Thanks folks!

@Quenten: The height measures are up from a nominal solid surface zero, just like a land-based map. The PDF/text description should clarify that in the Atlas.

The map was designed the way I'd expect a sea-dweller to think - i.e. just like a land dweller. We don't measure distance down from the "top" of the atmosphere, after all. Gravity still operates at the bottom of the sea, and that's the only place for fixed settlements and markers to exist, for instance, so I don't see any reason why such imaginary folks would think differently.

The angled contour labels are done exactly the same way they are on modern land maps, as it helps clarify which way is "up" for some folks. So yes, they are meant to be - and will remain - that way. It may not help your argument that I don't have a particular issue with reading them whichever way they are (lifetime of map reading and drawing, I suspect!) 😁

Although the Aak Hills map uses the Marine Maps style, that's as far as it goes; I had no intention of mirroring the conventions it represents, because that's based on purely land-dwellers' thinking, and this is intended as a sea-dwellers' map after all!

Having spent so much time concentrating on detailing the tiny unsubmerged areas of Errynor Map 01, it seemed about time I plunged down and started providing some sample maps detailing equally parts of the deep ocean's bed. I thought I would start with the Sea Orc/Ketorka cavern village of Aak, and so drew-up that map:

When I began preparing the notes to accompany it however, I realised I needed a second map to show some of the places across the nearby area as well. Thus was born the Aak Hills map:

For orientation, this next map is Errynor Map 01 - The Cliff, showing the seafloor view, with the Aak Hills area ringed in orange:

In terms of the layout designs, the Aak village map originated as another of those Curufea's Random Cave Map Generator website plans I'd used previously for the Kobalt Mountain Caverns on Zariq. As before the chosen suitable layout was dropped-in as the bitmap base for the CC3+ drawing, rotated, amended and added-to in places as required. The map was constructed by hand-tracing over this using the TJ Vandel's OSR Dungeons style from the 2015 Cartographer's Annual, labelled with the Mason Serif Alt Bold font that comes with CC3+. I wanted a more or less black-and-white style as a reminder this setting is in the deep ocean, where there's no daylight, and most vision will be purely monochromatic.

The Aak Hills map was a straightforward adaptation from the pictorial version in The Cliff map, now in close-up. However, its contents beyond the previously-mapped elements were randomly allocated using a variant of my own tables and system that were used to generate the original Errynor base maps' features.

I thought for this map it would be interesting to experiment with the only CC3+ style package designed for mapping seafloor areas, Marine Maps from the 2017 CA. This though is intended for mapping small, near-coastal areas only, so some adaptation and improvisation was needed. Basically, I inverted the usual contour colour scheme in Marine Maps, where dark blue shows the coastal shallows, with white reserved for the deeper places only. On the Aak Hills map, dark blue is used for the normal deep ocean floor level, with increasingly paler blue to white contours (several levels of these, just like in Marine Maps) showing progressively higher areas above that floor. With almost 12,000 feet, 3,660 metres, of seawater above even the highest peak shown, by no stretch of the imagination can even these higher white places be classed as "shallows"!

The Marine Maps symbols were repurposed, sometimes with minor additions, and like the Arial font labelling, this created a few problems as I'd added Sheet Effect glows to make things stand out more. The Marine Maps style uses very few Effects overall. What happened? Well, where the Effect-amended black symbols and text lay over the equally black contour lines, those contour lines showed through as breaks in the text letters and symbols. This was, as ever (for me anyway; not my first encounter with this!), easily overcome by simply copying the affected symbols and text onto another Sheet above their original one, but which had no Effects added to it.

After some brief experimentation, I decided to place the anchor "north" pointer and the scale bars on Sheets without Effects, as I found them too distracting otherwise. This "vanilla" appearance is how such labelling would appear using the Marine Maps package ordinarily.

Of course, I had to try out the automated contour-labelling option in Marine Maps as well, where I was delighted to find ANY text could be typed-in per label, not merely numerals. Thus I was able to label the contours clearly in both feet and metres without needing to resort to adding a map key.

Should be no tribble to do so...

Yeah, that's looking a lot better. The fill for that area of "internal" rock still looks "reversed" compared to the rock surrounding the complex though. I'd be inclined to move the cross-section further left, so it's not cutting across the first of the depth labels too.

Typo in the last line of the story text "the," instead of "then", I think.

Interesting progress.

The modern cave views maybe need a bit more work, mostly layout points.

The red numbers are very unclear in places on the plan view, and need adjusting or highlighting in some way.

The solid stone area on the plan between areas 1, 2, 3 & 4 needs amending, as it doesn't have the same wall colouring or shading as the solid rock surrounding the cave, so seems to be an unlabelled feature currently, not part of the rock.

The pair of cross-sections is confusing, and perhaps would benefit from labels to indicate what is being shown on each, or perhaps reduce the pair to just one (if so, the more detailed lower drawing).

Both cross-sections need realigning so as not to obscure their depth label scale. It may be worth running lines across each cross-section from the scale to make it easier to tell what the exact depth is in places further from the scale, and also think of adding a proper horizontal scale bar over the whole drawing. The tiny, currently unlabelled, bar is much too small to be useful, I think. Or perhaps remove the scale-bars entirely, and simply state that the grid squares are five feet each.

The lower border of the drawing needs moving down so as to be not touching the base of the lower cross-section drawing.

Also on the lower cross-section, it may be worth masking those parts of the symbols that currently extend through the floor in places.