With the style selected, it was time to copy over the linear elements to a new map, after a few further minor changes (mostly to avoid copying the symbols for the town wall again):

The building walls have already been changed closer to the new map style, although without any sheet effects on at this point. The dungeon design lines have been changed to blue as well. Several copies of this CC3+ drawing were saved, in case of later problems, and so the above and below ground map designs would match.

Next, the roads, town wall and main vegetation were all added for the surface map:

The background bitmap fill has been changed too, as the roads were getting a little lost in the earlier dirt brown default fill. Effects have been tweaked here to outline the pathways better, although the trees and bushes still need a bit more work.

Now, the building outlines have been switched to the WALLS sheet, and the first pine floors added (using angle-by-edge on the flooring polygons, and adjusting the shading's pitch and angle to tone-down the wood-plank colouring, although this felt too dark and similar to the surface cover, which meant further experimentation with several aspects of that pine plank fill to reach this stage:

Still not 100% sure about the floor colouring, but I can see what's happening in the buildings now at least (particularly with the BITMAP sheet outlines all hidden). The vegetation has been adjusted by adding a further TREES sheet, and moving some of the taller trees onto it. All still subject to further tweaking, of course, though the tree cover looks less 2D now, at least.

Next began a trickier stage (given virtually none of the mapped wall lines work with the "Ortho" setting), the process of showing what the buildings contain, and how they link to the subterranean features. New floor textures (and a tweaked pine floor one too), wall-lines, doors, windows, stairs, etc., were added, in a limited section only at this stage, which gets us up to date with progress on this map:

The BITMAP lines are back, so I don't start fitting the stairs and entryways to the wrong properties, (in theory). The two buildings done so far are the main public access points to the underground temple, and as you can see, I've already taken slight liberties with the original Stormwatch map, by connecting two of the surface buildings to better work as such. Lots more to do, however, not least the fact I'd forgotten to copy over where the chimneys are before starting these interiors, so there may be even more tweaking by next time!

Have you tried drawing either a simple, quite thin, line, or segments (like logs), to make up a line? Use either black or a suitable log-brown colour. Booms would be typically made up of low-lying, floating obstacles, like logs, rafts, barrels, even ships, linked by lengths of chain under the water, and probably fastened at the shore ends by a boom tower, which would allow the chains to be raised or lowered to prevent or allow access, so you could add some of those floating objects along the line too. You could also have a couple of free-floating patrol boats alongside it for waterborne protection.

With testing completed, the next stage could begin. My original thought was to use the Pär Lindström Horror House Annual mapping style to fit the overall unsettling theme, and because I thought a simpler drawing style would be interesting to use here. Ultimately, this was changed, but this was where I began. First, the hand-drawn dice design was imported:

Then a copied version of the outlinings plus the town wall segment was pasted onto a second BITMAP Sheet, whose placement was adjusted until it approximated to a fit over the dice design:

This view shows the extent of the mapped zone, and how far beyond it other items had been picked to ensure full coverage of the key area. It also indicates that the dice design barely fits the edges of any of the structures from Stormwatch. However, it also finally allowed the choice of area to be shown on the full Stormwatch map, by copying and pasting an amended version of the map border rectangle over to the Stormwatch map (as in the penultimate image from my first post here).

With this complete, I then drew an outline version of the dungeon design's layout, amended to fit the buildings better (at least as far as the nearer- and above-surface parts of the maps were concerned):

That was about the point I realised the surface map (or maybe maps) needed to be drawn in a different style, because the Horror House one doesn't have any vegetation symbols. While some could have been re-used from others, I thought it preferable to stick with a single style, if possible. Which turned out to be the Naomi Van Doren Fantasy Floorplans one. While not monochrome, it is a nice, fairly clean-drawn style, with a limited colour palette, which seemed appropriate for this high-northern (Stormwatch is at about 58°N latitude), somewhat creepy, setting. As we'll see next time.

[Had it been available when I started drawing this map last month, I might have been tempted to make use of Ralf's new Hand-drawn Dungeon Annual style. Actually, it might match quite well with Naomi's style, so you never know...😊]

For the next map in my ongoing Atlas project, I thought it might be interesting to try another work-in-progress topic, to show some of the developments as they happened along the way. It's been a while since I last tried this, and I do tend to forget to record progress while mapping, but we'll see how it goes! The initial posts below, over the coming days, will outline what's happened to get this map underway during the last couple of months, and only the subsequent notes will start to become rather more immediate.

