The water lines problem looks to be one of the classic issues with too many nodes too close together, in this case because the water drawing tool is set to not extend beyond the map border, and as a smooth drawing tool, it will automatically put a pair of "Corners" at the map border to create the straight line there. A Corner is basically three nodes very close together.

A quick check suggests you should be able to solve this by using the "Advanced" button for the water drawing tool, unchecking the "Restrict to map border" box and then save the tool. Then redraw your river, making sure you draw the ends a little way beyond the top and bottom map edges. DO NOT use the "C" = "Corner" option, just add a few nodes and make the ends of the river outside the map border a bit more rounded, with fewer nodes close together. The screen should hide this once you're done (or if not you can use the COLLAR commands to create a new, larger one - use COLLARDEL first to remove the existing screen, and then COLLARAUTO to add a new one - if I've remembered that right).

Hopefully, that'll cure this point at least. Good luck!

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.

The third of my potentially ten villages from The Whispering Wastes in Peredur is Ivan's Keep:

As previously, there are more details in my WIP Forum topic here, and the FCW and PDF notes files are below, with a higher res version of the map image in my Gallery:

Having successfully negotiated the outer "ring" of Villages that comprise the initial appearance of the Faerie city of Embra when approaching it from beyond, using the "Official Guide" map, the first set of Places that might be encountered in the city proper are the Enclosed Places:

Or as we see from the new lower map, the Enclosed Places of Interest, following along from the "tourist's guide" style of naming for these link-maps.

The perceptive will immediately spot the new-look frame border decoration, this time reworked after part of one in the Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" hardcopy book, combined with one of the Dover interlace bird motifs. The link-spaces themselves are simply labelled extracts from the final maps, with a couple of reminder notes for how GMs could use random rolls to determine where the travellers might be going next from here. The PDF and text notes include a further reminder not to forget which number was rolled if the final "Streets" location was chosen, as that map condenses five places onto one map, whereas the others feature just one place each.

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!

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...

And so lastly, we have the dungeon, linked by a rubble-hidden trapdoor from area B2 in the Castle, Crabwell Delve:

Jon Roberts Dungeon again, with a hint of Token Treasury 2! A nice, simple layout, and while it would have been pleasant to have more symbol options, a top-view statue of a Platinum Basilisk was always going to be unlikely, together with a gigantic Crowned Crab statue to fit over the top of, and around, the well. Hints of magic, fun and weirdness to be found in this long-abandoned, indeed long-lost, piece of subterranea, however, courtesy of those Story Engine card decks!

Next time, I'm apparently staying in the tropics, if a bit further south, to visit somewhere on the large island of Ethra in southwestern Doriant...

Which brings us to the last map in this group, covering the eight "ways":

While the seven streets were constructed randomly from the simple system I'd devised and used previously, the railway needed some further adaptations, reducing the angles turns and junctions could have, and such like. In drawing the final maps, I kept the roads deliberately free from as much obstruction as possible (vegetation and the proximity of the properties along each), since the essence of Travelling Places relates to movement. In the accompanying notes, I've suggested GMs should allow speedier normal movement when using any of these routes, as long as the party sticks to the way itself. And naturally, there are oddities. Such as the large, complex building shapes along Candlemaker Row, where sadly, I fear the giant standing candelabra that light this route at night will be barely visible, and likely unidentifiable, at the Forum's resolution on the above maps. So let's try this view instead:

That weird loop in Stave Lane came from the construction process alone, which was a pleasantly amusing surprise when I plotted-out what the dice had rolled for the first time, especially as it made Stave Lane - a name yielding expectations of being straight and direct - one of the most convoluted of Embra's mapped streets!

Heisenberg Terrace, naturally, isn't always there, while the bazaar in Cat Hall is run by a humanoid feline, Shrew Dinger... Go-By Street is easily missed too, without care (aside from being a test for people's knowledge of fantasy literature; a good spot to place The Genuine Magic Shop, perhaps - despite its different author). The literary origins of Everon Road's name might be an easier test though.

As for Runaway Railway, aside from the real-world city of Edinburgh (very loosely the inspiration for some of Embra's place-names, as well as its actual name) being a major railway centre in Scotland, it also has the surviving remnants of a far earlier horse-drawn passenger rail-line, the "Innocent Railway", so I felt I had to include a railway of some sort in Embra. It's obviously short and simple, though as with everything else in Embra, its size can be as deceptive as GMs require. Rather than get bogged-down in detailing the line's operation, I chose to have the rolling stock run by the magical forces of electrickery (see Wyvern Citadel on this, if necessary). Conveniently, the featured text - and remember, these things were chosen randomly! - involved lightning flashes, which made that decision very easy.

Back to topic!

Windy Tower: Sited near the east bank of Summer River in the Kara's Vale map's northwest, northeast of the line of Quarry Cliffs, and surrounded by jungle, is this fabulously ancient Tower, said to be a Wonder of the Ancient World. Notable for its unusual red stone.

