I was going to hold off posting this until December, but I might use it to make Christmas cards, so decided I needed input sooner. (There may be other holiday maps coming, too -- a winter village celebrating yuletide, maybe even a Santa's Workshop?)

For this one, I designed a "Winter Solstice" scene using Spectrum Overland. I have attempted to do both daytime and nighttime versions. (This is the map I was seeking an image of the moon for.)

Here's the daytime version. I wanted to use the henge symbol (very solstice-y!) but at first paused because it's on a dirt background and there isn't a snowy version. Then I figured: maybe elven magic consecrates that area and protects it a bit from the weather, like Lothlórien and Rivendell. I added the tundra terrain below it, and the less snowy trees around it to show that the henge is a bit warmer than the rest. I love the ice fissure but maybe it's a little much? And I just noticed how large the hill between the mountains in the background and foreground are -- should I reduce those ones (or at least move them down a little)?

Anyway, I also tried to do a few nighttime variations. (For the night ones, I may change the border color to be black.)

Here's one with just stars, no moon. And it doesn't have lighting effects.

Here I've added a public domain image of the moon. Is it too realistic? Would the moon image in CA80 that Ricko recommended work better?

And here it is with nighttime lighting. (Since the symbols have built-in shadows, should I move the moon more to the left side?)

Reduced the Lightness Base from 75 to 58 for the HILL sheet and 62 for the HILL 2 sheet (but I'm not sure that a 4 point difference is visibly apparent to the human eye), and added some more dunes.

Here's what it looks like with those new sheet effects. I can add more dunes as well -- either a few big ones, or more smaller ones? Also, I may have attached the wrong FCW file before.

Working on the Sakherma Ruins, a ruined desert temple in the Mike Schley style. For reference, the ruins are at the edge of a mountain range (middle right) in the Eknapata Desert below.

The temple was built with a covered temple partially constructed into the hills, with a courtyard surrounded by walls but open to the sky. The bronze plates that made up the roof were stolen long ago by scavengers, so now what was the interior of the temple is also open to the sky (except for the portion beneath the hill).

Here's the above-ground portion. The other things in the desert are an obelisk, and the head of a once-gargantuan statue, both appearing on the parent map. The river is a small stream that feeds into the Eknapata River on the parent map.

I tried different approaches with the sand dunes. Some are a lighter shade of the sand, some are a partially-transparent darker shade. Let me know what you think.

I fabricated ruined walls by constructing them in three layers and then using the color key cutout to carve out bits of them. They're supposed to have a brown stone core with a lighter gray stone surface. (The Corinthian pillars come from CA49.)

Now for the inside. I tried to show elevation changes using the techniques that Ralf recently demonstrated in the Height Transitions demo. Most of it shows more gradual changes, using Edge Fade effects rather than the Glow effects that Ralf used. The passageway that spirals down to a level below (not yet mapped) used the Glow effect to show sharper transitions. And there are a few areas with higher elevation. One is a small "chamber" off of a narrow passageway -- there are even stairs in that passageway. The other is the wider passageway leading to the underwater lake. It slopes up and then back down to the water.

That blue line? That's supposed to be a wall of glass. I added a bevel and a transparency to it. Not sure it works, and I am very much open to suggestions for how to improve it.

Here's the FCW file if anyone wants to suggest different effects to improve the wall of glass, sand dunes, or anything else.

Still writing up the proper description but in the meantime, I figured I'd post what I think is the final version of the final map. More sewer encounters, including a giant spider, some rats (both giant and ordinary-sized), a gelatinous cube, and some hungry foliage. (Of course, a proper battlemap would use moveable tokens, but this is for flavor -- the creatures are on a layer that can be hidden.)

Oh, and a whole bunch of skeletons, and a few zombies -- an explanation for those empty crypts!