There's something prowling around at the stones, so better not go out today.

Something like this, then?

Oh I see! Yes, I didn't like the dashed lines. Sorry Wyvern! All my elks have four good legs and are big enough to just wade through the snow.

Still open to suggestions.

I've changed a few names and written a possible history...

One possible history...

The first to come this way were the elves, who escaped the growing noise and fuss of the humans to come and live in harmony with the wilderness. As these things happen, eventually tales of gold and incredible wealth to be found in the hills around caught the attention of the dwarves, and they were not the sort to let an opportunity go by.

Akiya Pine is said to grow on the spot where the elven queen made her last stand. Some even say that the pine is Akiya – that she transformed herself on the point of death, and that her people likewise comprise the trees of the south facing slope either side of Elkton.

It was only after they were gone that the dwarves realised the elves had never been wealthy. However, they followed their dwarf instincts and found a pipe (a deep igneous intrusion) of diamonds deep underground through Maws Cavern.

And what diamonds they were! Big as elks, some say. This is how the settlement they and their human partners built came to be known as Elk Stone, or Elkston.

The dwarves worked out the diamond mine and moved on. In their wake they left a perfectly good but rather empty settlement, much of which fell to ruin. However, Elkston was now on the map, and eventually attracted a slow trickle of outcasts running for cover – criminals mainly, but among them the various were-folk who had been treated little better than they by the everyday folk of Alarius.

Today the population is low but steady. Strangely, they are mostly were-folk - mainly were-wolves and were-elk, but there are others among them who are a little more unusual, such as the huge were-boar, Jungen, and the tiny were-hawk, Shinsa.

Outcasts continue to arrive in Elkston; thieves, murderers - anyone with a price on their head, but for some reason they don't seem to do very well. Most inexplicably vanish within the first year, along with their associated bounty hunters. Maybe they cross the bridge and flee the ghosts of Akiya’s battle along the trails of the lost.

These kinds of label issues tend to happen when the rendering engine gets confused by overlapping black and white extents and fails to see some of the upper sheet - the labels. Please try changing the text colour to the very palest grey in the palette, and edit the glow effect to the very darkest grey.

You may be experiencing the same kind of trouble with your roads. Try changing the road colour to the very palest grey.

It's very unlikely that any of these issues are being caused by your system.

If you are still having problems when you've tried my suggestions, please share your .FCW file here with us so that we can have a more detailed look at what is happening.

Thanks Jim :)

This won't be part of the style because there are a few things that need far more time than is available to sort out before March, but I'm also working on a night time theme that might appear in the more distant future.

Hi hsv :)

Here is a show and tell thing I was working on when Remy posted above. I had taken a bit of time, so I decided to post it anyway.

I also realised when I checked the Tome reference that I had made a couple of mistakes. You are supposed to draw the drawing on the COMMON sheet, and the SYMBOL DEFINITION layer, rather than drawing it on random sheets and layers as I did.)

...

Turn the snap grid on, place the symbol to copy, and draw the inner circle in black.

Set a line width greater than zero (but not too large) and draw the outer circle.

Right click the polygon tool and pick the Regular Polygon option. Set the number of sides to 5 and use an alternative colour and the same centre point to draw a pentagon in the inner circle. Release the Snap option and turn on Attach. Use a third colour to draw the star in the middle by attaching the points to the corners of the pentagon.

This will leave you with more of a pattern than a star, but you can use this as a guide to make the star.

The easiest way is to delete the pentagon, explode the star, and use the resulting set of 5 separate lines and the F5 and F6 snaps to draw the star.

You can see where to pick and delete the guidelines from under the newly drawn star where the white lines are in the last image. This was just after I had deleted mine and before refreshed the screen. Change the star to white, and then you have something similar to the original symbol, though it will lack the translucent white outer ring.

To turn this into a vector symbol pick Define Symbol from the Symbol Manager menu, select the new drawing and D for do it.

(I've turned my window a random colour so I can see what I'm doing a bit better here. That's an option in the View menu, but you will have to turn it back to white when you are done - colour 15).

Also notice above that I have clicked the Symbols In Map button on the left beneath the Options... button in the catalogue panel to show the symbols used in the map. This is where the newly created symbol will appear when it's done.

When you hit D for Do It, you will get this dialog. Leave the settings as they are and give it a name. I usually stick pretty close to the original while also making it clear this is a vector drawing copy.

When you OK this dialog both it and the drawing you just made will vanish. Don't panic. Just click the Symbols in Map button again and scroll down to where you will find the new symbol you just made.

Then you will be able to pick the symbol and paste it wherever you like.

A newly created vector symbol like this one can be saved in a catalogue to make it available in other maps. I recommend saving it in a new catalogue next to all the other catalogues in the style's Symbols subfolder. Like this.

I hope that helps.

Another way is to hold down both the CTRL and SHIFT keys at the same time. The disadvantage of using them together like that is that its very easy to press only the CTRL key for a split second before you hit the SHIFT key, which makes it easy to accidentally scale the label instead of rotating it.

You can mess around with the global sun settings (right click the hourglass). Just playing with the Intensity a bit can give a more stormy appearance.

Though this only seems to affect the roof shading in this map. If you look at the shadow effects they are the same. To alter those you would need to adjust the shadow effects themselves.

Where you tend to use a lot of raw colour polygons and draw your own shadows, you could do something by playing with the palette colours, I guess, but that would be a whole lot more fiddly. Overcast light is much colder than sunlight. So you would need to turn everything more blue-greyish. Maybe a single overlay sheet might do it? Kill the bright hot yellows and reds a bit?

Hi Everyone! :)

In this Thursday's Live Mapping session Ralf will be using the first style of the 2008 Cartographer's Annual to draw a map in Pete Fenlon's classic 1980's RPG map style.

Come along and join in the fun :)

Hi Everyone! :D

In this week's Live Mapping session Ralf will be creating and using heraldic symbols from the March issue of the 2008 Cartographer's Annual.

Come along and join in the fun :)