Day 200 of 2023 seemed an apt moment for a fresh update on this project, so here we are, whole map first:

Further tweaking of labels and minor map features has proceeded apace since my late June update, and the type-up of my notes is in the early part of the University, area 259, currently, while the hand-scrawled preparatory notes are nearing the end of the Manufacturing District, area 293. Still a way from the area 360 end, but well up on the area 200 the day per area idea might have indicated otherwise 😁. (And yes, I STILL haven't got round to adding a symbol key or map title...)

For today's closer look, following last month's minor temptational mention, we have the extracted PDF notes for the less-well-off living areas of the Hall in The Dell, areas 191-224:

All being well, still more to follow!

Meanwhile elsewhere, most folks I'm aware of who were trying the D23 project seem to have been struggling to continue it of late. Some recent discussions on one of my more active Discords, where D23 was A Thing earlier, have indicated no one there's still persisting unfortunately, although a couple of folks on a separate Discord server were still posting occasional updates into early July at least. Certainly, having the base map and ideas for every area randomly generated in advance, as I did, seems to have helped keep my attention focused at least, so that might be a way to go for anyone contemplating something similar later this year or next, or on a smaller scale, for instance.

The East Wing runs to a mere two vertical Levels by contrast, based on images of a couple of layouts on the DF Discord, combined here with the usual additions and amendments, for all the final plans are much simpler than for either of the preceding pair of Wings, and clearly show their rectilinear original forms rather more. This was though quite deliberate, as part of the concept of the various Wings was to show differences between them, suggesting they could likely be put to different uses, and that this area was probably still largely under construction. Plus it wasn't only the layouts that had been getting figuratively tied in knots with some of the other maps!

Simplicity only counts for so much though, so the entryway from the Palace this time isn't on Level 1, but on the lower Level 2 (which is also a somewhat larger map than the others):

Yes, it's coming up to that time isn't it? So here's my final version of Cloven House, firstly with the secret cave hidden, and then revealed:

This will be winging its way to Remy for the Atlas shortly, with its text and PDF notes, but in case anyone might be interested, the PDF description is here as well, should anyone wish to be "enlightened" further on the nature of this haunted house:

Worth noting though that a few comments are a trifle "adults only", concerning a couple of the potential apparitions and other ghoulish elements.

Place 2 is the "famous" Red Picket Golf Course (given Embra is, extremely loosely, derived ultimately from the real city of Edinburgh in Scotland, it proved impossible not to include something relating to golf in these maps of the Faerie city):

This time, there is the option to hide the labels for the course separately from any other map labels, to make the various hazards and obstacles easier to see, although the labelling is essential to work out what is meant to be where in terms of trying to complete the course:

A small key has been provided with this map as well, to better clarify what the recurrent features of the course are meant to be. The PDF and text files for this map describe in detail the Faerie elements of the course, which plays as something like a cross between "real" golf and miniature or crazy golf, with fantasy aspects to-boot. Of course, those descriptions also explain why the course seems both a lot smaller and shorter than real-world golf courses (key word "seems"...), and that it may take players, non-Faerie players especially, days to complete a round of the nine holes. Benefits may accrue for those who do persist and finish the course, however. And they may find their time has not been nearly so wasted as they may have felt while still playing (Faerie time-dilation can work both ways, after all).

There are just a couple of buildings on the map, and these have been provided with internal-layout drawings via a couple more toggles in the Atlas FCW file for the ground floor, and the upper storey of the Clubhouse (only):

Completing the circuit is Embra - Summerset in the northwest, with its small village of single-storey properties, the River Clack with a bridge (albeit the bridge seems detached from the village rather), both the main Clack Valley tributaries, plus a curiously unlabelled third tributary stream, which seems more significant than the named Silverburn (a deliberate choice!). However, dominating the map's centre are two substantial lakes and a marsh:

Next-up will be the first of Embra city's contents, the Enclosed Places.

It's certainly a very beautiful map, and I know well how difficult it is to find a suitable real-world base map from which to draw this region, so I think you've done a splendid job with it!

As Sue said, the seas look a little "double-exposed" currently though.

How historically-accurate were you intending to be with it?

I ask, as ancient Mesopotamia is a particular place of interest for me, especially around the 3rd-2nd millennia BCE, along with the Black Sea and places adjacent around the 2nd-early 1st millennia BCE, and east to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and western India. They're places I've mapped and studied in some detail previously, and there are points I could make which might be of use, though only if you were wanting it to be more historical.

The river lines are very complex, particularly if you're going for that historical route, and a specific time-frame. The Tigris has pretty much held its course over the millennia, largely thanks to a stonier bed, but the Euphrates has drifted hither and yon across the silts of southern Mesopotamia especially, encouraged by deliberately-dug irrigation canals in places, beginning around the later 4th millennium BCE, for instance.

I know when I started out trying to map parts of this region, something that surprised me was how poorly different published atlas maps compared with one another as regards the modern watercourses, especially for anything other than the major river channels, even in the specialist (i.e. archaeological-historical) literature.

