I am going to try to install the Dundjinni symbols that Wyvern recommended.

In the meantime, I switched the clouds from the Forest Trails rapids to the Mike Schley clouds, as they are consistent in style with the rest of the map. I may try the Alyssa Faden clouds later but I don't have that Annual yet. I put the clouds on a sheet above and below the "Symbols on Cloud" sheet to give them a 3D effect (and also cover up the walkways/roads to the castle that are part of the symbol). I also added some of the "waterfall clouds" from the Forest Trail to the periphery of the Mike Schley clouds -- they aren't very noticeable but give a nice misty semi-obscurity to the trees and other symbols below. I tried having another cloud sheet for the edges that would allow me to use the Mike Schley clouds with a transparency effect added, but I didn't like how it looked.

I had the same problem that Julian did, in that the castle didn't always look like it was floating. I hope the drop shadows with the Mike Schley clouds rectify that.

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?)

I’ve been working on a temple inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, and while I think I’ve made some decisions in areas where I was vacillating, I’m open to feedback.

The temple is for a fictional religion in my campaign that shares elements from Ancient Greece and Rome (in architecture and in how the gods are depicted, like their attire). This temple is therefore not intended to be historically accurate: it intentionally mixes elements that were unique to Greek temples with those unique to Roman temples, and it intentionally deviates from both in certain ways.

I got to learn some new techniques as part of this. I used the Marine Dungeon from the 2021 Annual in large part because they include my favorite pillars, an essential part of a Greco-Roman temple. I used the color key effect for the first time in an actual dungeon (love the bronze inlay symbols). I made an effective use of layers for the first time, combining all of the roof elements from different sheets onto a single “roof” layer (called the “pediment”), which allows me to show or hide the entire roof by hiding or revealing a single layer – basic stuff, but it’s the first time I really paid attention to layers effectively. I also created my own custom symbols for the first time (for reflections from mosaics on the walls illuminated with luminescent crystals used by dwarves in my world to light their subterranean homes). And I played with lighting effects for the first time.

Both Greek and Roman temples used the temple’s pillars provide the ratio for the size of the temple. The space between pillars was always double the diameter of the pillars (except that the middle pillars might have an extra gap between them, sufficient to let two people walk through them side by side). The height of the pillars was ten times the diameter. (In my temple, the pillars are five feet wide, so there’s a ten-foot gap between each and each are 50 feet high.) There were always an even number of pillars in the front, from four to twelve, and the number of columns on the sides was based on the number in front. The Greek formula was double the number in front plus one, while the Roman formula was twice the number of pillars on the front minus one. (For the eight pillars in front of mine, the Greeks would have 17 on the side and the Romans would have 15.)

Greek temples were set on a series of three steps called stylobates, which surrounded the temple on all four sides. The Romans instead had the temple sit on a raised platform called a podium, with an impressive staircase entrance in the front (like the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building).

I intentionally mixed and matched Greek and Roman features to suit my fancy. I put the three stylobate steps at the base but extended it far in front of the temple to create a plaza area where temple priests in my fictitious religion could ritually sacrifice a wild auroch or boar so that the gods could feast on the aromas before the remains were used to feed the poor. I put then put my temple on a large, marble podium, but then used the Greek formula for the number of columns. (I used marble a lot -- are there any styles with granite fills?) I also used double rows columns because it looked cool, though I have no idea whether I used them in a “proper” Greek or Roman manner.

I also created a fountain or reflecting pool in the plaza, mostly so that I could play with the fun water effects (like the ripples at the fountain walls and the pedestals in the fountain with statues of the gods of the sea). That also gave me a chance to use the submerged bronze inlay effect. The inner wall with ripples had ripples on the outside of the wall, too. I wasn’t sure how to handle that, but I ended up adding an outer wall without ripples as a lower step, and that seems to have worked.

And I created three “barbecue” pits that temple clerics would use for their rituals.

