So, back for an update today!

Opening the New Drawing Wizard, and naturally picking the CCPro Overland style, I set-up a 30 by 30 mile square area (to give room around the base 20-mile-square mapped region for a title, possibly some labels, and suchlike), and changed the background colour from its default sea-blue to green, to fit the landlocked swamp I had in mind. Then I went to set-up a new BITMAP sheet and layer to import the base map image into, and was surprised to find there was more than just a single sheet available (which was what I'd expected), and that some of those sheets already had effects on them. I'd been assuming I'd be working without sheet effects (beyond a transparency on the BITMAP sheet, at least). This though opened up some fresh possibilities, as one concern I'd had was that a lot of the early vector symbols and fills use zero-width lines, which tend to vanish when extracting higher-res images. Being able to add elements like glows could help them stand out better, so this was going to be a somewhat more sophisticated map than I'd anticipated!

This is the opening scene with just the imported bitmap image in the map (I'm keeping these opening images deliberately under-sized for the Forum, as there's fairly little detail on them):

And this is it with the transparency effect on:

Next, I started sketching-in some base terrain elements beyond the centrally-mapped area, using only symbols, to have more control over their sizes. Here, I'm working with the BITMAP sheet's transparency turned off:

This is the appearance without the bitmap image entirely:

One advantage of this vector mapping style is that you can add effects such as transparency to the symbols sheets, and see - as here - that the symbols fade out a little, which is what I wanted to do for the area beyond the mapped zone, showing the terrain there still, yet without so much detail. There's no need for technicalities like the forced redraw command that would be needed for raster symbols, though these were all set-up on their own new sheet, of course. The symbols, incidentally, were all from the extensive "Filled" vector set available under the CC3+ overland style, which was the default set available on opening the new map.

The next snapshot shows this whole border zone completed, with the hills and river added, as well as a background colour showing the full extent of the hills into the central region as well:

I amended the edge fade on the terrain sheet to retain the softer transition at the edge of the hilly area. The perceptive may notice too that one hill seems a little less transparent than the others, as that one's now on the main symbols sheet, that has no transparency effect on it. That difference is a little more obvious as the central area gradually fills-in fully:

With that completed, deciding what symbols would be suitable to highlight the features on the fully-mapped area could begin - next time!

Well done, Monsen!

And again, many congratulations to everyone for sailing us well past the 1,000 Atlas maps now!

@Frosty: I don't think there's much available as a base map beyond what's been officially released by TSR/WotC down the decades, unfortunately, for the north of Faerun. I know when I was working on my map (ye gods - seven years plus ago!), I struggled to find anything useful for features among the ice, and most of that was from the earlier Forgotten Realms books from the 1980s. There's a little more for the near-coast region now (Ten Towns region and surrounds), at least. That does mean that much like jacolantern, you can go ahead and add/invent whatever you wish though.

Ah, the Star Trek mountains (well, they're shaped a bit like the arrowhead badges anyway!) 😎

Thanks very much folks.

Ideas and concepts for this little map group just seemed to fall into place around the time of Jim's death, and Jim's insatiable mapping efforts and enthusiasm, both for the Atlas and his other numerous projects, had already helped maintain my own focus on the Atlas mapping I'd embarked on, albeit at a far slower rate than Jim's. So it all started to seem as if it was somehow intended.

As I'd already mapped something for Kraken Island in Jim's Forlorn Archipelago last year (Haunted Cloud Mesa), and as the locations for all these D24/D25 maps were decided a year ago, I didn't want to switch sites for this one, as I've set things up to only place one map (or map group, where there's an area map as well as the dungeon one) per regional area selected.

Ricko's already suggested an additional map of his own for another spot on Lizard Isle, and will post that here shortly, I think.