Working on the inside of the church first before tackling the mansion, though I've been taking notes on the types of rooms one might expect in a medieval mansion. (Suggestions welcome.) I've just done the first floor so far.

Here's the outside.

The end portions of the right and left wings are actually covered porches, so the floorplan for Floor 1 will show the porches, and Floor 2 will show the roofs covering the porches.

Here's the inside. I used the parchment approach that Sue used with the Beaumaris Castle annual to cause the outside to fade out a bit. The four stairwells all go up and down.

Downstairs, the basement is mostly below ground, but a small portion is above ground, just enough for some high windows to let in daylight. The priests' offices are down there along other rooms. There might be some common rooms for church events (what's the medieval equivalent of Bingo?), but most of that sort of thing probably occurs at the Church Hall on the west side of the plaza. This level will include a room used to prepare bodies for funeral services. Another basement below that will contain catacomb crypts for VIP decedents buried beneath the church rather than in the graveyard beside it. The crypts will have a secret access to the sewers, which also connects to the sewers from the haunted mansion, allowing for secret travel between the church and the mansion (a plot point I'll share when all of the mapping is done.) The second floor will contain balconies. One will in the back between the belltowers, with more pews. The two sets of stairs on the north side of the church will lead to balconies on the east and west sides used primarily by the choir, although they can also accommodate more private seating for visiting nobles.

Here's a blow up of the altar area. The north side is raised a few steps up.

The third version uses Marine Dungeons as the basis, with stumps (and snakes) coming in from Creepy Crypts and trees coming in from Forest Trail. This has the best waves and ripples, naturally. I tried to darken the water a bit by using patches of the Water Deep and Water Deepest drawing tools, and then applying some effects to that sheet (specifically, using the RGB Matrix to make the deeper waters sepia toned, and then the Adjust Hue/Saturation effect to change the lightness by -15%. I should probably add more algae floating on top.

Anyway, these more mostly just for fun. I don't currently have a specific plan for them, but I wanted to see if I could create a swamp with current assets/techniques. Still hoping for a Jungle/Swamp annual some day. 😉

Making some final adjustments while writing up the description to submit this. Moved some of the treehouses around to make it slightly less grid-rectilinear, though I can't do too much without essentially starting from scratch. Even though the bridge symbols are short sections, it doesn't have curved sections, so my options for winding elevated walkways is limited. I do have ideas for how to do that next time, but it's another thing I'm not sure I can implement in this map without starting over. I also added some more trees and bushes below some of the longer walkways and around the neighborhoods, but not too much -- didn't want to totally hide the village. I agree that the typical wood elf village would be concealed enough that most non-elves walking by probably wouldn't notice it, but since this village is a major destination for pilgrims because of the temple, it's probably less concealed than most. I also added more to the upper canopy to hide the chimneys of the treehouses where lighting fires wouldn't be advised.

Here's how it now stands:

And here's a battlemap with the "Tree Canopy & Treehouses" layer hidden:

Added a few final touches (a friend was confused about the seaweed washed up on the beach, so I added a little more floating in the sea, and a few other minor tweaks here and there. Not really sure what that line cutting off the light in the nighttime version is from.

Here's the "final" (is anything ever really final?) version of the daytime and nighttime full maps. More details maps in my galleries.

Thank you, everyone, for your help.

After a bit of wrestling (and an evening of downloading massive files), I was able to install the Dundjinni symbols that Wyvern recommended. I added a griffon and a dragon with a rider. I also swapped out the giant hawks in the lower right side for a pair of eagles from the Mike Schley Overland that I missed. My flying creatures are a bit oversized compared to the castle, but I figure it's a bit of forced perspective, with the flying creatures coming in from above and closer to the viewer.

(I also trimmed back some of the farmland on the right side so that it's now mostly around the towns and cities.)

I belatedly discovered that Mike Schley's clouds also have a vericolor version, so I could add in some light gray ones to add a little texture, but I haven't done that. I will get the 2014 Annual with the Alyssa Faden clouds in a few weeks and try them on a whole new map from scratch.

Ricko, I am enjoying your tutorials. Thank you.

Thrilled to be included in the January 2024 Maps of the Month post, but I just noticed that although I posted the corrected map in the Facebook group, the final map here still has some upside down trees! Posting the corrected one now since the blog post links here.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for the feedback, it was very helpful. I put the legend back to the original size and location, and it actually looks pretty good. There's room for some lines to wrap if I make it slightly larger, but it seems legible enough as is. Also, I made the roads stand out a little more by changing the transparency effect from 50% opaque to 75% opaque.

