I was going to say this is probably better discussed as a new topic, but I see Royal Scribe has beaten me to it! The snag is here, anything useful will end up muddled-in with the maps and notes for this topic, making it harder for someone else to find in future.

With the style selected, it was time to copy over the linear elements to a new map, after a few further minor changes (mostly to avoid copying the symbols for the town wall again):

The building walls have already been changed closer to the new map style, although without any sheet effects on at this point. The dungeon design lines have been changed to blue as well. Several copies of this CC3+ drawing were saved, in case of later problems, and so the above and below ground map designs would match.

Next, the roads, town wall and main vegetation were all added for the surface map:

The background bitmap fill has been changed too, as the roads were getting a little lost in the earlier dirt brown default fill. Effects have been tweaked here to outline the pathways better, although the trees and bushes still need a bit more work.

Now, the building outlines have been switched to the WALLS sheet, and the first pine floors added (using angle-by-edge on the flooring polygons, and adjusting the shading's pitch and angle to tone-down the wood-plank colouring, although this felt too dark and similar to the surface cover, which meant further experimentation with several aspects of that pine plank fill to reach this stage:

Still not 100% sure about the floor colouring, but I can see what's happening in the buildings now at least (particularly with the BITMAP sheet outlines all hidden). The vegetation has been adjusted by adding a further TREES sheet, and moving some of the taller trees onto it. All still subject to further tweaking, of course, though the tree cover looks less 2D now, at least.

Next began a trickier stage (given virtually none of the mapped wall lines work with the "Ortho" setting), the process of showing what the buildings contain, and how they link to the subterranean features. New floor textures (and a tweaked pine floor one too), wall-lines, doors, windows, stairs, etc., were added, in a limited section only at this stage, which gets us up to date with progress on this map:

The BITMAP lines are back, so I don't start fitting the stairs and entryways to the wrong properties, (in theory). The two buildings done so far are the main public access points to the underground temple, and as you can see, I've already taken slight liberties with the original Stormwatch map, by connecting two of the surface buildings to better work as such. Lots more to do, however, not least the fact I'd forgotten to copy over where the chimneys are before starting these interiors, so there may be even more tweaking by next time!

Changing/adjusting line styles is one of those things that might be worth demonstrating in a video too, though, as it's one of the trickier elements to adjust and get right quickly, I've found.

And glad to see I didn't jinx tonight's stream by being able to turn up for it live for once 😊!

Returning to the Stormwatch map, I copied the positions of the rooftop chimneys to a new BITMAP sheet in the Nidag Temple Surface map, so they'd appear above the wall lines, using simple purple squares:

Since these only illustrate the rooftop flue outlets, the actual locations of the internal fireplaces can be a little different to this, and of course two fireplaces might even use the same flue, so allowing for some flexibility. Zooming-in to just the two buildings with the internal walls shows how I opted to set-up the fireplaces in these, based on where the purple squares were:

This also provides a clearer view of exactly how the interiors were being set-up. All very basic still, with just the essential main structural elements.

My initial aim with the interiors was to lay out just the access-points for the lower level dungeon design, as the next two snapshots illustrate:

It's possible other properties may yet link with the subterranean places, because, as commonly, more ideas were forming regarding the general layout, beyond the vaguer ones I'd already had - such as the angled section containing parts of an inn-like structure, with separate rooming-houses, loosely mirroring the higher-class rooms of the underground directly beneath them. Surface houses too for some of the priests, to help keep up the pretence, as well as other houses for the ostensible religion's followers above the various underground areas, who wouldn't be reporting unusual sounds from below to the authorities, of course!

Today's final shot shows that part of the area linking several properties has been dirt-paved, where there was once just a track, given that vegetation would be unlikely to long survive repeated foot-passage by priests and worshipful members of the Fellowship, aside from the relatively brief spring and summer at these northerly latitudes. Plus one more property has been "developed" with its initial internal fitments:

And yes, this does mean another surface map level will be needed for the new upper storey to this property (and others to follow!).

The thinking at present, incidentally, is that there'll be two priestly residences "above" the temple entrance ones (that's actually west, remembering north now lies to the right in this map view), and the new two-level building north of them will be a follower's house. In the angled segment, the only building with an interior thus far is a kitchen for both the surface inn and the subterranean kitchen, to disguise regular food deliveries below, and so forth. The long property below-right of the kitchen will be the dining hall/bar, and the rest of the properties along both sides of the track there will be other parts of the inn. These are not intended to be all connected, although some may be. Ideas are still developing...

Not sure I shall get much more done next week, but I'll report back on progress at some point soon(ish), with luck.

Yes, those dormers come in very handy for hiding unwanted chimneys; done this myself before for a tropical settlement map in the Atlas!

Thanks Ralf; as we've discussed before, it's always best to make sure about these things!

Very kind Sue. I'll have a rethink and maybe PM you if something occurs. I had a couple of other ideas, but the TT one came to me earlier today as a simpler possibility.

At typical overland map-scales, the second version of the gum tree could also pass quite well for a silver birch.

All looking great, as usual! ?

Great looking map so far.

I'm not keen on the altitude scale being on the later version though, as it's hiding part of the ocean current flows there.

Stating the scale of the map (1:XXXXX - whatever it is) might be more useful than a physical scale that's accurate only for the equator, but the latter could be helpful to give a rough idea of the planet size involved, as Monsen noted.

I just gave simple "Drift" names to a couple of the main currents on my Errynor/NW Alarius map, based on Earthly examples, so inventing more names for the major currents elsewhere would seem very reasonable.

Similarly, continent names for the larger landmasses would seem in-keeping with this pattern.

I suspect most prior mappers, like myself, have tended to assume similar major prevailing wind patterns to Earth's. So, NW Alarius is essentially Europe, and Alarius overall would probably see weather patterns similar to Europe-Asia. Beyond that though, things become a bit trickier, as the parallels with Earth aren't so exact, particularly the smaller seas between most of the continents. Be interesting to see what you come up with, however!

@WeathermanSweden: I think Quenten's provided you with more real-world ideas than you can likely use right now for ocean current names, though of course the names have changed over time in places, and a lot have regional (local language) variants too. The latter might be interesting to explore for Nibirum, perhaps.

I picked "Drift" names for the two main currents I showed, partly because the North Atlantic Drift, the northern part of the Gulf Stream, is relatively familiar from my own time studying geography from/in the UK, and partly because I was dealing with relatively near-coastal areas, where less-active oceanic water streams seemed appropriate. I have much interest in mapping the ocean floors in fantasy terms, and the civilisations based there, so adding some current activity was largely automatic.

With aspects like the altitude colour-key, I tend to add them on a map only where they won't be hiding anything that should be better shown. [It irritates me when published real-world maps aren't given the same consideration!] Otherwise, I simply set them in a separate side-bar of their own alongside (or below) the map. That has the further advantage they can be expanded to be easier to read, and other features, such as a scale, or notes on the map, can be added there as well. So here, you might add a key for the current arrow colours (and possibly the prevailing wind arrows, if these will be added to the same map), for instance, and maybe quantify what the different line thicknesses refer to, if relevant.

As Nibirum has more-or-less Earth-like seasons, is it worth considering a pair of maps for the alternate half-yearly views of the currents and weather systems? There are differences on Earth like this, though it does mean a lot more thinking-through of ideas than maybe is warranted for a fantasy world.

Thanks Remy. That's a bit disappointing, but trade-offs like this have to happen, I suppose. I'm still just using the Rich editor (that was the default originally, as far as I recall). Don't have a lot of spare time/energy for further experimentation currently...