Years ago, when I was first developing the pantheon for the halflings of my world, I accidentally recreated the Easter Bunny.

I had in mind that idea that the head of the pantheon was a grandmotherly figure. I pictured her baking pies and sitting in a rocking chair on her front porch dispensing common-sense wisdom. I had a mental image of her as an anthropomorphized rabbit, like Peter Cottontail's grandmother or a Richard Scarry illustration. But when I had the thought that maybe the living creatures of the world came from eggs that she laid, I realized that I had recreated the Easter Bunny. I decided to lean into that.

Here's my description for Mother Ailish:

The de facto head of the Halfling pantheon is a four-foot tall anthropomorphized rabbit named Mother Ailish. She is depicted as a grandmotherly figure dressed in an apron, bifocal spectacles, and a bonnet or straw hat. When she isn’t shown knitting on her front stoop while dispensing common-sense wisdom, she’s generally shown baking in the kitchen. In her ovens she bakes any manner of delightful confections, particularly savory and sweet pies, and for this reason halflings celebrate natal days (and pretty much every occasion) with pies in her honor. It is said that she baked, piece by piece, all the non-living things of the world in her ovens and then fashioned them together. Every living this in the world is said to be descended from an original that she gave birth to – not in a live birth but laid in bright, multi-colored eggs that her many children and grandchildren (all also depicted as anthropomorphized rabbits) then hid about the world until they were ready to hatch and populate the world with life. For this reason, the halflings have a spring celebration in which they paint eggs made of paper, baked clay, wood, leather, or the like, inside which is hidden toys and candy, which are then exchanged with friends and family and sometimes hidden for strangers to find. The holiday always falls on the first Estaradÿn that falls on or after the first full Caerudraal moon after (but not on) the Spring Equinox.

(Caerudraal is the smallest of my world's three moons. It takes 77 days to orbit the world, and weeks are 10 days, so the holiday is celebrated anywhere from the day after the vernal equinox to 87 days after.)

Anyway, when I created some rainbow images for St. Patrick's Day, I thought maybe I should do an Easter Mother Ailish Egg Hunt for Easter.

I used the Mike Schley Dungeon City style to create a halfling's home and garden. At first I tried to create varicolor decorations for eggs, but they're so small here that you couldn't see the decorations anyway. I tried to just create solid-colored eggs using the three-point circle drawing tool, but wasn't thrilled with the shape -- and the beveling effects didn't show up once the eggs were shrunk. I ended up just using Mike Schley's varicolor dragon eggs.

Anyway, here's my little halfling home and egg hunt:

Garden without Eggs

The home faces a rural lane, with the garden accessed through the home's back door. The garden has a gate that provides access to a side street. Everything comes from Mike Schley's city or dungeon assets except the hedges, which are Sue's connecting hedges -- and then I used her end/corner pieces instead of Mike's for the stand-alone hedges. And I think the flowers are miniaturized shrubs from DD3.

Garden with Hidden Eggs

Under the Trees and Gazebo Canopy

Mappy Easter -- er, Mappy Mother Ailish Day!

The red X's on the outside "offerings" pits (basically, barbecue pits) are different meat cooking on skewers symbols from the Bogies Redthorn Tavern assets. You can get them here, though it's a bit involved to install them. You could also safely delete those symbols and have the burn pits with nothing cooking on them.

The symbols inside the temple are custom-made symbols. The walls are supposed to have mosaics made with luminescent crystals, and the X'd assets are reflections on the floor from those mosaics. You could delete them, particularly since the reflections won't really match up with your lore, or you can download them here:

To keep the file path consistent, place them in this path, creating folders as needed:

CC3Plus - Symbols - Users - Kevin - Dungeon - Statues, Temples and Idols

Here's how it's supposed to look:

I'm sure everything will look good if you delete the missing symbols without trying to replace them with anything else.

Ricko gave me some great tips -- fixing the waterfall in the first image (it needed to be more in the foreground), rotating some of the elven buildings to face the road, and adding trees to conceal where terrain/symbols connect. I hope I found all of the spots that needed trees! Here are my adjustments:

When I was ready to revisit the idea with the Mike Schley style, I took inspiration from Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps that combine Mike Schley's Overland style with elements from the Cities of Schley Isometric style. I kept thinking about gold and leprechauns. Who else covets gold? Dragons, of course! So this rather large overland map has the rainbow ending on a dragon's nest with her golden egg. (Originally it was going to be a gold dragon, but the red one popped on the screen better.)

I will post some zoomed-in versions in my galleries.

Although I was pleased overall, it doesn't have the impact that Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps do. I decided to make another attempt, this time with a much smaller area and going vertical. I'm much happier with this next attempt, although I need a ton more practice to get mine looking a fraction as nice as Ricko's.

I had a silly idea of doing a whimsical map or scene with leprechauns and pots of gold for St. Patrick's Day. But I didn't know how to incorporate a leprechaun, and that got me started down another path about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I started one in the Cities of Schley style, with the rainbow ending on an island with a chest of gold, but it was terrible. Scrapped that (but later went back to the concept) and ended up doing one in the more photorealistic Forest Trails style. The rainbow ends at a henge, landing on a green gemstone.

Then I did a tweak to it, having it end on a runestone instead:

Once I was happy with how the rainbow itself turned out, I was ready to revisit the project in the Mike Schley style......