I am ready to submit the FCW for the Eknapata Desert for the Atlas, knowing that it won't be processed until after the contest ends (though it is a parent map for a village I am submitting to the contest).

Here is the FCW, along with a PDF Description and a plain text file (with accents replaced with standard ASCII characters).

(I just noticed that this looks vaguely like the Starship Enterprise.)

In Level 5, purified water from Level 4 hits at a high spot that slopes both to the west and to the east. Water that flows to the west will reach the end of the canal and be deposited into water pipes that take it out to sea. Water that flows east will end up in a supersized drainage canal to help carry refuse from the bottom of the Great Maw.

The Great Maw ends at this level. All manner of waste digestible by the Black Pudding is tossed in here, including unusable metal and wooden objects, as well as any bones picked clean by the Gelatinous Cubes in Level 3. Here, the Black Pudding is munching on a great bell that has been thrown away, as well as some broken furniture. (Yeah, townfolk would probably chop up the broken furniture for firewood, but I wanted to show the Pudding eating metal and wood.) Left untouched for daring adventurers: a ceramic urn and a stone statue that are indigestible, along with some glass bottles. There’s also a staff, book, and scroll case that should be edible…unless they’re magical.

An extra large canal brings any remaining wastewater to the sea. Here, a Voracious Sullage has stretched itself across the canal, holding on to two side pillars as it scoops up anything edible remaining in the water.

A portion of the Great Maw’s wall has broken down, revealing a few caverns that are home to a strange tentacle aberration.

If adventurers survive the Black Pudding, the tentacle aberration, and the carnivorous plants down the passageway, they might find an escape route through the southern passage. But they might not be home free: something got the last adventurers who rested here (though that something might have been carbon monoxide poisoning if they lit a campfire in this poorly ventilated space).

I tweaked it to change the effluent on Level 3 to Effluent o3, then changed it after the first Gelatinous Cube in the Waste Filtration Path to clear water with decreasing amounts of scum as it gets purified. Added some clear water near the cubes in the Filtration Auditoriums to show that they ate some of the contaminants as they were traveling through. Also added some floor stains.

I think this makes it a bit clearer that the Gelatinous Cubes are consuming the waste and purifying the water. I will go through add more scum to the floors and the effluent in Levels 2 and 3.

Level 12

The Temple of Fah is also a repository for a great number of religious and government documents. Many of them are mundane and boring: records of flood patterns and agricultural yields, of famine and other disasters. Vital records for the population: records of live births, marriages, and deaths. Historical accounts of the pharaohs and their accomplishments, and of great wars and battles. Bestiaries, zoological treatises, and other studies of the natural world. Transcriptions of religious documents. Every official government and religious document is stored in the temple, along with a great many other written works.

On Level 12, the senior scribes have private offices to do their work and manage the work of junior scribes in the levels below.

Level 11

On this level, there are six libraries, each equipped with rows of bookcases and numerous desks for junior scribes to maintain records and transcriptions.

Level 10

Level 10 has three shrines to different gods of the pantheon. These shrines may be visited by the pharaohs, top nobles, and senior government officials, but not the general public.

Level 9

Level 9 has two shrines to different gods, and a small room for priests to get ready. Most of the level, however, is occupied by the top third of a massive circular room dedicated to semi-private religious ceremonies such as coronations and royal weddings. At the cardinal points of that chamber, this level has 10-foot wide balconies (with railings) to look down upon the religious practices below.

Level 8

This level has five shrines to the gods. Although the great religious hall described above cuts through this level, there is no access to it from Level 8.

Level 7

This is the main level that non-priests are allowed to enter. It has four entrances from the first landing of the ziggurat (where, outside, there are also four more entrances that descend to Level 6). The central chamber is the 28-foot-high chapel where coronations, royal weddings, state funerals, and other religious ceremonies for the powerful elite are held. Three connected chambers are shrines to the three-part triplet god, with a fourth unconnected shrine dedicated to their mother, the feline-faced cat goddess. Two other chambers are used for the priests to dress or prepare for religious services, or for elite guests like the pharaoh to wait in privacy.

From here we can descend to the tombs in the lowest third of the temple.

Okay, here are the changes I made:

1. Added patches to the murkiness to break it up.
2. Added more bones on the right side and a pile of plundered treasure on the left. (Still not a lot of debris, though.)
3. Adding/increasing a Glow on the walls wasn't putting the tentacle corridors in a shadow like I wanted -- to get the shadow strong enough, it caused the contents in the sucker rooms to be too obscured. So I did add a shadow over the interior rooms and corridors after all.
4. Changed the Glow settings on the solid rock area of the cavern, so that the edges don't look so sharp. (I will also post the FCW in case anyone wants to recommend adjusting the settings.)
5. Moved all of the "above" rocks and weeds to a special layer that can be hidden or shown.
6. Added an entire layer of rocks to that new layer of varying sizes (up to 5x or 6x, I believe). I used the "symbols in area" function to scatter weedy rocks around, and then filled in.
7. Added a wall mask so that the constructed walls no longer cast a shadow on the excavated cave walls. Midway through, I realized that I could simplify my painstaking efforts by copying my constructed walls to another wall sheet above the mask, this one with no effects. The walls below the mask cast the shadows and glow; the wall above the mask has no effects, but allowed me to be a little sloppy in drawing the walls mask. (At the very end, I realized I could have simplified it even further by copying the cave walls to the Walls Mask sheet.)

Thoughts?

Thoughts?

Here's the inside of the temple. The floor uses white marble tiles that come from DD3, I believe.

The reflections, as with my original temple, are custom-made symbols that are meant to be reflections from the glow of mosaics made from luminescent crystals. I need to remember to remove them when I share the FCW.

The pillars use Mike Schley's ornate columns. Zoomed out, they look a almost "smudged," and the plain columns look sleeker. But zoomed in, the details of the columns' base is nice, and probably more like what a fancy temple would have.

Okay, here's the next iteration.

I tried to use blotchy lighter sands to suggest sand dunes, like the Sahara Desert, and darker blotches to show more solid, earth-packed areas. Not sure if I should try to get them to blend in more with a partial transparency or something?

Tried to make the roads show up a little more, but I can't tell if it was that successful. I liked the idea that the guys with the camels could be used on the trails roads to indicate that it was more of a general route through the sands, where most travelers would need an experienced guide to make sure they don't get lost, since a proper road would be blown away or covered with sand. There is a more treacherous area in the southern part of the desert called the Devil's Backbone, where a proper road on more solid land passes next to a 50-mile long fissure. It's a dangerous route, beset by foul creatures that creep out of the fissure, especially at night. But the road is on solid land, and without a guide, it might be a safer route than braving the shifting sand dunes. (I put a tower next to one of the villages down there -- maybe a wizard is there that the adventurers just have to visit?)

Thoughts?

We've been thinking of colors for sewers that are used for their traditional use. But if we start to think of the reasons why a necromancer might need a sewer-type system beneath their lair, or a demon lord, or an archfey, or even dwarves creating subterranean aqueduct, then all sorts of colors make sense: bright water, glowing green goo, rivers of blood, lava...the possibilities are endless.

May I adopt this little unnamed elven village marked in the red box on Virinress'Arl? (Quenten, since you did the parent map, please let me know if this is encroaching on your future plans.)

And here are some of the Mike Schley style: