Here are the first two levels of the basement. Sewers still to come.

Basement 1

A wine cellar in the northeast corner is conveniently close to the stairs, so that the wizard or their staff can slip down for a few more bottles in the middle of a dinner party. Continuing clockwise, the other rooms are a freezer, a larder, a storeroom, and in the northwestern corner, a refuse pit is used to throw organic, wooden, and metal waste for disposal in the sewers.

Basement 2

The second level of the basement doesn't appear to have much. A corridor heading west leads to stairs that descend into the sewers. To the south, a cavernous chamber has been turned into the wizard's grotto. River water has been pumped in to make a man-made pond, heated to a pleasantly cool temperature by a few warm luminescent crystals. A second, larger pool is warmed by enough luminescent crystals to keep the water as warm as a hot bath. The room is lighted by clusters of luminescent fungi. On the western side, a spacious WC also doubles as a changing room.

But wait, there's more! This floor also has two secret passageways. One near the stairs leads to the Wizard's secret treasury chambers. The outer chamber is used for coins, gemstones, and other valuables. The second chamber, accessed through a short corridor protected by a Glyph of Warding holds the Wizard's magical treasurers. In addition to being about 30 feet underground and carved into the rocky hillside, the treasury is protected by marble walls that are five feet thick. Between these walls and the rocky cliff is another foot-wide wall of lead to protect the room against scrying eyes.

Another secret passageway north of the stairs leading to the sewers leads to a cavern, through which a secret Teleportation Portal can be accessed. The southwest corner has been sealed by a Wall of Steel, protected by another Glyph of Warding. If you get past that, the passageway quickly dead-ends into a pile of rubble.

The Wall of Steel and the rubble can be hidden using the RUBBLE layer:

FCWs

And here are the FCW files for these levels. (Remy, this is not the official thread for submitting to the Atlas. I will create a new thread with these maps properly labeled and described, plus a village map to come.)

Hi Reddog! Welcome.

I'm pretty new here myself — though I’ve owned the software for many years, it’s only been about six months since I realized I couldn’t learn it simply by experimenting. The tutorials really, really helped me.

I’ll let others with more experience guide you, but my two cents: it sounds like Dungeon Designer will best achieve what you want. The name implies old-school D&D dungeons and caverns, but it's really great for any type of inside or outside floorplan (a house, a temple, some crypts, a section of a forest road where bandits are lurking to attack). If you want something that you can use figures on, whether to print out to use with miniatures or to use on screen with a virtual table top, Dungeon Designer will probably suit you best.

As for tutorials, which is how I learned: the new ones are great but I would start with some of the older ones to get the basics down. On the Video Tutorials page, you'll find a really well organized list. I started with Joe Sweeney's, which did a great job starting with the basics. They are old, and some tips have been superseded by software advancements. (For example, Joe made a point in the older videos of talking about placing symbols from the back and moving forward, but now there's a "Sort Symbols on Map" function that makes that advice no longer necessary.) But they really helped me get the concepts down.

The Learning CC3+ videos will give you a good grounding in the basic tools. I would then proceed to the Quickies section. With the Campaign Cartographer Concepts and Blog Videos, I would recommend going to specific ones once you've got the basics down and have a specific question about a technique or tool.

The Live videos are really great, but each one covers lots of different techniques, and many of the newer ones assume some basic knowledge, so I wouldn't start with them. Once you've gotten the basics down, you might want to look at the names to see if there are some tackling stuff similar to what you're doing. For example, if you're designing a dungeon, "Creating dungeon with the Jon Roberts style" and "Livemapping: Dungeon & Cave" would be useful. I've gone through almost the entire archives of Live videos and I learn something from every single one, but you'll want to have the basics down first.

Here's a bit more. More to come, especially fleshing out the empty spots within the village walls. Plus labeling, of course.

Made some changes. Scaled the starfield background per Ralf's tip. Moved the asteroid belt to the Inner System where it could be showed off more dramatically. Added a comet zone in the Remote System, using comets from CA80 HighSpace Star Systems. Changed the glow on the wormhole to a light blue so it would pop more. Decided to add some intrastellar jumpgates (like man-made wormholes) within the solar system, and for those I used Singularity symbols from CA80. And since I was already dipping into that annual anyway, I decided to swap out the planet symbol for the Jupiter-like planet Lythí and replace it with a planet symbol with rings from CA80.

And not that we had any reason to think Winter Trail/Winter Village would be different, but just for fun, here's a sliver of an alpine village.

Here is Winter so far. Still tons to do, but I've managed to get everything on their correct sheets, I think, and the imported sheets in the correct order. Converted the rivers to the iced-over versions. I will add breaks and cracks from Winter Trails later to the Spruce River and the lower part of Whispering Pines River, and then frost to the upper part of Whispering Pines River. Converted the paved roads to the default winter roads, and the dirt ones to the winter muddy roads. (You'll notice that one path at the ruins in #11 hasn't been converted yet. When I start to bring in style features from Winter Trails, I will make that into a path or maybe footsteps. Converted the crops to snow-covered counterparts. But the biggest changes are yet to come: swapping out the building, tree, and other symbols for their winter counterparts. I will have to look at the sample maps with the annual to get ideas for how to better display the label numbers.

That makes sense about making sure the major things are captured on the map, while being able to add smaller ones on the local area maps. And naming the features as well. I will have to come up with some names that aren't subconsciously lifting from literature. (Can't tell you how many times over the years I've thought, "Oh, Imladris is a good name for my elven kingdom -- no, wait!") I keep a running list on my phone of potential NPC character names. Some of those names may be suitable for place names instead (especially since so many place names are named after people.)

