Often, shadowing problems like this can be improved by softening the appearance of the shadows, to make them more subtle (increased transparency, reduced size, altered colouring, adjusted blurring are all possibilities).

The bridge shadow's showing an odd gap, and its presence illustrates that a shadow effect stacked on another one starts to look odd - the bridge is further from the sea than the cliff bases, yet its shadow is more distinct, for instance.

One option to escape that double-shadowing trap might be to use the existing shadow effect lines and areas to redraw the shadow as a separate polygon, and then turn off the shadow effects entirely. Using one of the "Solid" bitmap fills might work for this, or just a normal darker grey polygon with a suitable transparency effect.

There's also the possibility of adding some extra shadow effects to the little rocks in the sea, as they currently don't have any shadows, which makes them look a little odd where they're exposed to the light. If they're all only low-lying rocks though, they'd cast negligible shadows from this viewpoint anyway, so that may be a shadow effect too far 😉.

There are some basic geometric vector shapes available in the Symbols => Maps => Other folder, as "Geometry.fsc". These have a fixed colour, however, but if you have the CA62 Geometry.fsc symbol catalogue as well (it's in the same folder), that has varicolor options for the same basic shapes. That might expand your vector symbol options sufficiently.

As for converting colour maps to black-and-white, try adding an RGB Matrix Process effect set to "Gray", and see how well that works. You may need to adjust the full-colour version of the map to keep the contrast sufficiently clear in the greyscale view, but you can turn it on and off as required for exporting images of the map.

Fractal Terrains can export as an SVG, apparently, BUT it's not available as standard, and it may not work properly. There's a trick to it, and caveats - see this Forum post by a certain J Slayton from 2022. Your safer bet though might be using an online converter from one or other of the CC3+ "Save as..." options instead, as Scott mentioned already.

For scaling, the option I use is the drop-down menu command: Info => Distance. Make sure "Ortho" is active, but that "Snap" is off (buttons at the lower right of the CC3+ window), and zoom-in so you can see the grid squares on your image very clearly.

Then use the Distance command to measure the separation between the horizontal and vertical grid lines for a single square. "Ortho" will ensure you're only able to measure in the true vertical or true horizontal directions. (Although both should be the same, sometimes a minor distortion in the map image, especially if it's been scanned, means they're not exactly equal, and your own by-eye estimates can be a few pixels, or more if you're me, out as well.)

That will give you an overall value in map units (feet or metres for dungeon-scale maps, depending on which option you're mapping with) for the size of the grid squares on your image. If that doesn't match with the size of the snap-grid squares in your CC3+ map, then yes, you'll need to rescale the image.

To do this, use the :CC2SCALE: command (button to the mid-left side of the CC3+ window). Click the button, select the image using one edge of it that's free from other entities in your drawing, then click "Do it".

The Command Line will ask you to pick a scale origin (I often use the bottom left corner of the image, but pick whatever point seems best to you), and then it asks "Scale to" with a couple of further prompts. The easiest option here though, is simply to type in the value of the image's grid size, as just measured, and the size you need it to be, the two values separated by either the multiply or divide keyboard options, as appropriate. For example, if the image's grid is showing as 9.4 feet and it should be 10 feet, use 10/9.4 to make your image larger (if you get it wrong, just use the :CC2UNDO: command!).

Then check using the Distance command again, to see if this is now the correct size (or closer to it - sometimes, because of the decimal places involved, it won't be exact, but close enough is usually good enough, though you may need to adjust your CC3+ drawing in places to accommodate any differences). If it's still some way off, just use the Scale command again.

Good luck and good mapping!

For the next map in my ongoing Atlas project, I thought it might be interesting to try another work-in-progress topic, to show some of the developments as they happened along the way. It's been a while since I last tried this, and I do tend to forget to record progress while mapping, but we'll see how it goes! The initial posts below, over the coming days, will outline what's happened to get this map underway during the last couple of months, and only the subsequent notes will start to become rather more immediate.

Said map was intended for somewhere in the Emerald Crown Forest region of northeastern Alarius, here:

Zooming-in to the next map already in the Atlas, there were a couple of additional places already mapped (highlighted in pink), along with some equally intriguing unmapped spots:

As usual, the development of each new map in this project is an organic process, in that while thinking about where the map's to go, I'm also looking at the dungeon design, and identifying ideas for what its contents and purpose might be. In this case, the design was from two Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice in the Trailblazer set:

These translated into my hand-scrawled version, with the unconnected/extraneous passages and areas either removed or adapted, thus:

Looking through the Inkwell book that accompanies the dice for this pair of designs, the 6i one is from the Incantations/Magic Areas die, whose main-idea notes suggested this to be a temple masquerading as for a good/neutral deity, but which was actually for another less pleasant one - so that altar above the circular room drops victims down into it, for use in summoning an avatar of the deity, for instance.

The 6r die's main notes (for Rooms/General Areas), proposed it as part of the private quarters for some royalty, with a kitchen, dining room, and guards, while one of the alternative suggestions was for it to be an inn, possibly one with several vertical levels. In combination, these suggested a temple complex (replacing royalty with priests and inner-cabal followers), partly above ground, partly below. That suggested a larger population would be needed to both support and conceal such a place, as well as to provide victims for use in the summoning chamber.

Turning then to a couple of further books for inspiration, the "Tome of Adventure Design", and the very recently-released "Nomicon", both published by Mythmere Games, provided Maleng, Herald of the Seasons as the beneficent nature deity for the temple, with the congregation ostensibly calling themselves The Fellowship of Maleng, although they're really The Fellowship of Nidag, The Blind Slayer (the deity who's not so pleasant).

Looking at settlements in the Emerald Crown Forest area after this naturally pushed my thoughts towards the larger towns, and likely towards those on the coast, as probably having sizeable itinerant populations, where people chosen as victims would be less missed. Which eventually brought me to the pre-mapped town of Stormwatch:

It's probably not hard to see what drew me here - there are lots of anonymous groups of houses of the right size and rough orientation to fit the dungeon dice designs quite well. Finally, I picked a spot on the eastern edge of the map, outside the town walls, here:

At which point we discover I was missing a few small symbols (probably from the free, non-ProFantasy, sets usable in the Atlas) - for the inn signs, chimneys and waterwheels - hence the red Xs in places (the previous shot of Stormwatch was taken from the hi-res Atlas version).

Choosing that area wasn't straightforward, however, because a swift test-trial of my hand-drawn dice design showed the fit wasn't going to be exact, either from the placement and sizes of the various buildings, or the angle between the two main parts of the design. This wasn't unexpected, and after checking several potential alternatives, the orange rectangle on the image just above was picked as the closer fit. Even then, that area wasn't properly defined at this point.

I narrowed the spot down by setting-up a basic line drawing in CC3+, where I could compare the exact shapes, sizes and orientations of the Stormwatch buildings with the dice design draft map. This began by extracting those forms from the Stormwatch map thus:

The building outlines were generated more or less automatically, by simply copying the buildings to a new sheet and layer, and changing their properties (possible only because they were originally created using the CD3 house-drawing tool), while the tree circles and road lines were all hand-drawn. The two colours are because the original test-fitting was done just with the green-outlined buildings, and took several attempts. The red outlining was to make sure all the features in the final rectangular map area would be covered too, once the final "green" selection was made. Next time, pinning-down that rectangle.