Here's a "work-in-progress" area map for the Kingdom of Gongodûr, a dwarven kingdom in the southeast corner of the Gold Coast area I've been working on (to provide a home for a dwarven mining village I'm working on). I used the Mike Schley Overland style because it has the best dwarven community symbols.

I shaded the countries outside of the borders of my dwarven kingdom, but not sure if that's the right approach. I could do proper borders for those neighboring kingdoms if that would be better.

I still need to name the places that are new to this local map but the names from the parent map have been added. I was going to do them all in Copperplate font since the font has a sort of "chiseled in stone" look, but it's such a wide font that it made place names challenging. Colors, sizes, and effects on labels remains one of my weaknesses.

I was a little intimidated to attempt this without seeing a Live demonstration first, but since I have the day off, I decided to dive in.

My first attempt was just a small village (152 buildings, population of 920), but I can see how a lot of the conversion goes quickly regardless whether you have a population of 500 or 5,000.

Here's what Watabou generated for me (converted from PNG to JPEG for size considerations):

And here's what I was able to create in a few hours:

I didn't export the fields or the trees, just added them myself. Didn't do much in the way of adding furrows, etc., to spruce it up -- I can see why, even though it speeds up the process, I could still spend many hours adding lots of flourishes.

(One oddity from Watabou: The exported heraldic symbol that was exported ended up being different that what was shown, one deer instead of three, but no big deal.)

@Quenten and @Ralf, you did a magnificent job with this! What a tremendously helpful service you have done for Game Masters!

I am going to use this thread to officially submit my maps for the Gold Coast region of Doriant. I will have separate Work-in-Progress threads for feedback on maps as I am working on them, and then will use this thread for the official submissions so they are easy for Remy to find. I know Remy isn't processing new submissions until the contest ends, but this will queue up my future submissions for later this fall or winter, and it also provides a home for some of the villages I want to submit for the contest.

The first submission is ready! It's a 1000 x 1000 mile section on the western side of Doriant.

Here's a markup of the parent map to put it in context (the blue border represents the area I'm calling the Gold Coast.

And here is the Gold Coast with all labels but without political borders shown:

Here is the FCW file, along with a PDF description and a plain text description. (I stripped out accents and special characters in the plain text file.)

Primary Style: Annual Spectrum Overland

Toggles: "Borders (Political)" sheet to turn display or hide the political borders within the region.

@Monsen, please let me know if I've messed up and need to fix anything, or if you'd prefer submissions to be handled in any other way. I have lots of other local area maps within this region that will be ready to submit soon.

I made a few tweaks. Changed most of the effluent to brown except for the portions from the vents (aka storm drains) that's meant to be rainwater. Added a few bunches of leaves from Forest Trail to those ones. Added some bridges for maintenance workers to use to cross canals. Left a bit of green coming from one of the canals -- a mystery for adventurers to solve? I should probably add some slime....

Level 6

We are now in the lowest of the three sections of the temple. Most of the tombs contain two chambers: a treasure room and a burial chamber. A few will have multiple treasure chambers, and occasionally there may be more than one burial chamber in the suite.

Great pharaohs used to be buried with their wealth, but centuries ago, a new pharaoh decided to keep his father’s wealth, and instead buried his father with colored glass replicas of his jewelry. The pharaohs are generally entombed in a sarcophagus on a raised platform. Other sarcophagi in the room will usually be upright along the walls, but may be occasionally laid flat on the floor, a sign of great honor to the decedent. These are for the final resting places for people important to the pharaoh: spouses, valued concubines, children who did not themselves become a pharaoh, and occasionally even favorite servants like nannies who are treated as family. Those who predecease the pharaoh are reinterned at the time of pharaoh’s internment. For those who live after the pharaoh’s death, the tombs are opened to admit their remains, sometimes decades after the pharaoh’s internment.

Also of note: in this section, the stairs up and stairs down are generally far from each other, perhaps as a way to confuse and confound intruders intending to loot the tombs.

Level 5

This level has more tombs, but there are a few things of note.

On the west side, there is a burial chamber where the entrance to the treasure chamber and burial chamber have been destroyed, and the treasures and sarcophagus have been looted. The passageway to this section has been sealed but otherwise left untouched. It is the only looted section in this active temple.

Another burial suite is empty, waiting for a future pharaoh.

In the southeast corner, there’s a chamber with a great number of sarcophagi, some still empty. This room is the final resting place for high priests who have been honored to lay at rest near the great pharaohs.

One mad pharaoh had his burial chamber and three treasure rooms hidden behind a trapped secret door. The passageway also contains a covered pit that drops unwary intruders 20 feet to Level 3.

Level 4

More burial chambers. (Note the shaft for the pit from Level 5 that descends to Level 3.)

