One thing I forgot to mention last time was the map's frame. While this may seem rather broad, I'd already cut it down in size by this point, and changed the effects on it. Initially, there was an unusual, quite strong, use of the Edge Fade, Inner effect set up on the MAP BORDER sheet, along with a Blur. While this seemed OK when zoomed right out, closer-to, it started to look odd, with a vague mistiness due to the fade extending some way into the drawing. I swapped that out for a basic Bevel effect, and reduced the Blur somewhat, which is what's seen here.

Back at the mapping, I started using some simple linear templates to help me get a better feeling for the sizes and placements of various features as the drawing proceeded. This is very much a WIP shot giving an idea of what this meant in practice:

Also seen here (just!) is that the staircase in the "front" room has been shifted towards the back wall of that second above-ground level, that resizing of all the subsequent levels has been completed, a new staircase embedded into the floor of level three and placed on level two, with a red-line diamond and staircase just above level three, to illustrate how I was using that template to set-up the staircase placements. As the floor space decreases with height per alternate level, the red diamond shape is the size of the floor above, which, after placing the stairs on the next level above, is then moved down with a copy of the stairs to make sure they'll be in the right spot on the lower level, so as to pass through the floor above, and not drift off into space!

Looking closely, you may notice too that I've somehow managed to accidentally copy and paste a 10-foot floor tile in all this, tucked behind most of the top corner of level two here... There's so much to concentrate on with these isometric drawings, it's easy to lose track of things like this, particularly when coupled with the difficulties of clicking the right symbols when you want to move, reorder or copy them.

A little further on now, still with the drifting red-line diamond (having everything vertically aligned here was important, so as to be able to simply use the Ortho option when copying and moving things around, in conjunction with the snap grids. Often this was the 5-foot isometric grid, although the separation of the levels was done using the 10-foot, 2 snaps, square grid:

Progress here involved adding that great central pillar to most of the upper levels and the linking lines between levels one and two, completing the internal wall lines for level two, and adding the outer walls plus "windows" on level three, as well as sliding it down nearer the other levels. It was becoming clearer now that this overall drawing panel was going to be shrunk quite considerably in its final form, but for now, it was fine to have plenty of space to move things around in. I was starting to have doubts about that smallest, top level though.

Another session brought me to this stage:

All the levels have been brought into their final locations, more or less, the stairs emplaced except up to that topmost level (which probably now won't survive), and the red diamond has gone, replaced by a black rectangle, a guide for keeping the level separations straight. It's also clear how much space can be removed at the top of the drawing, and the frame is starting to feel quite oppressive here, as too dominant compared to the interior drawing.

The penultimate session achieved this stage, just before all the labelling and fine-tuning, but after the frame's final resizing:

That small upper level has gone, replaced instead with a double-height level six one instead, where the pillar structure angles over to connect with the vanes on the outside. Token efforts to show part of the vanes using repurposed symbols or drawn lines came to nothing, unfortunately. The symbol orientations are too limited and with too few options to construct something suitable, and the available space meant the kind of sketchy lines possible never looked right. It had been a battle to get the ruined uppermost level to look reasonable as it was - again, the symbols available aren't designed for ruined exterior walls, so I just did what I could. There's also an unfortunate "tide-mark" because of the wall-colouring that darkens at the base, and which looks messy when stacked like this to give a double-height chamber.

Hopefully, the labelling helps distract a little from such imperfections. Two versions, one with, one without, the isometric 5-foot grid (which is only labelled when the grid is shown):

I thickened up the grid lines a little from their default zero-width, so they'd show-up on higher-res images, and also added one of the compass roses available in this style. That was then labelled using the technique outlined in the mapping guide to the Ancient Tombs Part 2 Annual, using the Perspectives 3 3D projection mechanism on exploded text. It is somewhat unfortunate that the labelled orientation has to be northeast, not due north, but within the limitations of what's available, that was unavoidable! There'll be some descriptive notes to go with the drawing in the Atlas too, and higher-res versions with and without the grid are in my Forum Gallery as well. These are amazingly tiny files, for once!

