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 Hopefully, this may assist anyone hunting around for an MS Publisher substitute when the program's withdrawn by Microsoft next month.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!

This seems highly apt, given the long and difficult journey that has only very recently started to give us the physical world of Dolmenwood out in this reality! Indeed, when I saw your first post here, I thought that was where you were going with this topic 😊.

[Dolmenwood's a highly-detailed RPG and world-setting, published by Necrotic Gnome, as I know we're not all RPGers here. It's very dependent upon magical dolmens, standing stones, magical ley-lines and such like. And of course, it also has grimalkins, fey-cat-folk, as player-characters (amongst many other things)!]

Or try what I did, and which Sue beat me to posting about (😁), which was simply to change the properties of that piece of floor to be the same as the wall you'd already drawn:

There's always more than one way to do something using CC3+; you just have to hunt around to find it sometimes!

1. The style choice is obviously up to you, but the original PDF map you shared uses only very simple textures and plain colours for the hexes, and that wouldn't need more than a couple of texture bitmap fill options to accomplish, which the standard CC3+ overland styles could likely provide.
2. Once you have your source map as a bitmap image (a simple JPG will be fine), all you need then do is create a new Sheet in your CC3+ drawing, for ease call it "BITMAP", and a new Layer, also "BITMAP", and make sure both layers are active (click in their respective check-boxes, if necessary). Then, using the drop-down menu Draw => Insert file simply navigate to where your source map's image is stored, and click "Open". You'll then be asked to click the "First corner" (in the CC3+ window's command line), so pick a suitable spot in your map, and then enlarge the image to an appropriate size, before clicking to locate the "Second corner". Your map image will then be set-up in your CC3+ map file. Once the image is in-place, you can move, rescale and adjust it by clicking somewhere on the edge of the image (only), when the Command line asks you to "Select entities" for whatever command you want to carry out. You will need to check the map scale is correct once your image is in-place, by using the Info => Distance drop-down menu command to measure between two points on the image whose separation you know (flat to flat of a hex, for example), for simplicity making sure "Snap" is turned off, but "Ortho" is on. If the map image is too large or small for the hex-sizes you want, you can rescale it either by-hand, or (better) numerically, by typing the values into the Command line when prompted (and you can just ask it to multiply or divide with the numerical sizes; you don't need to work that out separately).*
3. Not sure why the hex snap grid isn't working for you, assuming you're trying to duplicate the map whose image you showed, because the terrain is shown as per whole hex there, so it'd be easier for you to just work with drawn hex-shaped polygons (created using the hex-corner points in the snap grid), and then place those hexes where required. As long as the hexes are the correct size for what your final map needs to show, this should be fine, and work with the snap grid.
4. Curves can be tricky, but you can simply draw lines using the straight path (or polygon) option instead. You'll need to click to add more nodes for lines/polygon edges to still seem curved in places, but it avoids the oddness that using the curved drawing tools can create sometimes.
5. You may have the arrow cursor set instead of the crosshairs one (crosshairs show exactly where your cursor is using a crosshair that covers the whole map). To change from one to the other, simply press Ctrl + T (and see this post for another option, as well as a caveat on this command's use).

Without seeing exactly what you're trying to draw, I suspect it'll be hard to give more concrete advice than this, but hopefully this will get you a bit further forward.

* [EDIT: I should also note that when you start to import your map image, you'll be asked what file path to use for the source map's image. For ease, it's preferable to have that source map image in the same folder on your computer as the CC3+ map file, and simply keep the "Store the file's path relative to the current drawing" radio button active - it's the default option for this query panel.]