Level 3

More tombs. (I noticed that some of the raised platforms don’t have a sarcophagus on them. Not sure if I forgot to place them, or if I placed them on the wrong sheet. I guess one of them might be for the reigning Pharaoh, and already contains the remains of predeceased loved ones, but that would only make sense for one of these tombs. Maybe the mummies just walked away?)

The pit trap from Level 5 ends here. Those who survive the 20-foot drop may discover a secret door that leads to another hidden chamber, where another secret door allows escape to the rest of the temple. The skeletal remains suggest that one poor soul either didn’t survive the fall or never found the secret door to allow their escape.

Level 2

More burial suites, along with some storage rooms for unused pots and urns.

Level 1

More tombs, along with stairs that descend to subterranean levels of the temple. (What, more levels?)

After my village of Per-Nezahd grew too large and is rightfully now a town, I went back to the drawing board and created a new village in the same Desert Oasis style. This one is significantly smaller.

[Note: this is in an area of the Atlas that has not yet been developed. I have parent maps almost ready to submit, and will start a thread later this weekend to submit them. Just finishing up the descriptions for them.]

There are 22 buildings that are either fully residential or mixed-use business/residential. I assumed an average population of 5.2 residents per residence, giving me a population of 114. Does that sound about right? I also spread things out a little more than you would in a walled city or town, but maybe I should spread things out even more?

I used varicolor bushes of different sizes to create crops. I don't know much about desert oases form, but I thought maybe a hill would be needed. I added a darker terrain below the hill to distinguish it from the smaller patches of hills scattered around, which were meant to be sand dunes.

I was going to use a ziggurat from SS5 as the temple, but the temple symbols in this annual were too irresistible to pass over. In the end, the only symbols I used outside of this annual were two broken columns in the ruins from CA49. For a village like this, it didn't seem necessary to label much in the village itself, just the temple and the taverna. I don't think a village of this size could support too much specialization, though there are market stalls available for the use of trade caravans that pass through. I also figured that this village was too small to afford to construct a wall (though maybe I should add a tower or two?).

In the lower right on a bit of an outcrop, I set some ruins of an ancient temple and city. Near the road that reaches the ruins, I placed a cart and scattered boxes and barrels to suggest that maybe an archeological dig is underway? Adventure hooks: maybe the archeologists have disturbed an ancient malevolence that should have remained untouched? Or maybe, Indiana Jones-style, the adventurers need to race to find an ancient artifact before the opposition finds it.

For the title, I used the default font for this annual, but it was too hard to read for other place names, so I used Papyrus for those labels. Is it okay to use a different font for the title? Should I switch the title to Papyrus? I didn't use the scale bar, as pretty as it is, because it says "miles" on it and this map is only 500 x 400 feet. (Although...if I ungroup it, maybe I can delete the "miles" text? I will have to try that.)

Any advice or feedback?

Ralf does demonstrate it at the end of this "Fractal Terrains to Parchment World" tutorial (around the 38 minute mark), using a full world Parchment Map that he had created the week before.

I decided against trying to "erode" the levels of the ziggurat. It was a lot to change, and I decided that I will keep the technique in mind next time I do one. Instead, I focused on adding layers of the sand texture to each level of the temple (except for the top portion that the priests are more diligent about sweeping). I tried to vary the patterning by starting drawing from different corners, but I'm not sure that helped much. I might alternate which of the sand textures are used, as I did set each to different scalings. I like the color and scaling of #4 the best but I really should change it a little so you don't see angled paths of no sand like on the north face.

I also added the edge of a mountain using the same techniques as the dunes, but with the bevel isn't smoothed as much, and I used a dark brown earth fill. Maybe I should move the mountain to the NW or NE corner?

Made some good progress, including labeling some of the primary businesses and points of interest. I also widened it a bit to make room for a legend. The text was a little hard to read so I added a semi-transparent back. Let me know if it's still too hard to read, and what you'd recommend to help that (make the back less transparent? darker or lighter shade?)

It looks good! First I tried it with 10-foot wide, 10 degree pitch increments, with a 80 degree pitch at the edges, working up to a 10 degree pitch at the center. The transitions were a little sharp:

Then I redid it with a more gradual transition, 5-feet wide sheets with 5 degree pitch increments going from 85 degree pitch at the edges to 5 degrees at the center. That worked much better! Some fill styles worked better than others, of course -- though some that I didn't care for might be improved if I play with adjusting the scaling. Roof tiles didn't really work very well, but wood worked, as did different stone fills. Here are the top 50% of my experiments:

Thank you for the tip, Sue! I can play with fills (and the scaling of those fills), but I feel like I have something solid to work with here.