The enclosed building of the temple is called a “cella,” from which we get the word “cell” used for where monks sleep (and later prison cells, and eventually the biological term for plant and animal cells). I added a door to the back room to allow priests to go back there without having to circle to the temple’s back entrance. And I added stairs going down to not-yet-designed crypts, which will include a tunnel connecting the crypts to the basement of the rectory, the building in the lower right. (If there’s a more appropriate Greek or Roman term for a rectory, please advise.)

The niches inside the cella are not historically accurate, to my knowledge. The Greeks and Romans both had rectangular rooms. They niches aren’t meant to be stained glass windows. They have mosaics on the walls that reflect light because they use luminescent crystals that naturally glow.

Here are some areas where I experimented with different approaches:

The Pediment, or Roof

Originally, I wasn’t going to show the roof, but I realized that players might not realize that the portions within the pillars were all under a roof, even the parts not enclosed by walls. So I added a shadow over the portion that would be under the roof, an effect inspired by the trees of the Forest Trail (where you can hide the trees but still show the stumps and the trees’ shadows, so players can know when they are under a tree or hiding behind it).

But then I decided I wanted to be able to show the temple roof, like when I recreate this for a full city. I experimented with different techniques for the roof’s material, and for allowing one side to be a little shadowed.

In one version, I used two different shades of stone from the CA161 Rycroft Town template to show the shadowed side. In the other version, and this is the version I’m leaning towards, I used the stone roofing tiles from CA177 Darklands City template on both sides of the roof, but then placed a black rectangle with a transparency effect (20% opacity) over the shadowed side.

Question: Do you prefer one roof over the other?

Offering Pits

For the sacrificial offering pits, I used a molten lava fill as the base, and then piled on some burnt wood from CA177 Darklands City. That template had some great flames, too. (Originally, the only flames I could think of were Mike Schley’s, which are great but in a very different style.)

The offerings come from the free Bogies Redthorn Tavern symbols, which are great but maybe a little too realistic?

Question: Are the flames too much? Are there other “barbecue” symbols you’d recommend?

Lighting

In a previous thread, I asked if there was a way to have lighting effects without disabling the global sun so that I could have an inside and outside (without having to recreate all of my sheets to have indoor and outdoor versions).

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/13954/adding-lighting-effect-without-changing-global-sun

The answer was no, so I had three options: (1) revamp all of my sheets so that the outdoor portions were on sheets after the end of the lighting effect; (2) use semi-transparent colored circles to simulate the effect of the glow from colored lights; or (3) create a separate copy of

That’s what I have so far. Any suggestions? (It’s my birthday, so please be kind!)

Oh, here's the FCW file if you're interested.

I am also ready to submit Eilân Danaäd, my sea elf village and harbor.

Primary Style: Marine Dungeons

Toggles: "Lighthouse Glow" layer turns on/off a glow indicating where light from the lighthouse emits.

It's located just north of an island off the coast of Enia, the elven kingdom on the north coast of the Gold Coast region previously submitted in this thread, in the area marked with the yellow box.

Another revelation that will be obvious to more experienced cartographers here: the TEXTURIZE effect!

I have been wanting to use heraldic symbols stitched onto fabric to make carpets, table runners, banners...and I kept looking in vain for fabric fills. The Modern set includes different colors of carpeting, but it was a little too photorealistic to work with things like Dungeons of Schley.

Through trial and lots of error, I stumbled across the Texture effect and was able to apply it to both a color polygon and the heraldic symbol on top of it to create the effect of fabric with the symbol stitched on. I experimented with a lot of textures, but the one that seemed most "fabric-like" to me was the DD3 Hay_Dry fill. (If anyone knows of a fill that looks more like linen or other woven fabric, please let me know. Maybe there's a good one in an Annual that I have not yet purchased.) And of course, different fills can create the effect of looking like your sigil was painted on wood, or the cobblestone floor (though with more trial and error, I learned that some fills don't really translate well when used with the Texturize effect).

Anyway, here are some heraldic banners or carpets or table runners or whatever:

I was looking for a peaceful, zen mapping project and was inspired by the expansion of Viking symbols released today. It also gave me an excuse to using some of the glacier and icy Overland symbols that I've never used.

