Happy June! Happy start to the meteorological summer! We're having a little heat wave in Northern California (80 F / 27 C here in San Francisco, but more like 100 F / 38 C just a few miles inland). So it sounds like a perfect time for the beach.

I haven't posted new maps in a few weeks because I was busy working on a few big ones. Right now I'm working on the interiors for the ziggurat I created to play with the new stairs annual. But while I was working on the lighthouse (more more experimentation with stairs), I got the idea of doing a proper fully underwater adventure. Something that the adventurers would need a Water Breathing spell or similar magic or innate ability for.

I have three ideas. One is an underwater lair of a sea witch or sea hag. That's ready to be posted next. Another is a fully underwater fortress or castle. I haven't started that one yet. But for this one, I wanted to do a Sea Elf Outpost that's a combination of caves v. construction, and underwater v. above. This Sea Elf Outpost is probably my favorite map of all of the ones I've created. It uses Marine Dungeons as the base, with fills and foliage symbols from Forest Trails and furniture from DD3.

In my campaign world, sea elves are reclusive and distrustful of the surface world. When they have to go about on land, they disguise themselves as high elves, so most "landlubbers" don't even know they exist. At this outpost, the sea elves can secretly spy on a nearby human city and the movements of the human Lord Admiral's navy.

Here's the island from above as the crow flies -- or in this case, as the seagull flies.

To give you a sense of perspective, this map is 1000 x 800 feet, and the hillside along the beach stretches about 625 feet. On the images with a grid, each square is five feet.

Seems uninhabited. But if we could use x-ray vision to see below the hill, this is what we'd see:

Come on in! Let me give you a proper tour. First, let's start with the main entrance (#1) and the first guard post (#2).

These underwater passageways eventually lead us to the Welcome Chamber (#3), sort of an underwater reception room. To the south is the underwater gardens (#4) where the sea elves grow various sea grasses, seaweeds, and marine mushrooms. To the east is the Great Hall (#5), with a storage room (#6) to the north. To the south, there are two locked rooms: the armory (#7) with spears, tridents, nets, and other weapons suitable for underwater combat, and the treasury (#8).

Next on our tour, we find three VIP bedrooms (#9) as well as group barracks (#10) and a storage room (#11). Of course, ordinary beds would be useless in an underwater bedroom. Who wants soggy sheets? I figured they'd probably use hammocks that they can tie themselves into so they don't drift away in their sleep (like astronauts in zero gravity). The hammocks connect to a wall on one side and a pillar on the other.

Next up, we have a room that has been nicknamed the Transition Room (#12), as it transitions from underwater to surface land. It's one of three rooms with ceilings high enough that the water doesn't touch the ceiling here, so you can pop your head above water even in the marine parts of the room. To the north is a room (#13) where folks can dry off and change their clothing, though the sea elves generally wear lightweight linen clothing that dries quickly on their own. Room #14 is called the Lesser Hall. It's nicknamed the Map Room because it's where the outpost commander and his staff pour over maps and other documents, which couldn't really be done underwater (unless they used clay tablets or waxed paper, maybe). To the north is another storeroom (#15), and then there's a dining hall (#16), kitchen (#17), and pantry (#18).

South of the Transition Room, an underwater passageway takes you to the second of the three rooms where the water doesn't reach the high ceilings: the chapel (#16). This room gave me an excuse to play with the brass inlays that I love so much, as well as the partially-submerged pillars with the ripple effect, and the partially submerged stairs. The orange/pink tiled area is an elevated platform. Maybe I should put chairs or something on it to make it clearer that it's above water. In my campaign world, elves use henge stones as places of worship, usually with seven inner stones representing the seven gods of the elven pantheon. Here, the sea elves have used pillars as a substitute.

From the dry passageways that head north from the chapel or east and then south from the dining hall, we get to the above-water bedrooms. The outpost commander's room is #20, and then there are two double-occupancy VIP rooms (#21) and dry barracks with seven beds (#22). Room #23 is a recreation room where during downtime, the sea elves stationed here can play games or make music (there's a harp on the table).

