Made some tweaks, particularly to the desert in the northwest corner. I added a TERRAIN SYMBOLS sheet of cracked seaflats. Over that, I did a second TERRAIN SYMBOLS 2 sheet for the sands symbol. And then finally, a third TERRAIN SYMBOLS 3 sheet for scattered dunes.

Also addressed the dimples in the temple by adding a layer of the gold foil for each level of the ziggurat. I probably won't add more color key "etchings in gold," but I had to add something, and now I'm all set if I do want more.

And recommendations?

Years ago, when I was first developing the pantheon for the halflings of my world, I accidentally recreated the Easter Bunny.

I had in mind that idea that the head of the pantheon was a grandmotherly figure. I pictured her baking pies and sitting in a rocking chair on her front porch dispensing common-sense wisdom. I had a mental image of her as an anthropomorphized rabbit, like Peter Cottontail's grandmother or a Richard Scarry illustration. But when I had the thought that maybe the living creatures of the world came from eggs that she laid, I realized that I had recreated the Easter Bunny. I decided to lean into that.

Here's my description for Mother Ailish:

The de facto head of the Halfling pantheon is a four-foot tall anthropomorphized rabbit named Mother Ailish. She is depicted as a grandmotherly figure dressed in an apron, bifocal spectacles, and a bonnet or straw hat. When she isn’t shown knitting on her front stoop while dispensing common-sense wisdom, she’s generally shown baking in the kitchen. In her ovens she bakes any manner of delightful confections, particularly savory and sweet pies, and for this reason halflings celebrate natal days (and pretty much every occasion) with pies in her honor. It is said that she baked, piece by piece, all the non-living things of the world in her ovens and then fashioned them together. Every living this in the world is said to be descended from an original that she gave birth to – not in a live birth but laid in bright, multi-colored eggs that her many children and grandchildren (all also depicted as anthropomorphized rabbits) then hid about the world until they were ready to hatch and populate the world with life. For this reason, the halflings have a spring celebration in which they paint eggs made of paper, baked clay, wood, leather, or the like, inside which is hidden toys and candy, which are then exchanged with friends and family and sometimes hidden for strangers to find. The holiday always falls on the first Estaradÿn that falls on or after the first full Caerudraal moon after (but not on) the Spring Equinox.

(Caerudraal is the smallest of my world's three moons. It takes 77 days to orbit the world, and weeks are 10 days, so the holiday is celebrated anywhere from the day after the vernal equinox to 87 days after.)

Anyway, when I created some rainbow images for St. Patrick's Day, I thought maybe I should do an Easter Mother Ailish Egg Hunt for Easter.

I used the Mike Schley Dungeon City style to create a halfling's home and garden. At first I tried to create varicolor decorations for eggs, but they're so small here that you couldn't see the decorations anyway. I tried to just create solid-colored eggs using the three-point circle drawing tool, but wasn't thrilled with the shape -- and the beveling effects didn't show up once the eggs were shrunk. I ended up just using Mike Schley's varicolor dragon eggs.

Anyway, here's my little halfling home and egg hunt:

Garden without Eggs

The home faces a rural lane, with the garden accessed through the home's back door. The garden has a gate that provides access to a side street. Everything comes from Mike Schley's city or dungeon assets except the hedges, which are Sue's connecting hedges -- and then I used her end/corner pieces instead of Mike's for the stand-alone hedges. And I think the flowers are miniaturized shrubs from DD3.

Garden with Hidden Eggs

Under the Trees and Gazebo Canopy

Mappy Easter -- er, Mappy Mother Ailish Day!

I have previously done the Republic of Lumadair, a portion of my campaign world, in many different styles. (There's an album in my galleries showing the different approaches.) I find it helpful to compare styles with a consistent coastline and terrain.

Anyway, here's a first pass at trying it with the new Ancient Realms Revisited annual.

I ended up using tower symbols instead of cities to show the major unnamed cities. I've only done a few of the icon symbols for major points of interest, though I can do more. Instead of putting the icons exactly where the locations would be, I put them off to the side with a dotted line to the actual location (similar to how I approached my Modern Journeys map).

This sort of forest approach rather than individual symbols isn't my favorite approach, but it's growing on me. For the coastal cities, maybe I should trace the coastline rather than being more freeform? Ralf brought in some Mike Schley symbols (Asian settlements) in his video tutorial, so maybe I will try that with Mike's tree symbols. I'm worried, though, that those tree symbols would make this look too much like a knockoff of Mike's overland style and not its own thing.