Said map was intended for somewhere in the Emerald Crown Forest region of northeastern Alarius, here:

Zooming-in to the next map already in the Atlas, there were a couple of additional places already mapped (highlighted in pink), along with some equally intriguing unmapped spots:

As usual, the development of each new map in this project is an organic process, in that while thinking about where the map's to go, I'm also looking at the dungeon design, and identifying ideas for what its contents and purpose might be. In this case, the design was from two Inkwell Ideas Dungeonmorph Dice in the Trailblazer set:

These translated into my hand-scrawled version, with the unconnected/extraneous passages and areas either removed or adapted, thus:

Looking through the Inkwell book that accompanies the dice for this pair of designs, the 6i one is from the Incantations/Magic Areas die, whose main-idea notes suggested this to be a temple masquerading as for a good/neutral deity, but which was actually for another less pleasant one - so that altar above the circular room drops victims down into it, for use in summoning an avatar of the deity, for instance.

The 6r die's main notes (for Rooms/General Areas), proposed it as part of the private quarters for some royalty, with a kitchen, dining room, and guards, while one of the alternative suggestions was for it to be an inn, possibly one with several vertical levels. In combination, these suggested a temple complex (replacing royalty with priests and inner-cabal followers), partly above ground, partly below. That suggested a larger population would be needed to both support and conceal such a place, as well as to provide victims for use in the summoning chamber.

Turning then to a couple of further books for inspiration, the "Tome of Adventure Design", and the very recently-released "Nomicon", both published by Mythmere Games, provided Maleng, Herald of the Seasons as the beneficent nature deity for the temple, with the congregation ostensibly calling themselves The Fellowship of Maleng, although they're really The Fellowship of Nidag, The Blind Slayer (the deity who's not so pleasant).

Looking at settlements in the Emerald Crown Forest area after this naturally pushed my thoughts towards the larger towns, and likely towards those on the coast, as probably having sizeable itinerant populations, where people chosen as victims would be less missed. Which eventually brought me to the pre-mapped town of Stormwatch:

It's probably not hard to see what drew me here - there are lots of anonymous groups of houses of the right size and rough orientation to fit the dungeon dice designs quite well. Finally, I picked a spot on the eastern edge of the map, outside the town walls, here:

At which point we discover I was missing a few small symbols (probably from the free, non-ProFantasy, sets usable in the Atlas) - for the inn signs, chimneys and waterwheels - hence the red Xs in places (the previous shot of Stormwatch was taken from the hi-res Atlas version).

Choosing that area wasn't straightforward, however, because a swift test-trial of my hand-drawn dice design showed the fit wasn't going to be exact, either from the placement and sizes of the various buildings, or the angle between the two main parts of the design. This wasn't unexpected, and after checking several potential alternatives, the orange rectangle on the image just above was picked as the closer fit. Even then, that area wasn't properly defined at this point.

I narrowed the spot down by setting-up a basic line drawing in CC3+, where I could compare the exact shapes, sizes and orientations of the Stormwatch buildings with the dice design draft map. This began by extracting those forms from the Stormwatch map thus:

The building outlines were generated more or less automatically, by simply copying the buildings to a new sheet and layer, and changing their properties (possible only because they were originally created using the CD3 house-drawing tool), while the tree circles and road lines were all hand-drawn. The two colours are because the original test-fitting was done just with the green-outlined buildings, and took several attempts. The red outlining was to make sure all the features in the final rectangular map area would be covered too, once the final "green" selection was made. Next time, pinning-down that rectangle.

Meanwhile, back at the topic in-hand...

Hunting for a potential Lower Level design meant checking through those unused from the Trailblazer dice, leading to one with suitable architecture and features being semi-randomly decided-upon, and mapped:

As a one-dice design, it did leave a bit of space around it, so picking the four elementals from the first Token Treasury set seemed an obvious decorative addition here. This time, I also opted to use the usual square-tile bitmap fill design for the chequered marble, now with that greyscale RGB Matrix Process effect I'd decided against for the Upper Level, because here, it IS the entire floor covering, so there's no unhelpful comparisons to be made with the "real" B&W marble textures. The Inkwell notes stated the design was diamond-form, and while I experimented with copy-and-pasted strips of my hand-drawn B&W marble chequer floor from the Upper Level, their sizing wouldn't fit evenly to the layout here. I then tried using the standard check fill for just the passageways and rooms, but trying to get those angled-by-edge to a neat 45° proved impossible for the shapes involved. So in the end, I just drew a large rectangle, rotated it, and then changed the design with angle-by-edge (and got rid of the roof shading look too, naturally).

This does lose the mild glow effect on the floor edges where they ordinarily meet the walls, although as I'd already left some pale shadow effects on the Upper Level walls anyway (which began as I wanted the external cliffs to have shadows on the outside), that shadowing, with the wall glows, seemed to work sufficiently well anyway. I don't often use shadows for dungeon maps, but in this case, they seemed to help everywhere.

Of course, there are elementals here, and the "pools" can be opened as scrying devices to their linked planes, as well as gates into them. If you look closely at the Elemental Grand Mage's Quarters (probably easiest on the Gallery version), you'll find how my attempt at making the view of a "roofless" four-poster bed turned out, as mentioned elsewhere on the Forum a few weeks ago.

Next time, it's back to northern Alarius, to find a spot somewhere in the Emerald Crown Forest region...