Also, are the numbers on the map okay? Should I make them bigger? (I just noticed that some seem to be different sizes, so I will at least have to standardize that.) Are there effects that would make them pop more, like a stronger white glow? Is there anything else unlabeled that should be labeled? I just provided a few sample businesses (inns, blacksmiths, etc.) figuring that a DM could make up something on the fly if players were looking for a specific type of business, but I can add others that folks think are necessary.

Neighborhood maps are a good idea if anyone wants to do a full campaign here (rather than an adventure limited to an inn or a temple, where the rest of the map just provides a general context). I have a whole laundry list of maps I want to do first, but once this is published in the Atlas (after the contest is done), I would welcome anyone to take a neighborhood and expand on it.

A few months ago, I posted a ruined temple that I designed in the Forest Trails annual. The folks who live in a nearby village often come during the day to picnic on the river banks to the south, southeast, and east of the ruins, but never on the ruins itself. There are rumors that the site is haunted (and plenty have claimed to have seen ghosts there at night). Plus, the place is overrun with snakes, some dangerously venomous.

I have finally designed the levels below the temple's ruins. This is mostly designed with Creepy Crypts, with heavy assist from DD3 and a few elements from Dungeons of Schley. I will post more images of this in my galleries.

The basement areas of this ruined temple have been taken over by an unsavory religious cult known for developing poisons as part of their worship of a serpentine god, and using them in their kidnappings and assassinations for hire. (The "ghosts" the townsfolk swear they've seen is actually smoke coming up through the ruined steps.)

The cultists mostly live in the first level of the temple's subterranean levels. They don't actually use the mossy steps (they enter and exit through lower levels). The original priests' chapel has been replaced by an alter to their serpentine god, and several sections of this level are dedicated to raising the venomous creatures.

The stairs in the northwest corner room also descend to the second level of the basement, but that's where they end. Here there are prison cells used to hold the cultists' kidnapped victims. One room is dedicated to raising the rats used to feed the pet snakes. A room that was once used to prepare the deceased for entombment has now been converted into a laboratory for the production of poison. There are also catacombs with crypts of the original temple's religious leaders. It's unclear whether the new cult also buries anyone in the crypts [maybe I will put a pile of bones in one of the sarcophagi that have been picked clean by the gelatinous cube in level three], but they do use one of the tombs for its secret use: the secret stairs in the southeastern-most tomb that descend to the third level. (Oh, the sewer pipes from Sinister Sewers are used to bring in fresh water from the river.)

The third and final level is mostly the real entrance/exit used by the cultists (though one "waste management" area brings in a gelatinous cube to keep things hygienic). Here, the stairs from the crypts above lead to a room with a tunnel to the north where the true entrance is located far away from prying eyes. But a secret door also leads to a winding stair: 506 stairs that descend another 380 feet to a secret room where a teleportation portal is located.

I have been experimenting with three different approaches of taking a portion of a world designed in Fractal Terrains and then expanded upon in CC3+. All three of these experiments export the same view in FT.

The portion of the world I practiced on is an equatorial island nation called the Republic of Lumadair. The coastline is 10,099 miles long, with a length of about 2,000 miles long, depending where you measure from. (For reference, Australia has a mainland coastline (excluding islands) of 22,258 miles.)

Here's what it looks like from Fractal Terrains:

Approach 1: Parchment Maps

As previewed in a separate thread, this was my attempt to render it in the Parchment Maps style from the February annual using a technique that Ralf demonstrated in this video. It's scant on details -- the kind of map my players might find in old ruins somewhere giving them a clue where to continue their adventures.

Approach 2: Jerion Shading

This approach, also previewed in another thread, using the technique in this demo from Ralf to take the Jerion style and add beveling effects to some of the contours to create shading effects. I added cities and major towns (and a few magical places) but only named the major bodies of water and the two close continents.

Approach 3: Mike Schley Style

This approach exports the same land mass into the Schley style (which I only recently discovered was an option in FT), then added some contours brought in from the Jerion style. This is the slowest-to-render map I've ever done due to some techniques (and lessons learned) that I will describe later in this thread.

I just love the versality here -- I can have identical coastlines for all three maps, but they all have different looks and vibes.

I am ready to submit the summer version of the village of Arbor Hollow for the Atlas contest. The spring, autumn, and winter versions (as described in this thread) will be submitted separately, not as part of the contest but hopefully by Monday so that if it's more convenient for Remy to process them all together, he has that option.

Here are the files:

This is where Arbor Hollow appears in the parent map, the Kingdom of Gongadûr, which was previously submitted in this thread. It is located in the yellow-boxed area in this map:

Pretty sure this is my last submission for the contest, but I have tons more stuff in varying stages of progress to submit for the Atlas later.