The published maps and artwork for ShadowDark all tends to be black-and-white. I don't mean greyscale here, but sharply-contrasting black-and-white line hand-drawings. It would be good to have something similar for CC3+ (especially for dungeon-style maps, as the current CC black-and-white dungeon styles don't have sufficient bitmap options, or high enough symbol and bitmap resolutions, to look sufficiently clear and presentable - I did some tests for this too), particularly given the current popularity of OSR systems overall, which tend to favour this kind of map look in general. It is though easy enough to convert these maps to at least greyscale, simply by adding a suitable RGB Matrix Process effect to the whole map:

Oh, and a minor tweak to the colour of the lettering!

There's an obvious couple of problems here. One is there isn't a great enough diversity of symbols to cover even the fairly small range of non-settlement features that might be useful, and which only an expansion of the style (either by PF or personally) would solve. [There is a further issue here too, in that none of the location symbols actually work to the standard snap grids used in this Annual. I'm not sure if that may have been amended since I downloaded my copy, however. I ended up having to place most by eye alone, certainly.]

The other is that anything placed in a coastal hex looks as if it's really in the sea, because that's just how hex maps of this sort work. That though is something I could resolve. Plus as I'd been randomly rolling terrain up, I'd noticed there was no "Hills" option in the current ShadowDark tables, so decided to tweak that a little to include some.

So the maps, and additional keyed terrains, came to look like this:

All I did for the coasts was add a small section of land from each adjacent hex over the coastal sea.

Just to make sure I'm not leaving anyone behind here, some brief explanation. From the early days of RPGs, those running the games have been encouraged to design areas for the players to explore, frequently using random generation systems to do so. "Hexcrawling" is the overland version of this, where each hex represents a fixed distance (if sometimes a little vaguely defined, given a hexagon is not the same size from its centre all around), commonly 5 or 6 miles, though larger or smaller sizes than this are not infrequent. What are now called "Old School Rules" (OSR) RPG systems often make use of this technique, and these have seen a particular upsurge in popularity this year, following ongoing problems from the current owners of "Dungeons & Dragons".

One of the unexpectedly phenomenal successes of recent times in the OSR line has been a new RPG called "ShadowDark", which presents a very streamlined update on the OSR theme, that incorporates improvements from modern RPGs more generally. I've been very taken with the whole ShadowDark RPG conception, particularly as the Core Rules include everything needed to play the game, such as a random generation system for hexcrawls.

Last weekend, I did a couple of small test areas, to see how the system worked (hexes here are 6 miles in size), and although the system which will appear in the printed Core Rules has been tweaked a little since then, I prepared the maps in CC3+ through the week, to see how they'd look, using the 2010 Overland Hex style. These are the basic maps as generated by the random system rolls, with a list of their contents, and a separate key:

This is a delightful-looking map - though I do especially like this style, so may be a bit biased!

A scale would be good, as the symbol sizes make it look like a little group of small islands right now, not a world map.

Maybe adjust the overall map size so the northernmost peninsula and tree symbol aren't vanishing off the top border edge of the map. It also looks as though the one snowy mountain symbol on this same northerly landmass is partly sitting over a couple of the grassy mountains that should be in front of it.

As Julian mentioned, some further ocean colouring would be helpful, and perhaps seeing if those two large green atolls in the northeast are on the same Sheet as the general landmasses, as they don't seem to have the same outer glow effect to them, which would hint at shallower seas closer to their shores, and perhaps also in their central lagoons (assuming that would be appropriate for what you have in mind here, of course).

Yep, had guessed something must be wrong. Best wishes to Ralf for a speedy recovery!