Late response to a query by Bill Harm on the March 30th PF livestream regarding making stains on parchment map backgrounds. I couldn't recall which Annual issue it had been on during the stream, but it's the Parchment and Paper one from June 2007!

This is an old sample map I made back in 2015, and which I've shown on the Forum before, for an ancient wargame campaign set in and around Anatolia, regarding some of the peoples and places mentioned in various versions of the story of the Argonauts:

It's not a complete set of everything you can do with it, but it gives a few ideas what was presented with that Annual issue.

I found it is worth hunting around online for old maps more generally, when I was working on my version of a Lovecraftian Providence map late last year. That one compiled information from about a dozen different maps in the end, as the most detailed ones - needed to identify specific properties - were originally published in at least one book, with each double-page map spread scanned separately online.

It really depends how much precision and detail you need from the historical side though, as it can be a lengthy process to find what YOU want, NOT what Google wants to show you!

Can't speak for how Ricko accomplished this, but it would certainly be very easy to do it all in the one FCW file.

What's caught my eye is how similar these hedges look at the overall scale-look of Sue's sample map here, to the effect you can get using the hedge symbols in the CA169 Fantasy Town style pack. However, those aren't connecting symbols, so you have to do it all by hand, one bit of hedge at a time!

(And before you ask, yes, I already did this in my Hydras In Smoke Maze for the city of Embra in the Community Atlas 😁)

I have found the DriveThru search options to be frustrating too. It's not helped because they have several separate sites, and some publishers will only add their products to one or two (commonly DriveThru and Wargame Vault). Searching also presupposes all publishers will use the same keyword terms in their products, and not all do.

Of course, it's possible the kinds and styles of symbols you're looking for may not exist anyway. We have kept coming back to requests for modern and cyberpunk symbols before on the Forum here, for instance.