I forgot that I wanted to have the feast happen at night. Just used the Solid 60 transparency rather than fussing with lighting effects. Went back and forth on whether the reflection from the stained glass windows should be above or below the trees. I guess it depends on how high the room is. Maybe it's on the second floor?

Ooops, I posted an older version of floor three. Here's the correct one.

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!

Okay, here's the second floor again with the courtyards with the same parchment mask as the rest of the outside. There's actually just one mask over the entire thing, but I punched a hole in it with the color key cutout effect. I guess I was thinking "inside v. outside" instead of "this floor v. lower floors." The magenta polygon is now on a COURTYARD layer, so it can be turned on or off depending on which approach is preferred.

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.

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.

A few months ago, I posted the Temple of Fah, a ziggurat I created to play with the CA209 Stairs and Steps annual. At long last, I have finally designed the interior.

I know this map is ridiculous. Egyptian pyramids only had a handful of rooms for the tombs of a pharaoh and their treasure. Sumerian ziggurats also only had a handful of interior chambers. But I decided to go whole hog and create a sprawling interior complex reminiscent of the classic dungeon crawls I first experienced with D&D in the early 80s. (My first introduction to the game was December of 1979.)

Here’s a side view of the exterior to give you a sense of the entrances:

There are two landings before reaching the very top of the ziggurat. The first is on level 7, standing on the roof of level 6, and the second is on level 13, on the roof of level 12. The entrances on each landing are to the left and right of the exterior stairs continuing up. The 10 feet wide doors are designed to be concealed for aesthetic purposes, blending in with the side of the ziggurat when shut, but they aren’t exactly hidden or secret.

The landings divide the ziggurat into three sections. The top-most section is primarily used by priests and religious leaders. The middle section has chapels and shrines that the royal family, wealthy nobles, and elite government workers are invited to for private religious celebrations, including weddings and coronations. The general public is never invited inside. Instead, religious leaders stand on the first landing of the temple to lead the masses gathered before the temple in their religious ceremonies. The lowest section contains the tombs of great pharaohs and powerful religious leaders.

I decided to design the interior rooms and passageways using the color key knockout effect that @amerigoV describes in this thread. The walls are granite from the CA149 Beaumaris Castle annual. Most of the other fills and symbols come from the CA150 Ancient Tombs annual.

Here’s an example of a level with the effects turned off:

Each level of the ziggurat is 10 feet above the level below. The rooms and passageways inside are mostly 8 feet high, leaving two feet of stone for the ceiling (or the floor for the level above).

Let’s go inside!

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.

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).

And here's the temple's basement. Here, monks who have passed their initiation tests live (there are above-ground barracks for the trainees, but only a fraction of them survive the training). While senior monks are entombed in the crypts when they pass away, trainees and more junior monks are cremated, and their remains are kept in urns in the columbarium. The ritual room includes a teleportation portal that can take senior monks to the "Trial of the Elements" dungeon, and this is where the initiates who have survived that trial appear at the end.

Oh, but wait, there's more: two secret passageways that connect to a secret escape route (revealed by unchecking the SECRET layer). One route is accessed through one of the sarcophagi that conceals stairs that descend (love that symbol, always need a reason to include it).

More to come in a bit...