Thanks Jim!

And thanks for the explanation, Remy. I appreciate fonts can be problematic in CC3+ at times, although in this case, the two ocean labels seemed to have changed far less than the placement of the four numerals and their associated snowflake markers, which had moved closer to the labels - on the version above here, much closer - than where they were set on the CC3+ drawing. Interestingly, on the higher res printout I did, the texts hadn't altered at all, so far as I could tell, but the earlier placement of the four markers and labels was wrong; not by so much as the lower res version above, but very noticeably all the same. Which does make me think still that it's been primarily a proximity issue along the same horizontal lines (maybe because both the snowflake and ocean text labels were placed using the same horizontal snap-grid placement). Odd the snowflakes should have dragged the numerals with them all the same, as they're not grouped, just individually placed, and the numerals aren't all on the same horizontal lines. Just one of life's little mysteries, perhaps ?

I had another look at the Locations map again today anyway, and decided to try moving just the numerals and markers further out from the labels, and that seems to have worked OK:

The separation is now only about twice what it was previously, yet as you can see, the difference in where they appear is very much greater, and almost exactly where the markers currently are in the FCW file, as well as on the higher res jpg and printout I tried.

Final checking of the accompanying texts is still to complete, but I'm hopeful of having the set ready to submit by maybe tomorrow or Saturday.

OK, maybe try this.

1) Set up a suitably-sized snap grid that'll let you draw squares of the exact size you need, and keep the snap grid turned on.

2) Draw an outline square of the size you require, with the line thickness you need it to be, using the snap grid.

3) Copy that square, and paste it immediately below the first one. Again, the snap grid is your friend.

4) Then paste another line of two squares to the right of the first two, with the half-square offset required. You may need to adjust your snap grid to allow this correctly.

5) This gives you a base of four squares in the correct pattern that you can then copy, making a larger area of squares with the necessary offset. Depending on how large an area of squares you need, once you have a larger part of the pattern available, you can simply copy said larger number of squares to speed things up. If you group the batches of squares too, that will make copying the groups easier.

6) Once you've filled the area you need with the offset squares pattern, save this as your base file that you can then open and re-save each time you want to draw a map using this offset grid.

By using the snap grid and basic commands like grouping the areas of squares, the whole process should be pretty quick to do, and hopefully fairly problem-free.

[Edited this where boldfaced, as I realised after posting that the pattern actually needs a four-square group, not a five as I originally suggested! (Otherwise you end up repeatedly overlapping the column with three squares in it.)]

Sorry to be late replying. The simple answer is "no", because the render export will always use the larger value for the larger map edge in a rectangular JPG export, and hold the other to the correct proportion accordingly.

This may mean having to switch the orientation before printing, depending on exactly how the image is to be printed, but when creating just the image file, that's irrelevant.

I always put the same value in both, because it save me worrying about which edge might be marginally longer in some almost square maps, or (and this is more likely!) me entering the wrong value for the obviously longer side because I forgot which box was which in the export pane!

Heading back to Artemisia from Lizard Isle in Alarius, this time I was aiming for somewhere in Statrippe, the southernmost sliver of the continent:

When I started a closer examination of this area for a suitable site for this latest map, there was an immediate complication, because the northern half of this area has been mapped twice in the Atlas, once on the Statrippe map, and once as part of a much larger map to its north covering the Dworaguz Ranges. To avoid the problem that a map can be linked to only one parent map in the Atlas, and as Statrippe was the map already identified here, this did rather restrict the options somewhat to a site in the southernmost sliver of the sliver that is Statrippe!

Luckily, there was an intriguing small island off the south coast, labelled as "Castle Peris (Ruins)", item 13 on the map here:

With no additional information about the isle available, its size, about 14 miles by 8 (22 km by 13), felt like a convenient area to map complete, and then drill-down to add the dungeon layout. Castle Peris was thus already suggesting scope for how to proceed 😉.

My initial thought for the isle's castle ruins was to reuse an ancient map of my own, a castle wrecked in a figure wargame 46 years ago for the specific purpose of creating an RPG setting. Of course, I then couldn't find the original hand-drawn map... Instead, I thought to source an alternative from one of the two - roughly as old - Judges Guild "Castle" books. I have though used quite a few of those layouts previously, and after a few duplicated random rolls, chanced-upon a handily-ruined castle with a neighbouring settlement, also partly ruined, in the second of those volumes.

The map layout for the dungeon was already decided from the Inkwell Dungeonmorph Dice designs, which just left the isle itself, a base image for which was quickly generated from the Statrippe map, with a grid to place random features set over it.

Rather than use random tables to fill-out the various points of interest, this time I'd decided well in advance to go with the latest set of card prompts produced by The Story Engine, their Loremaster's Deck and its Loremastery Expansion, cards designed especially to help create RPG settings. These have only just been published this year. The concept is pretty straightforward, in that you draw random cards from various sub-sets within the main deck, and choose suitable prompts, called "cues", from what's on each one. There are instructions to assist, but of course, you're free to adapt as you see fit, given their purpose is to help spark-off your own creativity - maybe in directions you might not otherwise have gone.

