Yes, have to say Joe Sweeney's video tutorials (pretty much all there was some years ago; things have greatly improved since!) were key to my learning how to get more and more out of the program too.

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.

Very pleased you'd found a good, workable solution to the "erosion" issue.

It is surprising sometimes how little extra you need to do to distract from the repeating texture patterns. Of course, there are others where you struggle to manage this no matter what you try, but hey!

No, sorry, I still don't get it...

😎

[That would be a more distant Ted comment, obviously.]

All the places that have been either mapped or reserved are shown as such in the online Atlas. Everywhere else is free to choose from - and don't forget that even if somewhere has already been mapped at some level, you could always map a smaller piece of that, down to a room in a house or a dungeon (or even smaller places!) if that hasn't been mapped in detail yet, should you choose to. There are no limits except your imagination!

You can reserve a place or places by commenting on this Forum topic, or by contacting the Atlas' organiser and coordinator, Remy Monsen.

Full information can be found out regarding all aspects of mapping for the Atlas on the How to Contribute page of the Atlas.

Dread's the one that uses a Jenga tower to resolve actions instead of dice, so it isn't for everyone (if you have real-life dexterity issues, say), although speaking as someone who has such problems, it can be a fun system for one-off games. I once saved the remaining survivors from a zombies-in-space game at a Free RPG Day some years ago, by doing the impossible and removing probably the last Jenga piece before the tower would have collapsed, to achieve the sort-of win (you don't really "win" in Dread though!). We had folks from the other tables imaging the tower after the event, as they couldn't quite believe it either!

I'd have thought cats would love Jenga towers. Might not be a "tower" for very long, but...😉🐱

Indeed, good luck with the surgery. As someone who also has manual dexterity problems, I can quite appreciate the problems. CC's been a definite boon in this regard.

Typical game of Dread then 😉!

I think it's just an issue with the resolution here on the Forum Don. The symbols also look pretty fuzzy to my eye right now on these shots. At a higher res on screen and in printout (at the level the map'll be available in its final version in my Gallery), it looks fine. I am also using a smaller size image than the maximum allowable here for these WIP shots to try to keep things a bit more manageable, as they're really just for general illustrative purposes. I did run a few tests to adjust the text glow early on, and this was certainly the better option from those at the "proper" resolution levels.

Back to the mapping, if with a shorter update today.

Adding the randomly-allocated features to the lower left quadrant meant dropping-in a couple of more substantial pieces of woodland, as already identified from the Duin Elisyr base map. That in turn meant thinking of adding some further smaller scraps of woods elsewhere, all of which quickly snowballed into adding place names for some of the main rivers, peaks and valleys, along with the first extra trails. There was also some tweaking of a few river lines, thinning some out, adjusting the courses of more, and suchlike. Plus amending the line of the pass road to better fit alongside the southern river out of it, now named as the Saskulaana. So it's all starting to look a bit more "lived-in", with just the upper left quarter to complete:

More tweaking of already-placed elements is likely, of course, and at some stage soon, I'll need to find somewhere to put the title, scale and compass pointer!