Next we come to the third room where the water doesn't touch the ceiling, my favorite room of the outpost, called the Dolphin Room (#25). Here, a separate passageway to the outside allows for intelligent marine allies to visit and confer with the sea elves: merfolk, intelligent dolphins, and an intelligent octopus. (Not sure if the turtles are also intelligent or if they just wandered in.) A platform on the west side is elevated above the water, where there's a chest with balls, hoops, and other lightweight, floating toys that the elves and dolphins use in various games they've devised. A dry passageway takes you to the lockup (#26), where unwary landlubbers who've stumbled across the elves may be held.

To the east, the Great Staircase (#27) takes you winding up to the top of the hill, where elves are posted as lookouts. On the way, you'll pass a locked room (#28) with a teleportation portal and an open room (#29) where the sea elves stash their bows and arrows and other land weapons.

A spiral staircase (#30) leads to the outside above the top of the hill overlooking the beach. (You can barely make out the top of the stairs above the #30 label.)

And one last feature on the island: the Alligator Cove (#31). The alligators are enough to deter casual visitors from the island, and the sea elves do enough secret mischief to more determined visitors to convince locals that the island is haunted. (The alligator symbols are actually crocodiles, but I got the names mixed up. They come from Dundjinni Archives.)

And that's the end of our tour of the Sea Elf Outpost! It took me a few weeks, which is why I haven't had a chance to post anything new recently.

I just had an epiphany -- one that may be obvious to most of you but has tickled me to pieces.

Ever since I saw Ralf's two video demos of Marine Dungeons of using the brass inlays (which prompted me to immediately purchase the 2021 Annual), I have been obsessed with putting in brass inlays wherever I can get away with it. I even did one in my recent Sun God temple which was in a Mike Schley style, only I used a goldleaf background from Sue's Parchments with a crude, hand drawn depiction of the sun.

I have wanted to do more inlays in everything, but I am not an artist. But it suddenly occurred to me: Sue's inlays are vector images, and CA15 Heraldic Symbols (from Annual Volume 2, 2008) are vector images, and some of those vector symbols are varicolor....

So I experimented, and it worked! Upper left is one of the vector images from Marine Dungeons, just as an example of how it's supposed to work. Upper right is a dolphin symbol from Heraldic Symbols that intentionally keeps the black outline, as does the fleur-de-lys crest in the lower left. The lion intentionally omits the black border.

There aren't a ton of symbols in Heraldic Symbols, and fewer still that are varicolor, but the cool thing is: if you use CA15 Heraldic Symbols to design a coat of arms, and use the varicolor symbols set to the magenta #6, you can then have the coat of arms engraved in brass at the base of the dais in your throne room. Just copy the crest into your map and move it to the floor sheet after placing the brass inlay fill on a sheet directly behind the floor (adding the color key effect to the floor if your map doesn't already have that).

Last month, I shared a map of a sewer system that I developed. @Lorelei recommended that I submit it to the Community Atlas...but I figured I couldn't submit a sewer system for a town without also creating the town to go with it. This one took a few weeks.

I have a hard time breaking out of orthogonal map-making. This very much looks like it was laid out on a grid, something I will have to focus on not doing next time. I was constrained, though, by the fact that the sewers were already designed and I had to make the rest of the city fit the sewers instead of the other way around.

I decided to design it in the Darklands City style. I had to include city cliffs (they're already in the sewers map, after all), and originally I considered using the City Cliffs like Ralf did in the second episode of his five episode Big City Project tutorial. Then I discovered that the rocky outcrops already in Darklands City make fantastic cliffs when stacked on one another, and there are even sheets already set up for the base, middle, and top cliffs. Honestly, the cliffs are probably my favorite part of the map. The waterfalls come from Forest Trail.

