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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!

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.

Having spent so much time concentrating on detailing the tiny unsubmerged areas of Errynor Map 01, it seemed about time I plunged down and started providing some sample maps detailing equally parts of the deep ocean's bed. I thought I would start with the Sea Orc/Ketorka cavern village of Aak, and so drew-up that map:

When I began preparing the notes to accompany it however, I realised I needed a second map to show some of the places across the nearby area as well. Thus was born the Aak Hills map:

For orientation, this next map is Errynor Map 01 - The Cliff, showing the seafloor view, with the Aak Hills area ringed in orange:

In terms of the layout designs, the Aak village map originated as another of those Curufea's Random Cave Map Generator website plans I'd used previously for the Kobalt Mountain Caverns on Zariq. As before the chosen suitable layout was dropped-in as the bitmap base for the CC3+ drawing, rotated, amended and added-to in places as required. The map was constructed by hand-tracing over this using the TJ Vandel's OSR Dungeons style from the 2015 Cartographer's Annual, labelled with the Mason Serif Alt Bold font that comes with CC3+. I wanted a more or less black-and-white style as a reminder this setting is in the deep ocean, where there's no daylight, and most vision will be purely monochromatic.

The Aak Hills map was a straightforward adaptation from the pictorial version in The Cliff map, now in close-up. However, its contents beyond the previously-mapped elements were randomly allocated using a variant of my own tables and system that were used to generate the original Errynor base maps' features.

I thought for this map it would be interesting to experiment with the only CC3+ style package designed for mapping seafloor areas, Marine Maps from the 2017 CA. This though is intended for mapping small, near-coastal areas only, so some adaptation and improvisation was needed. Basically, I inverted the usual contour colour scheme in Marine Maps, where dark blue shows the coastal shallows, with white reserved for the deeper places only. On the Aak Hills map, dark blue is used for the normal deep ocean floor level, with increasingly paler blue to white contours (several levels of these, just like in Marine Maps) showing progressively higher areas above that floor. With almost 12,000 feet, 3,660 metres, of seawater above even the highest peak shown, by no stretch of the imagination can even these higher white places be classed as "shallows"!

The Marine Maps symbols were repurposed, sometimes with minor additions, and like the Arial font labelling, this created a few problems as I'd added Sheet Effect glows to make things stand out more. The Marine Maps style uses very few Effects overall. What happened? Well, where the Effect-amended black symbols and text lay over the equally black contour lines, those contour lines showed through as breaks in the text letters and symbols. This was, as ever (for me anyway; not my first encounter with this!), easily overcome by simply copying the affected symbols and text onto another Sheet above their original one, but which had no Effects added to it.

After some brief experimentation, I decided to place the anchor "north" pointer and the scale bars on Sheets without Effects, as I found them too distracting otherwise. This "vanilla" appearance is how such labelling would appear using the Marine Maps package ordinarily.

Of course, I had to try out the automated contour-labelling option in Marine Maps as well, where I was delighted to find ANY text could be typed-in per label, not merely numerals. Thus I was able to label the contours clearly in both feet and metres without needing to resort to adding a map key.

The last of the individual Crossing Places maps covers the part of the Twilight Market here, Slateford Market (with a second view below showing just the map, hopefully for a little better clarity at the typical Forum resolution):

That the road layout and market stall placements look like the wings of a butterfly is not accidental. The original Judges Guild map on which this was based only had the layout on one side of the stream. It was though obvious that a simple ink-blot-style mirror image would produce this more pleasing pattern, thus this segment of the Twilight Market was designed with that in mind. Of course there's a watcher at the ford (from the featured text), and some more of the Mike Schley tree-houses, including an aerial tavern in the bough-structure overhanging the River Clack in the Butterfly Tree, "The Tasty Drop" (also a comment on patrons who miss their footing and end up in the Clack below...).

There aren't any actual buildings here however, simply tents, stalls, awnings, wagons and several open-plan covered spots (including a pair of green-tiled, circular bandstands). The thatched buildings in the treetops are intended as living parts of the trees, so aren't real buildings as such. Or that was my excuse for not providing interior layouts for them anyway!

The first Crossing Place is Fountain Bridge:

This has a small, scattered village on its central island, for which a toggle in the Atlas FCW file should allow the simple interior layouts to be seen (all have just a single storey):

On this somewhat more detailed view, it may be possible to make out that the two bridges seem a little odd - they appear to be translucent. This is not a mistake, as there are no solid, permanent bridges here in fact. Both are literal water-fountain features. The travellers stand atop one of the square stone bridge abutments, and are then catapulted across in a gentle arc by a tremendous pulse of water. They arrive dry and safe a few seconds later on the opposite abutment - unless someone panics, in which case, they may end up getting wet, or even dropping into the river, to be rescued by the omnipresent water faeries, who think such a thing a tremendous joke! Animals - except magical or Faerie types - cannot use the bridges at all, however. Text and PDF files explain a little more, although Eerie Wood and Eerie House remain as mere mysterious names, to be expanded only should GMs wish to do so.

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...

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.

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...

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!