First task on resuming mapping was to complete the structural building interiors and gardens:

However, while I was "digging" the gardens, it became clear the vague not-path from the road to the back of the inn wasn't clear enough. At first, I tried adding patches to cover the hard-line road edges, and tweaking the effects that created those lines too, but it didn't improve, so ultimately, I redrew the connecting area as a full stretch of the road-style dirt pathway, while retaining its funnel-like appearance as seen from above. Doing this though also made me think further about these roadways, so I also added some more of those little "weed clumps" along all the roads, notably at the junctions, in the places where wheels, hoofs and feet would be less likely to pass frequently, all to make the roads look a bit less maintained. They are beyond the main settlement's boundary wall, after all.

Plus we can see how that mid-property fireplace worked out in the end - a fireplace on one side, a cooking range in the narrow, galley-like kitchen on the other.

With this completed, it was time to begin detailing the internal contents of the central properties, those belonging to the temple and its ancillary elements. Temple access hall and priests' quarters first:

Followed by the dwellings of the lesser clergy and higher-ranked followers:

After which came the rest of the inn:

There were a few other changes made here as well. I wanted some water troughs for the stable block, which were simply drawn using fill polygons, as there aren't any suitable symbols in this style (although I did repurpose some stretched versions of the unlit braziers for the wall-mounted hay baskets in the separate stalls - likely too small to see at this res). It then occurred to me that other troughs could be positioned elsewhere, so I put a couple more in by the main crossroads, not far from the well there, and added a few cauldrons resized as buckets nearby, as already done elsewhere.

In addition, I changed the sheets for some of the larger furnishings, to give them a bit more shadow, and thus presence, when viewing the whole map, as I discovered I'd already done that for the bar furniture at the inn earlier. Not sure now if that was by accident or design though!

Finally, the last row of properties could have their interiors completed:

I did think of furnishing all the buildings, but felt that would draw attention too much away from the more central properties linked to the subterranean map. This does also leave open the possibility to install player-characters in one or other of these should they wish to spy on the temple and its congregation at some point. Plus it was common practice in many of the earliest D&D maps to show no roofs, just walls, stairs, doorways and windows, for surface buildings.

That just left the labelling, for which I chose the default font that comes with the Naomi Van Doren mapping style, the awkwardly-named IM FELL DW Pica PRO. Names for most of the items were predetermined using tables in Mythmere Games' "Nomicon", as noted in the first post above here, and allocated where appropriate. Thus we reach this completed first map, or at least its surface view, now at full Forum res, no less:

I'll spare you details of how much effort went into tweaking the effects, sizing, colouring and placement of the labels, compass rose and scalebar; suffice to say, it was almost a session in itself.

Next will be designing the upper floors of the properties here that have stairs, which may explain how that Banys Hall label applies to what are apparently two separate buildings at present...

Map seven from my set of ten is for another hamlet, Rularn:

A more extensive set of notes than usual have been added to my WIP topic elsewhere on the Forum (as I remembered to make some screenshot versions as I was constructing this one!), with a higher-res image in my Gallery. The FCW and PDF notes files follow:

As these "ghostly" comments may indicate, I'd had a few ideas of my own as to what else could have been happening in the area, partly also drawing on what I'd established for the Sussara Region earlier. One thing I was pretty sure of is that Marshmalika had been the first place attacked when the invaders arrived, given the Bay of Aqesh is a logical landing area, away from the open sea, where storms are more likely, and the most inland section of that would be as good a place as any to begin. I also thought it would be interesting to explore why their main headquarters wasn't on the coast any more, or indeed at an obvious communications centre with a reliable freshwater supply (it's the orange triangle on the Banjar province map in my first post above). Hence the ghosts, which the rank-and-file are most unhappy about. And there are oddly large numbers of poisonous scorpions and snakes where the ghosts are too, which were never found in such profusion previously, or indeed still at other parts away from the old inhabited locations.