My town also has two other water features: irrigation canals to bring water to the nearby farms outside of town, and an aqueduct system to bring water from the river into the town. Of course, the aqueducts should be covered (to keep blown leaves, bird poop, etc. from contaminating the water supply), but the water looks so pretty. (I put the aqueduct water on another sheet to tone down some of the effects that wouldn't work with such a narrow band of water.) There's a mill on the water designed so that the paddles scoop up buckets of water to deposit into a reservoir that feeds the aqueducts. I couldn't find a mill symbol, so there's a big tower for the reservoir, and its roof extends enough to cover the paddle wheel. ;-)

The "downtown" area includes a market square (24), temple (20), city hall (21), city watch and jail (22), and courthouse (23). The buildings around it are all merchant shops, while farmers and other merchants set up stalls in the plaza on market days. Building #16 is the community baths, located by necessity along the aqueduct line.

The upper portion of the sewer system is also shown, including the "Great Maw" (the giant pit where refuse is thrown down to be devoured by a Black Pudding), and the runoff where cleaned water is returned to the sea.

If you recall, at the lowest level of the sewers, a tentacle creature has taken up residence. I decided to put a mage's home in the town above that area (27). Still undecided: did the mage move to the town to study the creature that lurks beneath it? Or is he responsible for the creature? Perhaps he conjured it one night, summoning from the Outer Planes, and it escaped into the sewers where it eventually grew too large to escape its new home. In any event, the mage has grown prosperous by selling some of the green waste that the creature produces (as evidenced by the valuable exotic trees in his garden that he was able to afford to import). Turns out, that green goo is a useful ingredient in a lot of potion recipes, and other wizards (or their apprentices) travel to the mage to buy his green goo. They often stay at the Black Cat Inn (26) -- the proprietor named it as a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to a wizard's familiar.

Still to come: I want to make sure that every city is properly on the correct layer for the "All Buildings with Color" effect to work properly. (This style did not come with those layers, and for some reason the "Add city layers" command didn't work, so I added them manually.)

Thoughts? Recommendations?

I am still working on my ziggurat, but in the meantime I got sidetracked with another Stairs & Steps project.

I was inspired by Ralf's Live tutorial for this month's annual, where he built stairs going up a mountainside. I wanted to do the same. I was also inspired by seeing the stairs of El Peñón de Guatapé featured in this season of The Amazing Race. I wanted to put my cliffs on an island, and there's no better setup for that than the Marine Dungeons. Plus, while I used that annual to create my Greco-Roman temple, I hadn't used it for a proper marine dungeon. And while the Stairs & Steps annual includes the individual steps from Creepy Crypts, I remembered that Marine Dungeons also has their own individual steps. So handy!

So, stairs going up a mountain. Where are they going to? First I thought there might be a temple or monetary or standing stones at the top, but I've been gravitating to those and wanted to do something different. I thought about creating an observatory but wasn't sure how to do the telescope. Maybe a wizard's tower? But really: what's the most common sort of tower on a hill on a small island? A lighthouse!

There are about 285 steps (including six landings) that ascend about 165 feet to the top of the hill. I made a courtyard for the lighthouse to take advantage of the beautiful walls, complete with arrow slit crenellations.

Of course, to really take advantage of the Marine Dungeons style, I had to create ruins in the sea. There you might find a few mermaids chatting with a wise octopus. And if you look closely, there's some sunken treasure as well.

(This has inspired me to do a few maps down the road for the realms of some sea elves.)

Anyway, here's the lighthouse by day:

The lighthouse at night is coming up in a follow-up comment.

In a recent thread, @Traveller mentioned that he is seeking to discover the best style of designing castles in order to map the many real castles of the U.K.

I have been on a similar quest, though my quest is so that I can design fantastical castles of folklore and fairy tales, like Camelot and Sleeping Beauty's Castle, or the castles in Errol Flynn movies. Castles with many levels of battlements, parapets, towers and turrets, gardens with hedge mazes, and imposing keeps.

One of the things that seems to come up regularly in these forums is crenellations. I was experimenting using Mike Schley's walls along the top edges of my fortresses, and that looked okay, but didn't allow for much flexibility since the symbols come in one length and the wall drawing tool doesn't show the embrasures and merlons.

