Wyvern
Wyvern
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Community Atlas: Errynor Map 33 - Hwael Igland
No, I didn't try an export with the cliffs on, but zooming in and out made little difference to the problem that some of the lines spread across the intervening land, beyond the polygon's boundaries. There's also the issue that I design my Atlas maps to be viewed at the full-map level shown in the illustration above, and that's where I could see the various problems. While that might have been OK on an output at some size levels, if I can't confirm that in the CC3+ view, I'm not going to chance it!
Thanks Sue & Jim! ๐
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Mike Schley freebies
Hope you've all collected your new free symbols now.
Mike's certainly been racking them up this year. Sorry, I'm not grating on too much about this, am I? It would be unpalletable to be chained to that like an iron bar. Or that seems key to me anyway, to avoid being manacled to the last straw.
[There isn't a "groan" option here either, is there? ๐ Ho, ho ho! Christmas cracker jokes already...]๐
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New Commission. Ghorfar
"The png has no lines, thank heavens. But this jpg might."
Yeah, but aren't they for the contours, rivers, roads - Oh wait... ๐
Not sure about the strength of the "Copyright Bay" label either ๐
More seriously, the green skull with horns looks too pixellated to my eye; seems not to fit well with the rest of the map's style and clarity, though I appreciate that's entirely to do with the original source illustration, and not something that can be fixed without some serious redrawing.
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Traveller - City/Regional Maps
Depending on what kind of look you'd prefer, and also what sort of land area you want to map, you might also look at World War 2 Area Maps (which has options for illustrative contour lines), Cthulhu City (which also includes illustrative symbols for a selection of building types, albeit with "Call of Cthulhu" elements about some) or the Tactical Maps pack from last year's Annual.
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How can I change the text on scalebar?
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Winter Trail Project
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Top down symbols for overland maps.
Don't forget there's also the Fantasy Realms style from 2009, which has the essential top-down mountain and hill drawing tools.
It's important to recognise too that as soon as you move from the pictorial isometric or side-on images to top-down, you're immediately wanting greater precision in exactly what is where, hence I'm not sure trying to create a set of symbols for top-down features will work well enough. That argument is why there are very few hill and mountain symbols in Fantasy Realms, for instance, with the recommendation to make full use of the drawing tools in that style.
Top-down vegetation is tricky too - lots of rough-edged small rings with a couple of texture lines inside is liable to be all you'd see at typical overland scales. This does work, as it's what was used originally on things like the early SPI-style hex-based board-and-counter wargames, and it's fine as representation, but it's not particularly realistic. Plus it can be very easily drawn vector style, if you want to go down that route.
It's hard to know what would work better as identifying jungle symbols than palms (try a quick online search for jungle map symbols, and most of what turns up IS palms!), given that many jungle evergreens have general side-on shapes similar to in-leaf deciduous ones. Maybe adding a few hanging lianas in places, an attempt at stratification (albeit that means multiple trees per symbol), or splashes of colour for flowers and fruits might help, though again for overland-scale maps, most of that detail's liable to be lost. Altering the varicolor colouring might help with the extant deciduous woodland options, possibly. And for top-down versions, basically, again, you're looking at a rough-edged circle with a couple of interior texture lines.
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Winter Trail Project
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A small village
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A generic ruined town, 3 different settler groups



