to the settlement, where the houses thin-out to fields and wilder lands. Surface settlements are often heavily dependent on the nearby terrain (rivers, coasts, available materials, good agricultural land, etc.) of course, so lend themselves less well to being generated purely randomly like this.

That ain't no turtle! 'Tis a lizard-folk lich!😁