Having decided to prepare three identical layouts for the interior Barrow "dungeons", the obvious first step was to get a version of the hand-drawn map traced in to CC3+ which would then act as a template to be refilled and adjusted for each separate interior, given their contents were not going to be identical. As the general mapping style was already well-established, drawing this was pretty quick and straightforward:

The walls are paler than those in the two previous dungeons in this group, so as to indicate their different character to the typical stonework. The semi-tech setting was going to have plastic-coated metal panelled walls (or something similar), hence this choice of wall texture. While it looks quite straightforward initially, the layout here is actually on three different levels - the rectangular pit in the lower-right quadrant has a raised pathway/passage around it, and a trapdoor access from below into it, as well as two side passageways opening directly into it, for instance, and the elongated side-passages/rooms flanking the long, straight entrance passage (with wall slits into that long corridor) have a bridge accessway over the passage, connecting them to each other and, by secret door, the rest of the complex, though not directly into the entrance route. Took me a while to get to grips with this as well!

While that was all fine, as I was drawing this out, I started wondering about how the semi-tech-world's inhabitants were going to get in and out of here. I'd already drawn-up lists of items and potential denizens from the sources noted back in my first post in this topic, especially the Numenera RPG, and had realized the three layouts would work best with these as workshops, laboratories or a museum. Ultimately, we'll be going with one of each of those. Naturally, some kind of teleportation/transporter beam option was a possibility, for all that felt a little contrived.

Ordinarily, as explained previously, any segments of the geomorphic dice designs that don't link to the main part of the layout, including the connections off the dice edges, are simply skimmed away in preparing the Atlas version. However, now, I started thinking of adding some or all of those external links to this map too, as passages/doors only the semi-tech inhabitants could see and use. This is a shot of the two Inkwell Ideas Explorer dice designs I was using here to indicate what those possibilities were (from dice "V" and "K", in case anyone might wonder about those letter labels):

And this is how they were drawn into the CC3+ plan:

Each new passageway has a wavy line ending it, to show the route goes elsewhere beyond this map, without indicating where that might be, in the semi-tech land that isn't Nibirum. In addition, they've all been set up on the GAME MASTER ONLY Layer, and a series of new Sheets (for the walls, floors, grid lines, and dot-shading symbols), so they can be shown, or not, for each individual layout, something that's intended to be possible via a toggle in the final Atlas version. Each separate layout will have a variable number of these accessways only; the rest will be removed in those final maps. It made sense to draw the set together though, because there is quite an art to doing so, so as not to forget some key element.

While doing this, I next realised the long entrance passage and the rooms/corridors flanking it probably would be in the original Barrow stonework, not the semi-tech walls. This was mostly to avoid the complications of why the semi-tech folks hadn't wandered off into Nibirum at some stage, and more importantly, why they'd have set up a passage with viewing slits to watch for nobody ever coming in down that long passageway! Instead, if this was all the original stonework by the Barrow builders, simple anti-tomb-robber floor pressure-plate traps to shoot darts from magazines that had to be emplaced before the Barrow was sealed, began to crystallize, and were ultimately adopted, as a concept. Thus the wall texture there was changed:

Plus, it no longer made sense to have any linking passageways attached to the semi-tech world from this segment of the layout, so they were removed:

The perceptive among you will doubtless have realised that one other change has been made here, to the semi-tech wall texture. This happened because when I adjusted the new darker wall texture's bitmap scaling, I discovered that, as sometimes happens with the older Annual styles, I had to force the system to use the very high res bitmaps. I hadn't realised sooner that this wasn't happening automatically, partly because the walls lines are quite thin, I suspect. When I did that though, the selected semi-tech texture - the only one that gave a suitably pale appearance - started to vanish into the dot-shading exterior texture in places. This image shows a comparison test, where just the top left room's texture remains as it had been earlier:

Thus I ended up with simple, solid, pale grey wall lines for the semi-tech areas, rather than bitmap-textured ones.

Clearly, this is all still WIP, given that the entrance passageway doesn't go anywhere right now, nor have a blocking doorway to the outside, and the wall around the pit is likely to change too, so it doesn't look like the same solid walls as everywhere else, albeit that may be different for each of the three final layouts anyway. Plus everything needs fitting-out and labelling, something which is still rather in-flux currently, as the lists of items and denizens are allocated and consolidated to their respective layouts. Some progress though, at least!