I did one custom symbol of a dragon, but I'm not thrilled.

I used a parchment background but maybe a solid color would be better? (The icon background is on a separate sheet, so I could see if a texturize effect helps.) Or I could put a tower icon as the main icon with a dragon over it. If anyone knows of better dragon symbols to use, let me know. (I thought about the heraldry icons from CA15, but I'm not so sure.)

And here's the lighthouse at night. Fires are kept burning all night, reflecting off of mirrors (or polished sheets of metal) to cast light away from the mainland, though a window allows for some light to spill into the courtyard.

By night, a glow from the sunken ruins reveals a magical portal beneath the waves....

I am ready to submit my dwarven mining village, Vidural Village & Mines.

Primary Style: SS5 (Mike Schley City Style)

Toggles: "Roof" layer to hide/unhide the mountaintop to show or cover the mines below

This is located in this yellow boxed area of the Kingdom of Gongadûr that was previously submitted in this thread.

I am ready to submit Yréas Kóltyn Village for the contest.

Primary Style: Forest Trail

Toggles: "Tree Canopy & Treehouses" to hide/unhide the trees to create a battlemap

It is located in the yellow boxed area here (the parent map was previously submitted in this thread):

Took a stab at creating a town in the lovely new Ancient Cities style by @C.C. Charron. It isn't a whole town, just the North Bank area that is the more prosperous part of the town. Only a smidge of the poorer South Bank area is shown.

I tried the color key to nibble away at the textures, and it worked. But even better (and more obvious): I could, and did, add additional sandy patches to fill out the...fill.

But the color key suggestion gave me the idea of using it to nibble away at the temple itself, creating missing chunks (with magenta fractal polygons) and cracks (with a magenta fractal lines). I hope I didn't overdo it, but the nice thing about using the color key approach is that it's a lot easier to remove some of them than it would be to fix moving nodes around, for example.

I had already placed a gold inlay beneath each layer of the temple, but other than the very top, I didn't need it to be gold. I tried changing them to the Solid 10 and Solid 20 fills, but that allowed the pockmarks to return. So I changed it to a brown color and then added a gray inner glow.

If nothing else, the erosion takes your eye away from places where I missed fixing the repeating patterns of the texture.

I was playing with the Stairs & Steps annual, and (inspired by a recent episode of The Amazing Race, which I'm finally getting caught up on), I started to design something inspired by the steps of El Peñón de Guatapé in Colombia. I ended up gravitating to Marine Dungeons to do it in, but for my first foray into using Stairs & Steps, I wanted to start with something in the Mike Schley style.

One of the human cultures in my campaign world is a desert culture with a religion loosely inspired by Egyptian mythology. (They also have a militaristic government where powerful noble houses sponsor warriors who fight in grand competitions every four years to accrue points used to determine the number of seats each noble house has in the ruling council. I came up with the idea 40 years ago when I first watched the Olympics on television, and the idea keeps coming back every four years.)

Anyway, their religious temples are in the form of pyramids and ziggurats, and the latest Stairs & Steps annual gave me the impetus to create a ziggurat in the desert. This is designed in SS4 Dungeons of Schley, with bits of SS5 Cities and Schley and SS3 Mike Schley Overland thrown in.

I am seeking aesthetic input on a few things:

1. For the desert terrain, I chose a sandy background as the default and added a layer of a sandy texture over it. But I have also been playing with the cracked seaflats, sand symbols, and dunes symbols. Thoughts on what works?
2. I thought maybe putting the cracked seaflats around the border of the Ziggurat and then some dunes near the borders of the map. (One of the images I'm embedding zooms on some examples.) Should I put the sand symbol through? Just on the northwestern part away from the buildings? Not at all? I always triple-guess my aesthetic choices.
3. Inspired by the bronze inlays in Marine Dungeons, I wanted to do something similar on the top of the ziggurat. I created a crude inlay representing the sun, but then used the goldleaf texture from Sue's Parchments. Do you think that works, or should I instead use the bronze texture from Marine Dungeons?

Here is the full map to date, with a few zoomed-in images to illustrate my questions. (Oh, I am aware of the pock-marks in the temple. I plan to put a layer of a dark gray color or maybe the goldleaf fill below each level of the ziggurat to fix that. But part of me wonders if the pock-marks actually make the ziggurat look weathered?)

Ricko gave me some great tips -- fixing the waterfall in the first image (it needed to be more in the foreground), rotating some of the elven buildings to face the road, and adding trees to conceal where terrain/symbols connect. I hope I found all of the spots that needed trees! Here are my adjustments: