Thank you, dagorhir and Jim :)

I think a lot of the sweetness of the style was contributed by the water, so I've put an RGB Matrix Process on the default blue water and turned it considerably more murky. I've also started work on the tiled houses of the set.

Well I finished the trees for this first part. I decided they weren't dark enough and a bit too cheerily yellowish. Some of them were also not very well defined so I tweaked the brushes I was using and here they are now.

Working on the trees today with my new Affinity brushes. These new brushes I've got are also how I managed to draw the fire. No promises yet, but I am very much hoping to generate some kind of water flow symbol with them as well.

Well, I've made a start with the textures, which at this point are mostly grass - 6 shades, including burnt. There are a few natural symbols so far, including the first fire, and a tiny prototype building in 4 states - new, aged, derelict and ruined.

Hi Mika :)

There is no right or wrong way to do a thing in CC3. Only variations on a theme.

For my suggestion I have started with a standard DD3 template for this map (using one of the dirt bitmaps as the background), and prepared it by adding 10 new sheets. 9 of those sheets are STEP sheets, and one is a SCREEN sheet. This last sheet is designed to hide things that fall outside the area of the map. Some styles have it, but some don't. My copy of the DD3 template doesn't.

I didn't use the FLOORS sheet at all, but drew the mass of the rock directly onto the FLOORS MASK sheet using the freehand drawing tool. I modified the sheet effects to make the edge more prominent by adding a Bevel, Lighted, and strengthening the glow that was already there.

Each of the 9 steps is a simple white polygon drawn with the freehand drawing tool, such that it covers the entire extent of the level it represents and extends under the edge of the FLOORS MASK. Here is one of the step shapes with effects adjusted to show it's extent.

The freehand drawing tool doesn't create a polygon all by itself. You have to draw the outline a bit like you would on a piece of paper with a pencil, and then use Path to polygon from the right click menu of the Fractalize tool to convert it.

As you can see from the screen shot above, I have used 2 different techniques on the 2 sets of steps. Rather than carry on describing these effects and adding loads more to this description, I have attached the FCW file below, so that you can see how the Blend modes are set up. There is one important trick that is very useful to know, however, and that is if you set a Blend mode to 'Multiply' all the white is taken out of the fill. If the fill is solid white (as it is with these steps), then all you are left with is the line and the shadow showing on the top set.

I used Multiply as the Blend Mode on that top set of steps because the highlight effect on the other steps became extra concentrated where the edges were closer together.

Here is the FCW file for you to have a look at. If there is anything you don't understand just shout. Or you may decide to do it a different way.