Wyvern
Wyvern
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Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places
Wooded Place 5 is Wistful Hollow Chapel:
This was naturally somewhat easier as a drawing, with more random than planned vegetation, if still with a few substantial trees, and a lavish scattering of flowers across the Chapel's grounds. I picked the base map - yet another castle-form, who'd have guessed? - because the outline for what became the grounds looked like a very sketchy drawing of a prehistoric stone hand-axe, even though that has no bearing on the map or its contents at all!
Indeed, the Chapel's primary inhabitant (not even mentioned in the featured text) is a living, golden, Oriental Dragon that provides advice to the deserving who come here. That wasn't simply on a whim, but because there's a genuine church (the High Kirk of St. Giles) at the real-world city of Edinburgh that has a Chinese Dragon decoration in it. It wasn't hard to see that Embra needed something similar.
The map ended-up looking rather different to a lot of the larger Embra maps too, as the size of the buildings needed to be on a suitable "draconic" scale, so they almost look as if the map's in one of the smaller border frames, for all the map scales alongside clearly show it isn't.
Not all the illustrated structures are full buildings, as the "Interiors" toggle view demonstrates:
The Gates to the grounds are simply covered gateways, lychgate-style, while there's a tiled-roof walkway crossing the path between the Chapel and Side Chapel, not a linking building.
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Community Atlas: Embra - Constructed Places
Constructed Places map 1 is that for the ruler's Crepuscular Palace at Embra. Well, I say "ruler", but she's actually more the physical embodiment of Embra made magically real and living, The Verdant Sorceress, who flies on wings made of summer flowers. Something like the Archfey of D&D, though really more like the deity of/being who is Embra in power and abilities here. The name and flower-wings came from random rolls using tables in A Wanderer's Guide to the Feywild, by Heavenly Spoon, available on the DM's Guild download site (Pay-What-You-Want). The rest is more "me", however. I'd added some details to the PDF and text files for the Crepuscular Palace map before I realised it would be feasible to provide a CA3 drawing of the Sorceress for the Atlas as well, something that needed quite a bit of late revision of both texts and the Palace map. Although there wasn't space to add the full CA3 drawing to the Palace one, I did want to add a suitable link-spot by it. So this is the final Palace map:
And this is the lady herself:
Of course, this is only how she appears in her Elf-like humanoid form, when out and about meeting people, and not trying to terrify visitors unnecessarily. She could seem equally to be anyone else in Embra, or anything at the city - such as a flower, a shrub, a tree, a building, a pond, a floral meadow, a path, a hill, a forest, a cloud, a rainbow, colours in a cloud, the River Clack, or a blade of grass. In a real sense, she IS Embra, in all its aspects, positive and negative. (Oh, and this means the final tally of Embra drawings for the Atlas is now 58, not 57...)
Those who've been following this lengthy series of posts regarding my Embra mapping closely may recall the Palace Heights map among the Hilly Places, and spot the resemblance to this Crepuscular Palace one. That would be scarcely surprising, as they're the same place, here with the Palace a living, still fully extant, building, rather than grassed-over ruins. With an interior:
However, the interior is shown only for the ground level. The upper storeys - which all the towers, walls and great central dome have - are left for GMs to determine, if required, as the elements in it change from time to time.
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Mythic Carpathia map by Free League Games
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Sinister Sewers - Style Development Thread (CA207)
@thehawk makes a good point about ancient sewer systems. I think the earliest definite sewer pipes date to around 4000 BCE in what's now southern Iraq, at the ancient cities of Eshnunna and Uruk, although more sophisticated sewer systems survive archaeologically from the Indus Valley civilization around a millennium later (c. 2300-1800 BCE). Most were of brick or clay construction in various forms.
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Community Atlas: Embra - Wooded Places
The third map in the Wooded Places set gave me an opportunity to try something I've wanted to do for a long time, map some spiral patterns in woodland. Those sufficiently familiar with fantasy fiction might guess the idea originated in the "Mythago Wood" tales by Robert Holdstock (the original novel, "Mythago Wood", was published first in 1984), which made a lasting impression on me from when I read them back then. The final map though bore only a mild, passing resemblance to its original base. Thus came to be Spiral Glade Park:
The details are a little tricky to see at this resolution, so again, we can try a somewhat closer view of just the map part:
For those wondering, yes, Sleeping Lotus Hill does have a simple sketch of the sleeping Fey woman in white of the map's featured text, and her spiralling golden hair, surrounded by lotus blossoms. There are also a lot more flowers scattered across this map, as with several other of the Embra Places, of course. The PDF and text file notes suggest some possible benefits from traversing the spirals, and a warning regarding the curious grassy hummocks mostly hidden by the lotuses...
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Searching for Farmland
Simplest option would be to use the colour drawing tool, and then add an RGB Matrix Process Effect to the whole map, set to "Gray". This will make everything look B&W - so you could design the entire map using the colour set-up, and have it all appear as greyscale in the finished item.
In case you're unsure about adding the Effect, when you open up the Drawing Sheets and Effects dialogue box (click on the rectangle marked "S:" with the name of the current Sheet in at the top of your CC3+ drawing window), click on any Sheet, then click the "Whole Drawing" radio button above the Sheets list.
Then click "Add", select "RGB Matrix Process" from the list this will call-up, and then click to highlight the RGB Matrix Process Effect that's now been added to the Whole Drawing list.
Then click "Edit". Once you're in the RGB Matrix Process dialogue box, click "Predefined", then "Gray" from that list, and finally "OK", and then (assuming you have something already drawn on your map to check), click "Apply" to see what it does.
Good luck!
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Gobi Desert Map
You can certainly get an effect like that just using the normal DD3 symbols and drawing tools. I did something of the sort for Wyvern Citadel in the Community Atlas in 2021. The Forum topic on that's here, which gives an idea as to how I arrived at the final concept. That's shown on this shot of the ground level of the fortress (which shows the cliff lines the clearest):
There are higher res versions of all the maps in my Gallery, while you can pick up copies of the Atlas FCW files for the drawings here.
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And another small map, this time in SS2 / CSUAC2
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[WIP] Community Atlas, 1,000 Maps Contest: Villages in The Whispering Wastes of Haddmark, Peredur
Place four is from Hex 805, Toresk Village:
A somewhat more conventional, "open", layout for the next village in this group compared with last time's Ivan's Keep, if with more potentially untoward locations this time, including an overt reference to The Shimmering Cult, to add a little more linkage between features across the maps in this Haddmark mapping extravaganza. Those who read through last time's PDF notes here will have learnt the Druids from Hex 611 had a hand in creating the defences at Ivan's Keep (and may be responsible for the Goblin attacks on the place too, while The Shimmering Cult may be behind the Kobold attacks there...). Here, no similar problems, just a variety of dubious or curious goings-on. The map notes, as usual, have a little more detail.
Even so, I wanted the layout to be a bit odd, since the random rolls in the Shadowdark tables had come up with a Chaotic nature for the settlement (for those unfamiliar, most things in this RPG can be assigned an alignment - Law, Neutral or Chaos - as a keyword for GMs to apply as they choose to provide variant atmospheres for different places). So the village began nearer the river as a planned layout, but as more people came here, it spread more haphazardly eastwards, such that the older properties are now rather run-down and ill-favoured, despite also having a neater street pattern and fancy road-end walls.
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How do i know what i currently have installed?
Go to CC3+, find the drop-down menu "Tools" in the bar along the top of the window, and then go to the "Add Ons" label in that drop-down. That will show you everything you have currently installed, and you can click on any one of those names to access each individual item's description in an HTML file.






