Made some tweaks, particularly to the desert in the northwest corner. I added a TERRAIN SYMBOLS sheet of cracked seaflats. Over that, I did a second TERRAIN SYMBOLS 2 sheet for the sands symbol. And then finally, a third TERRAIN SYMBOLS 3 sheet for scattered dunes.

Also addressed the dimples in the temple by adding a layer of the gold foil for each level of the ziggurat. I probably won't add more color key "etchings in gold," but I had to add something, and now I'm all set if I do want more.

And recommendations?

I was playing with the Stairs & Steps annual, and (inspired by a recent episode of The Amazing Race, which I'm finally getting caught up on), I started to design something inspired by the steps of El Peñón de Guatapé in Colombia. I ended up gravitating to Marine Dungeons to do it in, but for my first foray into using Stairs & Steps, I wanted to start with something in the Mike Schley style.

One of the human cultures in my campaign world is a desert culture with a religion loosely inspired by Egyptian mythology. (They also have a militaristic government where powerful noble houses sponsor warriors who fight in grand competitions every four years to accrue points used to determine the number of seats each noble house has in the ruling council. I came up with the idea 40 years ago when I first watched the Olympics on television, and the idea keeps coming back every four years.)

Anyway, their religious temples are in the form of pyramids and ziggurats, and the latest Stairs & Steps annual gave me the impetus to create a ziggurat in the desert. This is designed in SS4 Dungeons of Schley, with bits of SS5 Cities and Schley and SS3 Mike Schley Overland thrown in.

I am seeking aesthetic input on a few things:

1. For the desert terrain, I chose a sandy background as the default and added a layer of a sandy texture over it. But I have also been playing with the cracked seaflats, sand symbols, and dunes symbols. Thoughts on what works?
2. I thought maybe putting the cracked seaflats around the border of the Ziggurat and then some dunes near the borders of the map. (One of the images I'm embedding zooms on some examples.) Should I put the sand symbol through? Just on the northwestern part away from the buildings? Not at all? I always triple-guess my aesthetic choices.
3. Inspired by the bronze inlays in Marine Dungeons, I wanted to do something similar on the top of the ziggurat. I created a crude inlay representing the sun, but then used the goldleaf texture from Sue's Parchments. Do you think that works, or should I instead use the bronze texture from Marine Dungeons?

Here is the full map to date, with a few zoomed-in images to illustrate my questions. (Oh, I am aware of the pock-marks in the temple. I plan to put a layer of a dark gray color or maybe the goldleaf fill below each level of the ziggurat to fix that. But part of me wonders if the pock-marks actually make the ziggurat look weathered?)

In a recent thread, @Traveller mentioned that he is seeking to discover the best style of designing castles in order to map the many real castles of the U.K.

I have been on a similar quest, though my quest is so that I can design fantastical castles of folklore and fairy tales, like Camelot and Sleeping Beauty's Castle, or the castles in Errol Flynn movies. Castles with many levels of battlements, parapets, towers and turrets, gardens with hedge mazes, and imposing keeps.

One of the things that seems to come up regularly in these forums is crenellations. I was experimenting using Mike Schley's walls along the top edges of my fortresses, and that looked okay, but didn't allow for much flexibility since the symbols come in one length and the wall drawing tool doesn't show the embrasures and merlons.

Anyway, I designed some symbols. I have 5' x 5' square ones. I have trapezoidal ones that can be placed to have arrow slits. I have corner L-shaped pieces. And I have several different rounded ones for round towers, including a tapered one to create arrow slits.

They are all created using CC3+'s drawing tools, with fills from SS4 Dungeons of Schley. There are five different shades of every shape, using Mike Schley's Natural Stone 1 through Natural Stone 5. (This was designed in SS5 Cities of Schley, but I imported the Dungeons of Schley fills as well.) I think that approach allows them to be used in the Atlas. @Monsen, can you confirm?