As usual with such competitions, there are far too many entries deserving of the top places, and far too few votes available per person to vote for all I might wish!

I do think it's important to emphasize again that everyone who took part deserves our praise and admiration. There's not a single map here that won't grace the Atlas with its presence.

And they'll also have pushed us on way beyond Map 1,000 once they've all been added to the Atlas.

Well done to one and all, regardless of what the final results may show!

Hi @anridiredubh !

A quick search found this via Reddit. It's based on the data here. And this is the Reddit topic involved. I found the link in the answer by v7x that he'd created himself around 6 years ago - and to my amazement, it's still available online (it's on Deviant Art)!

I'm not sure how it's been calibrated, given much of Antarctica's bedrock is actually below sea-level, but it might get you a little further forward. As far as I can see, it's simply an adapted greyscale rendering of the data that's usually presented in colour for better clarity.

Thinking more about the new Sticky Note Dungeon Annual just released yesterday, while checking it over and afterwards, it occurred to me that with a few additions, it could be used equally to generate a form of point-crawl overland map too. For those unfamiliar, this is a sketch that links places of interest in a pattern to identify how the various points can be reached, without bothering too much about the exact distances, directions or terrains intervening - except that things such as intervening difficult terrain might mean no direct links, with instead a set of further points bypassing the blocking feature to be encountered along the way.

As an example, I created this map almost ten years ago now for a wargaming magazine article on Jason and the Argonauts, showing a stylized series of overland connections along the western and northern Black Sea shores of Anatolia, into about the middle of that great peninsula, and along the coast north to modern Georgia, ancient Colchis:

This isn't all that clear at the usual Forum resolution, so I've added a further version at higher-res to my Gallery.

Thus essentially what can be drawn for such a system is a very simplified map, one that here even ignores the coast, and features only the main river lines of significance, chiefly those that cross travel routes, all in a rather abstract manner.

Something that's long been of interest to me has been trying to map the places referred to in H. P. Lovecraft's stories concerning his Dreamlands. I've had a couple of tries at this myself, the first time almost 40 years ago, and another that sadly didn't get very far more recently, using the beautiful E Prybylski Watercolour style from last year's Annual. Several other vastly superior to me artists have created their own versions of such a map over the years too, which all have their pros and cons.

One main difficulty is the details in Lovecraft's tales don't include things such as specific distances, or where different places might lie in relation to those mentioned in one story, and perhaps only obliquely referred to in another. Distances might be given in terms of hours or days sailed or flown on sea or in the air, or overland by yak, zebra or on foot, or might just be stated as being a long way apart. It's possible to estimate real distances by making assumptions, but this still doesn't help in locating where some of the places mentioned, but not passed through, or directly connected to elsewhere, were.

In the stories, as it would in genuine dreams, this all makes perfect sense, since these aren't real places, and Lovecraft was a lifetime lucid dreamer, so was writing more or less from experience. As a mapper though, it quickly becomes problematic.

However, the Sticky Note concept helps here, by generating a means to show places with some details about them, and lines showing how they connect, without worrying about details on exact directions, distances or even the size of a given place.

So I tried a quick version as a test earlier today. Had to create a couple of new drawing tools, and import a bunch of symbols from the SS1 Handrawn Hollow set, but it was all pretty straightforward. I drew out just the places along the Southern Sea coast, heading westwards from the great city of Dylath-Leen, as described by Lovecraft, using an annotated hand-sketch I'd prepared last year when working on the E Prybylski version:

Obviously, a lot more could be done than I've tried here, and this is a bit rough-and-ready in places, but the basic concept seems sound.

These SS1 hand-drawn symbols seem to work quite nicely, although I'm sure none of us would be averse to having a purpose-made set in the C. C. Charon style, should an overland version of the Sticky Note style be offered subsequently 😁!

(We might need an A3 or larger option for the paper to draw world-sized maps though 😉)

So finally, an actual map I DID make here!

The area map was going to be drawn and filled first. While the basic format for the style of hex-map was already established, I had some new sets of random design mechanics I wanted to try, to determine what was going to be in those identified hexes. These would later have Shadowdark notes added into the map's PDF file, where relevant, to keep a degree of consistency with the other maps in this current collection.

