I'm still practicing and experimenting with different maps of all sorts. Just for fun, I thought I would take a stab at designing a castle on a cloud. (Maybe it's a cloud giant's castle? Undecided.)

I started with an overland map set at 250 x 200, I believe. (Maybe I will do a city map of it later for a closer look, or perhaps a dungeon map.) I decided to use Mike Schley's Overland style. To create the clouds, I used various foams, rapids, and waterfall mist from Sue's Forest Trail set. It's hard to see until you move in, but there's a little bit of texture to the cloud added by the foaming rapids. I put them on a new sheet that I called "Clouds," placing it below the Roads sheet, which was the lowest of all of the surface-level sheets. I tried to put a drop shadow on the Clouds sheet but couldn't get it to work (entirely possible that some or all of my cloud ended up on the wrong sheet). Instead, I drew inspiration from the manual cliffs shadows that Sue had in Forest Trails. I used the Sea Contours to draw a shadow, and then moved the "Contours (Sea)" sheet to render before the cloud.

The castle, with its extra towers, was added to a "Symbols on Cloud" sheet that I created. I also had a Flying Lowest and Flying Low sheet above the Cloud sheet, and Flying and Flying Highest sheets below it. I thought the four different flying sheets would allow me to show things at different altitudes with different drop shadows, but I ended up only using one of them for the birds (maybe Giant Eagles or Giant Hawks?), which from the cartouches from Forest Trails.

Anyway, there's my first pass at something I haven't see here before.

This is lovely. Which annual are these from? I did a Google search and it suggested Volume 6 (2012), but that might have been something else he did.

Rats! Every sewer has rats (unless gelatinous cubes sweep through them). Those of us with Creepy Crypts can use the rats from that, but you may want to consider adding those symbols for customers who don’t also have that one.

We've been thinking of colors for sewers that are used for their traditional use. But if we start to think of the reasons why a necromancer might need a sewer-type system beneath their lair, or a demon lord, or an archfey, or even dwarves creating subterranean aqueduct, then all sorts of colors make sense: bright water, glowing green goo, rivers of blood, lava...the possibilities are endless.

I posted my comment above prematurely! I was the person on FB who asked if Gelatinous Cubes would be included, so now I'm really sold on this. I'd love to be able to include skeletons, bones, or other metal rubbish in the cubes, but I suspect that could be done by putting the debris on another layer with a semi-transparency effect.