Well, it's already in the Atlas, but these notes maybe add something regarding the creation process, and some of the problems encountered in preparing it. So, as mentioned in the Siolforland map Forum topic, I wanted to add an additional map to that main one, for the little offshore isle of Hwael Igland, although this is actually the largest of my planned islands off Errynor. During the original planning for this whole Errynor mapping project some years ago, I'd brought together a number of randomly-generated ideas, including a series of base-maps for the scatter of tiny islands in Errynor's seas from the island generator on the Red Blob Games website. The base chosen here was:

This is only one of the map views the site generates, showing just the chief biomes, with symbols and colour-coding. Other views provide more detail on the physical terrain. The rough-edged, sort-of hexagonal pattern the random system uses to create the map is naturally quite obvious here, although personally, this is quite appealing anyway, and produces some interesting coastal shapes especially. The random maps have no scale illustrated, so adjusting them to whatever size is needed is very straightforward, and here largely revolved around calling the mountains "hills", and the rivers "streams".

When generating the random island base maps, I had the overall shape for each in mind from my original hand-sketched Errynor maps, and simply tried different random options until I arrived at a suitably-shaped island for each. In this case, I'd decided this shape fitted what I'd already sketched, but only once it was inverted, as suggested by the final Siolforland drawing, even if the similarity is a bit vague:

Of course, the random base map is very incomplete, given the final Island needed at least one settlement on it, and for an Atlas map, it also needed further points of interest adding. So a series of fresh random rolls on my small-scale-map-feature tables were made, after which a fresh evaluation of the landscape was carried out, and some adjustments made, including factoring-in considerations from the Siolforland mapping (such as the already-decided height of the highest peak on the Island). Then the CC3+ mapping could begin.

As normal, I'd identified several possible mapping styles to use. Here, I was picking from some of the simpler black-and-white styles, suitable for the relatively small area involved. Partly this was a reaction against having been mapping purely in colour for some considerable time up to this point (not simply with my Errynor mapping), and partly a reaction to having mapped two Errynor islands previously in colour, Zariq and Zaraq on Errynor Map 01. However, the style I eventually settled upon, "Treasure Maps" from CA58 in 2011, was one I have used before in Errynor, when mapping the seafloor surroundings of the Kachayan settlements at Shark Bridge in the deep ocean of Map 01. On that occasion though, I'd really used little more than a couple of symbols, the backdrop parchment fill and font from the Annual issue, and had drawn my own not-symbol vector-shape objects for use there instead. This time, I was using the style more as it was meant to be, for a sea-surface island:

Once drawn, as soon as I started adding the labels, it became very obvious space wouldn't allow them all to be fitted on the map, so the background rapidly had to expand to fit the points-of-interest listings, to which I added a further minor complication by using colour-codings for the features on land, and those around the coast and in the sea, while retaining just the one numerical sequence! And then in the PDF description, I added-in the named places, breaking-up that sequence still further, which was an interesting experiment in producing a non-alphanumeric index...

Part of the reason I'd chosen this mapping style was because it allows the drawing of cliffs, as well as providing other landform symbols. The perceptive will, however, notice there aren't any cliffs drawn on the final map. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that at this map's size, the cliffs looked unworkably clumsy, as the drawing tool for them uses a non-scalable hatch fill, and moreover it sometimes reacts very badly to drawn polygons containing strong convex and concave curves (such as when trying to illustrate that cliffs continue right around a narrow peninsula, or a coastline with substantial indentations). In such cases, it can force part of the hatch fill beyond the drawn borders, so that the land looks like it's ALL cliffs in places, not just at the coasts. Even drawing the cliffs in small segments didn't work, because sometimes there was scarcely anything visible to show there were meant to be cliffs within the polygon area, and others where the polygon was almost all solid black fill. So I settled for relying on just descriptions in the PDF for where the cliffs lie (there are meant to be at least low cliffs around most of the Island's shores, and a couple of places where they're inland too).

