Returning to Alarius, if not to my usual part of it, in my Dungeon24-ish project (this previous topic has more information on that), saw me hunting for a suitable location on the Southern Scar Environs map of eastern Alarius, for where to place the fourth and final "Crypts" Inkwell dice design map.

That's a big area, and one affected by the unpleasantly weird effects from The Scar, the linear volcanic feature surrounded by swathes of greyness in the top centre of the orange rectangle in the above illustration. The dungeon design is, by contrast, tiny, although the nature of The Scar, as sketched in the map notes, coupled with the fact this was to be another burial tomb site, had already suggested something undead and/or necromantic as a theme for the subterranean layout. So that narrowed things down somewhat, and ultimately, the site very nearly chose itself, given that one of the few labelled main locations on the Southern Scar map was "Witch's Valley", which had a circle of standing stones set in its midst. Right at the northwestern, mountain-enclosed, end was a cave symbol, so that was that!

The orange rectangle around the cave is actually 25 miles by 16 in size, so not wanting to simply drop in a little dungeon map there, as has started to become typical for this project, I also needed to devise a suitable area map into which the dungeon design could be fitted. Having sketched the basic features for this onto graph paper, I then added a random selection of additional items from the sources mentioned in my first post last time on Mate Ora, although here, the selections were tweaked to better reflect the negative feeling of this area, so relatively near The Scar - if sometimes with a few hints that things were not always as they now appear here too. Once these feature locations were emplaced, it was possible to draw in a few river and stream lines to fit, since while no major river is shown in Witch's Valley on the Southern Scar map, valleys rarely happen without something of the sort, and the mountainous terrain, plus the near-tropical location (the cave symbol is at roughly 37° N latitude), showed there would be some water channels at least.

Then it was time for the mapping. Several possible overland styles were identified as having a suitably large number of mountain and hill options, of which the DeRust Overland style from Annual 81 seemed a good fit. Thus the Witch's Valley Head map:

The labelling font is the Mason Serif Alt Bold one that comes with CC3+, as that seemed a comfortably "spiky" fit for this map style. As normal, there'll be PDF and text file notes to provide a few more details on the labelled items in the final Atlas version. While the sites for these were chosen purely randomly, it was pleasing to find they'd clustered more towards the western to northwestern part, given those are the directions of the more imposing, larger, mountain symbols on the Southern Scar map beyond this selected area.

Well, I did already tinker together a few symbols for overland undersea use like this, which are available as part of the Atlas download pack. You can see some of them in-use on my deep sea-bed Errynor Map One - The Cliff map in the Atlas. If you dig around among the other seafloor maps from that one, you'll see I carried out a few more experiments with home-made undersea symbols, and the reuse of non-undersea symbols as undersea ones too!

I have to say too, that making new vector symbols for this kind of mapping is far easier than making bitmap ones 😁!

For the water-supply point, clay-lined dug-out ponds will work nicely as rainwater traps, if suitable hollows don't already exist. Channels from those can carry water downslope to wherever it's needed. However, the island's of a size and form that there could easily be wells dug, or even a natural spring or two (or a combination of all three) without needing to worry about more artificial means of water supply.

Interested to see how far back you'd faded the windrose lines in the latest map iteration.

Just a thought, but for Pern, maybe the windrose centres should be on a few of the more significant weyrs, not on the sea (probably without the fancy symbol though, if so)?

Glad you'd got it sorted now!