Making progress!

I think all of the Darkland City symbols (tile and thatch buildings, walls, towers, stone bridges, hedges) have been replaced with their snow-covered Winter Village equivalents. The one thing that I don't think Winter Village has are the stone outcrops (Sue, please point me in the right direction if I've missed them), but that's okay: I have ideas for how to add little patches of snow to the outcrops. I also don't think there's a snow-covered equivalent for the derelict versions of the Darkland City buildings, so the one derelict tower I used (over in the ruins at #11) was replaced with a regular snow-covered tower.

One thing I noticed: when I used the Symbol Manager to swap out symbols, sometimes the replaced symbol was slightly off. In two instances, buildings were replaced with a 90 degree rotation from what I had, and in a number of instances, the buildings had been moved either on top of or too far off from the roads. I found it easiest to make one replacement and then check the map to move the placements if necessary before moving onto the next replacement. Slow and steady! Still better to do it this way than to manually delete and replace each individual symbol. Please let me know if you see anything that looks like it needs to be adjusted.

Still to come: replacing Forest Trail symbols (earth cliffs, deciduous and coniferous trees, ruins, rocks) with their Winter Trail snow-covered equivalents. And then adding breaks and cracks to parts of the rivers, and frost to the others. I had an idea for making ice skating tracks over the frost-covered parts of the frozen river. We'll see if I can pull that off.

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?

Slight tweak. I started to work on the interiors, but as I was working on the church, I decided that I really needed to add a few belltowers because it was the only place I could work out getting stairs up to the balcony at the rear (entrance side) of the church. Added some labels while I was at it, but only on the daytime map. Maybe I will be able to get some interiors posted before the end of the weekend.

Made some tweaks to the second floor. I forgot that I planned to have a smaller family dining area on this floor. Ended up converting the office to a small dining room, as it has a nice fireplace and seemed cozier than the solarium. The head of household can do their books and office work in the library. Rearranged the appurtenant WC so that it's accessed from the hallway rather than the dining room. Still haven't figured out the white line with the paths (under the steps leading to the servants' area on the first floor).

Hello Mr. Red!

In addition to the top=down elven structurers that Ricko showed, Mike Schley also has isometric versions (like looking down at a 45 degree angle) in both his isometric cities (Symbol Set 6) and his overland symbols.

Here's some portions from a map I did using SS6:

And here's a bit of an elven city using his overland symbols, which come with CC3+:

Here's an elven village using the top-down symbols that Ricko showed:

You can find that in the Atlas here:

https://atlas.monsen.cc/Maps/fon'anar

But I also did an elven village using Darklands City and Forest Trail, where I drew platforms in trees, placed thatched homes on those platforms, and then put more trees above the houses -- with trees above and below, they look like tree houses.

https://atlas.monsen.cc/Maps/yr%C3%A9as%20k%C3%B3ltyn%20village

You can download the full FCW file from the Atlas if you want to see how I did that.

Here they all are, with and without the moon.

After my village of Per-Nezahd grew too large and is rightfully now a town, I went back to the drawing board and created a new village in the same Desert Oasis style. This one is significantly smaller.

[Note: this is in an area of the Atlas that has not yet been developed. I have parent maps almost ready to submit, and will start a thread later this weekend to submit them. Just finishing up the descriptions for them.]

There are 22 buildings that are either fully residential or mixed-use business/residential. I assumed an average population of 5.2 residents per residence, giving me a population of 114. Does that sound about right? I also spread things out a little more than you would in a walled city or town, but maybe I should spread things out even more?

I used varicolor bushes of different sizes to create crops. I don't know much about desert oases form, but I thought maybe a hill would be needed. I added a darker terrain below the hill to distinguish it from the smaller patches of hills scattered around, which were meant to be sand dunes.

I was going to use a ziggurat from SS5 as the temple, but the temple symbols in this annual were too irresistible to pass over. In the end, the only symbols I used outside of this annual were two broken columns in the ruins from CA49. For a village like this, it didn't seem necessary to label much in the village itself, just the temple and the taverna. I don't think a village of this size could support too much specialization, though there are market stalls available for the use of trade caravans that pass through. I also figured that this village was too small to afford to construct a wall (though maybe I should add a tower or two?).

In the lower right on a bit of an outcrop, I set some ruins of an ancient temple and city. Near the road that reaches the ruins, I placed a cart and scattered boxes and barrels to suggest that maybe an archeological dig is underway? Adventure hooks: maybe the archeologists have disturbed an ancient malevolence that should have remained untouched? Or maybe, Indiana Jones-style, the adventurers need to race to find an ancient artifact before the opposition finds it.

For the title, I used the default font for this annual, but it was too hard to read for other place names, so I used Papyrus for those labels. Is it okay to use a different font for the title? Should I switch the title to Papyrus? I didn't use the scale bar, as pretty as it is, because it says "miles" on it and this map is only 500 x 400 feet. (Although...if I ungroup it, maybe I can delete the "miles" text? I will have to try that.)

Any advice or feedback?

Finally had a chance today to add some names and some trees.

Here's the other map. Much smaller southern forest. This map has 2,380 trees -- nine more than the map above.

This is my first pass work-in-progress attempt to create a city map using an overland style (in this case, Handdrawn Fantasy) that Ricko does so magnificently.

It's meant to be a community of halflings and elves living together harmoniously, albeit mostly on opposite sides of a river.

Not sure if something like this would work for the Atlas because the scaling is tricky (and if it's not suitable, that's okay -- I had fun doing it). The map is set at 5x7 miles but then I had to enlarge a lot of the symbols.