Anyway, I designed some symbols. I have 5' x 5' square ones. I have trapezoidal ones that can be placed to have arrow slits. I have corner L-shaped pieces. And I have several different rounded ones for round towers, including a tapered one to create arrow slits.

They are all created using CC3+'s drawing tools, with fills from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. There are five different shades of every shape, using Mike Schley's Natural Stone 1 through Natural Stone 5. (This was designed in SS5 Cities of Schley, but I imported the Dungeons of Schley fills as well.) I think that approach allows them to be used in the Atlas. @Monsen, can you confirm?

(I used the Stone Paving Grey for the structures, but tried one tower with Stone Paving Brown to see how it would look. The intention was to try to create the look of

They are all designed for a five-foot wide crenellation -- basically, you'd draw a line or circle with a 5-foot width for the base of the crenellation and then place the merlons on top. I've tried it both placing them by hand and also using SYMBOLS ALONG, and both approaches work reasonably well.

I am not an artist, and I'm sure others here could do much better ones, but I think it gets the job done. I'm happy to share if anyone would like to use them.

Here is the FSC file and also an FCW example:

And here are some images so you can see how they look. (I put a Bevel effect on the merlons, which is showing some odd effects because the colors with the base are close, even though I used a darker shade of the Natural Stone for the base.)

Here's a close-up of the trapezoid merlons along the edge of a straight building.

And here's one using the trapezoidal merlons for the lower level and then the square ones for the higher level. It also shows the corner pieces.

Here are two different round towers. The one on the left has normal merlons, and the one on the right has tapered ones for arrow slits. (I need to fix the Wall Shadow effects -- the base of the tower should not be casting a shadow farther out than the crenellation on top of the tower!)

Here's a quick "proof of concept" of a multi-level castle with different crenellation styles, plus some domes from City Domes for turrets.

And one last tower using the brown paving fill. This one uses a wider merlon using the SYMBOLS ALONG tool, but I don't think it's quite lining up correctly.

Feedback welcome, and feel free to use the FSC if you like them.

Today would have been my grandmother's 105th birthday (she passed away six years ago). She was fond of turtles, so in her memory, I designed this silly little map of an aspidochelone, a giant turtle.

In mythology, the Aspidochelone was a sea creature portrayed as either a giant whale or giant turtle -- a creature so large that it would be mistaken for an island covered with sand dunes and vegetation. Sailors would camp out on the "island," but when the heat from their campfires awakened the creature, it would plunge beneath the waves, killing the intruders.

In my campaign world, one of my religions is loosely inspired by astrology. There are twelve gods depicted as mythological creatures who are shown in the heavens as constellations of stars. They each consecutively take precedence for one-twelfth of the year, when their constellation is most prominent. Each is assigned to one of the four elements, as well as one of three qualities. Chelys, the Aspidochelone, is one of these gods. He represents Water Resolute, "the great sea depths in their untamed but passive state." (The other water gods are: Tuthose, the kraken, Water Ascendant: water in its wildest, untamed form, like hurricanes at sea; and Melquart, the hippocampus, Water Adaptive: water tamed for use in drinking, cleaning, powering watermills, and the like. Chelys' month is the eleventh month of the Common Calendar at the second month of Autumn. (The calendar begins on the Winter Solstice.)

Anyway, here is an aspidochelone.

This isn't intended for the Atlas or the village competition, it's just for fun.

I'd like to be

Under the sea...

Here is the second of the three Marine Dungeons I've planned. The first was the Sea Elves Outpost, and the third will be a full-scale, multi-story underwater fortress (though it may take me a bit to get to it, as I'm letting myself get sidetracked).

My goal with this one was to go for speed. I wanted to see if I could create a nice dungeon in a reasonably quick amount of time. Like, imagine it's a Friday evening and I have to whip something together for my players who will be coming over Saturday morning.