Here's the map as it stands with more hills in the "midwest" area, more rivers and settlements, roads and a few major bridges. (My thought is that except if I name where a road crossing a river something like "Blah Blah Blah Ford," there's a bridge there, but I added a few bridges that are meant to be unusually grand ones.)

Let me know if you spot anything weird or geographically improbable, or if there's anything missing. I also need to double check the Atlas maps to the north of the area I claimed to make sure there aren't features like hills or rivers that extend past the southern edges of those maps.

I've been working on a larger dungeon map, but to take a little break, I decided to do an adventure map, a griffon's nest. I wanted it to be sort of isometric using an overland style, and ended up choosing a style I haven't worked with much before: Darkland Overland. I struggled with the nest and ended up turning to SS6, Mike Schley's isometric city style, using some varicolor hedges and hay bales (with some SS4 dragon eggs thrown in).

I may try it again in another style. Maybe Spectrum Overland? Or maybe a zoomed-in encounter map, but that will probably come after I finish the dungeon map I'm currently working on.

I decided I didn't want to redo the entire tower, so I did some stairs ascending around it from the courtyard as a proof of concept. I do like the idea of stairs winding around a tower. Wonder if I can make it go around multiple times? I have some thoughts on how to do that, but I will save them for another map.

In the meantime, here's how it turned out:

(It's subtle, but beneath the railing there are railing posts, which you can't really see but they cast a subtle shadow.)

Anyway, I'm rushing out the door, but I will make any tweaks when I return and then re-export the maps that show the tower.

In the recent Bird's Eye Overland development discussion thread, @HelenAA suggested of a set of castle symbols that could be fitted together to form different kinds of castles. I like that idea -- it's like the top-down version of the 3D symbols from the CA149 Beaumaris Castle annual.

Since the subject has been broached, I thought it might be a good opportunity to piggy-back on it and share a list I've been keeping of a "wish list" for a future Castle Construction annual.

The scope of this might require a two-part annual: one for the exterior structure and grounds, and another for the interior.

Anyway, here are my musings...

Fills

1. Metals (gold, silver, polished copper, tarnished copper, steel)

a. One set has the light reflection on it, like the Brass Inlay fill from Marine Dungeons 

b. Another set that’s just a plain fill without the light reflection (better for creating roofs, roof ridges, railings, etc.)

2. Flower beds (flower fills that can work with flower symbols like how the heather fill and heather symbols work together in Forest Trail)

Exterior

Castle Grounds

1. Rocky cliff symbols with compatible fills (kind of like the outcrop rocks in Darklands City) – good for building a castle on a hilltop, bluff, or mountainside

2. Hill symbols (good for perching the motte on with a motte-and-bailey style castle)

3. Heroic statues (male and female)

a. Statue of royal/noble figures

b. Statue of a knight on a rearing horse

c. Statues of major D&D player character classes (male and female):

i. Fighter with melee weapons

ii. Mage with a staff or wand

iii. Cleric/priest/holy person

iv. Rogue type (hooded & cloaked person)

v. Archer

vi. Bard/musician

d. Pedestals separate from statues so you can mix and match base and statue

4. Topiary – Bushes/shrubs trimmed into shapes of animals and mythological creatures

5. Flowers 

6. Flower bitmap fills (like how the Forest Trail heather fill and heather symbols work together)

7. Fountains

8. Equipment for a tiltyard (where jousts were held or knights are trained)

a. Quintain – shield or board on a pole (sometimes a mannequin) that would spin around the pole when struck by a jouster. Often a sandbag would be attached to the other end of the pole that would swing around and strike the jouster if they weren’t nimble enough.

b. Pell – A post or other target using for practicing sword strikes

c. Suspended ring – Hung from a string from an extended pole that jousters would attempt to put their lance through as they rode by. The string was weak enough to break if the jouster succeeded in snagging the ring.

Structure

1. Connecting walls-with-built-in-crenellations tool (or, alternatively, walls tool with separate crenellation symbols that can be dropped on it like in Marine Dungeons)

2. Turrets with different kinds of tiles, from Disney fairy-tale perfect to decrepit ruins

3. Fills with the same tile options as the turrets

4. Multiple drawbridge options (raised, lowered, broken…)

5. Flagpoles

6. Flags (varicolor) that can be “attached” to flagpoles

7. Spires

8. Elven latticed domes (like Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s LOTR)

9. Vines that can be added to the sides/tops of walls/roofs

10. Gargoyles and grotesques

11. Machicolations (“murder holes” on defensive walls)

12. Siege equipment

13. Architectural “frills” (like the tops of art deco arches or other decorations on the sides of buildings)

Interior

1. Magenta (or varicolor) cutouts for windows, doorways, arrow slits

2. Thrones (different options: ornate, shabby, “evil,” different materials (gold, stone, wood, ice, skulls), etc.

3. Ornate staircases (like for grand ballrooms)

a. Maybe modular staircase pieces, with symbols that can work together (but not as connecting symbols) to create different styles (winding down, fanning out at the bottom, branching at the top, etc.)

b. Different styles: marble, wood, etc.

c. With and without varicolor carpet runners down center

4. Musical instrument symbols

a. Upright and laying down

b. Harps, lutes, pan pipes, drums…

c. Pipe organs

5. Carpet symbols and/or fills

6. Varicolor vector symbol outlines of animals, mythical creatures, heraldic weapons, magical glyphs, runes, zodiac symbols, etc. to be used as floor inlays, “embroidering” on carpets/flags/table runners, etc.

7. Bells (large single bells for bell towers, and a row of glockenspiel bells)

8. Clock hands (above view, for clock towers)

9. Interior architectural frills – curlicues as engraved or embossed patterns on stonework?