Okay, here it is again with the cliffs back in their original sheet order. I moved it because I wanted buildings to be potentially covered by a higher cliff's shadow -- but we saw above how some of those buildings end up being partially covered by the cliffs if they are too close. I thought about replacing the cliffs that have rubble with the plain ones, so that the houses can be closer without touching the cliff symbols. But in the end, I'm not so sure it's that noticeable that the buildings aren't in shadow.

Here it is with the SOLID 10 terrain.

And here it is with a SOLID 20, so that it's darker and more mysterious higher in the mountain. Not so sure, though -- might be a little too dark.

Also, there's a bit of an Easter Egg hidden in there.

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!

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).

Still writing up the proper description but in the meantime, I figured I'd post what I think is the final version of the final map. More sewer encounters, including a giant spider, some rats (both giant and ordinary-sized), a gelatinous cube, and some hungry foliage. (Of course, a proper battlemap would use moveable tokens, but this is for flavor -- the creatures are on a layer that can be hidden.)

Oh, and a whole bunch of skeletons, and a few zombies -- an explanation for those empty crypts!

I went back to my previous save -- the last version before starting on the trees -- so that I could replace the trees individually to ensure exact placement. Having the coniferous and deciduous trees on separate sheets made it easier so that I could focus on the firs and the barren trees separately. (Another tips: make sure all of your original trees are on the Vegetation layer and then freeze the other layers -- before I did that, it was way too easy to accidentally grab other things unintentionally.)

Also (not sure if I mentioned this before), I used the effects from one of the Winter Trail sample maps on the white text. I think it makes them stand out nicely. One of the other samples used red text, which made for a nice contrast but felt a little jarring for this map. But I could do a dark blue like the legend if folks think that's better.

Busy day, so I'm just now getting a chance to get back to this. Don, did you mean something like this, where the foundational towers would extend from the riverbank to rise above the bridge, like the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, for example?

Okay, I made some adjustments based on everyone's feedback. I added some kelp forests outside, and I added some hydrothermal vents/chimneys in a few spots (the garden as well as a few other "dead ends" in the entrance passageways. I put one in the room with the coral. Although coral does not photosynthesize and does not need sunlight, it does consume algae that relies on sunlight for photosynthesis. I am going to suggest that the coral here are able to survive on the microbes that thrive on the vents.

(Maybe some underwater creatures use the vents to cook their food, too?)

We'll still have to assume that luminescent crystals provide ordinary lighting in common areas, and some sort of magical sunlight appears periodically, enough to provide photosynthesis for the foliage in the cavern areas (I decided not to remove them).

I'm making some tweaks to my next marine dungeon based on this as well. But first, here are some images showing the changes to the Sea Elf Outpost.

Some potential adventure hooks off the top of my head:

1. The adventurers were taken captive after stumbling across the outpost.
2. The adventurers were sent to negotiate for the release of an NPC ally who was taken captive.
3. Sahuagin raiders have overrun the outpost, and all of the sea elves who knew the location and magical coordinates of the teleportation portal have been slain or taken captive. The adventures have been tasked with sneaking into the outpost to find the portal and learn the coordinates so that a proper rescue party can teleport in to take the sahuagin by surprise.

Okay, I experimented by moving a few of the houses built with the Random Streets tool to a new "BUILDINGS - RANDOM STREETS" sheet. I was able to give these houses greater transparency than the buildings symbols to make them more similar. I also added a COLORIZE effect to make them a little grayer. But this threw off the look of the huts I tested with in the lower left corner that were also built with the Random Streets tool, so I moved those ones to a "BUILDINGS - RANDOM STREETS 2" sheet with a tan colorize effect.

The map is small enough that it's not too difficult to simply replace the random buildings with symbols, but it's an educational exercise to see if I can address it with special effects.

Here's how it turned out, starting with the full map and zooming in. Most of the test houses are in the block directly southwest of the circle part of the canal, with a few others elsewhere to see what they'd look like when the houses were on different terrain.

(Not sure why one of the huts turned browner than the others.)

In a previous thread, Ralf encouraged us to post ideas for future annuals and artists we’d like to see. I know there’s been threads of these sorts of ideas before, but I thought I would take the opportunity to start a new thread, and I hope folks will add their own thoughts.

There’s this one artist whose style I really love. She’s super busy right now, but if she ever has a spare moment, I always love new additions from … Sue Daniel! ;-)

This month’s annual highlighting Mike Schley’s Overland symbols really emphasizes how much of his stuff we have to work with – not just overland, but city and dungeon, too. Since he’s been a longtime D&D designer, his style is great at capturing the same vibe when designing your own maps for D&D campaigns. In deciding what style I want to use for a new map, I often gravitate to his because of how much variety there is to work with. (If he’s looking for city and dungeon level ideas, I would love more Greco-Roman buildings and furnishings.)

So in that spirit, I would love to see more annuals with stuff that is compatible with other styles, particularly Darklands City and Spectrum Overland. I know that might be tricky to do an expansion of an annual released years ago. When an annual has an expansion, it’s generally in the same year (Marine Dungeons, Darklands City, Forest Trail, Monkey Frog Overland, etc.) so that a customer doesn’t have to buy two annuals to use both sets together. But what about expansions designed to stand on their own but also work complimentarily with previous sets? I’d love to see more settlement and adventure-hook symbols that are compatible with Spectrum Overland, and more structures/buildings for Darklands City (and the snowy versions for Winter Village). Right now I’m on an elves & dwarves kick, so elven/dwarven Darklands City structures would be awesome.

Other ideas:

Jungle/Swamp Adventures: something compatible with Creepy Crypts & Forest Trails, but with more jungle elements – palm trees, tropical trees, swamp trees (like trees in water with the ripple effects from Marine Dungeons), bright flowers and other foliage, monster/beast footprints, vines, traps, treasurers you might find adventuring in ruined temples.

Castle Construction: something like CA149 Beaumaris Castle, but with design tools and more castle-specific symbols. Symbols like gargoyles, varicolor flags & banners, crenellations (like the way Marine Dungeons lets you drop crenellations onto walls), machicolations/murder holes, plate armor, thrones, weapons, murder holes, siege/warfare equipment…

Inlays: I’ve mentioned this before, but I would also love more varicolor vector symbols that could be used for so many things like heraldic charges, floor inlays, stitching on fabric (rugs, banners, etc.) – animals, weapons, flowers, runes (in dwarven and elven styles), Celtic or elven design patterns, astrology and astronomy symbols, etc.

This is a nice planet, by the way. I can't tell you how much I struggled to get the land-to-sea ratios and size-of-content settings to generate what I wanted. Even then, I had to do some terraforming to turn some inland seas into gulfs connected to a bigger ocean. (And then I flipped the north and south poles because I liked how it looked upside down better). Your world looks like it has some nice, large land masses that are separated from one another, giving yourself a lot of flexibility in how you want to develop things.