Having done (in varying stages of "in progress" and not all submitted yet) an elven farming village, forest village, and underwater village, as well as a desert town, what other unusual village environment could I tackle. How about...underground?

I decided to build out my dwarven kingdom in order to find a home for a dwarven mining village. It ended up being more above-ground than below. I did it in the Mike Schley style because it's compatible with Monsen's Mines.

The village is more fortified like a town, but I figured that was more to protect the mine, but it's still a small village.

Villages don't usually have many specialized shops, so I didn't label any of the potential-retail buildings around the town square. There's a little bit of agriculture, and a few villagers have gardens, but most of the village's food is bought or traded with the wealth generated from the mines. Pretty much every family in the village has at least one family member who works in the mines, and anyone else who doesn't has some job that supports mine workers. The Miners' Guild is more like a union rather than a what we might think of as a guild, as it represents the workers rather than the mine's owners.

But no blacksmith in the village. That can be found in a (well-ventilated) space within the mines.

If we hide the "Roof" layer (that is, the top of the mountainside), we can peek into portions of the mine operations. (I still need to finish furnishing this area.) There's a temple used by the entire village, and a blacksmith. Miners can eat in the Miners' Mess Hall during the day, fed by those who work in the kitchens. There's a set of offices for the Mining Administration, where the mine's accounting and payroll are managed. One room has several locked cages to provide extra security for the mine's ore and treasury. In a pinch, it can also serve as the village jail. (One wonders if the mine administrators will come to regret putting the lockup in the treasury.) There's a washroom where miners can get cleaned up before going home, but it's mostly used by the dwarves who live underground.

The furnaces in the blacksmith's and next-door washroom also heats water. The dwarves have created a cunning pipe system throughout this level of the mines that brings both hot and cold water to the residential suites and the kitchen.

There are six luxury residential apartments underground. Most of the underground residents use the common washroom, but the Mine Administrator's family has their own private bathroom with bathtub.

After doing a dark elf farming village and a wood elf forest treehouse village, how could I resist revisiting my sea elf outpost and using it as inspiration for a sea elf village?

This is Eilân Danaäd, a harbor and village in a rocky reef area north of an island off the coast of Dóriant. The village includes both dry ground structures on the harbor side as well as below-water residences on the other side. The sea elves created the harbor as an opportunity to trade with sailors from the Dóriant mainland, as well as sailors traveling to Dóriant. The elves sell or trade deep sea fish and marine vegetation that would be difficult or impossible for surface-dwellers to get to. They also provide ship repair services for ships damaged at sea, and help sailors navigate through the rocky reefs.

The harbor consists of a horse-shoe shaped tiered great wall, with a great tower in the center and two somewhat shorter outer towers. Each tower has a landing pad on top to accommodate aerial visitors who ride pegasi, griffons, or other flying mounts.

The Great Tower in the center extends all the way down to the sea bed. It contains the villages government, and has plenty of space both below and above the surface of the water for the sea elves to hunker down during the strongest storms. (The sea elves wouldn't drown in the storms, but they could be blown miles out to sea.)

The harbor includes an inn for sailors eager for a bit of dry land and a bed that doesn't rock. It also includes a tavern, where sea elves can imbibe with visiting sailors. (Drinking alcohol -- or any other liquids -- isn't possible below the waves, though in their marine environment, the sea elves do imbibe with hallucinogenic fungi, fermented sea cucumbers, and other intoxicants.)

There is no natural source of fresh water at the harbor, so the elves have created several cisterns to capture rainwater. Sprinkles of rain occur nearly daily, and storms (usually mild) occur frequently throughout the year.

Both the towers and the wall are in two tiers, with the lower tier rising about 50 feet above sea level and the upper tier another 30 feet above that. The wall provides protection for the above-ground part of the village for all but the strongest of storms.

Below the waves, most of the village residents live in private homes topped by either a hexagonal or octagonal turret. Each residence is either one, two, or three stories high, not including the turret. (Note the shadows of different lengths.) The entrance to each residence is through a doorway at the turrets. There's no need to swim all the way down to the seabed to disturb the coral gardens surrounding each residence, as the entrances are at the top.

The one-story residences are basically studio cottages, with sleeping and living spaces all at one level. The taller residences will have a common area off of the turret's entrance, with bedrooms in the levels below.