So the contents for each labelled hex were determined using, or adapted from, tables and random processes in "Into the Wild - Omnibus Edition" (from Third Kingdom Games, 2023). This is designed to work with the Old-School Essentials RPG by Necrotic Gnome, so it draws on creatures from that, and other associated sources among the established "old-school-rules" form of the RPG hobby (as to an extent does Shadowdark). This was my first time using Into the Wild, and it proved something of a challenge, as its layout is not the clearest to find things quickly, or avoid accidentally missing some key element. It did though come up with a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes after a little tweaking, and with occasional additions from the random Shadowdark tables.

The nature of the area, having wildly magical, magic-free and normal magic regions, meant I was looking primarily for unusual creatures or aspects for whatever came up randomly, and so often chose tables accordingly. I also opted to check for both features and creatures in each highlighted hex, again with adaptations, so not everywhere ended up with both elements. One aspect I decided against was involving any high-tech aspects from the barrows also appearing on the surface, as I quite liked the idea that only if a party of adventurers opened one of the barrow entrances and failed to close it properly, might those denizens begin creeping out into the world.

As noted for previous of my area maps, once the features list is decided, other aspects of the map start to fall into place, here including where the streams might lie, as well as larger areas of new terrain types, including some odd, black-sand dunes, and low hills, notably towards the eastern side of the magic-free and wild magic regions. After which it was time to progress to the CC3+ mapping:

This too proved quite a challenge, since the forest density originally hid too much of the normal hex lines (those not highlighted) and had to be revised a couple of times, to try to keep things clear enough while not looking too hex-based. Similarly, ensuring the highlighted-hex symbols weren't overwhelmed by the trees involved more tinkering. The No Magic Zone was possibly the easiest, as it was just the background colour revealed by punching a Color Key hole though the overlying terrain fills, creating the Wild Magic Zone's circuit simultaneously - that circuit achieved by a desert (dot-shaded) terrain fill polygon, without any effects to ensure the edges were sufficiently obvious.

A few extra symbol-shapes had to be hand drawn, such as the little pools (of mercury) in Hex 807, and the depressions in Hex 905 (harpy dust baths), one more of which items was resized and reused as the sinkhole for the stream in Hex 1102. Most other highlighted hex features were either normal symbols, or resized ones (sometimes resized differently in one or both dimensions).

The main drawn items were the three gigantic barrows, which were so large, they needed preparing as specific items. From the start, I thought they'd be more interesting as definite circles, as that seemed weirder than making them less neat and regular, aside from, of course, being easier to draw! Ultimately, I simply drew the first one, then copied it to the other two locations. Initially, I created a new drawing tool to prepare the outer circuit as white with a dark grey outline. However, that proved problematic at the join where the avenue leading in to the centre of the barrow was, with the darker outline showing a break there. Thus that idea was scrapped, and the outer circuit drawn instead using a dark and a white line of different widths on separate sheets. The little cross-lines, helping to suggest the outer stone walling (I've pretty much envisaged these as gigantic versions of the great Newgrange barrow in Ireland), were simply hand-drawn, and are deliberately not all straight or evenly-spaced, to hint at something maybe less manufactured about these structures, despite their overall regular forms. The interior dome was drawn using a Solid White 10 fill circle, or more accurately, copied and amended to be so from one of the outer circuit lines, onto a new Barrows sheet. This had a suitable lighted bevel effect added, tweaked to help darken the domes to make them stand out better. For some reason, the Solid White fill worked better than the Solid one in doing so.

Labelling the map wasn't altogether straightforward either, trying not to hide too many of the dead tree symbols, and avoiding the highlighted hexes, while still making clear what was being labelled. The "Scale" note was the most trying (bottom right corner), as having just squeezed in a "Feralwood Forest" label on that side of the map, I couldn't decide if I should lose the eleventh hex in column 1600 to keep the scaling comment on two lines, or lengthen it to three. In the end, the latter won out, as the map felt lopsided because of that missing end-hex. Well, I kept noticing it, at least!

Onward now to the subterranea!

[EDIT 19 November 2024: Although I originally added the provisional PDF description for the map to this post, I've removed it now, as the final version has been submitted for the Atlas!]