So to the small town of Marshmalika itself, or more correctly, its abandoned ruins:

While the style's the same Desert Oasis one as before, other than the sea, I've deliberately muted the choice of other colours here to reflect its ruined status, and had quite a bit of fun creating The Pit and the Pentagram (no, not Pendulum 😉). Hopefully, those will be a little clearer on the higher-res version in my Gallery, and of course, clearer still once in the Atlas. I also chose not to have all the nearby features be on, or fully on, the map, to add to that slightly edgy, uncomfortable feeling, while still keeping it usable as a gaming map. I have to say too, I'm impressed by the versatility of this mapping style, so with just this one Annual issue, it's possible to create a vibrant, living settlement (Sussara Village last time) and an abandoned, ruined one here.

When I started rolling the Inkwell dice sets to generate the base maps for this whole project, I made a few decisions in advance. One was that I wouldn't reuse the same dice-face design twice (I just re-rolled any duplicates), and because I wanted to keep the maps fairly small and manageable, that I'd roll randomly between 2 and 4 dice at a time only. I'd then put together the map based on how the dice fell on the table, once slid together into a whole, naturally. For this "Ruins" set map, I just rolled two dice, and the orange rectangle on this image shows what the dice had set-up:

Most of the major features of the settlement, in fact, as that seemed appropriate. The only real change I made here was that the Temple was originally a group of large, partly or wholly ruined buildings, with trees and an open area in the adjoined block to its right. However, the Desert Oasis style comes with its own ruins, including this one, and it seemed a shame not to use it! The expanded areas were a mix of randomly-rolled options, with logical completions and expansions of roads and trails to fit the landscape around the settlement. Other ruined properties further from the centre aren't shown, as already buried by drifting sand, dust and ash, which is explained in the PDF and text files for the final Atlas version, along with what's going on at the various labelled sites. That House of Bones area is an especially unpleasant reminder that the place was invaded by ruthless folk who cared nothing for the local populace, incidentally (so those sensitive to such things should be warned).

I'm not sure if it's been all this thinking about warfare and ghosts, but my next port-of-call is (as randomly decided) to be on Mate Ora, southernmost of the islands in the Nga-Whenuatoto archipelago, a land where the dead walk, apparently. At least it's still in the southern tropics of Nibirum, so decently warm!

EDIT Feb 3: The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted there were missing internal lines in the Pentagram; images have now been corrected!

Hex 1307, Rularn: Instead of simply presenting the seventh map in this series briefly, as previously, it occurred to me in time to actually make some preparations for it, that this would also be a suitable point to illustrate how the maps in this set have been prepared. This is meant as a sort-of WIP topic, after all. And yes, this is a bit late to remember it!

As those who've followed some of my previous attempts at WIP topics here will know, I tend to work from hand-drawn sketches, scanned in and used as a base template for my CC3+ maps for the Atlas. These small settlement maps this time though have been done in a slightly different way, without a scanned-in bitmap to trace or adapt from.

That's in large part because of how the layouts for these villages and hamlets were arrived at, using the Shadowdark RPG random mapping systems. By rolling a few dice, and seeing where some lie in relation to one another on the tabletop once thrown, a basic settlement layout can be generated. I varied that system slightly, by drawing on other random tables in those rules to further detail some elements, and for the hamlet-sized places - such as Rularn - I reduced the options for how many features there could be in them.

This first stage generated the following information, including a sketch-idea for the map:

So there are two districts, on the north and south sides of the hamlet, with the keyword names "Low" and "Slums" having specific references in the rules for what tables to use to decide on the features in each. From these can be derived a number of points of interest, sometimes for the settlement as a whole. I've added notes based on the location already decided for Rularn from the Whispering Wastes overland map, and, based on the number of items in the settlement, a rough tally of houses for the whole place, generated using the old Judges Guild "Village 1" book, as noted back in the post about Ljungby Village above.

From this base, another rough sketch was prepared, using the Whispering Wastes drawing for the specific hex involved, to get an idea of how the various component parts might fit together:

Rather than using this as a template, it's really just a loose idea at this stage. The reason the stone circle and henge bank haven't been added yet is because I need to see what the layout looks like in the CC3+ map first, and can then determine where exactly those will lie. The Mill, a specific addition here beyond what the random rolls have identified, might not survive at all, or might be moved, or converted to a windmill instead, say, to comply better with the stone circle feature. The line of the Cindaros River in the sketch is likely too close to the main settlement for everything to fit inside a particularly circular surround presently.

