As I noted after completing my Dendorlig Hall project last October, I'd hoped to have returned to my Alarius mapping by now. Other matters intervened however, and are liable to persist through at least the first quarter of this year too, so I thought it worth trying some smaller mapping projects for a while instead. Partly, this came about following discussions with a few folks on a Discord regarding what to do about possibly continuing with the Dungeon23 concept this year, given almost no one had persisted all year with that, and few had accomplished anything like what they'd hoped for it.

The concept I have for myself currently is to try to map a small dungeon or area each week or so, which, although probably impractical in the long-term, does provide a focus of sorts. Those I complete will all go into the Community Atlas, and following my normal preference for some element of randomness about such Atlas creations, I decided to use the Inkwell Ideas dice sets to generate the base maps in all cases.

For those unfamiliar, the Inkwell dice sets are packs of themed, over-sized, six-sided dice (D6s), where each face has on it a different geomorphic dungeon or cavern drawing. The packs contain either five, six or eight such D6s, and there are currently 12 packs available, three of which are overground settings, nominally "Villages", "Cities" and "Ruins", although the "Ruins" dice are duplicates of the "Cities" ones, where parts of the design have been wholly or partly destroyed. Twelve packs, you say 😁? As in months in a year...

By using random numbers, and selections, of dice from each set, I've generated 52 individual hand-drawn maps based on what the dice provided, which designs were then randomly allocated to places on Nibirum for which regional maps existed in the version of the Atlas I'd most recently downloaded, albeit from earlier last year. The ultimate placements for almost none have been finalised yet, as I'm opting to identify specific locations for them only as I'm progressing. So far, things may turn out to be more complex than I'd hoped, as it may be additional smaller area maps will be needed for many of these along the way too, to define more exactly where they are.

However, the first small map and its new area map are complete, and have been submitted for the Atlas, having oddly enough landed by-chance right into one of my own area maps, the Wyvern Citadel Defence Zone on Kentoria!

Although actually prepared in order of dungeon first, then overground, when going into the Atlas, this situation of course is reversed, so the general area the dungeon was to end up in has first to be identified, what became the Monseignor District map, whose placement was to be here:

That area now looks like this, in more detail:

Or at least it does using the Overland Black & White style from Annual 20. Most features had already appeared in the earlier larger area map, or its description, although now some semi-random names and features could be added to those previously unnamed and not shown. Plus of course, the location of the dungeon map had to be provided as well, at Melgore:

I spotted today that Remy Monsen has just posted the final segment in his three-part look at mapping railways at battlemap scale using CC3+, and really just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed this examination of practical mapping based on real-world sources. There are links to the earlier parts, from May and June 2023, at the end of this new blog piece as well. I know I could comment there, but such comments tend to get easily overlooked, and this is an interesting, and very useful, group of articles, like many on the blog.

If anyone's needing more inspiration for drawing rolling stock especially, don't forget too to check out what's available by way of scale drawings from actual railways which abound in the model railway world, as well as via museum and heritage railway sites, many of which are freely available to download online, albeit as Remy mentioned, those prior to the early 20th century are in shorter supply.

Plus, as Chaosium will be launching a KickStarter for the boardgame of their huge "Call of Cthulhu" roleplaying-game scenario "Horror on the Orient Express" next year, for release in 2025, this might be no bad time to brush-up on your railway carriage design skills 😉!

If the gelatinous cube symbol is actually partly transparent anyway (given you can see the texture of the floor below it), items don't all need adding to the cube. As long as the items exist as symbols, they can simply be put "below" the cube by the map's creator.

On the size element, the "you can drive a cart along them" argument is partly why I suggested seeing the sewers in "The Third Man" movie, because that's where the climactic chase happens, with large numbers of police and soldiers, where there are multiple levels stacked over one another, and nobody has any problems for headroom, and places are up to river-cavern wide in parts. Somewhat like the early London Underground "tubes" (and I'd assume others built around the same time, later 19th century), some of these would have been dug out as trenches, had their surfaces coated with mud/bricks/concrete, etc., and then covered over later where necessary.

I suspect green became the default sewer-water option as an easy way to differentiate it from the blue "ordinary" water which didn't involve anything too "realistic" (given blue as normal water isn't realistic either, of course).

And are we calling these the Sue-ers now 😉😁!

My email about this arrived around 6½ hours ago now. Resubbed already, naturally!