Unfortunately, the fills aren't included with this Annual as far as I can tell. From the Mapping Guide with this issue:

"If you do not own Dungeon Designer 3, you can still use the png and pdf versions of the maps, as well as the adventure description of the ship. To create your own ships you will need a copy of DD3 though."

The missing fill is definitely a DD3 one, Water Blue 5 Bitmap (or if not that exactly, it's one from the same Bitmap group).

DD3 is indeed a separate ProFantasy product.

@Medio: I think you should probably post whatever you're comfortable in showing. I don't really do WIP threads myself, as I tend to chop and change things while I'm mapping, and that's all done offline, but it is interesting to follow others' process in this regard.

The size of the trees you select should ultimately come down to whether they make the map easier to read quickly, or not. Personally, I like the mix of sizes, and the background colouring for the forests, in your second Sep 20 map posting above.

To my eye, the forests in your Sep 21 map no longer look as clear. However, you need to go with what works best for you ?

Finally got round to watching this on catch-up tonight, and very good it was too!

Nothing particularly new there for me for once, but as Sue said in the chat, it's an excellent resource now to point out for other people regarding importing fills and symbols into a different style map, for example.

And I never cease to be impressed by how much you and Ralf are able to suppress yourselves when something goes awry! There's a lesson for the rest of us there too, perhaps ?

You could use the map divisions as your scale, though as the map's rectangular, you'd need to pick the one that works best only for that, and just add a note on the outside edge of the map border to say what the scale is. Adding a scale bar - it's easy enough to draw your own if the symbol option for the style doesn't appeal, for instance - might be a better alternative here though.

Are the different land colours intended to show approximate contour levels? Or are they for vegetation background effect? If the former, maybe think of adding a height key. If the latter, then I'd agree with Sue that the trees may need adjusting, as they seem too sparsely scattered for clarity otherwise.

Sorry @jmabbott; didn't intend to make it look like I'd ignored your Oct 7 reply to me, but for some reason (and I think Sue's raised the point previously), it didn't show up when I visited the Forum yesterday, and indeed I only discovered it today because there was a new Notification about it which weirdly wasn't there yesterday, or when I first came to the Forum today! Oddly, the bitmap discussion posts, including that with your grey-dot PNG WERE there though then!

The early D&D maps everywhere were a real mish-mash. The very first one I ever saw, before I even saw the rules, was published in the May '76 issue of Games & Puzzles magazine, part of an article on D&D by Steve Jackson (of the original Games Workshop). That was beautifully hand-drawn, with nice scribble-sketched filling for the solid rock, but there wasn't even a scale on it, let alone a grid! The sample dungeon level on page 5 of "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures", Vol.3 of the original three 1974 booklets (white box for me, in '76!), was sketchily hand-drawn with solid black for the rock, and plain white passages and rooms, but again, neither scale nor grid. Then the maps in Dave Arneson's extensive "The Temple of the Frog" wilderness and dungeon adventure in Blackmoor Supplement II (1975 - mine's the '78 5th reprint!) each have a hugely invasive square grid across all parts of every map - to the point where some parts of the map become more or less illegible, because even the parts with squared walls are slightly offset to the grid, and the grid's just so dominant. Yet even there, none have a scale! There are a few corridor and room sizes mentioned in the text details, though the place-names mentioned in the text aren't always shown on the maps either. I think I came to the decision the squares had to be 10 feet across when I ran part of it. Seems incredible looking back though - and can you imagine the uproar online if WotC did that now?!

On the black-background PNG, I've noticed for some time that the default Win 10 image viewer, "Photos" currently, I think, has an irritating tendency to add a black background to any transparent background PNGs that are fairly light-coloured. While this is handy for white-on-white images, it's off-putting when you see the thumbnails in File Explorer suddenly with black backgrounds you know you didn't put there. I wonder if something like that's happened here?

The magic ice-cream's clearly raging hot curry flavour.

So, supernova orangeade, then?

Have we hijacked your thread long enough yet, @Loopysue ? ?

There may be others island generators about that I've not chanced-upon, though the only one I've really tried much with is the Red Blob Games one. It's hex-based, for more or less volcanic-type islands, and gives you options to fiddle about with the look and biomes live using the same island shape. You can save the image whenever you like, though only as a PNG (and it's an automatic download, so you have to change the filename from "download.png" each time, which is a bit irritating if you're trying to do a lot at a time). It is a bit keen to add jungle unless you rack up the coldness and end up with a vegetation-free cold inner zone to the island, though you can always tweak that after the fact. Might be something to experiment with for the Watabou site even so, perhaps.

Interesting. Just checked with Chrome myself, and although the link doesn't work if you click it directly, if you right click while hovering the cursor over the link, and then click Open link in new tab, it works fine.

Castle Ravenloft's the only published adventure I have copies of from all its "official" iterations. Big task ahead!

Though I'm guessing you're not going to be doing the isometric cutaway views as well, and for the original, it's really not orange enough!

[With apologies to anyone unfamiliar - the original I6 module from 1983 came with a big fold-out poster map of the whole castle with isometric floorplans in a semi-cutaway view, with each floor level (twelve of them inside and below the castle, plus another of the courtyard within the castle's outer walls) clearly separated. It was printed in black, white and - several shades of orange to brown!]