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!

I tweaked it to change the effluent on Level 3 to Effluent o3, then changed it after the first Gelatinous Cube in the Waste Filtration Path to clear water with decreasing amounts of scum as it gets purified. Added some clear water near the cubes in the Filtration Auditoriums to show that they ate some of the contaminants as they were traveling through. Also added some floor stains.

I think this makes it a bit clearer that the Gelatinous Cubes are consuming the waste and purifying the water. I will go through add more scum to the floors and the effluent in Levels 2 and 3.

Okay, here's the next iteration.

I tried to use blotchy lighter sands to suggest sand dunes, like the Sahara Desert, and darker blotches to show more solid, earth-packed areas. Not sure if I should try to get them to blend in more with a partial transparency or something?

Tried to make the roads show up a little more, but I can't tell if it was that successful. I liked the idea that the guys with the camels could be used on the trails roads to indicate that it was more of a general route through the sands, where most travelers would need an experienced guide to make sure they don't get lost, since a proper road would be blown away or covered with sand. There is a more treacherous area in the southern part of the desert called the Devil's Backbone, where a proper road on more solid land passes next to a 50-mile long fissure. It's a dangerous route, beset by foul creatures that creep out of the fissure, especially at night. But the road is on solid land, and without a guide, it might be a safer route than braving the shifting sand dunes. (I put a tower next to one of the villages down there -- maybe a wizard is there that the adventurers just have to visit?)

Thoughts?

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).

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!

I am ready to submit the FCW for the Eknapata Desert for the Atlas, knowing that it won't be processed until after the contest ends (though it is a parent map for a village I am submitting to the contest).

Here is the FCW, along with a PDF Description and a plain text file (with accents replaced with standard ASCII characters).

Okay, here are the changes I made:

1. Added patches to the murkiness to break it up.
2. Added more bones on the right side and a pile of plundered treasure on the left. (Still not a lot of debris, though.)
3. Adding/increasing a Glow on the walls wasn't putting the tentacle corridors in a shadow like I wanted -- to get the shadow strong enough, it caused the contents in the sucker rooms to be too obscured. So I did add a shadow over the interior rooms and corridors after all.
4. Changed the Glow settings on the solid rock area of the cavern, so that the edges don't look so sharp. (I will also post the FCW in case anyone wants to recommend adjusting the settings.)
5. Moved all of the "above" rocks and weeds to a special layer that can be hidden or shown.
6. Added an entire layer of rocks to that new layer of varying sizes (up to 5x or 6x, I believe). I used the "symbols in area" function to scatter weedy rocks around, and then filled in.
7. Added a wall mask so that the constructed walls no longer cast a shadow on the excavated cave walls. Midway through, I realized that I could simplify my painstaking efforts by copying my constructed walls to another wall sheet above the mask, this one with no effects. The walls below the mask cast the shadows and glow; the wall above the mask has no effects, but allowed me to be a little sloppy in drawing the walls mask. (At the very end, I realized I could have simplified it even further by copying the cave walls to the Walls Mask sheet.)

Thoughts?

Thoughts?

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 have thoughts on things I'd love to see in future Annuals, but if I mention something that already exists in an older Annual, please advise and I may go buy it!

• Greco-Roman symbols (both City and Dungeon level) - aqueducts, baths, forums, temples, amphitheaters (and at the dungeon level: couches, statues)
• Elven Village (if in a Mike Schley-compatible style, could expand on his elven homes in SS5, or could be totally unique) - tree houses, swan boats and canoes, henges, colorful/exotic flowers and plants, fairy circles, and specialty animals: deer, swans, exotic birds, unicorns, pegasuses (pegasi?), giant eagles and their nests
• Airships - dirigibles, hot air balloons, magical flying ships, Spelljammer-compatible ships
• Academy/University - not sure what this would include, but I will need to design one at some point
• Botanical Garden

If Mike Schley is still doing monthlies:

• Throne Room - thrones, dais, crowns and other regalia (perhaps with pillows to display them on), banners, shields (upright as wall decorations), red (or varicolor) carpets that can be combined into a long strip (or as a fill?), couches or lounge chairs, suits of armor.*
• Library - more bookcase options, more open/closed books, varicolored scroll cases, rolled-up scrolls tied with varicolored ribbon, ink jars with feathered quills.**
• Gnome or Artificer Workshop - though there are some alchemist supplies already
• Mines - tracks, handcarts, pickaxes, individual gems (as opposed to a pile of gems)
• Fairs or festivals - the marketplace symbols have a lot, but I'm thinking about things for performers: juggling pins and balls, musical instruments
• Harbor / Docks / Shipyard - nets, tridents, fish (in open barrels, in piles, and individually), coils of rope

(* With these, I dug through the Mike Schley symbols and found some that could work -- the varicolor "chair ornate" could make for a golden throne, and there's standing armor in weapons. But I haven't found any couches or lounges, just benches and chairs. And there's small area rugs but nothing I saw that could make for a long stretch of carpeting.)

(** The temples and necromancer sets have some of these, though I don't recall seeing feathered quills.)

Also, I have some great photorealistic fills for these sorts of things already, but I'd love more illustrated-style fills for granite, more marble, maybe carpeting?

Getting a little practice in with Sinister Sewers this afternoon. (I've been mentally mapping out an elaborate waste management system, but this is just for practice.) If I'm lucky, Ralf will do a demo with the next Live -- looking forward to seeing his strategies and tips.

The canal in the lower left is meant to be regular water from a storm drain (maybe I should add some leaves) that would normally mingle with the effluent and push it through, but a gelatinous cube is gobbling up all the leaves and everything. (My waste management system will make extensive use of oozes to keep things tidy.) I used Effluent 05 for the water. Was that intended to be regular water? Is there a better approach for that?

I ended up going with the green effluent for most of it because I liked how the colors popped. But I will probably use the browns and yellows mostly, maybe with the green used for scum, and maybe waste "water?" coming from the sewers connected to a necromancer's lab.

I was struggling getting a break in the wall to the room without canals to work properly, and then realized that an archway was a perfect gimmick. This room was intended to be the main access to the sewers, but there are also ladders or rungs near the surface vents. Threw in some carnivorous vegetation for fun. Maybe some adventurers will be hired to find out why waste management workers are disappearing.