@Lillhans Here here! I would concur with @OverCriticalHit . I've tinkered around with the info from the pdf tutorial, with some mixed success. A video tutorial would certainly help to point out where I'm going wrong. Or what I might be doing right, for that matter. Not everyone has Ralf's unflappable demeanor on camera, so pre-recorded would certainly be fine by me.

I didn't discover Tolkien until the early seventies, but once I did, I was really hooked. The maps were wonderful in both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, and I tried to make my own in a similar vein with pencils on plain lined notebook paper. Of course, I didn't want to copy Tolkien himself, so I had to make up my own place names for cities and countries. After that, though, I came across many other maps, such as the one by Robert E. Howard in his Conan stories, the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, the maps in the Shannara series by Terry Brooks, and many other fascinating gems in a variety of fantasy and historical novels. Maps are a great way to visualize the relationships between various places within the fictional setting.

The love for a really good map has continued with me throughout my life. When I discovered CC3 some years ago I put that love to work for me, creating a series of maps for my own fantasy novel, which I'm happy to say to both @Loopysue and @Maidhc O Casain I actually finished and published. It was a work of love that only took me about thirty-five years to complete. So, by way of encouragement to the two of you, hang in there. It may still happen.

@Loopysue

A giant ocean of gas. Wow! I like that. I normally think of it as a large blister or pocket of air, which obviously exists in a gaseous form. A clear vapor you might say . . . normally. Our atmosphere, contained in an envelope, like a huge balloon which encompasses our tiny planet. Let's just hope some giant kid doesn't wander by and pop it.

@Wyvern

You are absolutely right. For time sake, I did not design the maze myself. I think the website was called mazegenerator.net or something like that. Your link takes you to the right place. I just pulled the file into CC3+, put it on its own sheet, and used that as a guide for my walls. Using "ortho" to draw the walls over the original maze made it incredibly easy, but I had fun nonetheless. The trees and stuff came from the CSUAC. Nothing original from me and really no artistic talent on my part. It just took a little of my time.

In regards to all the labor needed to move the heavy furniture into place, I think I got a hefty discount from "Dungeon Deliverers."

@MalkShack Did you possibly mean "Hungary" rather than Hungry? The map looks good so far. Just follow Loopysue's advice to get your parchment effect. Trust me, she's really good at parchments.

@Lillhans Looks great, Anders! Has such a cool water colory look to it. Am I right in reading your cryptic reference to failed video takes as a hint for an upcoming tutorial on your innovative style? My fingers are crossed, but I'll try to be patient. Keep up the good stuff.

@Lillhans I like it, Anders. Definitely looks like a water color painting. Still got my fingers crossed about the video.

@Loopysue Thanks for the kind words. Yes, it is a rather wiggly coastline, but I tend to think of it as extremely rugged, rather than overly smooth. It's sort of reminiscent of the coast of Norway with lots of twists and turns. The main reason, Sue, is that this map started out long ago as a product of my imagination, long before I discovered Campaign Cartographer, and perhaps even before there was such a thing as ProFantasy Software. I took hex paper, taped a bunch of sheets together, and drew out everything with a felt-tip pen. Different colored pens, as a matter of fact. I was really determined to stay only on the hex lines themselves to see what I could come up with, rather than drawing across them. It was perhaps a lit clunky, I admit, but I actually found it somehow appealing. I'm not really an artist, and it just seemed to give it more of a natural ruggedness that I liked.

I took that old map and scanned all the different pieces of hex paper to give me my coastal outline. I loaded that image into CC3 and traced over it with a fractal coast tool. I tried to follow mountain and river schemes as best as I could, but I haven't completely filled in all the other details as yet. The overall general shape and skeletal structure of the world helps me to visualize where to place things as I write. I guess it's more functional to me than trying to make it into a piece of artwork. I still have only a basic grasp of the software, but I'm learning. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

@Lillhans I like the goblet. It does look like how I imagined the Holy Grail to look. A carpenter's cup and not a king's chalice. But am I right in thinking you're thirteen pages into a tutorial of some kind? One that might reveal to the world the secrets behind your "fake hand-drawing" style. That would be sweet. Any idea when we might expect . . . hope . . . for a completion of that project? And should we look for it here or on another platform?

@Wyvern You seem to have a habit these days of hijacking threads, but so be it. You are absolutely correct in looking back to Julius Caesar for the origins of our calendar mess. Hence, as you say, the "Julian" calendar. He wanted to be immortalized so he placed his own month smack-dab in the middle of the year, pushing the other months down. Some time later, Caesar Augustus, not wanting to be outdone, added his own month ("August") just after Julius ("July"), once again sliding the months down. Hence we have September (the 7th month) now as the ninth; October (the 8th) became the tenth; November (the 9th month) became the eleventh and December (the 10th month) was destined to be celebrated as the twelfth month. The last two original month names fell off and have been forgotten.

As to the western traditions involving our common religious holidays, they were in use long before the middle ages. These all date back to the pagan mystery religions of Babylon some twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred years ago. The combination of eggs and bunnies were symbols of fertility for the so-called Queen of Heaven, Semiramis. The name Easter itself is derived from the Babylonian goddess "Ishtar," and was a form of Semiramis/Astarte/Isis worship. We can thank the Roman emperor Constantine (circa 320 AD, or CE if you prefer) for beginning the process of incorporating the practices of earth-based pagan religions with a form of quasi-Christianity to make the new state religion of Christianity more appealing to the masses of his empire. The practices didn't change really, just the names. Unfortunately most of this pagan symbolism persists today.