By the time I'd chosen a property to map the floorplans for from Vertshusen for this contest, I already had some ideas as to what it was going to be, and what mapping style I'd be going with. The chosen property is that marked by the red square in the SE corner of the walled area:

My initial thoughts had revolved around a haunted house theme, and because I've already done quite a bit of mapping for the Community Atlas using some of the more realistic floorplan styles, quickly decided I wanted to do something different. For me, part of the point in participating in the Atlas is to experiment with new ideas and different mapping styles.

Three possible styles were uppermost in mind, all very similar tech-drawing styles, the 1930s Travel Guide Floorplans from the April 2011 Cartographer's Annual, the 1800s Floorplans from April 2016, and the one I finally selected, the Dracula Dossier style from September 2015. Haunted house, after all!

However, I also took a look through the PDF of "Hobbs' Architecture", which was a recommended freely-available download from the Internet Archive site, mentioned in the mapping guide and webpage for the 1800s Floorplan style, to get a feel for what house layouts should look like and contain in this general type of map appearance.

The working title for the map was "The House That Wasn't There", as I had vague early ideas of creating a building that wasn't always there. Indeed, one initial concept had been to pick a completely empty space in the city, and map the house into that, only I couldn't find a space large enough!

Which building was chosen was partly down to something that looked interesting, that was also a little out of the way, and the final choice was swayed after I was drawn to one of the smaller buildings in "Hobbs'":

which just looked interesting, and had some features not dissimilar to the building in Vertshusen. The size and scaling weren't the same of course, as the Vertshusen buildings are uniformly tiny by contrast to the structures in "Hobbs'". It was a starting point though.

Having measured the house size on the Vertshusen FCW, I set up a suitable template in the Dracula Dossier style, and then directly imported (copy & pasted) the "Wasn't" House and its neighbouring properties, setting "my" house down in the centre of the map border area.

Of course, it's angled as originally drawn, and as others have commented in topics for this mapping contest already, that's not the friendliest layout for drawing rectilinear structures. So I copied the house again, and rotated it to better suit, and then copied that twice more (as my initial idea was for a ground floor plan, an upper floor plan, and a further plan for the two taller roof towers. I also imported copied scans from the Hobbs' book as reminders for the overall look of the plans, setting them up on their own Sheet with a Transparency Effect, so I could position them over the CD3 house roof and get a better idea of what might go where. And then started drawing. This illustrates where I'd got to with the drawings when I ran out of time yesterday:

Part of the reasoning in heading off next to tropical-desert Kumarikandam for my sort-of Dungeon24 project (outlined here earlier), was because by chance, that continent had come up as the next random choice for another dungeon based on more of the Inkwell Dice "Crypts" set designs. A second map had also been randomly allocated to this place later in the process, for one from the (City) "Ruins" set. It seemed sensible to tackle them together, especially because both had also been allocated to the Banjar Region map. That map is pretty large-scale however, so there isn't a lot of detail on it:

Despite that, picking a couple of suitable spots wasn't too difficult, using notes already provided from this zone for ideas (it's recently been invaded by mysterious assailants, who seem intent on slaughtering the tiny, sparse local populace, hence the ruined settlement markers and that ominous, creeping "conquest" line). It did though mean that my two selected settlements (shown by the tiny red squares on the above illustration) were going to need small area maps to better locate and describe them, aside from the "main" dungeon map. Each of those squares is really 20 miles on a side.

The "Crypts" dice map was to be first, and I opted for the inland site at the intact village in the heart of the Banjar Mountains for it, close to the headwaters of one of the two main rivers there, the one that drains into the Bay of Aqesh (my choice for the subsequent "Ruins" map was the ruined settlement near the mouth of that same river). So I began by mapping the dungeon, as that was already prepared in hand-scrawled form, and progressed outwards to the village, and then to the surrounding 20-mile area. Plus I also got distracted and did portraits for two of the main characters in the dungeon.

Here, we'll go from larger to smaller, starting with the 20-mile area map, called simply "Sussara" (which is also the name of the village):

For what perhaps should be fairly obvious reasons, I selected the Scorching Sun Annual style for this map, labelled with the Vinque font from the 2015 CA. Quite a number of features, such as the various trails, and the names of the two nearby rivers, with Cedar Woods, had already been decided when completing the Sussara Village map. The other main river, the Sagirkala, was shown, though unnamed, on the Banjar Province map, as well as the main river, what I've called the Kalabanjar. However, the intermittent rivers were added to give a more complete look, with a range of extra elements decided from a couple of sets of random tables, notably those in the Atelier Clandestin book "Sandbox Generator" that I've mentioned, and used, before, adapted accordingly to suit this environment. As normal, there'll be PDF and text notes to accompany the map once in the Atlas, to explain a little more about the various features, and what some of the names mean.

