Thanks very much folks!

@Mike: Weirdly, the Ireland maps are the only ones I showed that have never been published! The main Erin one is still one of my favourites, partly because it was done so early in my CC mapping and yet turned out so well, partly because of all the interesting things I was able to find while researching it.

@Sue: I rather envy people who can just sit down and create a map from scratch, or have an idea in their head they can bring to life as they go. I have to plan in detail in advance!

@OverCriticalHit: All these maps were done using CC3, not CC3+, and so far as I recall, there wasn't any other option beyond tracing the coastlines in by hand using that. There are options now that would let you automatically trace a sufficiently contrasting edge within an imported image, for instance, and that would have helped to a degree.

One big problem I had was that with the Near East and Black Sea maps, the areas covered weren't available on any single atlas or paper maps I could source, where there was a consistent scaling and use of contours. The problem was so great for the Near East ones, I eventually abandoned attempts to draw them as contour maps, and opted for the simpler Mercator-style drawings instead. Even on the Black Sea map, I simply had to wing-it to fill gaps towards the eastern edge on the maps I had.

Of course, things get still more complicated when you're trying to adjust coastlines to their ancient appearance using what may be a simple line-drawing map in a published research paper, a sketch-map that may not be even in the same projection as that in the atlas chosen as a potential base map, let alone have a similar scale, or show any contours or other connecting features!

I suspect that because I've been drawing maps for a very long time, at first only by hand, then later using various DTP or graphics programs, the idea of hand-drawing suitable polygons, both of the coasts and the contours, which may each sometimes take a number of sessions scattered over several days, hand-tracing something like these isn't such a big thing in CC. Indeed, there may be advantages to this, as several problems appearing on the Forum in recent times have resulted from traced coastlines having too many fractal nodes along them, and crashing the program as a result. Approaching mapping from the direction I have, means that for many years, I've tended to draw things like coastlines using only straight-edge polygons, since at this kind of regional scale, you can't tell any difference. If you need a curve, you just add a few more nodes. So if you look at the Black Sea map, for all the seeming complexity of the coasts there (many of the contours were done using smooth polygons instead), I didn't have a single CC3 crash while drawing it this way. I did foul up a couple of times, and have a lot of redrawing to do as a result (there may have been Naughty Words said as well...), but that was down to me, not the program!

Seeing the replies to Monsen's original query, I seem to be something of an aberration, as while I do make maps for RPG use, and tabletop wargames sometimes, the primary reason I invested in Campaign Cartographer initially was to make historical and semi-historical real-world maps, particularly regarding military history, and its mythical counterpart, from what wargamers class as the "Ancient" period. This covers pretty much everything prior to the widespread use of gunpowder weapons during European medieval times.

One of the first maps I did with CC3 was for use with the Erin wargame rules produced by Scottish company Alternative Armies. This concerns the mythological island of Ireland, its waves of invaders, and the battles they fought in the mythical past. Alternative Armies make a unique range of cast metal 28mm miniatures to go with these rules, interpreting some of the mythic inhabitants of Ireland in interestingly unusual ways (to me, anyway). The background information in the rules included some details on a few places already, along with providing a sketch map based on a 15th century CE drawing from details given by Claudius Ptolemy (circa 90-168 CE). However, I wanted to go further than this, and embarked on a lengthy journey into the mists of Irish mythic history, and how that has been influenced by physical topography and prehistoric sites across the land.

Ultimately, in 2012-2013, I constructed three maps of this mythical place. The first was based on modern topography, with selected Curious and Ancient places of interest added using various red-labelled symbols or markers. The purpose was to provide a range of sites scattered across the whole of Ireland, without cluttering the map too greatly, to help stimulate ideas for Erin game scenarios, drawing upon real-world and mythical Ireland, where the latter elements were mostly taken from the different redactions of the 11th century Lebor Gabala Erenn (The Book of Invasions).

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Since this was intended as a poster-sized map, the labels on this image are mostly illegible, so to give a better idea of what was going on, this is a closer view of the central-eastern part of the island - still a little fuzzy to keep within the Forum's image parameters.

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Blue labels are for watery elements - so coastal features, rivers, lakes and so forth - brown place-names for physical features such as mountains and hills.

Next, I drew-up a revised version of that 15th century Ptolemy's map of Ireland with all of Ptolemy's place-names added using blue and brown labels, and red-labelled items taken from the Erin game background positioned in relation to the amended geography, as far as possible, along with green name-labels for the five peoples involved in the Erin setting.

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While compiling notes for this project, I came upon a paper by Robert Darcy & William Flynn, "Ptolemy's map of Ireland: a modern decoding" that had been published in 2008 in the periodical Irish Geography (Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 46-69, if anyone wishes to hunt it up). Their research suggested a rather different form for Ireland as understood by Ptolemy, and on the principle one can never have too many maps, I decided to draw a third version showing this, again adding features as for the "other" Ptolemy map, but this time making the named watercourses more closely follow patterns like their plausibly-identified modern ones, variant coastline permitting.

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Further afield, one of my particular historical-archaeological interests has long been the ancient Near East, notably from the 4th to 1st millennia BCE. Published maps often use only established modern geography when discussing parts of this region and period, whereas both coastline and river courses are known to have changed considerably in places. This can become confusing, especially where ancient coastal trading settlements seem to be nowhere near the modern coast, along with those places no longer served by watercourses or wells of any kind. Plus of course, even maps with the earlier coasts and watercourses shown (so far as such things can be established now) frequently failed to contain other details of greatest interest to me - isn't that though always the way?!