Moving next to the CC3+ mapping, I decided from the beginning that all these small settlements were going to be placed on identically-sized maps, 800 by 650 feet in size, determined using the sizes the various settlement-sized maps were for the Faerie City of Embra, referred to in the Bruga's Hold post earlier in this topic. The settlement itself would always be the main focal-point for the drawing, which would leave parts of the outlying areas available for a variety of additions or enhancements, including notes and elements such as the title, scalebar and compass pointer.

The first things to do included adding a title, dropping in the river lines, and the main road that connects elsewhere, with a label for that too. I put these basic names in so early to remind myself which map I'm doing, aside from other things! This also means I remember to check things like river and road widths from any map intended to connect, however distantly, with the current one. Sometimes these might not be the same - rivers tend to widen downstream, for instance, and roads don't need to stay identically-sized along their lengths either. However, this sets things up, which can always be changed later. These WIP map illustrations are deliberately under-sized compared to Forum norms, to clarify they're really only indicators of what was going on, rather than cluttering the topic up with images larger than is really needed for that.

Ordinarily, I'd next add the highlighted buildings for shops, etc., as these are typically the larger properties, or the ones that better-define the settlement's overall layout, and other notable features such as any market place. Here though, everything has to be constrained by an outer henge bank and ring of standing stones, so I set up a new TEMPORARY Sheet and Layer, and drew in a template circle on those to show where it was meant to be (and after a bit of trial and error, it must be said):

With that prepared, the identified properties can be added:

Since this settlement is at the end of the road, and had already been suggested as rather run-down, that seemed the ideal chance to make use of a few of the ruined buildings in this style, one of which - as used - had the form suitable for a rectangular warehouse-like barn/shed. Thus that shape and size became the template for the drawn properties alongside it, apparently in a better state of repair. I've also brought in a copy of the water mill already featured elsewhere in this series, although as we can see, it's now on the lesser of the two rivers here, to keep it within the henge-ring.

Adding the rest of the houses, with a few ruined ones, fleshes-out the settlement, after which more smaller roads and paths to the doors can be added, together with some larger expanses of paved yards, by the mill and baker's, the inn and the warehouse sheds, including a few walls:

It may not be that obvious at this smaller resolution, but I've also added chimneys to various of the properties. After which, the henge can be added, and the temporary green circle hidden (not deleted for now, just in case!). Having already experimented with the Solid 10 bitmap fill and some lighted bevel effects for the barrow mounds in the Osalin map previously, I simply reused that again here, copying the effect over to a new HENGE sheet. Somewhat to my surprise, it looked fine without further tweaking, although the colouring overall was too close to the rivers, so I decided to add something by copying the henge polygons onto the LAND FEATURES sheet and then changing their fill style first to use the CA100 Grass texture (which was OK, but not ideal), and then to what had been problematical earlier in the sequence of villages, the Road Dirt fill, which this time gave enough texturing "under" the semi-transparent henge polygons to help the henge segments stand out as NOT rivers (or ribbon lakes)!

With the henge in place, now just the standing stones were needed, and a similar technique could be applied to create those, a simple polygon with a suitable lighted bevel effect, although I did also darken up the shadows to help them stand out more, as at this scale they needed to be small. I opted for the bitmap Solid 30 fill style for them, again to give them better definition. Although at this reduced size, they appear as little more than dots, this view shows the northern half of the ring completed:

After which things started to move on apace, completing the standing stones' ring, then adding some labels, and starting to fill-in the gaps, with a few more changes. This shows a typical partway-through shot of the process. The Mill label has been moved to add some small fields and other vegetation as well.

From here, things tend to progress more organically, as fresh ideas surface along the way for how to make the place feel more "alive".

