Thanks very much Sue!

Inkwell indeed have a fascinating collection of RPG-ideas mechanics like the dice and accompanying books, and a range of cards as well, for settings, adventures and characters. In fact, they currently have an active crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit that has only 36 hours left as I type this (ends 2024 May 10, 03:00 GMT) for some new cards.

Meanwhile, resuming from where I left off, the first thing I wanted to do was draw the base shapes for those hex-rooms, so they'd be actual hex shapes, not my wonky hand-drawn efforts. This would give a clearer impression of where the four upper level layouts could go, and allow adjusting the position of the inserted base-map, before starting the mapping. So I set-up a suitable 10-foot hex snap-grid:

The "Edit Hex Grid System" dialogue pane does pretty much all the work for you, as once you type in the first hex dimension, it automatically calculates the second. For everything else, apart from the grid system's name, I just used the default settings. The resulting maze of dots allows an easy check that the size will work for what's needed. One hex-room is larger though, so I also created a second, 15-foot hex grid similarly.

Then I created a TEMP Sheet and Layer, drew out both the hex-room layouts onto those, using 0.4-width lines, and made four copies of each that could then be moved around to test different layouts. The next illustration shows what I settled on just before beginning the map. In it, the BITMAP sheet now has a 50% transparency effect activated:

The locations for those upper levels are liable to need further adjustment, since I'm likely to want to vary the individual layouts, plus the cave walls will need to be shown too. That will mean more shuffling about, and could require the map border and background to be expanded as well. Neither should be all that difficult, at least in theory...

And so to the basic cave mapping:

Nothing fancy here as yet, as I've just dropped in a simple hand-copy fractal polygon of the main cave floor and the exterior, using the Cave, Default drawing tool (which also adds walls automatically). Using the drawing tool means it's easy to trace the exact outer lines of those hex-rooms in each respective cavern, although it does mean the cave floor won't be drawn beyond the map border. That creates a couple of problems, as the Outer Glow effect is larger than the current SCREEN sheet's mask (that thin white strip just outside the map's edge) can hide, and there's also a darkening towards the top left map corner due to the Inner Glow on the cave floors.

Enlarging the SCREEN's mask (typing-in the commands "collardel" - which removes the existing Screen Sheet mask - and then "collarauto" - which creates a new, larger, mask on the SCREEN Sheet) is easily done, but I'll wait a while for that, because I also want to draw on some exterior terrain over the cave's base design here, with some vegetation, to make clear it's the outside. Drawing that terrain "floor" so it extends beyond the map's border will also hide the "Inner Glow" issue there currently. That's something for another day though.

Since the next map in my sort-of Dungeon24 project was scheduled for a new continent for me, and the largest on Nibirum, Doriant, that seemed an opportunity to try to present it as a WIP topic for once. This is something I rarely try, as I usually forget to record what I've been doing as I go along when mapping. So, while making no definite promises, let's give it a try!

The starting point was, as usual for this part of the project, the base map generated by rolling, in this case three, of the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph dice from the "Delver" set, which produced this layout:

Each die in the Inkwell dice sets has the usual number somewhere on every face, and a unique symbol or letter to show which it is in that set (which is also keyed to descriptions in the accompanying book, for those sets that have them). The symbols have become more complex and non-ASCII as the series has progressed! Here, the "+" die is the one with the entrances, as mentioned last time (see the Petroc Hills topic). Ordinarily, I construct the layout based on the orientation and relative positions of each die as thrown, connecting them to form a pattern. Here though, the entrances die needs to be oriented to fit the rest of the pattern.

Naturally, being geomorphic, there will always be parts of the designs that can't be used, commonly exits that probably won't exist on the final map, or short stretches of dead-end passageways, like that in the lower left of the "1+" die. In this case, a large proportion of the design on the "1$" die and about one-third of that on the "6@" die don't link with the rest. Those might be connected up easily by adding short sections of new tunnel to the linked caves, or they could be left out. As none of these unconnected sections had any of the intriguing hex-rooms, or any other features not present in the rest (except the natural stone steps, which I'd just used in the previous map), I was already thinking to leave them off the final design. What convinced me to do so was checking the text in the accompanying "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition", as that suggested using the caves as a bee-folk lair, with the two hex-room caverns as having five vertical levels in each.

Naturally, those could be done as a set of separate maps, one for each level. Given the relatively small areas though, I thought it would be more interesting to try to present them on a single map, with labels to indicate which level was which instead. That would need space leaving on the base map where those could be drawn, so losing the upper segment from the dice design made sense. Thus we come to something like this:

from which a hand-drawn base map can be prepared, smoothing-out the no-longer-exist exits, and fitting the hex-rooms more tightly into that southern cavern especially. As my original hand-drawn version is now so amended and annotated I suspect nobody but me could make sense of it, I've redrafted just the map from it in a clearer form for use here, a scan of which can be inserted later into the CC3+ map for copying:

Graph paper makes copying the designs easier, as the dice geomorphs are based on a 10-square layout, with the exits always 3 squares from each die-face corner (hence the layout marks and dots, mostly cropped-off the edges in this diagram). I take each graph-square to be 10 feet per edge, which squares of course make rescaling the image in the CC3+ map much easier too.

A by-eye estimate, coupled with years of practice, suggested a base-map size of about 350 feet by 150 feet should work OK to start with (it can always be enlarged later, if needs-be), and having decided already to use the basic DD3 style of Caves & Caverns from Cartographer's Annual 7 for the map, I went ahead and created a new map, followed by inserting this base map onto a new BITMAP Sheet and Layer created for the purpose:

This screenshot shows the 10-foot grid squares, for easy comparison with the graph paper ones. And so it begins...

Helen, you can find that map, and many other illustrations, on the Pauline Baynes website. She was an amazing lady who did a huge number of illustrations, including the only ones of Middle Earth not drawn by Tolkien himself during his lifetime which he authorised.

This map, and that for Middle Earth, were available as posters at one time, as I used to have both. They are true works of art!

Plus, she also did all the maps and illustrations for all of Lewis's "Narnia" books. There is, or was, a single volume hardcover at one stage which had all the texts, maps and illustrations in, all in colour, if I recall correctly.

Interesting looking map so far.

The wall maybe looks a bit too perfectly circular for something apparently hastily constructed, and the interior also seems a little too "planned" in this regard. Typically with something rapidly fortified, there'll be houses, etc., that end up beyond the walls, or become demolished ruins (whose rubble then vanishes into the new walls!). Also, if the wall's quite new, few properties will have been built facing it so neatly, unless they too have been very recently (re)built. This ignores the problems or advantages because of terrain, naturally.

Some of the bitmap fills may need rescaling at some stage to avoid their repeating pattern being quite so obvious (the effect's accentuated currently because of the very fine-scale square grid, which makes it tricky to know which of the fills other than those at sea this might impact), and you might want to move the title box, as it's currently hiding part of those green segments of the undersea contours which presumably have some significance, given their limited extent.

Increasing the edge fade on the undersea contours would help blend the lines there, and you might want to redraw some of them using smooth polygons too, to lose those very sharp corners in places currently. The "Horsehead Nebula" deep water head looks good, although it probably shouldn't be cutting so directly through the shallower water contour near the shipyard.

To paraphrase from "The Simpsons" TV show, obviously...

"C:/DOS

"C:/DOS/RUN

"RUN/DOS/RUN"

😁