Map The Second is...

Hex 403, Bruga's Hold:

A logging hamlet on the upper Swirl River, among the woods of the southwestern Siljan Hills, this is a rather isolated, frontier-style settlement, with trails leading-off to logging camps, or former ones (the trails southeast of the river crossing were where much of the timber for the settlement originated, for instance). Markets here aren't common, but the open space is handy for storing piles of fresh timber prior to sending it off down-river, or overland by trail southwards. The self-styled Queen's tough, if not as young as she was, and her extended family keeps most things more-or-less in-check here, though her nieces at The Corner Daughters have a tendency to accuse those they dislike of theft, something that works best with outsiders. The grandiose apothecary's shop-name was a random choice (it does look outwardly like a small temple), which seemed too apt to waste - see the notes above on the Crystal Cathedral - while "Merry Wares" became something of a running joke, as it cropped up randomly twice more in different settlements in this set for quite different places. I retained that too, as GMs can decide if it's at all significant.

On the original map, I started out with the woods rather denser than they are now. That looked much too dominant, and would have been unrealistic so near the settlement, so, much like the original loggers here, I had to thin them out somewhat. The mapping style makes use of both tree and bush symbols, and a bitmap tree fill drawing tool, which in combination for the densest areas here help give the woods a particularly 3D feel, although the symbols have to be applied judiciously to better hide the edges of the bitmap-fill segments. Of course, I had to delete and redraw all the first areas of the fill, as they were far too large, and it took a little experimenting to get the sizes right after that, in combination with the individual scatter of trees and bushes. Luckily, I had a fair idea of how best to achieve all this, as - although it was using a somewhat different style, and in colour - I have done quite a bit of woodland mapping for the Atlas before, for those who remember the extensive mapping series for the Faerie City of Embra - like the Wooded Places maps.

Amazing amount of work in this, and looking excellent!

Rather reminded of the reconstructed layout of the ancient Near Eastern city of Mari by it now. Except that has been done as rather more circularly-symmetrical, and has a broad canal stream running through it, rather than the main river channel. Two-thirds were washed away by the shifting over time of the Euphrates' channel anyway, so there's a fair bit of guesswork involved with that, of course.

In terms of the number labels, the larger size ones seem clear enough to me now without enlarging the glow, although you could increase it if you need them to really stand out more. Sometimes just moving them slightly to have a different background colour surrounding them might be enough to "cure" any perceived difficulties, I suspect.

Not sure about the "13" label in the city for the patch of green there; not certain that's really needed.

You might add a few more trees and bushes along both river banks. These could be regularly cleared and/or farmed in the city, but outside, they'll grow wherever they please, and there's enough water.

Maybe add labels for the two circular canal basins, or even a couple of the main canals, along with a fancy name for the bridge, say? And perhaps a name for the river too?

So, the first of my theoretical ten villages is ready, from Hex 005 of the hex-map somewhere above (or here, in case that's a bit easier to find!), Ljungby. A few more details are in that linked post, although the PDF is here as well for those interested. Deliberately, I've kept the notes short, hoping that might improve my chances to complete all ten village maps!

Hex 005, Ljungby Village. There is no established pattern for settlement maps in the official Shadowdark supplements as yet. Individual buildings and small groups of structures tend to be shown on maps identical to those used for subterranean areas, without illustrating the broader regions beyond them. Naturally though, in selecting something suitable for the Atlas, I was going to stick with a black-and-white style, and selected the Annual 100 Black & White Towns option as suitable for all these smaller settlements.

The Shadowdark main rules do provide random systems for generating settlements and places of interest therein however, including the general layout for roads and districts, which is what I used for all the settlements here, although because I'd already mapped the surrounding region, some adjustments and additions were needed. These systems don't provide details on population size or the number of non-interesting buildings, so for those, I turned to an old standby, my trusty, if slightly worn, "Village Book 1" from Judges Guild back in 1978, as this has mechanics to generate numbers of shops, etc., based on a randomly-rolled population size. I simply back-calculated a rough population size based on the points of interest already chosen, which allowed me to estimate a number of additional properties for each place.

I ran into a few difficulties with the chosen mapping style, as the Grass and Road Dirt bitmap fills come out very weak and faint (the Road Dirt one especially), and are scarcely visible on an image of the map, despite experiments in adjusting the settings. The alternative road tools use the Road Stone fill, which is somewhat harsh. As I wanted the roads to look more like tracks here, I compromised on something that could be seen on the final image OK, if still looking a bit too "stony", by adding a Transparency effect to fade the lines down, without using the original Edge Fade, Inner effect, as that seemed to be part of the problem making the Road Dirt fill effectively invisible.

Symbols for the buildings needed tweaking to get them to reasonable sizes (the standard size for some is fine for sheds and similar, but a bit too small for houses), and the typical problem with a number of the "City" styles cropped up, in that houses drawn using the drawing tool stand out far better on the map than those from the symbol catalogue. I simply drew the buildings that needed highlighting with the drawing tool, saving the symbols for everything else. Chimneys were added by-hand, helping to indicate occupied properties (sheds and barns were left without). The area is about 69 degrees South latitude after all, so no chimneys was never an option!

This style uses the AquilineTwo font as standard. However, I found this wasn't clear enough to properly read the labels, so switched to Primitive in all cases here, which meant amending two of the symbols as well, the scalebar and the compass indicator, to switch fonts. With luck, this all should mean the subsequent maps are a little easier to achieve.

And so to Ljungby itself:

One advantage with using Transparency on the road fills, is it makes the ford on the Swirl River look more "ford-like". I also chose to add the series of small plots in the lower right corner as the start of the nearer farmlands, and to represent small-holdings used by the villagers. There are a few sheds and barns scattered about there as well. I found adding sheds nearer the village proper started to make it feel too cluttered, with the scatter of trees and shrubs. Adding some sketchy contour line symbols north of the river helped indicate the land was rising that way, for all these need to be placed as free from other map features as possible, or they quickly become lost - hence why there isn't another south of the river. The eye's natural tendency to fill-in gaps helps the illusion here.

The other significant additions beyond what randomness had provided included the mill, with the miller promoted also to be village mayor. There's a dodgy bakery (which rumour has it may be the source of the rat problems north of the river...), so I felt a mill would be useful as well. The Market Place was a bit too blank, so it received a Toll Booth for collecting tolls from the market traders, and a well for arriving draught animals.

Only nine more to go!

So this is what goes on on the Plateau of Leng then... 😉🤴😷

[Do I need to mention those last emotes are for The King In Yellow and The High Priest Not To Be Described - and yes I know it's his mask that's meant to be yellow, but what can you do? 😁]