Followed by the rest of the labels, as the final map (now at its full Forum resolution):

One further minor tweak was made to the shadows on the standing stones, to darken them up more, and help them stand out better against the vegetation, with a new scroll and a further note or two on the nature of the settlement.

And suddenly, there are only three more settlements to go!

Travelling Place 1 is Toll Cross, which as we see, is an unusually heavily built-up area, surrounded by dense greenery, beyond which is open grassland or moor:

While the base-map was a similarly heavily-urbanised area, the nature of Toll Cross (and indeed even its final name) derived chiefly from the accompanying featured text, and especially that demonic satyr figure. The Impassable Hedges mean anyone wanting to visit the shops or houses here, or even just pass through it directly as a crossroads, is channelled into using one of the four access-routes. Then I adjusted the layout of the buildings slightly in places so those on foot can get to only a fraction of the properties inside unless they pass through the central Boulder Square, where Guess Who waits, like a spider in a web... This view is with the labels turned off to get a better impression of the settlement:

This looks a bit odd (or at least, it's meant to), with some strange rooflines, and what seem to be many towers. An extract from the accompanying text and PDF file may help explain:

Despite the range of building shapes and sizes, they all have just a single accessible storey at ground level inside, as the toggled view to show the building interiors indicates:

This also shows just how much some of the rooflines, and particularly those horn-towers, don't marry-up with the building outlines, yet the buildings, thanks to their lack of internal connections, further help block any attempts to avoid using Boulder Square. And if you try to fly in, it turns out those roofs aren't so immobile as they may appear...

Back for another visit to Alarius for the next segment in my sort-of Dungeon24 mapping (now so delayed, it's increasingly likely to become "Dungeon25" soon...). I noted in the topic for my immediately prior maps, set in the Whispering Wastes of Haddmark, Peredur, that this was scheduled for somewhere in the Feralwood Forest region of northeastern Alarius:

That's a big area, so from the start, I expected I'd be needing to prepare another area map, as well as that for the dungeon. Examining the Feralwood Forest map, it didn't take long to zero-in on a suitably intriguing-looking area, the Barrows of the Ferine Magi:

Since the base map for the dungeon was derived from the third of the four generated using the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph "Explorer" dice set, I'd again be aiming for a similar black-and-white design look to the previous couple of dungeon and area maps in this series, including that for this new general area one, which would be done as a hex map once more. So I generated a suitable hex-gridded version of the area, from which to start thinking more about the setting:

The hexes here are each six miles across in their north-south dimensions.

During the latter stages of the village mapping for the Whispering Wastes, I'd already begun thinking about what might be in this area, as there are no settlements, roads or watercourses shown, just the woods, the central region of dead land, the three barrow markers and the obelisk.

Ordinarily, I, and perhaps many of us, would assume the over-sized barrows were simply markers indicative of a large area, within which might be numerous burial mounds. However, having earlier been working with some of Ricko Hasche's delightfully pictorial maps, where the images for places and features are often hugely over-scaled compared to the physical land area, had set me wondering as to what if those were indeed to-scale depictions of the objects/places involved. An eighteen-mile high obelisk might be pushing things rather, although it could still be taller than might seem "normal". The concept of ten-mile-diameter round barrows though started to take hold.

While the dungeon map to be fitted now to one of these barrows was of the usual quite small size, that needn't prevent it being within a gigantic barrow mound. Burial chambers inside real-world barrows can be very small, compared to the overall barrow's size, for instance. The place-name and that vast tract of dead land all around the barrows also needed to be considered; wild magic from the wild magi that got out of hand in a big way, say.

From that, it was a short step to declare much of the inner zone drained and now devoid of magical energy, so no magic will work there, surrounded by a one-hex-wide ring where wild magic holds sway (the pale white circuit in the next image), and where using magic can be especially dangerous and unpredictable. This is Alarius, after all, perhaps the most magical of Nibirum's continents, so safety catch off! Outside that ring, things are more "normal", albeit creatures from the wild magic zone still might have wandered off there, of course, or indeed into the inner zone, unless they required magic to exist (a magically-powered construct would fail at the border, for instance).

The white small circles on the image above show the randomly-chosen hexes in which there is something of note. The three barrow entrances have also been marked thus, and the location of the obelisk.

What of the barrows? Are they burial mounds, perhaps ones gigantically enlarged by the magical event that blasted the woodlands around them? Or the squashed remnants of once-soaring mage towers? Or something else entirely - such as spacecraft magically ported-in from another dimension? That latter concept intrigued, and in a greatly modified form became the basis for the eventual dungeons (yes, yes, three barrows so now there will be three identical-form dungeon maps from the dice-set base one too!). This drew on ideas from the 3rd edition "Hyperborea" RPG by North Wind Adventures (formerly "Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea"), whose tagline is "Swords, Sorcery, and Weird Science-Fantasy", the "Metamorphosis Alpha" RPG by James M Ward (in both its original TSR and current, largely unchanged, Goodman Games formats), and especially - thanks to its degree of oddness - Monte Cook Games' "Numenera" RPG, which runs with the concept attributed to Arthur C Clarke, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", in a world setting of the distant future, where tech is essentially treated like magic. That idea is also an aspect of Metamorphosis Alpha, set on a small-country-sized spacecraft lost among the stars, whose inhabitants have long forgotten they were once its crew and passengers. Thus the "magic" that still functions in the barrow-dungeons is really all technology. For anyone concerned about that in a stricter fantasy setting, I also adopted the Numenera idea that many smaller devices are one-use items. Thus things in the barrows mostly still work most of the time. Things portable enough to be removed may only work once.

So expect a degree of weirdness in the map notes to follow. You have been warned!

It's pretty much standard practice in a lot of real-world cross-sectional mapping to vary the line direction like this, often to follow a specific passageway, or series of linked passages and caves. The purpose of the cross-section is to provide useful detail that's not so easy to identify on the plan-view map, so any line that works best to show that is appropriate.

Indeed, if you take a look at the PDF mapping guide for CA7, Caves and Caverns, this is exactly what Ralf (I think?) did in drawing the sample cross-section for that cave using the modern cave mapping style.

Sometimes, it may even be helpful to use more than one such cross-section.

Looking at the cross-section on your first map above here, while it's interesting, in pointing out how variable the levels are in different parts of the cave system, it's not all that helpful, since it implies other parts of the caves may be at similarly variant levels, without indicating what those may be.

In some cases this may be of merely academic interest, where caves aren't directly linked to one another and are some considerable horizontal distance apart, for example. However, where the passages and adjoining caves are at different vertical levels, it can be much more important - i.e. if a passage enters in the ceiling of the next cave, say.

It may also be useful to add some cross-sections of individual passage segments next to the area on the main plan view too. For instance, there are a couple of clear choke-points towards the SE end of the narrow, SE passageway. This suggests they're more or less impassable, yet there's a mapped cave beyond them, so there must be a way through, if perhaps only a crawl-space. A cross-section of just the choke-points on that passage next to the narrowest parts would help clarify that.

Thanks very much everyone!

And on Quenten's point, the odd thing is the Character Artist portraits take hardly any time at all, by contrast to other types of map.

It is a shame that Character Artist doesn't get the same kind of updates and additions other parts of the CC3+ program suite do; some variant body and face shapes would be interesting, for instance, though I appreciate that would add a lot of extra work, fitting the various costumes and weapons, etc., to such alternate forms. Still, if you don't ask...

GM's Day today seemed an apt moment for another progress update for this project, which is continuing, if having been somewhat interrupted at times by external events since my previous post. In the interim, the handwritten notes for the place have reached area 168 now!

However, today's notes focus on the re-explored parts of Dendorlig Hall, which, as mentioned earlier, comprise areas 50-66, 93-110 and 143-146. These have been allocated the same red numbering colour as the reoccupied "Village" section (areas 1-49), as also discussed before, while the unexplored bulk of the underground complex has been numbered in black. This illustration shows the south corner of the map, covering all the "red" areas now, as well as the nearby "black" ones (and remember, south is now towards the top right corner of this map as viewed here, north towards the bottom left; the Water Temple area, 17, in the top right corner, handily provides a reminder of the cardinal directions with its arrowhead-shaped sub-chambers).

