I am humbled!

High probability this part of town is called Garden City by the locals. Cleverly, only the properties next to the city wall need that added detail.

Very much undecided what to do with the remaining space between properties and wall, however. Perhaps the greenery has spread beyond the walls of the well-off over time, creating a bit of a park-like thing.

Thanks! Yours too! I think it kind of helps for the speed going from the impossibly faint colours of the D&D, and now not having to work too hard to come up with what to put in there to make things appear. I think a low-details setting and just the one little house there helped too :D

Wood texture is going places now I think. It looks a bit like carrots for the time being but with the side patterns being brought into the fold, later, I think that won't be a problem. I mean, if it's all carrots....

Oh, and yeah; I ended up with a winter story there of a serpent going for the star and whatnot on the left. So maybe each side of the wooden frame will be telling a story of sorts.

They deleted the Trash Can and divided by zero all at once, didn't they...

The fast and loose with the details would most certainly be a detriment to some game systems. But it actually sort of works at the encounter map level, I think. Style is not going to be for everyone, granted, but the part of me who likes the idea of taking down a painting and stepping inside for some initiative rolls is 100% thrilled.

The trick is picking a motif that woos the crowd to the point where its properties as a map are no longer questioned

😂👌

You know what, I am not ruling out it could pass for an encounter map after all...

Anyway. This Water's Edge exercise - which supposedly is a means to propel the Quay Thing into greatness - has lead to the discovery that patching together cells of a certain shape is not really applicable for larger tiles of less structured patterns. So for slabs of this size, or greater, "folding" a single straight path by way of node insertion I find is not only meditative; the natural lack of precision ensures there will be gaps, and those gaps kind of will do for slab texture what closed fractalized polygons do for contours.

But what fascinates me the most is that it lead to my, finally, realising that custom symbols is a sound investment after all, @Loopysue. :)

Here's what I didn't get at first, everybody, because stupid:

This is all those lines and polygons turned into a symbol, as per the Symbols -> Define Symbols operation: it grabs everything and turns it into - in this case - a circular object which displays whatever was put into it as one single visual representation.

And that means everything goes into the same sheet as one single object too. While possible to force a Sheet destination for the symbol, you would neeed seperate symbols for each individual element to get the colour effects I am pushing with this style of map design. For the tower (as well as the rest of the piece) I am using sheets for Contours, Base Colour, Toning Colour and also Smudged Colour.

Furthermore, since it's just one symbol object - there is nothing to manipulate other than its size, placement and mirror-copying it. You can't add nodes to a symbol, trace along its edges, or remove things from it etc.

Alltogether not very positive for this particular approach to designing maps in Campaign Cartographer. Karma, I guess :D

Above, however, is the symbol in editing mode, accessed from the Symbol Manager. It's all there: lines, paths, and polygons. All drawn to specifications as per the moment of making a symbol of them.

Removing all the colour polygons, then, I am left with the very basics of the design in question: the contours.

And this is what I want from a symbol. I want a pattern clone which I can freely manipulate. And I can, because copying from the editor means I get to copy the lines and paths as such, rather than as a symbol object.

This tower can now be kitbashed into the basis for a wall turret or a ruin or whatever. Colouring is no time at all!

And so, the Symbol catalogue becomes the Mandala catalogue. For my flannelgraphing.

Wall ditch, yay!

There seems to be a time and place for using contours in grass terrain; not all elevation will benefit from it - obviously. Will need to figure out the slopes...