None of the residences have cooking facilities. Dining at home requires food that can be eaten raw, or previously-cooked food that can be served cold. Instead, cooking is done at common cooking spaces (#3), where residents bring food on long skewers to cook over geothermal sea vents. The cooked food can then be brought back home, or can be brought to one of the dining commons (#4) for a picnic.

The sea elves do have a few marine agricultural gardens. Each of these has a pillar in the middle, where gardeners can activate an enchantment that helps keep pests away. The enchantment creates the illusion of a shark swimming around the area. The illusory shark radiates a low-grade Fear spell. Elves are immune to the spell, and it's low grade enough that most intelligent creatures only experience a mild feeling of foreboding at best. But for fish and other low-intelligent sea creatures, the spell triggers a flight reflex, which helps the elves keep their crops from being nibbled away by marine pests and predators.

Farther away from the harbor, I created a few examples of the rocks and reefs. I tried a different approach to creating them. Instead of using polygons with a sharp bevel, I instead used several polygons with a "Shaded Polygon (Angled by Edge") effect, each with different angled slops. Let me know if you think I pulled it off.

Some sort of tentacled sea creature has taken up home near one of the reefs. The sea elves can help sailors navigate around it to avoid a Scylla v. Charybdis catastrophe.

When I was working on Fon'Anar, my elven farming village in Verinress'Arl on Artemisia, I had an idea for a different approach for an elven village that I wanted to try next.

This little village of Yréas Kóltyn is set in the Kingdom of Enía, a northern country in the Gold Coast region of Dóriant that I am submitting as parent (or great grandparent) map to the Atlas. It's a religious community overseen by an archdruid who oversees religious observances at a Great Henge located in the Firessi Woods. For context, it's located in the yellow box on this map:

I did the map using the Forest Trails annual, with heavy assist from the Darklands City annual. Here's the map in progress:

And here is a more battlemap-ready version of it with the trees (and treehouses) hidden, and just stumps and shadows shown:

The treetops and treehouses are all on a single layer to make it easier to toggle them on and off.

The idea of the village is that they've grown up in support of the temple in support of the elves who make pilgrimages there for the opportunity to experience religious services in one of the holiest places in the kingdom.

Here's the temple close up:

In my campaign world, the elves have seven gods, which is why this has seven standing stones in the center ring, then seven arches and seven stones in the middle ring, and then fourteen arches in the outer ring.

The archdruid's home also serves as a sort of local government for the community. It's the only treehouse home accessible with proper stairs. All of the other treehouses have wooden ladders or rope ladders that can be pulled up to impede access from intruders. Here's the archdruid's home:

The other buildings on the ground here are stables (#3), an inn (#4), and a general store (#5).

The villagers live somewhat communally. Since it would be kinda dangerous to cook food in a treehouse, there's a common kitchen and Great Hall. Everyone has a job, and for some, it's to work in the kitchens to cook for the village -- kinda like the dining commons at a university, perhaps.

Here are the "commons." It includes a small aqueduct to bring fresh water to the kitchens (7) and community baths (9). Dining is in the Great Hall (8). On nice evenings, a bonfire can be lit (10), around which the elves often sing and dance.

Most of the elves live in multigenerational treehouse homes. There are a few neighborhoods of these homes in the village, and residents can walk through their neighborhoods on elevated bridges without needing to go down to the ground. Here's an example of one of those neighborhoods:

I was going to add lots more trees throughout these neighborhoods, but they kind of distracted from the homes themselves.

Since the treehouse homes wouldn't have cooking or fireplaces, I guess these residences shouldn't have chimneys. I tried to cover the chimneys with upper canopy foliage, but I missed a bunch.

I think there are 28 residential treehouses (excluding three attached to the archdruid's that I thought might serve as guest accommodations for VIP pilgrims. They're meant to be multigenerational homes. In calculating the village's population, many residents do you think I should assume per residence?

Any thoughts or feedback?

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.

Made some tweaks. Got feedback that if the pyramid may be an adventure hook that someone may want to map, maybe it shouldn't get cropped off the screen. Moved a few things around on the outcrop so that it could fit on screen. Also added the scale bar. Figured out that to edit the text from "miles" to "feet," I had to explode it first, then ungroup it to edit the text. But now I have this nagging memory that we aren't supposed to include scale bars in the Atlas?

Any other feedback or thoughts?