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...

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!

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.

In my accidental "voyage of discovery" of non-standard maps this year, following my learning of the playing card maps highlighted here earlier, recently I came across some old UK annotated postcard maps, not least one that the H P Lovecraft Historical Society reprinted as a physical prop with one of their series of 1920s-30s-style audio programmes, "The Iron Maiden", published early last year. Mostly, these "Dark Adventure Radio Theatre" shows are based on the works of H P Lovecraft and similar horror writers of that period and before. The prop in question was this map of the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, from the 1920s:

This style of map could be quite easily drawn using CC3+, and I particularly liked the annotations, as elements it would be easy to add to such a small-area map to inspire adventures in a fantasy setting, notably that short list, the "Six wonders of Wight".

Again, like the county playing card maps, this could be something readily adapted for RPG mapping use, I think, to give a fresh twist on how they appear. Of course, a dedicated style, with suitable feature symbol illustrations for CC3+, wouldn't go amiss either!

As mentioned with my previous map in this series (Gruvrå's Mine in Peredur), for the next, I'd be returning closer to my "home" territory in Alarius, as the map chosen to place this one in was the Alarius North Central region:

The base map from the Inkwell Ideas geomorphic dice rolls was another using just two designs from the "Delver" set, so I checked the Inkwell book for these (the "Dungeonmorph Book of Modular Encounters: Delver, Trailblazer & Voyager Edition"), finding there an interesting group of suggestions of which I ended-up using rather a lot in the final map and accompanying notes. They also influenced where the map could be placed within what is really a vast area of Alarius.

Indeed, several smaller maps have been set within the Alarius North Central region already, so I checked those. As I couldn't find quite what I was looking for among them, I decided to pick a fresh spot suitable for a new area map, on the edge of the large agricultural basin around the Elm River's headwaters (that's the river large and important enough to be shown even on the continental map above). In both the next images, the orange-outlined square of my selected area is 20 miles per side:

This is right on the edge of the "civilised" lands here, around 56° N latitude, and from the appearance of the terrain, a cool temperate spot, but not iced-in year round thanks to being sheltered by the mountains surrounding the fertile riverine plains. Then I devised a hand-drawn graph-paper map for it, with the main terrain types sketched-in, and randomly rolled up some feature options, this time chiefly using just my own random tables. These in turn led to the main watercourse layout, based on where the settlements and other points of interest were. During this process came a realisation that there were quite a few "awakened plant" and "interesting wildlife" features which fitted nicely with the loose druidic theme already generated from the Inkwell Ideas dice book.

And so to the CC3+ mapping. Following my attempts in recent maps of this group to combine more-or-less matching overland and dungeon styles, I thought it would be worth trying-out the Jon Roberts overland and dungeon styles, using the Cartographer's Annual 190 Jon Roberts Revisited overland style for the small area map:

So, welcome to the Petroc Hills! After finding I'd be having giant eagles on this map, I decided the local dialect term would be "petroc" for them, as meaning "small" or "little" roc (= gigantic bird), which also accounts in part for the repeated reuse of "roc" and "rock" in the names (because the pronunciation's the same!). As luck had it, the random locations for some of the settlements on the farmland were close to the map's southern edge, and I decided to site them right on, or extend them slightly over, that border, helping to reinforce that edge-of-civilisation theme. Plus I dislike having maps of this sort which show too marked an "edge of the world" effect. Thus of course, many hills are just peeping onto this map from beyond it too.

I found this style a delight to work with, as the terrain symbol drawings are of such high-quality, they can be greatly enlarged, yet still look superb, and I was especially pleased to find that by rescaling the farmland bitmap fill, the pattern in it would work perfectly for each diamond shape to represent the size of an individual farmstead or family group of smallholdings at this scale, without having to include every farmhouse. When it came to naming the features so-mapped, I found just the hill shapes and forms to be sufficiently inspiring, without having to resort to random tables for their names, and in some cases, their characters. And I did like that pastel grey-green, watercolour-like colouring; very restful 😎 .

However, the style's range beyond the non-terrain symbols is rather restricted, with just a single fashion of settlement types, and some basic trees, so I also used some of the Mike Schley, Herwin Wielink and standard CC3+ overland symbols to indicate others of the special features. Most don't seem all that out of place here, luckily.

For those interested in such things, most of the settlements are predominantly Human in population, although there is a sizable Hill Dwarf community in places (their main settlements are at Appleby, Strawberry Fields and Furzeholm), along with features such as a glassworks in the Strawberry Fields area and apple orchards at (naturally!) Appleby, while most places - even some of the small farmsteads - have their own minor breweries and distilleries, as the whisky from places here is highly prized elsewhere.

Out in the wilds, we have stingbats (that phrasing a minor in-joke for any Shadowdark RPG enthusiasts 😊), which are essentially the blood-sucking, small bat-like creatures called "stirges" in D&D, griffons, cave bears and wild boars, aside from the giant eagles, and also a community of Stone Trolls at the top of Stoneman Vale on the great hill of Stony Heights (also called Griffon Hill). Stone Trolls here highly prize certain kinds of stone, and especially jealously guard the magical Jewel Tree in "their" Vale (it fruits genuine gemstones each autumn).

And right in the middle of the map, at the foot of Rosebud hill, we have Rosebud Caverns, the little underground complex, and cause of all this mapping...

