If you're struggling to work out the general sizes of things as a whole, you might find it useful to look through some real-world maps, like an atlas, a map of your local area and your own town, for instance. That should give you some ideas about the amount of detail visible on different area-sizes of map.

It might help you too to draw out some sketch-maps by-hand first of what you're wanting to create in CC3+, as that way you can get a rough idea of what size of map is going to better-fit the map you're wanting to draw once you start-up in the program. Even if you don't get it right this way, you can always resize the map in CC3+ if you find the area's too large, or not large enough. We've all been there!

Meanwhile, back at the topic in-hand...

Hunting for a potential Lower Level design meant checking through those unused from the Trailblazer dice, leading to one with suitable architecture and features being semi-randomly decided-upon, and mapped:

As a one-dice design, it did leave a bit of space around it, so picking the four elementals from the first Token Treasury set seemed an obvious decorative addition here. This time, I also opted to use the usual square-tile bitmap fill design for the chequered marble, now with that greyscale RGB Matrix Process effect I'd decided against for the Upper Level, because here, it IS the entire floor covering, so there's no unhelpful comparisons to be made with the "real" B&W marble textures. The Inkwell notes stated the design was diamond-form, and while I experimented with copy-and-pasted strips of my hand-drawn B&W marble chequer floor from the Upper Level, their sizing wouldn't fit evenly to the layout here. I then tried using the standard check fill for just the passageways and rooms, but trying to get those angled-by-edge to a neat 45° proved impossible for the shapes involved. So in the end, I just drew a large rectangle, rotated it, and then changed the design with angle-by-edge (and got rid of the roof shading look too, naturally).

This does lose the mild glow effect on the floor edges where they ordinarily meet the walls, although as I'd already left some pale shadow effects on the Upper Level walls anyway (which began as I wanted the external cliffs to have shadows on the outside), that shadowing, with the wall glows, seemed to work sufficiently well anyway. I don't often use shadows for dungeon maps, but in this case, they seemed to help everywhere.

Of course, there are elementals here, and the "pools" can be opened as scrying devices to their linked planes, as well as gates into them. If you look closely at the Elemental Grand Mage's Quarters (probably easiest on the Gallery version), you'll find how my attempt at making the view of a "roofless" four-poster bed turned out, as mentioned elsewhere on the Forum a few weeks ago.

Next time, it's back to northern Alarius, to find a spot somewhere in the Emerald Crown Forest region...

I prefer to stick with an appropriate adhesive. ?

Next bit!

I'd already had to adjust the symbol sizes to be sufficiently visible on the map for the base design, as the default setting had proven much too small and hard to see. When I started adding the feature elements, those felt still a little too small even using that adjustment:

So I tried this higher-res test - this and the subsequent images are all at the standard, larger, Forum size-resolution, here concentrating on just that key central map portion:

The new symbols indeed look awfully small here as well, so were quickly changed to larger sizes, although that in turn meant some further adjustments in positioning to retain clarity, and sometimes even swapping-out the symbols for alternatives, a process that was likely to continue for the rest of the mapping (which I find to be a very common occurrence). The central area with resized symbols:

Followed by a shot of the whole-map view:

At about this stage, although it seems I didn't preserve any of the screenshots I took during it, I tried adding some of the Character Artist vector monster symbols, to show what creatures might be found where in some of these locations. While that seemed worth an experiment, as the general drawing style is comparable with the other symbols in the Filled set, there's a little too much detail on the CA creature drawings to work at a suitably rescaled size here, so ultimately that idea was dropped, which is probably why I overwrote the images showing the attempt. Hey ho!

Finally for today, we have the map with all the inner-zone features added, albeit these are still little more than place-markers at this stage, before a range of adjustments takes place to settle them in better with one another, and so that aspects such as the stream-lines make better sense with those in the larger region, etc.

Edging a bit closer to a finished map, at least!

It may help you decide how and what you'll need to draw by finding a real-world 19th century map that you like and think will work for what you're intending (suitable for the size and type of area you want to map, for instance). Then take a look at the thumbnail images for the various Annual issues that Loopysue created elsewhere on the Forum, to see if any of those match closely enough to what you're aiming for. Each thumbnail links to the correct issue on the main ProFantasy website, where there are different examples of the same style in use, which again should help you decide which might be better for what you want.

The Cartographer's Annual 94, Vandel's Dwarven Dungeons has an anvil and a furnace in it, and you might find some suitable objects for use as tools in various places - try the weapons catalogues, for instance. The Munson's Mines pack from CA125 has some whole and broken mining tools, as well, for instance. Might take some finding all there could be of interest, and you might run into difficulties getting things to match if they're drawn in different styles, of course. And it depends whether you have all these add-ons, of course!

This blog posting by Remy Monsen might be worth reviewing, as it will allow you to create an image of whatever you wish that looks as if it's been cut into the surface involved.

I think the problem we're having in helping you is we don't really know what YOU think constitutes Steampunk, or what it is you're trying to map, so just saying you want Steampunk assets without saying what they're for, is a little like asking us to give you a piece of string to accomplish a task you can't define. Now you're saying you found some Steampunk packs elsewhere but they weren't what you wanted (which rather goes against your prior comment that anything under the Steampunk label would do). Maybe if you could say what assets you DO want and what it is you want to map, instead of what you don't, we might be able to help more. It's clear you know what you're looking for, but we don't.

Certainly there is no ProFantasy pack that carries the specific "Steampunk" label, if that's all you were hoping for, although that doesn't mean there aren't assets you could use in that genre in many other packs, as we've tried to indicate in the notes above.

Map nine in my little set of ten is for Skara Hamlet:

The usual WIP and Gallery updates are elsewhere on the Forum for this map, plus the FCW and PDF notes files for it are below:

The final Hilly Places map condenses the last four items, the streets, into one sketch:

These have a different random design mechanic behind them to the individual-place maps, and it became a particular fascination for me to see what patterns came out of this system. Here, I had to fit hills to the streets so-created, but that wasn't particularly difficult. Some features along the routes could be added based on the various featured texts, while others simply came from the street names, or the shapes the system produced, if sometimes with a bit of adjustment, or inspiration that struck while drawing them. Circus Place though just happened to look like a huge pair of spectacles from the outset - and what greater spectacle than a circus? Well, two circuses! Not saying it definitely did, but that might have influenced the final appearance of The Eye in Western Approach as well! Plus how apt was it that Western Approach can be approached only from the west? Sometimes, you start to wonder if randomness is truly "random" after all...