On Ralf's 2025 Ancient Realms Revisited tutorial this morning, there was discussion about using the Color Key rivers tool (where a magenta river is placed on the LAND sheet, cutting through the land to reveal the sea below). It was mentioned that the terrain sheets have to go over the land, and that means that you have to draw terrain around the rivers or using the regular rivers fill instead of the cutout.

I tried to do an experiment. On the left, I drew blue rivers over a swampy terrain. Not bad, but you do have to connect it properly to the coast for it to look right. But then on the right, I tried a different approach. I used the Color Key Cutout rivers on the land. Then I drew a swamp over it. Then I added the COLOR KEY effect to the LAND FEATURES (SWAMP) sheet (moving it to be the first effect), and then copied my magenta rivers to that sheet as well.

Both work well but I really like how the river pops in the swamp on the right. Quenten's CC4 wishlist idea in the chat of allowing color cutouts to cut through multiple sheets is a great idea, but in the meantime, copying the cutout to multiple sheets seems to work well.

Holy smokes, it worked! (Once I read the PDF mapping guide to figure out that the Dracula Dossier maps are created under Floorplans and not Dungeons, that is.) These CAD files are .DWG files, and CC3 was able to import without any problems. Now I have to decide if this is the venue I want to use, and whether it would be easier to delete the stuff I don't need from the CAD import, or started from scratch drawing over a bitmap. Anyway, very excited to have new (for me) options to play with.

Here's the other map. Much smaller southern forest. This map has 2,380 trees -- nine more than the map above.

I redid the southern forest for the first map. I deleted the original blocks of mixed forest trees but kept the semi-transparent gray forest background, and then added a few thousand individual trees. Mostly deciduous and pine, with a healthy smattering of different-colored fruit trees along with a handful of barren trees and a surprise or two. There's something very peaceful about placing all of them individually -- though maybe that's easier to say when there's "only" 2,371 trees and not 41,000!

Here's a close-up of a bit of the forest.

On to the other map!

This is very helpful advice. I will go back and redo the forests at the bottom of each map.