Next time, we begin the delve underground to see where that Old Summoning Chamber leads to...

Just settle for a mouth organ instead 😉.

@Royal Scribe : There are four books by Vance that comprise his Dying Earth stories, The Dying Earth (1950), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Cugel's Saga (1983) and Rhialto the Marvellous (1984), but if you can find them (try Amazon), you should probably read the tales in their more definitive versions, published in the past few years by Spatterlight Press, as Mazirian the Magician, Cugel the Clever, Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight and Rhialto the Marvellous, because these are the Vance Integral Edition (VIE) versions, with amendments bringing the texts back to Vance's originals, rather than what was sometimes published originally. There are 62 volumes with all of Vance's tales in the complete VIE collection (he was a very prolific author!), and you can find more about it on the Jack Vance Official Website here.

[EDIT: And it did finally occur to me that I should have changed this from a "Work In Progress" to a "Finished" topic - so I now have!]

@Royal Scribe I think it was who was asking on today's PF livestream about stain symbols on maps, like the ring left by a coffee cup.

I couldn't find anything like this in the two more recent Annuals I mentioned in the livechat, the Sticky-Note Dungeon one, CA214, or the Investigations Props & Handouts one, CA73. However, there are some stain options, like inkblots and multiple circular features, in CA06, Parchment Backgrounds. You can see some in action on this map in my Gallery.

There may be more elsewhere too, but I suspect this Parchement Backgrounds style was what I'd thought of.

I was going to leave a discussion of some of the text items to my closing post on this topic, but since that's not quite ready yet, and as the subject's been mentioned, we can today take a closer look at...

The Kaiin Mutiny*

Using text in Campaign Cartographer can often raise issues, and is typically one of the most complex elements. Aside from variables such as which font to choose, the font size for particular labels (as only one size can be allocated to each text item), suitable colouring and effects, the placement point can often be the trickiest to get right. Text will tend to expand away from whatever placement point is chosen at different screen and image resolutions - if that's "Mid Left", the text will usually hold fast on its left side, expanding away to its right, for example. This can only be fully overcome by using the "Explode" command on the text, to convert it to graphic entities that will hold their positions correctly. While this has advantages sometimes, it has the serious disadvantage that the text can no longer be edited as text, so make any mistakes, and the whole rigmarole must be gone through again.

In this case, I was using two different font sizes, and thus separate text items, for many of the map labels, larger for the place-name, smaller for the notes. The Kaiin label was an especial problem, because at the place-name font size, there wasn't enough room to fit the full text line in due to "The Melantine Gulf" label. So I reduced the font size for "The White City" part, and set-up the two parts of the name-label aligned, but with the intended fixed placement points of mid-right for "Kaiin" and mid-left for "The White City". It looked fine, as this screenshot from the FCW file shows:

However, rendering the map image as a JPG at the normal Forum resolution, and it came out like this:

This is unusual, but I didn't spot it right away, hence why it appeared on the map images posted last time (and again in one of the WIP images still to come). Typically, once I think a map's completed, I do a trial printout on an A4 page, so I can check it for mistakes, rather than relying on just on-screen images. Which is where this little "delight" was noticed. Checking the FCW file showed that "The White City" had been given a mid-right placement point as well as the "Kaiin" one, which I'd guess was due to a mis-click on my part; luckily, easily corrected, as this sneak-preview of a later-stage-mapping image shows:

One further point about the map labels should be noted. As often happens with such labels that have effects on them, when placed over mapped features with a very similar to identical colour, that can cause the text to lose definition, or gain unwanted holes and marks. When I spotted that first, for the "Fer Aquila Mountains" label, I decided to duplicate all the on-map texts to a lower sheet without effects on it, which stopped the problem in its tracks. That did though help slow-down the whole labelling process subsequently, both in remembering to do it on a per-label basis, and when the label's placement point, font size, or appearance for multi-line texts, had to be amended after adding it. Which, of course, is partly why the Kaiin Mutiny was allowed to continue for so long 😉!

* A punning reference to the title of an old Humphrey Bogart movie.😎