I didn't discover Tolkien until the early seventies, but once I did, I was really hooked. The maps were wonderful in both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, and I tried to make my own in a similar vein with pencils on plain lined notebook paper. Of course, I didn't want to copy Tolkien himself, so I had to make up my own place names for cities and countries. After that, though, I came across many other maps, such as the one by Robert E. Howard in his Conan stories, the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, the maps in the Shannara series by Terry Brooks, and many other fascinating gems in a variety of fantasy and historical novels. Maps are a great way to visualize the relationships between various places within the fictional setting.

The love for a really good map has continued with me throughout my life. When I discovered CC3 some years ago I put that love to work for me, creating a series of maps for my own fantasy novel, which I'm happy to say to both @Loopysue and @Maidhc O Casain I actually finished and published. It was a work of love that only took me about thirty-five years to complete. So, by way of encouragement to the two of you, hang in there. It may still happen.

I haven't made up complete languages yet, but I have enjoyed tinkering around with individual words here and there. I guess I caught the bug from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.R.R. Tolkien a lot when I was a kid. I've employed some of them in my own book, like names for creatures or various objects which are unique to the world I created. Names like bathalisk, theralon, sironath, and the like. Character names and place names are certainly common among fantasy writers, I would think. And good names are always useful. I met Anne McCaffrey some years ago and she urged those in attendance to compile and keep a list of names which we could draw upon whenever we needed one. That practice has stuck with me all these years later, and I have lists of thousands of names I can use.

Marc Okrand is well known for creating the Klingon language for the Star Trek franchise. Being an actor and a writer, that had greatly appealed to me, but I never really had the time to develop those kinds of projects fully on my own.

The other thing I've played around with is creating my own fonts, ones that are unique to different places and people groups. I think that sort of thing can add a lot of depth to whatever stories you are writing. Tolkien certainly was masterful at doing that with his dwarf runes and elvish scripts.

Here's a better screenshot. Thanks, Sue, for that little trick about print screen. I've pressed the key before but nothing ever happened. I didn't know you had to paste the image somewhere.

I tried unchecking and checking the box several times, then hitting apply, but to no effect. Sue, I looked at the layers as you suggested and nothing was frozen but the template layer.

Here's the FCW file, but I can't imagine it's any different than your copy.

I loaded a few other maps from previous annual issues and got the same problem with the sheet effects, no color key polygons were working effectively. I am of the mind there is some other bug in my system which is affecting the CC3+ performance. I may have to contact tech support to see if they have a solution. Otherwise I'll probably have to re-download something.

@Quenten Thank you for your help, but as I've already mentioned, I tried that several times and had no favorable results. It's like the entire sheet effects sub-routine is not working.

@Glitch

Hey, looks much better now. The big hacienda no longer looks like it's floating. Good job!

@Ralf

Thanks Ralf for changing the code signing on Inked Ruins. I tried over and over to install it, but my computer just would not let me do it. And what I really found annoying is that the Windows program not only wouldn't install it, but actually deleted the installation file from my computer right before my eyes.