Here's a version with a darker red:

And here's a version where I tried lighter text on a darker background. (The white ones at the end are the only ones that really work.) For this one, I moved the text to a different sheet so I could turn off the white glow that just made it look bolded in a way that made it harder to read.

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.

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.

I was going to render a part of my Fractal Terrains campaign world in the new Sarah Wroot Revisited style, just to play around with the new style, but I decided to wait until Ralf has a chance to do a tutorial first. In the meantime, I went back to the January 2024 annual that I never really played with, Fantasy Realms Reimagined, to try it with that.

I was going to render the Republic of Lumadair area of my map that I have done before in the Parchment Worlds, Jerion Shading, and Mike Shley styles, but I decided that it was too massively oversized for this style. Those maps are 6,109 by 2,445 miles! (I think we calculated that Lumadair is slightly smaller than Australia, and the map includes part of the mainland continent of Lenoch, which I wanted to include to be able to do more mountains and rivers.)

So I picked a prominent river in the main kingdom I am developing, the Achalus River, and decided that it would run through a duchy named after the river. This is a much smaller map than Lumadair, but it is still 1,343 by 537 miles.

Anyway, here is the Fractal Terrains output in both the Jerion and Schley styles, just for frame of reference:

And here is what I did in Fantasy Realms Reimagined:

I copied over a mid-level elevation contour from the Jerion export to serve as a temporary drawing guide for the hills, and then another higher elevation as a temporary guide for the mountains. This style doesn't actually have a hills or mountains background the way the Schley style does (I mean, it does, but just for the individual hill or mountain itself: it renders onto a layer for the hill or mountain itself, with the ridge lines going on another layer). But I decided it was helpful as more than just a drawing guide, so I changed the hill background to brown and the mountain one to gray, put them on separate sheets, and added Edge Fade and Blur effects.

The coast looks blurry, but that's just because the map is so large. Here's how it looks zoomed in (it has a bevel effect on the LAND sheet instead of having a separate outline on a Coast sheet):

Even though I labeled this post as a Work in Progress, I probably won't do much more on this particular map. We'll see how much more I do when I have a chance to revisit it with the Sarah Wroot Revisited style. I may end up adding all the extra stuff when I flesh out the entire kingdom, which I suspect I will do in the Mike Schley style. This was just for fun and practice -- and it gave me a chance to use a style from this year's annual that I haven't really worked with before (other than using the hills in a back-burnered rendering of the Wizard of Oz map that I'm working on).

I've been playing around with Wyvern's great suggestions.

I tried to give the ziggurat a more weathered look by using the FRACTALIZE command. The default settings were way off but I played with it enough to think that with time, I could get it to look right. The problem was that I tried it on a single layer of the temple, and even with just that single layer, it added so many nodes that it slowed everything way down -- and that was just the first of eighteen levels of the temple! So I think my temple won't look weathered after all. Maybe the gods are preserving it. ;-)

Then I hid the desert symbols so that I could play with the different textures and effects to create the illusion of dunes. The Dungeons of Schley style has five sand fills (with 1 being the lightest) and five corresponding partially transparent textures to overlay. The main background in my map was the middle one, Sand 3_SS4. Over the entire map, I also added the Sand 2 T_SS4 texture on a sheet called SAND TEXTURE 1 BASE, which has an inner edge fade to soften it. I then added another sheet called SAND TEXTURE 2 PATCHES, where I drew patches of the textures 1, 4, and 5 (2 already applied to everything, and 3 being the same as the main sand).

For the dunes, I added another sheet, SAND TEXTURE 3 DUNES. It has three effects: Edge Fade, Inner; Bevel, Lighted; and Blur. I then added dunes, trying with first the Solid 10 fill and then some of the sand ones -- but actually, I kinda think the Sand 3 blends in best.

Here's how it looks:

Here's my Bevel settings:

And here's the FCW:

Thoughts? More dunes? More sand patches? More anything else?

As an aside, learning these desert techniques is very helpful. Last November, one of the first maps I attempted was a Blue Dragon's desert lair. I abandoned it, but I've learned so much in the last six months -- time to revisit it!

When I was coming up with "spooky season" mapping ideas, I was debating between a haunted house or a witch's lair in a swamp. Why not both?

That required experimenting with some different styles to try to create a swamp. (Let this serve as another plug for a jungle/swamp annual compatible with annuals like Creepy Crypts, Forest Trail, and Marine Dungeons.)

I wasn't sure which way to go...so I ended up doing three versions. One is in the Mike Schley Dungeon (SS4) style, the second used Forest Trails as the basis, and the third used Marine Dungeons (though the second two had to borrow a bit from DD3 and other styles).

I don't know a lot about swamps, but the images I've seen show a lot of trees both on dry land and in the water. In all three versions, I made it so that the tree tops could be hidden, both to create a battlemap version and also to show that some of the trees were growing out of the water and not just from patches of solid land.

Here are all three side by side, and then in the comments I will show each one in more detail.

Had a little fun with the second Hive monthly released today. The Kheek'zit invaders have made it to the mainland, infecting and destroying the Natlalihuitl Empire's southern cities as they continue to push their way north....

And here are some of the Mike Schley style:

If the ProFantasy Gods are listening: a future annual that I think could really complement the Marine Dungeons would be a "Jungle Adventures" dungeon. It would provide an opportunity to bring in palm trees and coconuts that could also enhance Marine Dungeons. Maybe some swamp building tools, including tree trunks with the ripples used in Marine Dungeons? Lots of colorful jungle foliage. Maybe some giant mosquitos or other bugs? Alligators or crocodiles? Think of the Indiana Jones-inspired adventures! Golden idols! Whips and fedora hats! Aztec-inspired ruins. Maybe a perfectly round boulder for traps. (The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite action/adventure opening scene of all time.) Just planting an idea....

Reinstalling seems to have done the trick. Still had to manually delete the lines that were already there, but the lines weren't reintroduced when I redrew more farms and forests. Thank you!