Which is a slight paraphrase of the Kara's Vale map notes about it. I'm not sure quite why, but my thoughts for how this might be mapped drifted away to a 50-year-old fantasy skirmish wargame from 1976 called "Citadel: A Quest Within A Wizard's Tower" published by Fantasy Games Unlimited. This used basic thin-card-printed maps (brown ink on pale yellow card) drawn to 25 mm scale (the general height of cast-metal, normal-human-sized wargame miniatures back then), with square, thin card markers for the creatures defending the tower, the treasures and traps inside, and the connections between the different tower levels. Hero miniatures had to be provided by the players, and their relative strengths also decided that way, which made for quite a bit of work in advance, before being able to play the game originally. There were six card maps, printed on both sides, giving a dozen different floorplan layouts, only six of which were used per game, and the blank reverse counter sides created a fog-of-war situation, meaning the heroes had to check every counter to navigate their way between the tower's levels, find the treasure, and battle the monsters, without knowing what each counter might be in advance. As a game, it was OK, though often quite lengthy to play, and the card markers made it very easy to accidentally knock things out of position, albeit these were common elements in other games of the period. It also didn't look great, so we sometimes substituted monster miniatures for the card markers, only to then forget what strength each monster was meant to have... Joys of youth, eh?!

Feeling this to be a suitably Ancient Wonder of the World, I thought it would be interesting to adapt it for the Windy Tower maps. The floorplans meant the layouts for each level were available straight away, although those were amended in places to add doors (the original game had none) and a few extra walls. The connections between levels were originally portals in essence, because any on a given level might go to, or from, or both to and from, any other level in the tower, a concept retained here too, along with the two main treasure options, an amulet and a talisman, and the use of three types of defending creatures. In the original game these were "humans", "near-humans" and "non-humans" of varying numerical strengths. That, and the general "ancient" concept, drew me to warriors and mythological creatures from ancient Mesopotamia on Earth, because artworks from the 3rd to 2nd millennia BCE and later there show a similar range of beings - humans, demi-humans and non-human creatures. We know very little about any of these, even archaeologically for the human warriors, so there'd be options for some suitable expansion and interpolation of fantasy elements here.

Having got this far, with a list of possible options for all three defending creature types, some semi-random rolls helped decide what was where (limited so as not to have too many creatures or portals on any given level), after a further decision had been made to use all twelve tower floorplans, so Windy Tower would have twelve levels. Naturally, not all the creature options were chosen in the final version, but those that were are all provided with notes in the Atlas version (and here too for clarity), with statistics for the Shadowdark RPG, to help provide some pointers to their strengths, powers and abilities.

And so to the map. As each level in the Tower is an identically-sized square in area, there was the possibility of setting up twelve separate Atlas maps, using a simple copy & paste option between each map to draw their outlines and other basic features. However, that seemed a bit "ordinary", and as part of the point of this project has been to try new (for me) things from time to time, I decided instead to draw the Tower in a single map, with the contents for each level on its own Layer, and then to set-up hyperlinks for the portals on each level that would then allow one click on said portal to show each Tower level as it was encountered, using the FCW version of the map. After first checking with Remy Monsen to ensure A) that this wouldn't cause problems with the normal Atlas navigation processes, and B) that I had the correct macro commands to actually do this!

Following which, the mapping could begin. As the connections between levels were randomly set, including the surface entry point, the first level encountered when approaching from outside is Level Five:

While the original floorplans were fairly basic, they did commonly show variations between the flooring in separate areas, so something of that concept was adopted here too, with effects and furnishings to liven things up further.

One significant problem was finding suitable markers for the different defending creatures per level. I'd already decided that these would appear as statues until activated by intruders in their part of their own level, so their starting locations needed to be identified. However, the range of top-down statues and creatures in the Mike Schley style - even with all the monthly symbol options - is extremely limited, especially as some of the statues have large bases as well. Adding the original DD3 creature options only helps marginally, again thanks to a limited range of options, most of which don't include varicolor that will allow creatures to appear as statues instead. So the creature options used here were purely a compromise, using varicolor shading at times to separate the different kinds, and occasionally adjusting the sizing as well for the larger non-humans.

From Level Five, we have portal options to go to Levels 2 or 3, but rather than following such convoluted paths in showing the rest of the maps, the remainder will be presented simply in numerical sequence.

That though will have to wait for another time - like the notes on what a "Winged Lion-Dragon" might actually look like!

Not sci-fi, since they were all done for the Nibirum Community Atlas, which is all fantasy mapping, but they were done in the general style of planetary-system mapping, so may still be of interest. However, I did a series of maps for said Atlas back in 2018 - Forum thread here, Nibirum Solar System start page here, with a sample map to give you an idea, just for the inner planets:

All these maps are also in my Forum Gallery here.