I have a collection of public domain images produced by the Society for Creative Anachronism for use as heraldry symbols, and I used one of an octopus to use as a tracing guide. All told, it took me about four hours, I think, to do the first draft. I then went back to rip out the gardens that require sunlight (per the conversation in the Sea Elves Outpost thread) and replace with things that wouldn't require sunlight.

This one is called The Octopus' Garden. It's unknown who first excavated this realm beneath a marine mountain, carving it out in the shape of an octopus, but it has now become the lair of a Sea Hag.

Here it is unlabeled:

Here it is with labels:

The octopus' eight arms serve as wings in the lair (or maybe we should say tentacles instead of wings), with the suckers becoming small rooms in the lair. The southernmost tentacles open to the sea, becoming entrances to the lair, while the other six are fully enclosed. The chambers in tentacles 1, 2, 3, and 4 are used to produce food for the lair's residents.

As you enter -- if you can get past the sharks that the Sea Hag has enchanted to guard her entrance -- you'll see that the chambers closest to the entrance get just enough sunlight (improbably) to grow vegetation. The other chambers grow things that don't need sunlight, particularly marine mushrooms. (True story: freshwater aquatic mushrooms were discovered about 15 years ago. They're only found in a single mile-long stretch of the Rogue River in Oregon, in a spot where my family has a cabin that has been in the family for generations. But in my fantasy realm, saltwater mushrooms are abundant.)

Other chambers are used to raise shellfish, sea urchins, and anemones, who are all fed with vegetation harvested from the kelp forest outside of the lair on the northeastern side.

The chambers in tentacles 5 and 6 are all prison cells. If you look closely, you'll see a double set of gates in the entrances to those chambers. They all have hammocks for the prisoners to sleep in, but they are also all equipped with shackles bolted to the lair's walls for situations where a prisoner may need extra restraints. If you look closely, you'll see that two of the cells have humanoid creatures (probably sea elves) shackled to the walls. Another has a humanoid skeleton, while a fourth has the skeletal remains of some other creature. A fifth has an imprisoned mermaid, and the others in this closeup are unoccupied.

The chambers in tentacles 7 and 8 are are bedchambers, each equipped with a hammock and one or more chests so the resident's valuables don't go floating away.

The "head" of the octopus is a Great Hall, where the Sea Hag holds court. Today she has chosen to take the form of a giant octopus.

The two spots labeled #10, where the octopus' eyes would be, are extraplanar portals. Some say that one goes to a dangerous swamp in the Feywild while the other goes to an even more dangerous fen in the Shadowfell. Others say they go to the Elemental Plane of Water, or to soggy planes of the Abyss.

Why would our adventurers go there? Perhaps they are trying to rescue the mermaid, or the other NPCs. Perhaps they need to use the portals to get to the next stop of their missions. Perhaps they need to negotiate with the Sea Hag for help with something. (Maybe one wants to trade her voice for a love potion -- no, not that.) Maybe the Sea Hag has a magical artifact that they need to complete their quest....

Having done (in varying stages of "in progress" and not all submitted yet) an elven farming village, forest village, and underwater village, as well as a desert town, what other unusual village environment could I tackle. How about...underground?

I decided to build out my dwarven kingdom in order to find a home for a dwarven mining village. It ended up being more above-ground than below. I did it in the Mike Schley style because it's compatible with Monsen's Mines.

The village is more fortified like a town, but I figured that was more to protect the mine, but it's still a small village.

Villages don't usually have many specialized shops, so I didn't label any of the potential-retail buildings around the town square. There's a little bit of agriculture, and a few villagers have gardens, but most of the village's food is bought or traded with the wealth generated from the mines. Pretty much every family in the village has at least one family member who works in the mines, and anyone else who doesn't has some job that supports mine workers. The Miners' Guild is more like a union rather than a what we might think of as a guild, as it represents the workers rather than the mine's owners.

But no blacksmith in the village. That can be found in a (well-ventilated) space within the mines.

