Happy June! Happy start to the meteorological summer! We're having a little heat wave in Northern California (80 F / 27 C here in San Francisco, but more like 100 F / 38 C just a few miles inland). So it sounds like a perfect time for the beach.

I haven't posted new maps in a few weeks because I was busy working on a few big ones. Right now I'm working on the interiors for the ziggurat I created to play with the new stairs annual. But while I was working on the lighthouse (more more experimentation with stairs), I got the idea of doing a proper fully underwater adventure. Something that the adventurers would need a Water Breathing spell or similar magic or innate ability for.

I have three ideas. One is an underwater lair of a sea witch or sea hag. That's ready to be posted next. Another is a fully underwater fortress or castle. I haven't started that one yet. But for this one, I wanted to do a Sea Elf Outpost that's a combination of caves v. construction, and underwater v. above. This Sea Elf Outpost is probably my favorite map of all of the ones I've created. It uses Marine Dungeons as the base, with fills and foliage symbols from Forest Trails and furniture from DD3.

In my campaign world, sea elves are reclusive and distrustful of the surface world. When they have to go about on land, they disguise themselves as high elves, so most "landlubbers" don't even know they exist. At this outpost, the sea elves can secretly spy on a nearby human city and the movements of the human Lord Admiral's navy.

Here's the island from above as the crow flies -- or in this case, as the seagull flies.

To give you a sense of perspective, this map is 1000 x 800 feet, and the hillside along the beach stretches about 625 feet. On the images with a grid, each square is five feet.

Seems uninhabited. But if we could use x-ray vision to see below the hill, this is what we'd see:

Come on in! Let me give you a proper tour. First, let's start with the main entrance (#1) and the first guard post (#2).

These underwater passageways eventually lead us to the Welcome Chamber (#3), sort of an underwater reception room. To the south is the underwater gardens (#4) where the sea elves grow various sea grasses, seaweeds, and marine mushrooms. To the east is the Great Hall (#5), with a storage room (#6) to the north. To the south, there are two locked rooms: the armory (#7) with spears, tridents, nets, and other weapons suitable for underwater combat, and the treasury (#8).

Next on our tour, we find three VIP bedrooms (#9) as well as group barracks (#10) and a storage room (#11). Of course, ordinary beds would be useless in an underwater bedroom. Who wants soggy sheets? I figured they'd probably use hammocks that they can tie themselves into so they don't drift away in their sleep (like astronauts in zero gravity). The hammocks connect to a wall on one side and a pillar on the other.

Next up, we have a room that has been nicknamed the Transition Room (#12), as it transitions from underwater to surface land. It's one of three rooms with ceilings high enough that the water doesn't touch the ceiling here, so you can pop your head above water even in the marine parts of the room. To the north is a room (#13) where folks can dry off and change their clothing, though the sea elves generally wear lightweight linen clothing that dries quickly on their own. Room #14 is called the Lesser Hall. It's nicknamed the Map Room because it's where the outpost commander and his staff pour over maps and other documents, which couldn't really be done underwater (unless they used clay tablets or waxed paper, maybe). To the north is another storeroom (#15), and then there's a dining hall (#16), kitchen (#17), and pantry (#18).

South of the Transition Room, an underwater passageway takes you to the second of the three rooms where the water doesn't reach the high ceilings: the chapel (#16). This room gave me an excuse to play with the brass inlays that I love so much, as well as the partially-submerged pillars with the ripple effect, and the partially submerged stairs. The orange/pink tiled area is an elevated platform. Maybe I should put chairs or something on it to make it clearer that it's above water. In my campaign world, elves use henge stones as places of worship, usually with seven inner stones representing the seven gods of the elven pantheon. Here, the sea elves have used pillars as a substitute.

From the dry passageways that head north from the chapel or east and then south from the dining hall, we get to the above-water bedrooms. The outpost commander's room is #20, and then there are two double-occupancy VIP rooms (#21) and dry barracks with seven beds (#22). Room #23 is a recreation room where during downtime, the sea elves stationed here can play games or make music (there's a harp on the table).

Next we come to the third room where the water doesn't touch the ceiling, my favorite room of the outpost, called the Dolphin Room (#25). Here, a separate passageway to the outside allows for intelligent marine allies to visit and confer with the sea elves: merfolk, intelligent dolphins, and an intelligent octopus. (Not sure if the turtles are also intelligent or if they just wandered in.) A platform on the west side is elevated above the water, where there's a chest with balls, hoops, and other lightweight, floating toys that the elves and dolphins use in various games they've devised. A dry passageway takes you to the lockup (#26), where unwary landlubbers who've stumbled across the elves may be held.

To the east, the Great Staircase (#27) takes you winding up to the top of the hill, where elves are posted as lookouts. On the way, you'll pass a locked room (#28) with a teleportation portal and an open room (#29) where the sea elves stash their bows and arrows and other land weapons.

A spiral staircase (#30) leads to the outside above the top of the hill overlooking the beach. (You can barely make out the top of the stairs above the #30 label.)

And one last feature on the island: the Alligator Cove (#31). The alligators are enough to deter casual visitors from the island, and the sea elves do enough secret mischief to more determined visitors to convince locals that the island is haunted. (The alligator symbols are actually crocodiles, but I got the names mixed up. They come from Dundjinni Archives.)

And that's the end of our tour of the Sea Elf Outpost! It took me a few weeks, which is why I haven't had a chance to post anything new recently.

Okay, I made some screen captures and JPG saves to illustrate the process.