The first of the Hilly Places of Interest is a rocky mound by the curiously narrow River Clack, Palace Heights:

No real sign of a "Palace" as such, although that maze of low, grassy features all over the slightly domed hilltop hints that something may have been here once. This is one of those Places I'd had an idea or two about before the project was too far along, and parts of this map will recur in a subsequent one from the Constructed Places, where the Palace isn't just a series of grassed-over ruins. Faerie time-dilation effects can permit all sorts of weirdness, and in this case, both the hill with ruins, and the hill with a fully-functional Palace, can coexist simultaneously in Embra. The particular one to be found - perhaps even both - dependent on how the city is navigated.

The original concept came about loosely because the real-world city of Edinburgh, which was an early influence for Embra, has its own great castle-palace, set upon a rocky pinnacle in the city, although the two aren't closely comparable beyond that, chiefly because each of the Places for Embra being unconnected from any others, has to be presented on a more-or-less standalone map, whereas Edinburgh Castle's rocky platform continues down into the adjacent street area leading up to it, known as the Royal Mile.

Next is another Edinburgh-influenced location, this time based on the huge, semi-wild, volcanic-rock hill of Arthur's Seat. In Embra, this becomes the large hill named Mab's Couch:

As Arthur's Seat has a number of walking trails across it, it seemed reasonable Mab's Couch should have some as well, and the focal point of a stone cairn at the top. The red sandstone ruins that might never really have been buildings are a purely-Embra aspect though, as is the oddly-dressed madman (?) of the featured text. When thinking of suitable place-names, I felt it might be apt to add something with a perhaps more tangible frisson for potential RPG character visitors, hence Sithich Woods, as, from the accompanying PDF and text notes for this map:

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 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...

The last set of Embra "Places" maps is that for the Constructed Places of Interest, linked from central segment 7 on the "Official Guide" map:

This is the busiest set for individual locations of any of the Places groups, with seven, leaving a mere three to be condensed onto the eighth "Streets" map.

The Celtic knotwork border was adapted from one in the, by-now-famous, Dover Clip-Art "Celtic Borders on Layout Grids" book, providing a completely connected square, to complement the original circular design used for the Village maps. That seemed an appropriate method of "book-ending" the entire set, as well as tying-in with the idea of both being constructed places, if of somewhat different sorts. In altering the design from what had been a vertically-elongated rectangular one to the required square here, I discovered when looking at the finished piece with its colouring, that I'd accidentally produced an asymmetry in the patterning. I did wonder briefly about amending that, but liked the look of something slightly off-kilter as apt for a Faerie setting, and so left it. The hours of effort it would have taken to change it had, of course, nothing to do with that choice...

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!

Next to be mapped was the Castle Peris area, various locations in which had a scattering of weird and wonderful items added to them thanks to the random card draws.

There are three main parts to the map, the Harbour (most of which has fallen into the sea), the Village (much of which has only had building foundations laid, and may never have been inhabited - or not for long, at least) and the eponymous Castle itself. Living here much of the time is that now-amended, card-derived "Chieftain", who has become Hypatos, the isle's sole permanent humanoid inhabitant, a self-exiled, hermit-like Human, and former chief sage, who successfully predicted a major eclipse and planetary alignment in the past, but being imaginative and forgetful, he then failed to warn of an abdication crisis he believed these celestial events portended, somewhere on the mainland (he is quite vague as to when and where all this took place). He still wishes to right the wrongs he thinks followed that crisis. He is convinced there is something on the isle that will help him resolve those perceived wrongs, although he does not know what (possibly that Talisman at the Watchtower of the Sea). He is also the sole priest, of sorts, for The Twisted Torchbearer, and is apparently under her protection. He is very knowledgeable about the isle, and seems to have been here for a very long time, although his appearance suggests no great age, merely late middle-age...

Further notes will be in the final Atlas version.

The drawing itself was done using the Jon Roberts Dungeon style from Annual 54, since it allows the easy draughting of surface areas like this as readily as underground ones. If it had building roof options, I might have been tempted to add those too, but the cross-sectional, ground-floor-only plan views are in-keeping with the original "Castles" book maps, at least!

Next time, the little dungeon map proper.

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!