If we hide the "Roof" layer (that is, the top of the mountainside), we can peek into portions of the mine operations. (I still need to finish furnishing this area.) There's a temple used by the entire village, and a blacksmith. Miners can eat in the Miners' Mess Hall during the day, fed by those who work in the kitchens. There's a set of offices for the Mining Administration, where the mine's accounting and payroll are managed. One room has several locked cages to provide extra security for the mine's ore and treasury. In a pinch, it can also serve as the village jail. (One wonders if the mine administrators will come to regret putting the lockup in the treasury.) There's a washroom where miners can get cleaned up before going home, but it's mostly used by the dwarves who live underground.

The furnaces in the blacksmith's and next-door washroom also heats water. The dwarves have created a cunning pipe system throughout this level of the mines that brings both hot and cold water to the residential suites and the kitchen.

There are six luxury residential apartments underground. Most of the underground residents use the common washroom, but the Mine Administrator's family has their own private bathroom with bathtub.

Revisiting my ancient town of Kukaar. Now that I'm working on a tiny sliver of the Atlas, I found a place where I would like to place this (once the parent maps are complete). However, my first just-for-fun map was just the wealthier northside district, but to put it in the Atlas, I really needed to map the entire city. I had to expand it southwards, but I didn't like how it looked as a vertical map, so I also expanded east to make it square. That forced me to also add some more residential neighborhoods in the northside, and I decided that a city this size would have a governing noble of some sort, so I also added a palace there.

Using two of Ralf's recent tutorials, Modern Journeys and Real-World Vector Data, I was finally able to create a condensed map of a 71-day vacation my parents took me and my twin on when we were 4 years old. (The images for the icon symbols are all public domain or CC-BY. Photo credits below.)

Like Ralf's Real-World Data tutorial, I had weird gaps in the middle of my map when I tried to convert the vector lines to land. Unlike Ralf, I didn't have the skills to be able to resolve it (despite watching the tutorial three times)...so I kludged a solution by drawing more land over the gaps. There was some other weirdness on the eastern side of the map that I didn't even have to worry about once I realized that I only had to show the part of the U.S. where we traveled.

Also, because I wasn't shading each state differently, I didn't have to trace the boundaries the way Ralf did. I simply moved the lines to a Border sheet and changed their properties to be the color and line thickness that I wanted.

I originally was going to source the photos from the U.S. National Park Service's website, where they have a database of images from their parks that are all in the public domain. (In the United States, all intellectual property published by the government is automatically in the public domain.) I was struggling to find images I liked, so instead I resorted to Wikimedia Commons. I made a point of only using photos that were either in the public domain or were published by a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Those licenses allow for commercial use, unlike the CC-BY-NC licenses (even though this isn't for commercial purposes), and allow for derivatives (unlike the CC-NY-ND "no derivatives" licenses). That allowed me to edit the images to be in sepia and cropped into circles. Instead of following Ralf's approach of making them sepia in the map, I used GIMP to desaturate them to sepia and then crop them to a circle which was then exported to a PNG (with the portions outside of the circle being transparent).

I added the photo credits to a Map Note and added a hotspot in the lower right corner to open up the note. Here are the photo credits (including some I wasn't able to use because of space considerations):

San Francisco, California - Dasturias, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Big Sur, California - Brian Lopez, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Los Padres National Forest - Damian Gadal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Disneyland - Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chiricahua National Forest - Zereshk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Carlsbed Caverns - Eric Guinther, User:Marshman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

White Sands National Park - uncredited NPS employee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Petrified National Forest - AndrewKPepper, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Canyon - Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons

Glen Canyon Dam @ Lake Powell - Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Mesa National Forest - National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

White River National Forest - JasonC photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Rushmore - Colin.faulkingham at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Teton National Forest - US Forest Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yellowstone National Forest - Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Glacier National Park - TaikiMcTaikiface, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Banff National Park - Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Baker National Forest - Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Falls View, Olympic National Forest - Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Crater Lake, Oregon - DSparrow14, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Redwood National Park - m01229 from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons