If the gelatinous cube symbol is actually partly transparent anyway (given you can see the texture of the floor below it), items don't all need adding to the cube. As long as the items exist as symbols, they can simply be put "below" the cube by the map's creator.

On the size element, the "you can drive a cart along them" argument is partly why I suggested seeing the sewers in "The Third Man" movie, because that's where the climactic chase happens, with large numbers of police and soldiers, where there are multiple levels stacked over one another, and nobody has any problems for headroom, and places are up to river-cavern wide in parts. Somewhat like the early London Underground "tubes" (and I'd assume others built around the same time, later 19th century), some of these would have been dug out as trenches, had their surfaces coated with mud/bricks/concrete, etc., and then covered over later where necessary.

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.

The water texture looks rather "busy" to my eye, but that's probably just me.

There is an issue with some of the text however, where the grey glow is blending into the background in places - on roads and buildings, especially where the road edges are outlined with narrow dark lines - e.g. "Petaluma Stockyards" and "The Heart Markets". In other places - e.g. "Northwind House", "Xi Ling's Market Gardens" - the text itself looks somewhat transparent when set above paler backgrounds. This is all based on the Gallery image, incidentally. However, it did look as if there problems with the text in parts of even the lower-res whole-map view posted above here.

The bulk of the city seems a little empty of named places. Maybe even a few major street names might help here, although perhaps a few of the larger or different-looking properties might be named as well/instead?

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.

Have you thought about leaving the hatching off entirely? You really only need it if there's nothing else to show what's solid and what's not, I suspect.

Well, I'm still hunting for the connecting sewer symbols to let me create a sewer layout for Parchment City (hey, it says I can do this on page 1 of the PDF Mapping Guide for it!) 😉😁!

[At a not-so-wild guess, that's an accidental copy-over from the March Annual!]

Thanks Jim!

Yeah, the Inkwell City dice are a bit trickier to use than some of the other sets. They work quite well for focal points within a town or a city, less well to not at all for defining the whole settlement. It's possible to tinker around with the Villages set too to get a kind of "fading edge" to the settlement, where the houses thin-out to fields and wilder lands. Surface settlements are often heavily dependent on the nearby terrain (rivers, coasts, available materials, good agricultural land, etc.) of course, so lend themselves less well to being generated purely randomly like this.

That ain't no turtle! 'Tis a lizard-folk lich!😁

One of the Twitch livestreams I follow more regularly runs out of New York City, and they seem to have endless problems with their Internet connectivity. I gather from what's been said that this is a particular NYC thing, where each few city blocks ends up trapped with only one available ISP, so even complaining doesn't help, as you can't threaten to switch to a different provider.

And don't get me started on those dratted "Captcha" things. Great, images so tiny I can't even guess what they might be showing, and you want me to identify a what in each of them (US terms do not always travel well, folks...)?

"A" looks more natural to me too, Sue.

The cross-hatched decoration (don't know what the proper term for it is, sorry!) seems undamaged despite the roof holes beneath it. As this seems to be of fairly flimsy outer surface material (compared with the depth of roof thatching), it seems unlikely it would have survived intact when the entire thatch below it has rotted away - even if it had just broken and raggedly partly fallen-in, say. I'd guess in some cases it might partly survive sort-of intact, but not always.

It does also look a little odd that none of the holes are where the greenery is; the extra weight and implication that that's where water's collecting, so mulching the thatch down into a growing medium plants can root into, might suggest that kind of area would be ripe for collapse as well.

Not a problem, Remy. There are 58 of mine in this set alone, and I know I tend to add extra complexities too.

In addition to all this (behind the scenes), we ran into a problem with a rogue fcw32.pal file I didn't even know I had, so some of the colours on the initial maps from the Embra set entered into the Atlas were wrong, and those files had to be changed, aside from everything else...

On the upside, I see we're rapidly closing-in on 750 Atlas maps now, and I'd guess once all the oustanding ones have been added, we'll likely surpass the 800 mark.

Might need to start thinking of that 1000-map contest shortly at this rate 😉