We've mentioned before on the Forum that Chaosium provides a lot of free PDF resources that you can download from their website for the various RPGs and supplements they produce. Today, I picked-up a physical copy of their latest Call of Cthulhu book at my FLGS, "Cthulhu By Gaslight - Investigators' Guide", the updated version of an earlier work for the line in which our own ScottA had a hand back in the day!

With the book comes a beautiful fold-out map of late Victorian London drawn by Alyssa Faden, a name doubtless familiar to some here, especially those who have her style pack from the 2014 Annual. You can download a free PDF version of that London map (and a set of the players' maps from the book, which share a similar look) via the links on the Cthulhu By Gaslight webpage here.

Yes please to the Elf, Dwarf, Halfling and Orc structures, plus ruins, ships, icy elements, a volcano-mountain, variant settlement features (including for different cultures)! And after those, also perhaps:

• Magical site markers
• Battlefield marker, and a more general flag-style marker, to highlight important sites that don't fit to specific structure types.
• Oasis symbols for the deserts.
• Two more bridges at different angles to the current one - one running straight down the page, the other angled down from top left to lower right.
• I really like the Henge and Tomb hill markers, as they look good on any terrain. Another such marker with a cave mouth would be very useful.
• Some Mountain Peak symbols without the snowy tops (so grey mountains, just no white caps).
• Seeing the animal and creature comments, just the actual creature without any associated terrain would be better, as usable anywhere. Snag is, going down this route is liable to lead to requests for a lot more "resources" style markers - domesticated creatures and crops, minerals, etc.
• Some jungle-style trees, perhaps including mangroves, as well as the fruit trees Monsen mentioned.

I'll probably think of others later, but these are what're coming to mind right away. It's a wonderful style, and it would be excellent to see it expanded as far as possible in future, I think.

And thank you very much for creating it!

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...

There's a good reason for that. It is!

@Royal Scribe Have you taken a look at the DD3 Creatures symbol options? There isn't a gargoyle, but there is a golem that might work as one. None of the options in that have bases, and most have varicolor options (though not all that work on the whole creature, to turn it to stone, say).

And obviously shocked there's no wyvern statue 😉🐲

Yet 😁

Helen, you can find that map, and many other illustrations, on the Pauline Baynes website. She was an amazing lady who did a huge number of illustrations, including the only ones of Middle Earth not drawn by Tolkien himself during his lifetime which he authorised.

This map, and that for Middle Earth, were available as posters at one time, as I used to have both. They are true works of art!

Plus, she also did all the maps and illustrations for all of Lewis's "Narnia" books. There is, or was, a single volume hardcover at one stage which had all the texts, maps and illustrations in, all in colour, if I recall correctly.

Certainly, I found drawing "Naughty Lass" quite a challenge overall. There's a particular complexity in trying to visualise things in 3D to be able to draw 2D versions from top-down and side-on viewpoints, and deciding exactly which line you'll pick for the cross-section, etc. There isn't an ideal solution, so you end up just picking whatever seems to work better, and hope users/viewers will be able to tell what was intended.

There is a similarity to the cross-sectional views of caves we've discussed before here, though with a ship, you can't usefully vary the line of any sections, as that just makes it still harder to draw for a vehicle.

I'm not saying it will definitely help, as I'm not sure what changes were made when the Ships Annual was updated, as they were drawn only using the original, but I had to handle similar deck-level elements, and other features, when designing "The Naughty Lass" for the Atlas. For ease, you can pick up the deck plans FCW here, and the sideview here, in case those may assist.

Note though that I did "cheat" with the yards, by having them piercing their respective masts, partly because it's a magical vessel, partly because I was trying to avoid needing to show the complexities of the rigging...

As you might tell from my frequent use of random options in my Community Atlas maps, I've been a long-time fan of such random design systems, for all they can need a bit of nudging sometimes to get things to work out OK. I've not used the 5E system as yet, though almost exactly 20 years ago (July-August 2001), I created a classic 12-level dungeon using the random system in the original (1979) AD&D DMs Guide, each level filling an A4 page of graph paper. All done by-hand then, however. I did make a start converting it to CC3 not long after I got the program, around 2014 or 2015, I think, but that was very slow going, as I hadn't the option then to scan the hand-drawn maps to trace in CC3.

Have to say that your map looks a lot more elegant and less cluttered than any of my old ones from that dungeon set, so the 5E system may be something I should experiment with in future, perhaps...