Note that only the red numbers have been adjusted to better fit their locations on this image so far. I've been amending the number-placements beyond this only as I've been typing-up the notes, as well as making occasional amendments to the room layouts, and that type-up still lags considerably behind the hand-scrawled descriptions, by about 70 areas currently.

Next here are the extracted notes as a PDF for just the re-explored zone. In the final full PDF and text notes, it's intended they'll follow along directly after the "Village" notes that I posted here last time, and will then continue into the unexplored parts as well (so you may need to re-read parts of last time's PDF to get these new notes to make sense; or what sense they may make at this stage, anyway...):

As before, these are just the draft notes, and haven't been fully checked as yet, so may be subject to changes later, but they will give some ideas as to what's been happening.

From the original map alone, it's long been clear that some areas of variable shapes, sizes and connections, have mutual links or locations that suggest a main purpose or function - that's what prompted the whole reoccupied "Village" concept initially, for example. From that base, it's followed naturally that the Hall area, far from being a random dungeon (even if that's how it began!), was really an underground town or city-sized settlement originally, and one which had been expanded and adapted at different times. Hence we have places such as the Arena (66, whose ancillary rooms extend into the unexplored zone as well) and the Stone Garden (143) from the latest PDF notes. Elsewhere, there is already a former nightclub-like entertainment venue, with a separate dance-hall/plaza, a communal swimming pool, a royal palace, and the royal tombs, with other features noted for possible inclusion that are still to be emplaced subsequently. Some of these have been inspired by the random Wizardawn room descriptions; sometimes those descriptions have dovetailed beautifully into what I'd decided the areas were to be, without first checking the notes (which always raises a smile), although much remains to be finally defined.

More when I know what it is!

So, back for an update today!

Opening the New Drawing Wizard, and naturally picking the CCPro Overland style, I set-up a 30 by 30 mile square area (to give room around the base 20-mile-square mapped region for a title, possibly some labels, and suchlike), and changed the background colour from its default sea-blue to green, to fit the landlocked swamp I had in mind. Then I went to set-up a new BITMAP sheet and layer to import the base map image into, and was surprised to find there was more than just a single sheet available (which was what I'd expected), and that some of those sheets already had effects on them. I'd been assuming I'd be working without sheet effects (beyond a transparency on the BITMAP sheet, at least). This though opened up some fresh possibilities, as one concern I'd had was that a lot of the early vector symbols and fills use zero-width lines, which tend to vanish when extracting higher-res images. Being able to add elements like glows could help them stand out better, so this was going to be a somewhat more sophisticated map than I'd anticipated!

This is the opening scene with just the imported bitmap image in the map (I'm keeping these opening images deliberately under-sized for the Forum, as there's fairly little detail on them):

And this is it with the transparency effect on:

Next, I started sketching-in some base terrain elements beyond the centrally-mapped area, using only symbols, to have more control over their sizes. Here, I'm working with the BITMAP sheet's transparency turned off:

This is the appearance without the bitmap image entirely:

One advantage of this vector mapping style is that you can add effects such as transparency to the symbols sheets, and see - as here - that the symbols fade out a little, which is what I wanted to do for the area beyond the mapped zone, showing the terrain there still, yet without so much detail. There's no need for technicalities like the forced redraw command that would be needed for raster symbols, though these were all set-up on their own new sheet, of course. The symbols, incidentally, were all from the extensive "Filled" vector set available under the CC3+ overland style, which was the default set available on opening the new map.

The next snapshot shows this whole border zone completed, with the hills and river added, as well as a background colour showing the full extent of the hills into the central region as well:

I amended the edge fade on the terrain sheet to retain the softer transition at the edge of the hilly area. The perceptive may notice too that one hill seems a little less transparent than the others, as that one's now on the main symbols sheet, that has no transparency effect on it. That difference is a little more obvious as the central area gradually fills-in fully:

With that completed, deciding what symbols would be suitable to highlight the features on the fully-mapped area could begin - next time!