To give an idea of what this all means in practice, this is the spread I generated for the isle's general features:

As you can see, there are cues on all four edges of each card, and each is also double-sided, but with more descriptive concepts on the white-coloured reverse. You simply pick which one (or ones) you prefer, and run from there. I chose the Location card with "Isle" on, because obviously, it's an island I'm designing, but the rest were all randomly drawn.

So now we have a name for it, "Isle of the Full Moon". It's filled with the sounds of songbirds. It has extensive subterranean features, and requires guides to get to, as well as being the hiding place for a chieftain of some kind.

To find out more, I delved into what the songbirds might be:

Here, I've fitted the Songbird Creature card with a Focus Sleeve, to help remind me what it is I'm examining further. The birds are gleaming, they use echolocation or specialised vision, they're not simple physical animals, and there's a notable subspecies at a Watchtower. So now we have a new island feature with this watchtower (which might be part of the ruined castle still at this stage), as well as more details on these magical birds. Intrigued, what of the Watchtower?

That little yellow 3D wooden arrow comes with the card deck, and helps identify what's from where, when creating complex card webs, incidentally. Now we know this is the Watchtower of the Sea. It has a spiralling form, has been overtaken by plants or fungi of some kind, is located in a cave or grotto, and there's a hidden Talisman in it somewhere. On down the rabbit-hole...

Those little wooden arrows come in different colours as well! So we've now an ardent Talisman with navigational powers, that can also bend luck or fate, and which is buried with a mapmaker in - where else? - the tower. And that's where I stopped for this card-chase, because by this point, my own ideas had begun to spiral like the Watchtower. But I still needed to check what the Chieftain was:

I doubt I need to walk you through how to read the card spreads by now, but this character was starting to feel less like a "classic" chieftain, and more like the leader of a group of sages or scholars, who'd made a mistake in the past, and exiled himself to the isle to try to find a solution ("he" was just randomly rolled for).

There was a lot more of this card-design process subsequently, for all the features of the isle, with developments, adaptations and changes in what was already done as things went along, and further ideas were sparked. It was a particularly rich process using the cards, rather more so than can be the case with only random tables sometimes. Without going into too many details, as there will be a full set of notes in the final Atlas version, these are some of the more important elements.

The isle became formally called Selenos, which is a loose ancient Greek-ish version of "Isle of the Full Moon", in-keeping with the main cultures of Artemisia. Despite being in the tropics (it's at about 16°N), I decided it could be oddly temperate at times, opting for it being where a cold current from the Frigid Ocean to the north sweeps down the east coast of Artemisia, then turns west, meeting a warm current from the Doriant Ocean to the southwest, helping to create frequent mists and fogs, hiding the isle, and making the extensive offshore reefs, shoals and sandbanks severe hazards for navigators. Thus only expert local sailors stand any chance of sighting the isle, let alone landing on it safely, as many wrecks in the waters nearby confirm.

The isle has alternative names, including The Hidden Isle, and The Isle of the Lost and Broken. The latter comes from it being the home and rebirth-place of the goddess Eunike Lysistratedoros, aka Gaiane, or more commonly The Twisted Torchbearer, whose domain is misplaced, broken and imperfect things. She may have created Selenos as her home. Tales hold the isle can be found only on nights when the White Moon is full, with the waxing and waning Moon reflecting the goddess' cyclical nature, periodically dying and being reborn here.

Fairly naturally, the songbirds became Moon Birds, which fill the air with strange, haunting music all across the island and the seas around, and which look like flamboyant, colourful Birds of Paradise. Plus they're magical creatures made from solidified moonlight, able to see equally well by day or night, and see the invisible too. Some say the isle is home to Sirens, because of the birdsong.

Aside from the Greekier personal names being derived randomly from tables in the Hyperborea RPG, everything else came from, or was inspired by, the cards.

And so, finally, to the map! I wanted to try to use a connected style-group again, as with the Snakeden Swamp maps on Lizard Isle, and chose the Jon Roberts Overland style here (and the Dungeon one for the later maps).

Ordinarily for a map of this size and scale, I might have tried to make the coastline more varied. However, as the isle's so little-known and under-explored, I'd already decided to keep it fairly close to the lines of the original from the Statrippe map. Plus as I wanted to use the edge striping coastal effects option available in this style - for the shoals, reefs, etc., offshore - a more complex coastline can sometimes make those look a bit too messy, so the cleaner lines overall looked better to my eye. As you might expect by this point, the names don't always mean quite what you might think!

There is also an alternative version of the map, with an eventual Atlas toggle, because there's a curious magnetic effect centred on the offshore - actually undersea - Pole of Confusion, which deflects lodestones and compass needles within about five miles (8 km), as shown on this view:

More to follow!