Okay, I made some tweaks. The Alae (#16) have been moved up to be more central in the Peristylium courtyard. Now they are going to be strictly for honoring the household's ancestors, because next to the Exhedra (#19) I have added two shrines to honor the gods, the Lararia (#20, or singularly, Lararium). It's amazing what you can learn from Google if you just ask the right questions. I thought I can gotten down the rooms for Roman villas, but when I asked Google whether Roman villas had chapels, it told me about these shrines to gods. Plus, that gave me another excuse to use the brass inlays that I love so much. (Added some inlaid shells next to the pool in the bathhouse, too.)

Also added a shaft (#22) for hot air from the basement hypocaust to reach the top floor. Across the hall, there's a shaft (puteus) for water to be piped up into a little room with a tap for the water (puteal) -- that came from Googling "what did ancient Romans call a 'well'?"

Still have to add windows and doors, and furniture. Wish we had some Roman couch symbols!

Good idea! I meant to do clouds and then forgot. Moved the cliffs to a Symbols Front 3 sheet (already had Symbols Front and Symbols Front 2 sheets), and also added some trees there. I will try it as a vertical map when I do a different version in Spectrum Overland. The battle map will probably be top down.

Level 6

We are now in the lowest of the three sections of the temple. Most of the tombs contain two chambers: a treasure room and a burial chamber. A few will have multiple treasure chambers, and occasionally there may be more than one burial chamber in the suite.

Great pharaohs used to be buried with their wealth, but centuries ago, a new pharaoh decided to keep his father’s wealth, and instead buried his father with colored glass replicas of his jewelry. The pharaohs are generally entombed in a sarcophagus on a raised platform. Other sarcophagi in the room will usually be upright along the walls, but may be occasionally laid flat on the floor, a sign of great honor to the decedent. These are for the final resting places for people important to the pharaoh: spouses, valued concubines, children who did not themselves become a pharaoh, and occasionally even favorite servants like nannies who are treated as family. Those who predecease the pharaoh are reinterned at the time of pharaoh’s internment. For those who live after the pharaoh’s death, the tombs are opened to admit their remains, sometimes decades after the pharaoh’s internment.

Also of note: in this section, the stairs up and stairs down are generally far from each other, perhaps as a way to confuse and confound intruders intending to loot the tombs.

Level 5

This level has more tombs, but there are a few things of note.

On the west side, there is a burial chamber where the entrance to the treasure chamber and burial chamber have been destroyed, and the treasures and sarcophagus have been looted. The passageway to this section has been sealed but otherwise left untouched. It is the only looted section in this active temple.

Another burial suite is empty, waiting for a future pharaoh.

In the southeast corner, there’s a chamber with a great number of sarcophagi, some still empty. This room is the final resting place for high priests who have been honored to lay at rest near the great pharaohs.

One mad pharaoh had his burial chamber and three treasure rooms hidden behind a trapped secret door. The passageway also contains a covered pit that drops unwary intruders 20 feet to Level 3.

Level 4

More burial chambers. (Note the shaft for the pit from Level 5 that descends to Level 3.)

Level 3

More tombs. (I noticed that some of the raised platforms don’t have a sarcophagus on them. Not sure if I forgot to place them, or if I placed them on the wrong sheet. I guess one of them might be for the reigning Pharaoh, and already contains the remains of predeceased loved ones, but that would only make sense for one of these tombs. Maybe the mummies just walked away?)

The pit trap from Level 5 ends here. Those who survive the 20-foot drop may discover a secret door that leads to another hidden chamber, where another secret door allows escape to the rest of the temple. The skeletal remains suggest that one poor soul either didn’t survive the fall or never found the secret door to allow their escape.

Level 2

More burial suites, along with some storage rooms for unused pots and urns.

Level 1

More tombs, along with stairs that descend to subterranean levels of the temple. (What, more levels?)

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.

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.

Before attempting to do my entire Earth-sized world in the new Birdseye Continental style, I wanted to practice on a smaller bit of land, the tried-and-true Republic of Lumadair. I find it helpful to have the exact same FT export used for so many different styles -- I can toggle through JPGs of all of them while the coastlines remain identical, for better comparison.

I won't have time to do more work on it for several more hours (it's the start of my workday here on the Pacific coast), but I figured in the meantime I would seek feedback on my progress so far.

First, for perspective: Lumadair is in an equatorial climate. Very equatorial. Fractal Terrains tells me that the equator runs right through the middle of it. The latitude runs from -10 degrees on the southern side to +10 degrees on the northern side. Here it is circled on a map of my campaign world:

(After doing some terraforming to turn some landlocked great lakes into seas connected to the oceans, I made some adjustments to how it's viewed. I discovered that rotating the longitude perspective by 90 degrees allowed the main landmasses to all appear on the map without wrapping around. And I flipped it because I liked how it looked better that way, so FT will tell you that the top of the map has negative latitude numbers, with positive ones on the bottom half, but since that's not displayed, it's easy enough for me to mentally adjust.)

There are more images of Lumadair in my galleries if you want to see the terrain and symbols in other formats.

Here is Lumadair so far in Birdseye Continental. Haven't drawn most of the forests yet, nor water depths. I want to redo all of the mountain ridges and ripples to make them fit together a little better, and also be slightly less linear, even though they should still more or less be going in the same direction.

Here are the mountains in northeast corner up close. I tried to use varicolor green ridges to show lower mountains covered with trees, but I'm not sure how well that worked. I might experiment with adding a chameleon or drawn hill beneath them to give them more height. The snowy part is for a mountain that is so high that it is perpetually snow-covered. I think it's the third highest on my campaign world? I think the highest is about 30,000 feet and this one is around 25,000 feet. But I think I want to adjust the snow terrain to be a little tighter to the snowcapped ridges. Thoughts?

I do like how the swamp turned out. The main rivers have a default width of 3, but I added more branches with widths of 2 and 1. (This swamp map also shows an experimentation of putting a ridge on a chameleon hill.)

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

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.

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

Reduced the Lightness Base from 75 to 58 for the HILL sheet and 62 for the HILL 2 sheet (but I'm not sure that a 4 point difference is visibly apparent to the human eye), and added some more dunes.