Yes, that enormous size for the upper level is quite something! I wonder if the original designers didn't just add a scale as an afterthought at times. There were often issues with those early maps and scenarios, though that was true of the original D&D rules too; we just made up stuff to cover what wasn't there or didn't work!

Even the dungeon level has loads of empty space - think of having to excavate all that rock and cart it away down all those long corridors, and then up spiral stairs, if it were real!

Random dungeon design came out of helping get folks started with something that had never been done before; thinking about why things were like that only came gradually to most of us at that stage, because it was all so new and innovative. I soon became a fan of coming up with ideas for why things were as they were after that though. If there are 40 kobolds in that broom closet, someone must have put them there, after all 😉

The outer-ring circle seems fine where it is. Moving it might unbalance the look of the whole, assuming you have licence to move it at all, of course. I imagine that's why the whole central design is off-centred to the hexagonal walls.

Might be worth considering a different wall texture, as the rectilinear alignments in the current one make it look a little odd.

That's really nice! And obviously a lot clearer!

The tree-rings discussion has made me wonder if you could simulate the look of tree-rings within the trunk as a drawn polygon using the Edge Striping Sheet Effect. That would need a specific pattern to be available in the catalogue of such items, but it would follow the edge of whatever polygon was drawn, which is clearly a key aspect to the design. Someone better-versed in such things than me could doubtless advise more usefully on the practicalities of that though.

Honestly, mushrooms are pretty much indifferent to light. They're the fruiting bodies of fungi hidden below the surface anyway, so don't have much use for sunlight either way (except secondarily, because what the fungi are feeding on often does rely on sunlight to exist - trees and such, say), and they often don't last very long given all they're doing is distributing spores into the air.

Of course, magical-land mushrooms might feel differently about that!

Smaller pieces of tree stacked on the larger ones, and on a higher Sheet in the stack with a similar shadow effect, might help with the "flat" trees.

It depends how you see the mountain range Jim, I think. Not all mountain ranges are crowded with mountains in reality, after all. Some of the "empty" spots could be hidden valleys, or even plains, with impassible mountains all-round, like the classic Shangri-La.

If the Ash Mountains are more than a name (so something like volcanic ash), maybe the valleys there could be grey with ash too, where nothing will grow, say, if you want a little more variety. Or maybe a scatter of a few trees here and there (really as much for decoration as indicating any genuine small woods, perhaps).

Well, as the trees are symbols, they can be easily resized and stacked as I suggested, just as they are now. I've worked this in some of the dungeon/small overland map styles, though of course it works better in some styles than others.

Not convinced about the scariness of ordinary worms - though the symbols are beautifully done, as we'd expect.

The maw of the "Tremors" worm is something else again though! (1990 movie - Wikipedia link for the confused!)

As for the question "Are worms creepy?", there's always the D&D Purple Worm...

Yeah, I did think about that some time ago, but there's also the problem that the text's position shifts at different resolutions, such as when you zoom in or out. I've tended to work texts at just the full-map resolution for some time now because of this, so that I know exactly where the lettering's going to be. Thus if I can't read the text clearly at that level (and I usually do an A4 test-print to double-check), something has to be tweaked. In this case, that was the size of the glow.

Thanks for the compliment!

As for the positional dot, there isn't any real point to doing this, because the village's relative position is only of potential importance when approaching the city from outside (when the direction would be obvious anyway), or when moving away from it. In one sense each Village actually IS the entire city, but at a level only visible on the Mortal plane (so it only seems to be a little settlement). In addition, GMs can opt just to pick a Village, or decide one randomly, for the players to encounter when trying to reach the Faerie version of Embra, rather than using their approach-direction, so again that would invalidate such a marker.

This reminds me of the first time I opened GIMP - OK, I have the three (what? why?) windows open; NOW what do I do? And which of the three windows do I do what in?

Glad you've managed to source a better program for creating seamless textures though. I know this is something that keeps on coming back time after time for quite a number of folks here.