(I used the Stone Paving Grey for the structures, but tried one tower with Stone Paving Brown to see how it would look. The intention was to try to create the look of

They are all designed for a five-foot wide crenellation -- basically, you'd draw a line or circle with a 5-foot width for the base of the crenellation and then place the merlons on top. I've tried it both placing them by hand and also using SYMBOLS ALONG, and both approaches work reasonably well.

I am not an artist, and I'm sure others here could do much better ones, but I think it gets the job done. I'm happy to share if anyone would like to use them.

Here is the FSC file and also an FCW example:

And here are some images so you can see how they look. (I put a Bevel effect on the merlons, which is showing some odd effects because the colors with the base are close, even though I used a darker shade of the Natural Stone for the base.)

Here's a close-up of the trapezoid merlons along the edge of a straight building.

And here's one using the trapezoidal merlons for the lower level and then the square ones for the higher level. It also shows the corner pieces.

Here are two different round towers. The one on the left has normal merlons, and the one on the right has tapered ones for arrow slits. (I need to fix the Wall Shadow effects -- the base of the tower should not be casting a shadow farther out than the crenellation on top of the tower!)

Here's a quick "proof of concept" of a multi-level castle with different crenellation styles, plus some domes from City Domes for turrets.

And one last tower using the brown paving fill. This one uses a wider merlon using the SYMBOLS ALONG tool, but I don't think it's quite lining up correctly.

Feedback welcome, and feel free to use the FSC if you like them.

OMG, I discovered that if you set three steps across with the center one (moved to front) in varicolor, you can create a carpet runner down the center of your staircase. My grand ballrooms will have the grandest of grand staircases!

I promise not to spam this thread with more discoveries, and will wait until Ralf has a chance to do the Live, but I just couldn't hold back with this one.

A few months ago, I posted a ruined temple that I designed in the Forest Trails annual. The folks who live in a nearby village often come during the day to picnic on the river banks to the south, southeast, and east of the ruins, but never on the ruins itself. There are rumors that the site is haunted (and plenty have claimed to have seen ghosts there at night). Plus, the place is overrun with snakes, some dangerously venomous.

I have finally designed the levels below the temple's ruins. This is mostly designed with Creepy Crypts, with heavy assist from DD3 and a few elements from Dungeons of Schley. I will post more images of this in my galleries.

The basement areas of this ruined temple have been taken over by an unsavory religious cult known for developing poisons as part of their worship of a serpentine god, and using them in their kidnappings and assassinations for hire. (The "ghosts" the townsfolk swear they've seen is actually smoke coming up through the ruined steps.)

The cultists mostly live in the first level of the temple's subterranean levels. They don't actually use the mossy steps (they enter and exit through lower levels). The original priests' chapel has been replaced by an alter to their serpentine god, and several sections of this level are dedicated to raising the venomous creatures.

The stairs in the northwest corner room also descend to the second level of the basement, but that's where they end. Here there are prison cells used to hold the cultists' kidnapped victims. One room is dedicated to raising the rats used to feed the pet snakes. A room that was once used to prepare the deceased for entombment has now been converted into a laboratory for the production of poison. There are also catacombs with crypts of the original temple's religious leaders. It's unclear whether the new cult also buries anyone in the crypts [maybe I will put a pile of bones in one of the sarcophagi that have been picked clean by the gelatinous cube in level three], but they do use one of the tombs for its secret use: the secret stairs in the southeastern-most tomb that descend to the third level. (Oh, the sewer pipes from Sinister Sewers are used to bring in fresh water from the river.)

The third and final level is mostly the real entrance/exit used by the cultists (though one "waste management" area brings in a gelatinous cube to keep things hygienic). Here, the stairs from the crypts above lead to a room with a tunnel to the north where the true entrance is located far away from prying eyes. But a secret door also leads to a winding stair: 506 stairs that descend another 380 feet to a secret room where a teleportation portal is located.