I have quite a few of the earliest items in this line, going back to the later 1970s. The earliest were some sheets of square floor tiles and wooden planks printed on card that you had to physically cut up to use. They weren't tiles as such, you just had to cut them to whatever corridor size and shapes you wanted. That's where the concept of geomorphs probably originated, to make best use of things like this. There were a few other bits and pieces with that, including a cut-up stone stair sheet, both straight and spiral, and some wooden doors. They were printed with a single colour per sheet, and good-quality, black, hand-drawn lines to show the texture. One of the stone colours was cream, with neatly-drawn, square and rectangular sub-tiles per 5-ft square (scaled for 25mm/28mm minis back then), the other stone was grey with numerous small "crazy-paving" style pieces per floor square, and a few bits missing to show it as "worn and very old", the stairs were grey with wavy-edged steps, so as to have a bit of character, and the wood doors and planking done in a pleasing red-brown. Can't recall who made them now; might have been the original Games Workshop - they were certainly the UK sellers.

Then in the early(-ish?) 1980s, I bought up a full set of the Steve Jackson Games "Cardboard Heroes" range of A-frame standee card minis, which also had to be physically cut-up from their full-colour-printed sheets, and which had a huge array of mini options for characters, monsters and all manner of flat-lain items. You can still buy these now, but as downloadable PDFs to print at home. They're still excellent, as the artwork quality was uniformly splendid, and at the time nobody else was making things like this. Spoilt for choice in home-print options these days, of course!

About the same time, I found a booklet called "The Compleat Tavern", published by Gamelords in 1981. This provided a whole array of tables and rules for running events of all kinds in taverns and bars in fantasy RPGs. Main reason I got it was because it had a loose foldout tavern plan printed on thick paper (mono printing on cream paper), which again came with cut-up sheets of items like tables, chairs, benches, etc, printed brown on darker cream thin card.

Subsequent to that was a set of pull-out and cut-up printed item sheets in an issue of either "Dragon" or "Dungeon" (the TSR in-house magazines of the period), which were simply printed black on flat-lain small rectilinear tile-shapes, suitable for the items involved (jars, barrels, chests, etc.). Can't recall what date that was now, but from the basic print-style, I'd guess sometime in the 1980s.

And lots more since, naturally, though I didn't come across anything quite like these 1984 pieces. Being in the UK though, getting hold of anything published in the States was often very difficult, and commonly expensive.

Which is fair enough!

I think at the time I was bought the original D&D boxed booklets, and even when the City State arrived, there were two UK importers for the whole country here, so it was never easy - or cheap - getting hold of any of the US-published items. Made it all a bit more special though!

To answer some of the questions here, yes these were genuinely used as playing cards back in the day, but they also had an educational aspect, described sometimes as a sort-of early pocket atlas. The full sets included the usual 52 cards, an explanatory extra card, and a title card with a map of England and Wales divided into counties. The cards were among the first maps to show roads. As the sample here shows, they also gave the county dimensions, latitude (they predate the adoption of the Greenwich meridian for longitude in the mid-19th century in Britain) and selected towns' distances from London. It's thought only one complete set of these cards still survives, although there are a few incomplete ones, and more surviving individual cards.

You might want to redownload SS1 if you don't have the Fantasy or Handdrawn symbol folders available, as there are definitely four folders showing in my SS1 symbol sets - these two, plus "Peter" and "Sean". Unless the contents have been changed since I obtained mine (they are all dated 2016 in my installation, certainly, so that was a while back!).

I wouldn't rely on the program to automatically change symbols sizes to always look right. I often find these need tweaking, sometimes quite substantially (and not always by the same amount for all symbols in a style).

Really just have to pick or adjust things to suit per map. Once you've done it a few times, it becomes pretty automatic.

Your first comment sounds like the pink shape is being drawn on the wrong sheet. If you're using a drawing tool to create it, that may be set to a different default sheet than the one your Color Key effect is on. If so, it's easily changed by simply carrying out a Change Properties command immediately after finishing drawing the shape - so before it vanishes (you can check to see which sheet it's drawing on while you're drawing it in the information boxes along the top of the CC3+ screen).

I'm guessing that the fractal poly's ending up on the wrong sheet too, as there's no reason it wouldn't work properly just because it's a fractal shape.

The other key element is the Color Key effect MUST be at the top of the effects list for that Sheet, or it doesn't work.

You can use Ctrl+C or the drop-down Edit menu's Copy command, select the items you want to copy over, and then click "Do it", picking a suitable point to copy them from.

You will need to prepare a new map file first (just set up a blank map in the correct style, and of a suitable size), and have both it and your existing map open together to do this more easily. Providing you open each map separately, that won't be a problem (just use Windows Explorer to find the files you need, for instance).

Thanks @Ricko. In cases like this, I simply try to work with the original style as far as possible, and it is practical to "force" the Mike Schley cliffs to work as north-facing, even if it does mean quite a bit more effort. It would certainly be helpful to have some north-facing cliffs in this style already though!

For the central valley here, I simply added a Solid 10 polygon over the lower part to darken it a little. The effect is very subtle, but I found using the Solid 20 fill felt too obvious, whereas this seemed to help the effect just enough to fool the eye - to me, at least 😎.

I think most, if not all, the character items are indeed from Character Artist, RS - I recognise many of them, certainly!

It's those treasure-hungry young dragons. They keep moving things about...