When @Monsen announced the latest Forum mapping contest, for a (winter?) holiday-themed postcard-sized map, I was deep in the latest part of my Community Atlas mapping project for Nibirum, and indeed still am, so wasn't sure if I'd have time to do something useful for this as well. But you know how it is when you start having vague ideas for something...

Thus away from any CC3+ mapping, I jotted down a few silly place-name thoughts. Since some early comments on the contest topic had suggested something holiday-themed appropriate to the place of origin would be suitable, I focused into aspects of the Christmas period in Britain, which of course include ghastly jokes, puns and other nonsensical daftness. I'm not sure how far all these may survive beyond these shores; however, it's too late now, as the map's done!

My original list of nearly 40 place-names was quickly halved, given how small a postcard-sized map would be, and then being me, I sketched-out by-hand on squared paper where all these places were going to be in a rough sense, based on random dice rolls. The square sizes were chosen based on an estimate of the size the symbols would be on such a small map, to hopefully avoid over-crowding.

I'd already decided I wanted to use the standard CC3+ Overland Vector Color style for the map, as I have a fondness for vector styles, and this overland style in particular. Vector symbols have the advantage it's often quite possible to add-to, amend or adjust existing symbols, or even create new ones, without them looking too awful, given my legendary lack of artistic ability...

When I began, I had the loose notion I might try and take a few screenshots for a WIP topic here, though I soon forgot all about that unfortunately, as the map started to come together remarkably quickly, after a few early tweaks to get the symbol sizing to look right. I created a few fresh tools, and tinkered with the Effects in places, though nothing very major or time-consuming. The latter needed adjusting mostly because the Effects had been set for a much larger mapping area, of course, while the former needed adding because for some unaccountable reason, the style's designer hadn't prepared for drawing whisky rivers and snowy roads in advance. Some people are strange 😉

Handily though, the style's symbols all have really helpful varicolor options for being snowy-frosty white in just the right places (with a couple of minor exceptions, where a few snowy flatter roofs had to be added by-hand). In barely a couple of hours, the basic map was done. It needed a few fine-tuning adjustments, but the longest task, once all the labels were added, was trying to work out the better colour combinations for those labels and their Glow Effect, so they'd stand-out nicely, without being overwhelming. That dragged on for over an hour, to the point where I'm sure I ended up more or less where I'd started!

And so we have Merry Old Christmas Town, British-ish style:

You'll be showing us the railway timetables to get to Oakwood next (but I'm not getting on Joe Sargent's bus there)!

[The latter's a Lovecraft reference from The Shadow Over Innsmouth story for anyone confused...]

Thanks very much @Monsen (especially, as I know these were a little complex to add into the Atlas) & @Loopysue !

The second of Aunty's vehicles, and the concluding drawing in this whole Errynor Map 01 set, is Scuttle, as promised earlier, a giant-crab-legged, ramshackle, shipwreck hut. This has two floors, accessed by toggling in the Atlas' FCW map, with a further toggle option to add a five-foot grid:

For the crab legs, I tried sourcing top-down crab images online, but couldn't find one that worked well enough for what I wanted for tracing. There are few crab symbols in CC3+ and its add-ons, and although I did find one that looked good among the free Dundjinni Archives collection, it wouldn't scale-up properly without becoming too pixelated. In the end, I used that enlarged symbol as the base, and partly traced, partly redrew, the legs as individual segments on different Sheets, and then fitted them to the base of the hut, as now illustrated.

The bulk of the hut and its contents were copied from The Naughty Lass deck plans, the walls and windows redrawn, and a driftwood balcony added to the front of both lower and upper floors, partly to increase its overall crab-like appearance. By contrast to the ship, these drawings largely flew together quickly. A fresh PDF and text file of notes and - done!

Hopefully, more Errynor maps to follow!

And so to the vehicles. The first of these, the wrecked ship, proved by far the most time-consuming in this Aunty MacKassa set. I'd selected the Sailing Ships pack from the 2009 Cartographer's Annual, which as noted previously, provides only limited help for drawing pre-gunpowder-period vessels, especially as I prepared these illustrations some time before the Annual was updated in April 2021.

My design for what became "The Naughty Lass" (it can sail beneath the waves and on the surface, after all!) was decided following heavy influence from Pauline Baynes' drawings of "The Dawn Treader" in C. S. Lewis' novel of its voyage, along with the nicely-detailed "Sea Ghost" ship drawings in the D&D scenario book "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" (2019, p. 53). This led ultimately to this deck plans map:

I got into rather a mess with this, however, as my initial idea had been to have one vertically-narrow rectangular plan view with the individual decks being toggled on and off one at a time within that condensed space using the map's Layers. Unfortunately, this ran into problems due to interference between the Sheet Effects in the lengthening stack of Sheets per deck, and between decks. So the deck plans had to be separated out, and the map greatly expanded, into the form now shown here. The Layers though ended up partly in the very condensed form as originally envisaged, partly in a more standard format for the decks I'd constructed later in the process. The Sailing Ships pack was meant to show just one deck per map, but that had seemed a little too clumsy for what will be really just a minor adjunct to another map once entered into the Community Atlas. I'd definitely draw the map differently as far as the Layers are concerned, if starting again now. At least it looks more or less OK still, I hope!

From the beginning, I'd also wanted to do a vertical section for The Naughty Lass, as that option is part of the Sailing Ships set-up. So I did, complete with "ghost ship" glow:

And an optional metric scalebar, via an Atlas toggle in the FCW file:

I also had to tone-down the original daytime-bright sky backdrop, to something more dismally matching Aunty's nature.

Again, a PDF and text-file set of notes will accompany both these drawings, in which you can find out about the nature of the ship's "adults-only" figurehead and how it relates - in Aunty's idea of dark humour, naturally - to the vessel's name...

For the Atlas, the Section Drawing is linked from the Coral Cave map via the "ghost ship" symbol in the top right corner, with the Deck Plans map connected from the Section Drawing only.