There's a similar issue with the hatch fills for the marshes and the "grassy-look" texture on the hills, though luckily the hill symbols don't rely on that hatch fill, as they're scalable objects in their own right, as normal, while there's a series of individual marshland symbols in the Annual as well (which I was particularly relieved to find after trying the marsh drawing tool, with similar problems to the cliffs). I toyed briefly with drawing suitable shapes into separate polygons for the cliffs I wanted, only to veto that as far too time-consuming in this case. I assume part of this problem stems from the fact the style's intended to be used for maps around 20-25 miles or so across (as the PDF mapping guide suggests), whereas Hwael Igland fits very easily within a 10-mile square.

Despite this, I was pleased with how the final map had worked out, and to have had the chance to play around with a style I'd barely touched previously.

I've done a lot of mapping with this style (and indeed I currently am again), largely because I like it so much. I picked it as the basis for the 40 maps in my ongoing Errynor mapping project for the Community Atlas, after all! It'll be nice to see it get some live-streaming love and attention though!

I find it actually has quite a good range of symbols, more so than some styles, which, in combination with the range of textured fill options and colours, is what makes it so attractive for me.

Of course all styles could always do with more symbols - as many of us have commented here before 😁

[And I think we all also know in most cases, that's not going to happen!]

Dee-licious! 🍳

So far as I recall from modelling the 8- and 6-rad armoured cars (i.e. also from period images and information), the aerials were fixed in position, and at a height above the turrets all the time. These are the early-war "bedstead" frame aerial types, not the later war smaller "star antennae" which were retrofitted to some models, incidentally.

Oh - and belated congratulations on your ascension to Master Mapper status @Lillhans ! Very well done!

Enclosed Place of Interest 3 is the Floating Dale Park:

This can be used as a typical real-world park, with opportunities to wander around, or play outdoor games on the central Playing Fields, whose unusual shape may call to mind that Faerie outdoor games and sports may not be quite those familiar from the Mortal Realm.

There are a handful of surface-level buildings scattered around the map's centre, as one of the map toggles will reveal:

These include the Pavilion, where equipment for playing sports and games is available, as well as a restaurant in the central octagon beneath the building's dome. And yes, some of the vegetation is actually intended to be of living glass in Glass Tree Forest. And again yes, those ARE bridges made from rainbows over the River Clack. As ever, the text and PDF files will explain a little more about both facets, and others, from this map. In case this seems not very "Enclosed", there ARE boundaries to the Park which are deliberately less obvious than some.

You're just throne this out there, aren't you? 😉

Well, as it's turned out, not quite "next time" for Level Thirteen after all!

As I was drawing the various Tower levels, and especially when setting-up the cross-level hyperlinks, it soon became obvious I was relying on my own hand-scrawled schematic showing how all the levels connected with one another to manage that. This suggested a further such properly mapped schematic might be helpful for GMs trying to run the Tower with the portals active in the sequence shown on the maps. Thus we also have the Windy Tower GM's Guide map:

Although it was relatively simple and quick to draw (especially compared with setting up multiple macro hyperlinks per level!), it proved a little more complex than anticipated, thanks to the number of crossing arrow lines. Plus the whole went through around six different hand-sketched iterations before settling on this layout, to try to keep the arrow-line patterning as relatively simple as possible.

Now it's done though, it has been quite entertaining to use it to navigate using the FCW file's hyperlinks between the levels, when checking them in comparison with the text notes ahead of the final Atlas submission.

And so REALLY next time, Level Thirteen!

And so finally...

My original idea was to set this dungeon map up as a cellar to the Tower. However, the use of portals to navigate between the main Tower maps, suggested this one could be set up instead as a further level, whose separate nature, while hinted-at by the need to use the golden talisman from Level Seven to operate the portal from Level Nine to it, would only become fully obvious once it began to be explored. It also leaves open the question as to whether this is genuinely just another main Tower level, one with a more secure, semi-secret accessway, and even whether most of the Tower levels might be on a completely different plane of existence to the outside that connects with Level Five.

Regardless of that, this is the final map, whose base was generated by a trio of the Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph dice faces from the Adventurer set, here with a few minor tweaks and adjustments:

As the labels indicate, there are alchemical aspects here that survived from my initial thoughts on this layout, now added-to by golems - and there are several of those here, including some variant levitating Iron Golems that can also freely teleport within this Level (only). There's also something horrifyingly vast and terrible magically held in stasis in the Great Holding Chamber. You'll have to read the notes in the Atlas version to find out more, but it's known as The Devourer of Deserts (no, not "Desserts"...) thanks to The Story Engine card draws.

