Must admit, I was getting slight déjà vu feelings watching Ralf's livestream yesterday, as parts of it reminded me of my Wyvern Citadel maps for the Community Atlas. Very different scale of course, but there are inevitable similarities for drawing anything set on a craggy hilltop in this kind of more realistic style.

I made much more use of symbols however, rather than drawn polygons, for the cliffsides, though I did experiment that way originally (see this post in my Forum notes on the Citadel map, while still in progress). Just couldn't get the bevelled polygons to look right though, so switched to a technique developed for battlemat cliffs by another of our resident mapping experts, Shessar, as described via the Forum post here. As ever with CC3 mapping, there are always different methods to try!

Looking forward to Part 2 of this video, to see how it all develops. Anyone would think Ralf was running a game set in Middle Earth...😉

I suspect you'll need to post the FCW file here to get some definitive answer to why these symbols are showing as green and with a green edge, as there are too many variables to try to guess at something useful without that information.

The wall and tower symbols in Darklands City go on to one or other of the SYMBOLS Sheets. There is a dedicated SYMBOLS 2 (walls) Sheet, and another SYMBOLS 3 (towers) Sheet, although you would need to have selected either of those Sheets to have the walls (or towers) go on to one of them as you place the symbols. Otherwise, if you have no other SYMBOLS Sheet selected, they will default onto the normal SYMBOLS sheet only.

This really is invaluable, Sue. As I've printed-off the PDF mapping guides for virtually all the Annuals, I tend to remember if I've seen a given style somewhere, but if someone then asks, I end up hunting through the PF website pages to find it, usually guessing which year it's in first, because I can't find it in the mass of printouts otherwise...

I've not explored anything like enough of the issues in detail to have favourites, though my ongoing Community Atlas mapping has provided opportunities to experiment with quite a few.

@jmabbott If you're subscribed to the PF Newsletters, you'll find there are sometimes money-off vouchers available for webstore purchases in those, and the company has in the past run generous Black Friday promotions, which might make the complete Annual collection a bit less fearsomely-priced. It's how I completed my set a few years back; after that, it's "just" a question of keeping-up with it year by year. That's not so bad either, as if you're a subscriber, you usually get a time-limited, money-off renewal purchase option around the end of the current year as well.

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.

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.

I don't have any kind of set pattern for this. I simply apply labels where they're needed on a per-map basis. Sometimes those will be letters or numbers, if space is tight, at others actual words. I've used a mixture of both on some maps - as in the topic where the query was first raised, for instance.

In general, and for smaller maps where there are distinct routes that might be followed, like Royal Scribe here, I'd start with the entrance/first area and number in rough sequence from there. As long as your labelling is clear and unambiguous, and makes sense to you, I'm not sure anything beyond that is altogether important.

Occasionally, you'll need to make decisions as to which route to follow with labels first, and some things may need labelling out of sequence if they seem to fit better that way (say, if a label is going to obscure some key point in the room, but by using the next-but-one number, it wouldn't, or something like that).

Sometimes, it'll make sense to follow specific patterns as Ricko mentioned - clockwise/anticlockwise, top to bottom, etc. - but that depends really on exactly what's being mapped, and what purpose the map has.

I may be misreading the hand-drawn version, but aren't the trees meant to go right across the mountain peaks as well? On the CC version, it looks like they're almost all bare rock currently (judging only by the coloration, not whatever that grey fill style is meant to represent).

I ran into the same issue that Ralf identified during the livestream when preparing my recent Monseignor District map for the Community Atlas, regarding the unscalable hatch styles, when trying to map the swamp areas there. My problem was greater though, because the area I was mapping was a lot smaller, at 10 x 15 miles.

The way I got around it was by accessing the hatch style's FCW file, and simply copying over all the constituent vector polygons, and rescaling the lot together. I then just copied and pasted those rescaled elements to where I needed them for the swamp texture, and in the forms required. This had one advantage, as I also wanted some grassland texture to represent the farmlands, and the swamp texture's polygons include those horizontal linear polygons too. Just a few more copy & paste operations.

It would be practical to use the hatch style's FCW file to set up individual symbols for use when mapping this way, so the individual pieces would be scalable like any normal symbol. Plus that would have the advantage you could also make use of techniques such as "Symbols in Area", "Fill with Symbols", etc. If you're going to be making frequent use of one of these early Annual styles, that would definitely be worth doing.

These are interesting experiments. It's something I've tinkered with a little before, and it is tricky to get the look right.

There are two further possibilities here, I think. One would be to try just using the Mike Schley clouds, and see how those work out. A possible trick might be to use some inverted dark hills for the underside of the clouds (these might need resizing, and testing out different varicolor options); not sure about this latter. The other would be to add some more clouds elsewhere over the map in the style of those you already have. Their isolated nature right now is drawing too much attention to the contrast with the ground, I suspect. More clouds might help disguise that.

You might also try using the Alyssa Faden clouds (if you have the Annual with them in, at least) as an alternative, as the shadows on those would help with the "multi-layered" cloud concept, and some would work as just darker clouds. They're more similar to the cloud forms you have now than the Mike Schley ones, certainly. The Mike Schley ones do have gaps in them though, which might make them seem more natural over a Mike Schley landscape. Those options are a bit limited though.

In terms of aerial creatures, I've a vague recollection of a winged dragon on a north pointer in one of the mapping styles (which would need work to extract just the dragon, and which in any case I can't now find, so may simply be misremembering...), but if you have Dungeon Designer 3, there's a top-down cockatrice which could just about pass for flying, I think. However, there's a greater range of options in the free Dundjinni symbols - dragons, birds, bats, other flying animals, etc. If you don't have those, you can find the link to them here, though they do need some care to install correctly.

Good luck for further progress!

Yeah, I agree with Monsen regarding the text labels. There's also a problem that parts of the words on the paler text fade where they overlie the palest green on land.

I get the impression too that the roads are on a Sheet higher than everything else, so look to be overlying some of the text labels as well.

Might be worth tweaking some of the red dashed border line nodes to try to remove the odd long dashes in places, though this is a perennial difficulty and can't always be properly resolved, I know.

I'm finding the dashed roads a bit distracting. Partly, this seems to be because the roads cross over the settlement circled-dot symbols, so that could be simply part of the Sheets issue noted above. However, I think it's also partly because the roads often don't pass through the centre of the settlement symbols. While that can be a legitimate point on a map (i.e. the main road may not pass directly through a settlement), at this scale, I think it probably should be tidied-up.