Hey, as someone who used to DM with bits of cut-up graph paper, and with friends who DM'd using hand-drawn lines on clear-plastic-covered hex paper, this looks amazing! Mind you, that was close-to 50 years ago, so we had some excuse (that and there wasn't any other option back then!).

Cthulhu City is a great period style, though the final map of the three above seems a little bright and almost sunny for a Vampire City, perhaps? 🧛😎

I like the snakeskin-look road especially!🐍

Just following-up here on my earlier comments re the free LibreOffice program "Draw", as I finally got around to installing and doing some basic testing of it earlier today, so can confirm it will indeed open MS Publisher files OK. Not sure it has all the same functionality as yet - as usual, it takes forever to find where the programmers have hidden the features I'm most likely to use regularly - but it does open files with finished images, Publisher-drawn diagrams and photos, and they're all there. The only thing I did notice is that a couple of photos I'd resized after cropping in Publisher had become a little distorted, although resizing by-eye corrected their appearance at the expense of enlarging the images, which would then need resizing to fit the text again. I'd guess that would probably work better if I'd cropped and resized the image in Draw, though I hadn't time to check that would work. Hopefully, this may assist anyone hunting around for an MS Publisher substitute when the program's withdrawn by Microsoft next month.

And now we can all smial at the Halflings, after last month's lofty Elvenings!

On the beds subject, I spent part of today constructing a plausible top-down, dungeon-scale view of a four-poster bed, with curtains. Essentially, it's a cutaway, because the top's missing, given seeing where the bed (and anything hidden by the drawn curtains) is more important than that top cover panel (which could be added using a rug/carpet, if available, anyway - or even a repurposed and maybe resized wooden table).

What surprised me a little is there aren't any such beds in the styles I was using (DD3 Dungeons Digital and SS2 Fantasy, so all vector designs); generally, the vector styles have a lot more variety in their symbol options, probably because vector is an easier style to work with/draw in overall, of course. Which at least meant it wasn't that hard to take a suitable bed, and resize different varicolor pieces to work as posts and their feet, with wall-symbol curtains, to create such a bed.

For raster symbols though, it would be great to have some actual options that don't need extra user input!

Something you might consider is using this kind of pictorial drawing to illustrate a more traditional top-down map of the same (or a larger) area, in a loose medieval style. Pauline Baynes used this concept to splendid effect on her Middle Earth maps for J R R Tolkien, and her Narnia maps for C S Lewis, for instance, showing images of selected, specific places on the maps.

Exactly!

I don't think it really matters what kind of top-down style you choose - even if the settlements are just dots, the pictorial representation shows what's actually there, which is really the point in many respects. The actual region map would really be too small to show pictures of the settlements to scale, so the drawing shows those at the expense of "unrealistic" scenery and scaling instead.

Many of the pictorial styles we routinely use in CC3+ are already a compromise between accurate images and true scaling anyway. Ricko's shown masterfully and repeatedly what can be achieved by ignoring scaling entirely, and going for a purely pictorial representations using those images!

You don't need to invoke hag magic for the warmth. Think Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, which is in a not dissimilar northern location - subterranean volcanic heat can help here too. And/Or you could have the seas warmed by the volcanic offshore island on the regional map's edge, with likely more undersea volcanism nearby as well. Warmer seas in a colder climate will give plenty of surface fogs and mists, so all nicely humid, dank and dark (fogs often lift into very low clouds that artificially darken the days, for instance), so also ideal hag territory!

And, because this is the most recent of your topics to be updated here RS, a quick "well done" on having a second Cartographer's Annual showcasing your maps this year, with this month's issue just out!