There's a lot more weirdness here, including what seem to be randomly inlaid dark metal symbols in the floors, walls and ceilings in places (another card-generated idea), as well as more conventional dark metal inlay designs, courtesy of our own Loopysue's Marine Dungeons! Some of the accessways are incredibly narrow (that between chambers D and E is barely 18 inches, 45 cm, wide, for instance), raising questions as to how some of the large, bulky equipment ever got into the inner western and northern parts of this complex. Which is just as it should be for what's clearly an anciently-created place belonging to a highly powerful magic-using person/creature. Who seems to be nowhere at all in the complex currently...

The golems are intended to function much like the other guardians elsewhere in the Tower, in stasis until required to tackle intruders, except here, there are often passwords required to stop them activating, not to mention the silver amulet needed to open the door to and from the Entrance Chamber (A). The whole Windy Tower project was though a fascinatingly creative exercise, tying-together (sometimes very loosely!) the randomly-generated card-draw concepts, as well as the oddities of the dungeon layout.

One final piece of weirdness I only found an explanation for after consultations with Loopysue and, indirectly, Remy Monsen. It's been a very long while since I mapped using the Mike Schley Dungeon SS4 style. When I came to draw the Level Thirteen map, as usual, I imported a JPG version of the hand-redrawn dice design as a base to work from in CC3+. I always check the sizing of that, and adjust it when done if needed, using the drop-down Info menu's Distance command, measuring the separation of the graph-paper grid lines using the ortho setting. Ordinarily, that calls up an information panel that looks something like this (I'm just picking random points here to demonstrate):

However, what came up was this:

I thought I must have hit some unrecognised shortcut key by mistake, but then I couldn't find a way to reset it, either using the CC3+ Help menu, or anything in the Tome.

It turns out though that there are actually two commands you can type into the command line to find distances like this, DISTANCE (which gets you the first panel above) and DIST2 (which gets you the lower panel). Now quite why DIST2 has been set as the default in SS4 is a mystery nobody seems able to resolve, given that (thankfully!) it isn't used anywhere else like this. There probably are circumstances where being able to measure both bearing and distance together might be useful, and also the vertical and horizontal distances simultaneously, but it is appallingly confusing to have this thrown at you when all you want is a straight distance measurement. In this instance, it's fairly obvious, if not intuitively so, as to which is the correct value for what was being measured, although that wouldn't necessarily be so obvious under different circumstances. Something to be aware of when using SS4, though - and if you do just need a "normal" distance measurement, simply type-in DISTANCE to get it!

Now it's time to leave Doriant for the time being, and head off to Lanka in Kumarikandam for the next maps in this project...

Thanks very much Sue!

I wanted the cliffs here to look different to yours, which I'd already decided to use for the red sandstone types at Embra, as the Palace Heights ones are meant to be a harder, volcanic type of rock. Actually, a Faerie type of volcanic rock, which has different properties and abilities to "ordinary" volcanic rock, so I also wanted the forms here to act as a reminder that something a little different to normal was involved. I also used a similar style of cliff drawing in one of the Crossing Places Streets - the Rocky Vale under Seafield Road there, again because the Vale is a weird place that can't be reached, another reminder of something odd happening there.

Just finished catching-up with today's video, as I wasn't able to be there for it live.

I've used Character Artist quite a bit over the years, and it was a shame to discover there are no plans to update or expand it, if perhaps understandably so, given it is something of a "luxury" add-on, compared with the primary mapping purpose of CC3+ in general.

Reviewing the video so soon after it was posted means the chat wasn't available to view (it sometimes is lost anyway, if the video is later edited before its final YouTube posting), but I don't think it was mentioned there that there is also the original Character Artist Pro, which has many more drawn-symbol options than CA3, and is much easier to draw your own additions onto, because it uses the far simpler vector drawing style. I suspect many now wouldn't feel it to be "pretty" enough, compared to the more modern hand-drawn version, unfortunately, but it is a versatile tool that shouldn't be ignored - to me, at least!