A couple of CC3 examples. This was one of the first maps of its kind I devised, back in 2013-14, for the 3rd millennium BCE, to illustrate the relative locations for a selected number of key ancient settlements around the Fertile Crescent region, notably in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

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Those familiar with the area will appreciate the head of the Gulf lies significantly north of where it does now, and there are more channels - mostly human-built canals - on the lower Euphrates river.

The second example, from the same epoch, was to illustrate the places east of southern Mesopotamia known to have had trade links with the near-Gulf city-states.

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Here, there have been additional changes to the Pakistan-India coast and the lower River Indus, for instance.

Sadly, the FCW files for both these maps were lost in separate hard-disk and memory-stick failures, before the originals could be copied elsewhere, so all that survives are a couple of JPEGs.

Returning to more mythological themes, something else which has held a long fascination for me is the voyage of the Argo, firstly thanks to the Harryhausen "Jason and the Argonauts" movie, but in later times through the various ancient Greek and Latin versions of the tale. In 2015, I finally got round to doing some CC3 mapping for that too, regarding the outward voyage of the Argo from Greece to Colchis, at the eastern end of the Black Sea (modernly Georgia). The overview map:

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However, as this was designed as an A0 poster, I'd be amazed if anyone can properly read any but the largest labels on this reduced-size version. So this is just the mainland Greece part:

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Even that's not as clear as it might be, but the eagle-eyed may spot an unexpected inland lake where there now isn't one north of Pagasae, restored to its probable 1st millennium BCE appearance. And if you think some of the names look a little faded, you're quite right; that was entirely deliberate, because settlement names were often widely understood for the period, but regional names could be rather more fluid.

I did a whole series of maps for some of the places sailed-by or stopped-at in one or other version of the Argo's journey, using a similar "contoured" style to this Black Sea one for the more historical settings and places. However, I switched tack for those more mythological places, such as Colchis:

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You'll notice a lack of scale on this image. That's because even the relative location of the places shown isn't firmly-fixed in the tales, let alone how far apart they were from one another. Real-world geography is no help at all, as even the possible location of the city of Aea isn't as established as you might hope.

Along the way to Colchis, I devised a series of tabletop wargame scenarios, including mythical battles described in the tales as well as some "what if" ideas that didn't feature so, drawing on the "Hordes of the Things" (HotT) fantasy wargame rules. These allow small-scale actions to be fought on a handily square area - often no more than three-feet on a side. So I sketched the tabletop layouts for those too with CC3, like this one for the escape of the Argonauts from Colchis with the Golden Fleece:

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Can the Argonauts get to their ship and escape before the pursuing Colchians catch them?!

Working on all this, in conjunction with the HotT rules, which allow for longer wars to be fought too, I came up with a couple of on-land campaigns between the various peoples along the southern Black Sea coasts and further inland that the Argonauts had met, knew about, or had sometimes fought with, many of whom also featured in the more historical ancient texts. So another mapping style could be explored as well, if of a more abstract nature suited to the standard HotT campaign procedures:

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It may not be obvious that Dorylaeum and Ankyra are intended as independent, unaligned cities, separate from the named powers illustrated here. For orientation, Cius and Amycus represent places near the eastern-southern Propontis/Sea of Marmara coasts, while the line from Calpe via Mariandyni City (modernly Eregli) to Sinope is effectively the southern Black Sea coast east as far as the modern Sinop headland of Turkey.

Jim, there are currently 138 volcanoes claimed as known beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone. There are strongly suspected areas of volcanic activity beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet as well, but this region has been much less studied overall. The figure of 138 volcanoes is from Wikipedia's Geography of Antarctica page, an order of magnitude that other sources confirm at least. There are also numerous surface volcanoes on and around Antarctica, aside from places such as the famous Mount Erebus.

The map(s) shown here are from the BEDMAP 2 survey project conducted by the British Antarctic Survey in recent years (you can access a much enlarged version of of the first map shown by WeathermanSweden on the linked page). It's also worth reviewing at least the first map (Fig 1) in a paper available for free PDF download via ResearchGate The glacial geomorphology of the Antarctic ice-sheet bed, because this shows both the current coastline (black outline) and the rebounded one Loopysue was talking about (white outline). The latter confirms Antarctica sans ice would indeed be a substantial "new" solid landmass to explore, along with some significant islands of many sizes across much of what's now called West Antarctica.

I didn't find any real missed marketing opportunities among the Annual descriptions personally, but you are probably correct to suggest most folks come to the Annuals after they've been using the main Campaign Cartographer software for a while - so the lists of what each contains mean perhaps rather more than they might for someone coming to them "cold". Certainly, those, plus the text descriptions and illustrations were enough to sway me. But I have long been a sucker for a pretty map anyway!

As for the Forum contributor connections, there may be earlier discussions I don't recall now, but there was an interesting What Are Everyone's RPG Connections? topic started back in June. And there are quite a number of writers/novelists who are active here too - making maps for their books, especially.

This is though an excellent time to consider a complete Annuals purchase, because by buying the Annual Bundle, you get all eleven years' worth of Annuals for the discounted price of 189 GBP, less ANOTHER 30%, because of the ongoing Black Friday Promotion (ends 2017 Nov 27), so making the total just over 132 GBP, less than half price overall.

I mention this because that's what I did last year, after also trawling through all the Annuals, and finally realising there were too many interesting things to be selective (for me anyway)!