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!

Having thus generated the surrounding wilder lands, it was then time to construct the random, geomorphic-dungeon-designed map, as noted earlier, using the OSR Dungeon style from the 2015 Annual, in the manner established for my immediately prior map, again mirroring that used in the Shadowdark supplements. Since the Inkwell Explorer dice are one of the sets for which no written descriptions are available, I'd had to work up some ideas about the content well in advance, so seeds for some could be planted in the regional Whispering Wastes map. One of the random map designs for this layout was a fairly obvious temple structure, albeit with a curiously crystalline-looking central focus:

Having tried a few random rolls on the main Shadowdark tables, I came up with a cult that spoke only in whispers (which of course ultimately developed into the area's name), but nothing that seemed to match the temple's crystal focus. So I turned instead, and rather by-chance, to a free PDF Shadowdark supplement, created by the online Discord community earlier this year, which allows the design of slightly weird mega-dungeons randomly, on-the-fly. This is called "Shadowdome: Thunderdark" (SD:TD), and was used to create a random mega-dungeon, run through by two teams of players in direct competition, at Gary Con 16 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, USA, in March 2024. 

I began with a few random rolls from tables in SD:TD, and stumbled onto several items with a crystalline theme that way. Some quick adaptations to extract other related features, more random rolls and a few deliberate choices, and suddenly the layout became The Crystal Cathedral of the Whispering Wastes, or "Crystal Cathedral" for short:

This was located, hidden away and hard to find, in Lightning Ravine, Hex 1002, with the Outer Doors opening onto a ledge partway down one of the side-canyons in said Ravine. It was rather fun to watch the whole coming together from what was provided by SD:TD, with some expansions and a little adaptation in places.

Ultimately, the process provided a gigantic creature, "The Shimmering", that was living in the crystal, and which had descended from the stars long ago, sinking into the earth and creating a protective crystalline casing for itself. It had set-up a cult of humanoids (The Shimmering Cult) to provide living creatures it can feed upon, turning them into fresh parts of the crystalline features scattered throughout this little complex, with a view to eventually having sufficient power and energy to return to the cosmos. (Freely acknowledging here influence from Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space", and Nigel Kneale's "Quatermass 2", where even the cult acolytes receive a small "mark".) The cultists become transformed into parts of the crystalline structures eventually, gaining extra powers and abilities along the way. Plus parts of the cult can be found in other places in the Whispering Wastes, as the notes for that map, and this one will suggest. Cultists who are always on the lookout for lone travellers and others who seem unlikely to be missed...

Ordinarily, that would have been that, submission ready for the Atlas, and I'd have been moving on to the next small dungeon map in the series, intended for somewhere in the Feralwood Forest of Alarius. However, while I was finalising the notes for both these maps, Remy Monsen dropped-in the 1,000 Atlas Maps Competition. As noted in my first posting here, the Shadowdark hex-mapping system allows the creation of individual sites as well, including settlements, of which there are ten on the hex map, all village or hamlet sized. As I'd already done the basic layout designs for these in preparing the map notes anyway, I decided to try mapping all ten. Whether they'll all be finished before the contest ends is, of course, another matter. I will complete them, if other things allow, regardless of that though.

First village is to come next - Ljungby (Hex 005)!

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...

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!

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...

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.

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!

Hopefully before folks get too involved in their mapping for this, it's worth reflecting that Vertshusen is situated around 65° South latitude on Nibirum, which means it's about on the Antarctic Circle (for Nibirum, this is at 65°S). So in summer, the Sun never sets, and in winter it never rises. For those less familiar with such locations, it may be worth examining some of the architecture and building layouts used in settlements in such places today on Earth - Alaska, Northern Canada, Iceland, northern Scandinavia and northern Russia (there are no southern hemisphere equivalents on Earth) - some aspects of which might require a nudge or two from magical elements to replace the technological ones, given there really weren't many substantial, permanent settlements around the Arctic Circle during medieval-equivalent times on Earth.

The fifth map in my Whispering Wastes set is the weird necropolis setting of Osalin Village:

I've added some fresh notes about it to my WIP topic, and there's a higher-res map in my Gallery for this place too. Meanwhile, the FCW and PDF notes files are here:

Still reeling from the shock that the style wasn't called "Sinister Suers", naturally 😉!