The first thing to know is that there are 18 levels to the temple, with a wider landing (15 feet instead of 5) on the 6th and 12th levels. And the second thing to know is that every level actually has three sheets:

(1) the main sheet for the level, with the stone fill;

(2) a sheet below it of a different color, because the beveling effect on the main sheet can cause weird pockmarks if it gets confused with the colors below the sheet with the beveling effect; and

(3) a sheet above the main one for the level for the sandy debris.

I called the sheet below the main one for each level of the temple "Inlay," because at one point I thought I might have brass or gold inlays on each level, but I ended up only doing that at the top.

Here's what Level 6 looks like with all three of its sheets on but all of the other sheets hidden (except for the 5th level as well as the stairs, just to provide perspective):

You can see erosion around the sides as well as some cracks (like from the stairs on the south side, as well as a little above the western stairs).

On the "inlay" level below, I put a polygon of solid color. I made it brown, because if it was the same gray as the stonework above, the beveling on the sheet above it would get confused and create weird pockmarks. But I also added a gray inside GLOW effect so that it look gray when it showed through the erosion:

Okay, here's how I did the erosion. First, I added the COLOR KEY sheet effect to that sheet, using the default magenta #6. (Also, it's important to put that sheet effect first on the list, before the Glows and Bevel and Wall Shadow).

This effect tells CC3+ that when it sees anything of that magenta color on that sheet, cut through whatever's on that sheet and instead show the sheet below it (in this case, the brown-with-gray-glow on the Temple Level 6 Inlay sheet).

I then used the fractal polygon tool to create small bits with that same magenta color, as well as the fractal line drawing tool to create the cracks. Here it is with the sheet effects turned off so you can see the magenta color, along with a zoomed-in version to see it a little better:

(There's a fractal crack in the stone above the fractal blobs. You can barely see it but it works when the sheet effects are turned on.)

When the sheet effects are turned on, anything on that sheet that's covered by by the magenta polygon will be cut away, showing instead whatever is on the sheet behind the stone. It doesn't matter if the color key cutout extends onto the white part, because there's nothing to cut away there and the sheet below would have been shown anyway.

Here's what the whole thing looks like with sheet effects turned off.

Crazy how powerful CC3+ is to be able render all of those effects to turn this mess into an identifiable ziggurat.

If anyone is interested, here is the FCW file. (It's slow loading when the sheet effects are turned on because of all of the nodes added by the fractal bits.)

Another revelation that will be obvious to more experienced cartographers here: the TEXTURIZE effect!

I have been wanting to use heraldic symbols stitched onto fabric to make carpets, table runners, banners...and I kept looking in vain for fabric fills. The Modern set includes different colors of carpeting, but it was a little too photorealistic to work with things like Dungeons of Schley.

Through trial and lots of error, I stumbled across the Texture effect and was able to apply it to both a color polygon and the heraldic symbol on top of it to create the effect of fabric with the symbol stitched on. I experimented with a lot of textures, but the one that seemed most "fabric-like" to me was the DD3 Hay_Dry fill. (If anyone knows of a fill that looks more like linen or other woven fabric, please let me know. Maybe there's a good one in an Annual that I have not yet purchased.) And of course, different fills can create the effect of looking like your sigil was painted on wood, or the cobblestone floor (though with more trial and error, I learned that some fills don't really translate well when used with the Texturize effect).

Anyway, here are some heraldic banners or carpets or table runners or whatever:

I tried the color key to nibble away at the textures, and it worked. But even better (and more obvious): I could, and did, add additional sandy patches to fill out the...fill.

But the color key suggestion gave me the idea of using it to nibble away at the temple itself, creating missing chunks (with magenta fractal polygons) and cracks (with a magenta fractal lines). I hope I didn't overdo it, but the nice thing about using the color key approach is that it's a lot easier to remove some of them than it would be to fix moving nodes around, for example.

I had already placed a gold inlay beneath each layer of the temple, but other than the very top, I didn't need it to be gold. I tried changing them to the Solid 10 and Solid 20 fills, but that allowed the pockmarks to return. So I changed it to a brown color and then added a gray inner glow.

If nothing else, the erosion takes your eye away from places where I missed fixing the repeating patterns of the texture.

I just had an epiphany -- one that may be obvious to most of you but has tickled me to pieces.

Ever since I saw Ralf's two video demos of Marine Dungeons of using the brass inlays (which prompted me to immediately purchase the 2021 Annual), I have been obsessed with putting in brass inlays wherever I can get away with it. I even did one in my recent Sun God temple which was in a Mike Schley style, only I used a goldleaf background from Sue's Parchments with a crude, hand drawn depiction of the sun.

I have wanted to do more inlays in everything, but I am not an artist. But it suddenly occurred to me: Sue's inlays are vector images, and CA15 Heraldic Symbols (from Annual Volume 2, 2008) are vector images, and some of those vector symbols are varicolor....

So I experimented, and it worked! Upper left is one of the vector images from Marine Dungeons, just as an example of how it's supposed to work. Upper right is a dolphin symbol from Heraldic Symbols that intentionally keeps the black outline, as does the fleur-de-lys crest in the lower left. The lion intentionally omits the black border.

There aren't a ton of symbols in Heraldic Symbols, and fewer still that are varicolor, but the cool thing is: if you use CA15 Heraldic Symbols to design a coat of arms, and use the varicolor symbols set to the magenta #6, you can then have the coat of arms engraved in brass at the base of the dais in your throne room. Just copy the crest into your map and move it to the floor sheet after placing the brass inlay fill on a sheet directly behind the floor (adding the color key effect to the floor if your map doesn't already have that).