Getting a little practice in with Sinister Sewers this afternoon. (I've been mentally mapping out an elaborate waste management system, but this is just for practice.) If I'm lucky, Ralf will do a demo with the next Live -- looking forward to seeing his strategies and tips.

The canal in the lower left is meant to be regular water from a storm drain (maybe I should add some leaves) that would normally mingle with the effluent and push it through, but a gelatinous cube is gobbling up all the leaves and everything. (My waste management system will make extensive use of oozes to keep things tidy.) I used Effluent 05 for the water. Was that intended to be regular water? Is there a better approach for that?

I ended up going with the green effluent for most of it because I liked how the colors popped. But I will probably use the browns and yellows mostly, maybe with the green used for scum, and maybe waste "water?" coming from the sewers connected to a necromancer's lab.

I was struggling getting a break in the wall to the room without canals to work properly, and then realized that an archway was a perfect gimmick. This room was intended to be the main access to the sewers, but there are also ladders or rungs near the surface vents. Threw in some carnivorous vegetation for fun. Maybe some adventurers will be hired to find out why waste management workers are disappearing.

I have thoughts on things I'd love to see in future Annuals, but if I mention something that already exists in an older Annual, please advise and I may go buy it!

• Greco-Roman symbols (both City and Dungeon level) - aqueducts, baths, forums, temples, amphitheaters (and at the dungeon level: couches, statues)
• Elven Village (if in a Mike Schley-compatible style, could expand on his elven homes in SS5, or could be totally unique) - tree houses, swan boats and canoes, henges, colorful/exotic flowers and plants, fairy circles, and specialty animals: deer, swans, exotic birds, unicorns, pegasuses (pegasi?), giant eagles and their nests
• Airships - dirigibles, hot air balloons, magical flying ships, Spelljammer-compatible ships
• Academy/University - not sure what this would include, but I will need to design one at some point
• Botanical Garden

If Mike Schley is still doing monthlies:

• Throne Room - thrones, dais, crowns and other regalia (perhaps with pillows to display them on), banners, shields (upright as wall decorations), red (or varicolor) carpets that can be combined into a long strip (or as a fill?), couches or lounge chairs, suits of armor.*
• Library - more bookcase options, more open/closed books, varicolored scroll cases, rolled-up scrolls tied with varicolored ribbon, ink jars with feathered quills.**
• Gnome or Artificer Workshop - though there are some alchemist supplies already
• Mines - tracks, handcarts, pickaxes, individual gems (as opposed to a pile of gems)
• Fairs or festivals - the marketplace symbols have a lot, but I'm thinking about things for performers: juggling pins and balls, musical instruments
• Harbor / Docks / Shipyard - nets, tridents, fish (in open barrels, in piles, and individually), coils of rope

(* With these, I dug through the Mike Schley symbols and found some that could work -- the varicolor "chair ornate" could make for a golden throne, and there's standing armor in weapons. But I haven't found any couches or lounges, just benches and chairs. And there's small area rugs but nothing I saw that could make for a long stretch of carpeting.)

(** The temples and necromancer sets have some of these, though I don't recall seeing feathered quills.)

Also, I have some great photorealistic fills for these sorts of things already, but I'd love more illustrated-style fills for granite, more marble, maybe carpeting?

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?

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 have noticed a side effect from mapping with CC3 for a year (your mileage may vary). I have always been interested in cool architecture, but now when I am out and about, I am much more aware of little architectural details. Specifically, I find myself wondering, "What would that look like from a birds-eye view...and what techniques would I use to render that in CC3." 😉

(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.

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.

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!

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.