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:

Very cool!

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).

Added a few final touches (a friend was confused about the seaweed washed up on the beach, so I added a little more floating in the sea, and a few other minor tweaks here and there. Not really sure what that line cutting off the light in the nighttime version is from.

Here's the "final" (is anything ever really final?) version of the daytime and nighttime full maps. More details maps in my galleries.