Last of the individual Wooded Places is this group's segment of the Twilight Market, Green Market, where instead of the colourful and unusual tents and awnings of many other parts of the Twilight Market, all the stalls are set into the colourful and unusual vegetation, or grown from it in one way or another. It is a Faerie Wooded Place, so what else?

There might be an argument too that having started using some of the Mike Schley treehouse symbols from very early on in the Embra "Places" mapping, it was inevitable I'd sooner or later want to use more of the "ordinary" trees from it too. That despite the fact I've grown to love the Fantasy Town mapping style during this whole Embra mapping project; there's something very satisfyingly 3D about the woods it can generate with a little bit of effort, for instance. Should anyone be wondering, all the trees, bushes and flowers (= tiny varicolor trees) were placed individually, not using the CC3+ random drawing tool options, throughout the entire Embra collection, incidentally.

I ran into a few issues with CA3 some time ago, where I found a few missing items, or varicolor features that weren't varicolor, or symbols that weren't correctly set to match the standard CA3 snap grid. I reported those to ProFantasy, and what I found were all fixed quite quickly.

It sounds as if you may have spotted at least one other symbol - the missing sleeves - where there could be an issue, and if so, I'd recommend reporting that to PF directly (indicating exactly which symbol is missing).

The problem with CA3 is there's a huge number of symbols many of which look very similar to one another if you're only checking the artwork, and not testing every one in a full CC3+ drawing, so these few have probably slipped through the cracks somewhere, I suspect.

We've been asking for more artwork options for CA3 for years. However, I don't think it's an especially popular add-on for the main program, and is somewhat removed from its core mapping facilities, so it seems unlikely anything much new is liable to appear any time soon for it. The hand-drawn look is more modern-looking than the original vector artwork (which is still available in CA3), although the vector artwork was much easier to draw your own additions in, if you needed them, than the newer raster versions.

@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.

Yeah, I'm with Mike on the anti-snow front! It might look OK from indoors, but when you've had to slog through it, or have spent days clearing it at times, it VERY quickly loses any appeal.

And yes, Joe's right about the concrete look now. It's very tricky. I know even looking at specimens of the mineral galena can be difficult, as it can be both shiny silver-white and black at the same time...

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!

SS5 Cities of Schley has a selection of Halfling house options (grassy mounds with round doors and windows), and also Elven treehouses, plus rough-looking Orc buildings. The main CD3 Bitmap B style has a larger range of fantasy building options as well, including for Halflings (houses and grassy mounds) and Elven treehouses again, as do the main CD3 vector styles, so there are options there without needing to go down the Annuals route. And the Annuals, being smaller in size than these main products, do tend to concentrate more on providing the basic styles first.

It is worth noting that you can draw your own house shapes using the CD3 toolset, and give the roofs whatever texture you wish from the range of options you have available. Stacking different shapes on top of one another on different Sheets with variant Effects can also increase the options for how things appear. DIY treehouses by placing a suitably-shaped and textured house in different sized tree and other vegetation symbols, all on separate Sheets, for instance. And things like varicolor wooden roofs can be made to work as market stall awnings with a bit of resizing and choice of suitable colours.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Sue! Can't really add much beyond what's already been suggested above for Darklands Cities II, after all that... 😪

Overland, Cities and Dungeons are the three key planks for CC3+ mapping though, and it has been mentioned here now, so... 😎

@Glitch - Something else you might try is having a second window with another program (such as Windows Explorer) on full screen mode, so it hides the CC3+ window completely. This helps stop the looping as much, and you can check the thumbnail view to see when the CC3+ screen is showing correctly again. I spotted Ralf did exactly this on this week's livestream at one point, so I know it's not just me who finds this helps sometimes!

+1 from me for the tanks/AFV annual!

If you're seriously thinking of a full range of vehicles, maybe choose a specific theatre and time to reduce the options somewhat. Colour schemes and camouflage will easily swap over, but the modifications to vehicles, and the different types involved, end up as the real problems (speaking as a long-time model-maker and WWII wargamer).

Aircraft to follow? 😉

Map The Second is...

Hex 403, Bruga's Hold:

A logging hamlet on the upper Swirl River, among the woods of the southwestern Siljan Hills, this is a rather isolated, frontier-style settlement, with trails leading-off to logging camps, or former ones (the trails southeast of the river crossing were where much of the timber for the settlement originated, for instance). Markets here aren't common, but the open space is handy for storing piles of fresh timber prior to sending it off down-river, or overland by trail southwards. The self-styled Queen's tough, if not as young as she was, and her extended family keeps most things more-or-less in-check here, though her nieces at The Corner Daughters have a tendency to accuse those they dislike of theft, something that works best with outsiders. The grandiose apothecary's shop-name was a random choice (it does look outwardly like a small temple), which seemed too apt to waste - see the notes above on the Crystal Cathedral - while "Merry Wares" became something of a running joke, as it cropped up randomly twice more in different settlements in this set for quite different places. I retained that too, as GMs can decide if it's at all significant.

On the original map, I started out with the woods rather denser than they are now. That looked much too dominant, and would have been unrealistic so near the settlement, so, much like the original loggers here, I had to thin them out somewhat. The mapping style makes use of both tree and bush symbols, and a bitmap tree fill drawing tool, which in combination for the densest areas here help give the woods a particularly 3D feel, although the symbols have to be applied judiciously to better hide the edges of the bitmap-fill segments. Of course, I had to delete and redraw all the first areas of the fill, as they were far too large, and it took a little experimenting to get the sizes right after that, in combination with the individual scatter of trees and bushes. Luckily, I had a fair idea of how best to achieve all this, as - although it was using a somewhat different style, and in colour - I have done quite a bit of woodland mapping for the Atlas before, for those who remember the extensive mapping series for the Faerie City of Embra - like the Wooded Places maps.