I didn't want to lift from Norse mythology and decided to go with Icelandic names, which I stole freely from lists on Wikipedia.

I will also post this in my galleries if anyone wants to zoom in closer.

I'm ready to submit my desert village of Djayet for the competition.

Primary Style: Desert Oasis

Toggles: none

The village is located in the yellow boxed area of this area map. (The area map is the Eknapata Desert, on the eastern side of the Gold Coast -- both were previously submitted in this thread.)

I made a few tweaks per Jim's suggestion. I added some misty cloud coverage above the castle, and also added some cloud wisps above the mountains and on the right side. I also added a few more smaller birds meant to look like they were flying lower.

I also discovered that Mike Schley's Overland style already has cloud symbols, but I wasn't sure how they'd work semi-transparent. I added them as a base to the castle but most of the clouds are still from Forest Trails.

Also made a few other tweaks, like adding hills to separate the grasslands from the default terrain, and a few more trees below the castle peeking through the clouds.

I looked through my symbols to see if there were any other flying creatures, but couldn't find anything. Mike Schley's lovely dragons were sleeping, not flying. I even checked WikiMedia Commons to see if there was a flying pegasus or dragon in public domain that would be suitable, but didn't find anything. If anyone has any other recommendations for other flying symbols, please let me know.

Okay, I made some screen captures and JPG saves to illustrate the process.

The first thing to know is that there are 18 levels to the temple, with a wider landing (15 feet instead of 5) on the 6th and 12th levels. And the second thing to know is that every level actually has three sheets:

(1) the main sheet for the level, with the stone fill;

(2) a sheet below it of a different color, because the beveling effect on the main sheet can cause weird pockmarks if it gets confused with the colors below the sheet with the beveling effect; and

(3) a sheet above the main one for the level for the sandy debris.

I called the sheet below the main one for each level of the temple "Inlay," because at one point I thought I might have brass or gold inlays on each level, but I ended up only doing that at the top.

Here's what Level 6 looks like with all three of its sheets on but all of the other sheets hidden (except for the 5th level as well as the stairs, just to provide perspective):

You can see erosion around the sides as well as some cracks (like from the stairs on the south side, as well as a little above the western stairs).

On the "inlay" level below, I put a polygon of solid color. I made it brown, because if it was the same gray as the stonework above, the beveling on the sheet above it would get confused and create weird pockmarks. But I also added a gray inside GLOW effect so that it look gray when it showed through the erosion:

Okay, here's how I did the erosion. First, I added the COLOR KEY sheet effect to that sheet, using the default magenta #6. (Also, it's important to put that sheet effect first on the list, before the Glows and Bevel and Wall Shadow).

This effect tells CC3+ that when it sees anything of that magenta color on that sheet, cut through whatever's on that sheet and instead show the sheet below it (in this case, the brown-with-gray-glow on the Temple Level 6 Inlay sheet).

I then used the fractal polygon tool to create small bits with that same magenta color, as well as the fractal line drawing tool to create the cracks. Here it is with the sheet effects turned off so you can see the magenta color, along with a zoomed-in version to see it a little better:

(There's a fractal crack in the stone above the fractal blobs. You can barely see it but it works when the sheet effects are turned on.)

When the sheet effects are turned on, anything on that sheet that's covered by by the magenta polygon will be cut away, showing instead whatever is on the sheet behind the stone. It doesn't matter if the color key cutout extends onto the white part, because there's nothing to cut away there and the sheet below would have been shown anyway.

Here's what the whole thing looks like with sheet effects turned off.

Crazy how powerful CC3+ is to be able render all of those effects to turn this mess into an identifiable ziggurat.

If anyone is interested, here is the FCW file. (It's slow loading when the sheet effects are turned on because of all of the nodes added by the fractal bits.)

I have a habit of showing my work-in-progress and then forgetting to post the final. So here it is with two different roof styles. (For comparison, you can see the version done in the Marine Dungeons style in my gallery.)

Oh, and here's the FCW if anyone is interested in using it.