So, the map was put to good use this weekend. Not just for one bossfight, but two, heralding the end of our 11 year long campaign on Virana.

Most of you don't know my campaign, but the the main idea was that the players would play through one of the most important formative periods of the world. And we did that by basically playing two interwoven campaigns. In the standard campaign, we played a rather "standard" AD&D campaign where the players discovered something was wrong with the biggest church in the world, and that an evil entity was behind it, while also playing a campaign set about 5000 years in the past where the player characters played as dragons (Council of Wyrms rules). Basically, actions by the dragon characters would end up having consequences in the current world.

So, the players learned that the evil entity behind the problems where the evil dragon queen Tiamat. She had tried to enter the world several times throughout history, so basically the campaign ended this weekend with first the Dragon characters driving back Tiamat in the past and temporary driving her from this world, then switching to the current world where the standard AD&D characters had to drive her back again, with her power level being affected by what the dragons managed to accomplish, but this time finish the job, thanks to certain artifacts made in the Dragon timeline.

So, two fights, same battlemap, same enemy, but with different character sets with hugely different skills and abilities.

It was two hard fights, and a close call, but the players did manage to win the day and save the world, and they seemed to enjoy the fights. So, mission accomplished I guess.

I didn't finish the map during that video back then (Nor did I really expect to, since I spent a lot of time talking about map usage, scale, and other VTT considerations), but as the session where I need this will be this weekend, I have finally finished it.

There are still several things I am not too happy about with this map, in particular the transitions between the different levels, and the symbols doesn't flow with the terrain nearly as well as I could have wanted, but I had to balance several considerations, among them making the map clear and easy to read when loaded into a VTT, how much time and effort I could reasonably use for a single encounter, as well as for the fact that while I am a master in the technical side of mapping with CC3+, the visual arts is not really my strong side. So I guess this is what I consider a "Meh, good enough for it's purpose" map.

I could have made the map a bit more atmospheric by making it darker, and perhaps used some dungeon lighting to make a nice glow from the lava, but I am using it on a projector in a lit room, which means it will be far more usable if it isn't too dark, and have a good level of contrast.

Note that this map is pretty huge for a battle map, 500 by 500 feet, which means 100x100 squares if using the standard 5' battlemap squares. A standard human character (movement 12) would need 4 full rounds just walking in a straight line from one side to the other, before considering any terrain movement restrictions.

I've put links for larger versions of each image.

Here's the finished map in CC3+ (Larger version [7500x7500 pixels])

Here's the CC3+ file for it.

And here is the finished map in MapTool, ready to play (Large Version [2544x2248 Pixels])

When it comes to symbol sizes, I think an important part of a map is that information is legible when zoomed out. Exactly how large that is depends on the map obviously, but in most cases, it will mean the symbols will be covering more area than the settlement actually takes up.

Currently, the settlement symbols do look a bit small IMHO. They don't have to be scale 1, but I think they could probably be 0.5.

More "precision" is usually better done by making a new local map from parts of the main map, which can show more details, and "more correct" settlement scaling. Exactly where the cutoff point for detail level lies between those maps of course differ based on the map itself.

How do you log into the forum? If you use the google social logins it will automatically grab the name from the google profile, there is no option to change that.

If you wish to use another username, you must log in using the forum's own username/password login.

If you want a smaller area, I suggest you look at an area on one of the existing regional maps rather than straight on the continent map. That should allow you to find something more akin to the scale it sounds you are looking for. Or you can make 2 maps, do this larger scale one, and then develop a section of that map further on the second map.

But as for adding features like a lake, of course. The basic premise with any atlas is that there will always be features that are too small to appear on the higher level maps, that will only appear on a detail. Main idea here is to just keep it small enough that it wouldn't realistically appear on the world map (Which in general would mean smaller than any lake that do appear on that map.) But do make sure to add lots of interesting features, that's part of the fun, and allows other mappers to make interesting detail maps from your map.