Probably just me, but the latest image looks like a bunch of lost Daleks trying to find their way home from a country walk 😉

Continuing the process of zooming-in brings us to Sussara Village, at the heart of the Sussara area map:

This time, I chose the Desert Oasis Annual mapping style and its accompanying ArabDances font, although I also needed some trees from the Mike Schley Cities (SS5) set, as I wanted to add some cedar-ish trees, while Desert Oasis only offers palms and shrubs. To generate the base map, I combined three old village maps from the venerable Judges Guild "Village" Books 1 and 2, again adapted accordingly, as I wanted quite a scattered community. The population of Banjar overall is tiny, so there seemed little reason not to give most folks plenty of space to build on.

Some features were decided in advance, as the nature of what I'd opted for in the dungeon meant a distinct spiritual element was going to be important here, and I thought it would be fun to add to the mix a small community of monks from the vast, rather distant, but still loosely neighbouring region of Tiantang in Kumarikandam, far to the north of Banjar. Since the folk here are accepting of nomadic wanderers, it seemed natural they wouldn't balk at still more distant people wanting to settle here too. Other items were chosen from random lists in "Village Book 1" and the settlement options in "Sandbox Generator", including the fact there are naturally-occurring flower-like crystal formations "growing" out of the soil in places, especially over and around Flowerfield Peak. Hence names such as "Billawr" (one Arabic-ish variant for "Crystal") and the Village's own name (Sussara = Glass Flower). The irrigated fields were quite fun to set-up, although at this scale, most of the smaller elements (shadufs, water gates, etc.) couldn't be added, even had symbols been available, without making the map seem very cluttered. Similarly, fences, livestock pens and sheds, and small gardens near most houses weren't included. I did though add a couple of carts to the Market, and three small well-fountains, to hint at what such tiny structures might have looked like. Notes on what is visible will be in the Atlas, as ever.

Of course, we also need a means to access the dungeon map that started all these above-ground explorations, so activating the "Village Secret" toggle in the final Atlas FCW version, will reveal a couple of hidden stairwells in the cellars of two separate, and otherwise unremarkable, properties (zoomed-in here for clarity at the usual Forum-acceptable size):

Very few folks here even know they might exist (which doesn't include the current occupiers of either dwelling!), and fewer still know what potential significance the Tomb of the Prophet may hold...

Hex 005, Ljungby Village. There is no established pattern for settlement maps in the official Shadowdark supplements as yet. Individual buildings and small groups of structures tend to be shown on maps identical to those used for subterranean areas, without illustrating the broader regions beyond them. Naturally though, in selecting something suitable for the Atlas, I was going to stick with a black-and-white style, and selected the Annual 100 Black & White Towns option as suitable for all these smaller settlements.

The Shadowdark main rules do provide random systems for generating settlements and places of interest therein however, including the general layout for roads and districts, which is what I used for all the settlements here, although because I'd already mapped the surrounding region, some adjustments and additions were needed. These systems don't provide details on population size or the number of non-interesting buildings, so for those, I turned to an old standby, my trusty, if slightly worn, "Village Book 1" from Judges Guild back in 1978, as this has mechanics to generate numbers of shops, etc., based on a randomly-rolled population size. I simply back-calculated a rough population size based on the points of interest already chosen, which allowed me to estimate a number of additional properties for each place.

I ran into a few difficulties with the chosen mapping style, as the Grass and Road Dirt bitmap fills come out very weak and faint (the Road Dirt one especially), and are scarcely visible on an image of the map, despite experiments in adjusting the settings. The alternative road tools use the Road Stone fill, which is somewhat harsh. As I wanted the roads to look more like tracks here, I compromised on something that could be seen on the final image OK, if still looking a bit too "stony", by adding a Transparency effect to fade the lines down, without using the original Edge Fade, Inner effect, as that seemed to be part of the problem making the Road Dirt fill effectively invisible.

Symbols for the buildings needed tweaking to get them to reasonable sizes (the standard size for some is fine for sheds and similar, but a bit too small for houses), and the typical problem with a number of the "City" styles cropped up, in that houses drawn using the drawing tool stand out far better on the map than those from the symbol catalogue. I simply drew the buildings that needed highlighting with the drawing tool, saving the symbols for everything else. Chimneys were added by-hand, helping to indicate occupied properties (sheds and barns were left without). The area is about 69 degrees South latitude after all, so no chimneys was never an option!

This style uses the AquilineTwo font as standard. However, I found this wasn't clear enough to properly read the labels, so switched to Primitive in all cases here, which meant amending two of the symbols as well, the scalebar and the compass indicator, to switch fonts. With luck, this all should mean the subsequent maps are a little easier to achieve.

And so to Ljungby itself:

One advantage with using Transparency on the road fills, is it makes the ford on the Swirl River look more "ford-like". I also chose to add the series of small plots in the lower right corner as the start of the nearer farmlands, and to represent small-holdings used by the villagers. There are a few sheds and barns scattered about there as well. I found adding sheds nearer the village proper started to make it feel too cluttered, with the scatter of trees and shrubs. Adding some sketchy contour line symbols north of the river helped indicate the land was rising that way, for all these need to be placed as free from other map features as possible, or they quickly become lost - hence why there isn't another south of the river. The eye's natural tendency to fill-in gaps helps the illusion here.

The other significant additions beyond what randomness had provided included the mill, with the miller promoted also to be village mayor. There's a dodgy bakery (which rumour has it may be the source of the rat problems north of the river...), so I felt a mill would be useful as well. The Market Place was a bit too blank, so it received a Toll Booth for collecting tolls from the market traders, and a well for arriving draught animals.

Only nine more to go!

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:

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!