I am so glad you asked, because you know I've been keeping lists! You can check out some of my ideas in this thread, but here's a recap of some highlights:

Interior

• Thrones - Ornate metal and stone; "elven" (wooden with art nouveau flourishes); "evil" (skulls, spikes, etc.)
• Regalia - Crowns; scepters; orbs
• Couches - Both "regular" and Roman-style (I think SS4 only has chairs that I make extra wide for couches)
• Mage/Sage Furnishings - Globes, astrolabes
• Ornate Staircases - Maybe modular so you can construct your own (left, right, and center for bottom, middle, and top, in stone and wood, with and without varicolor carpeting)
• Musical Instruments - Upright and on their side (lutes, harps, harpsichords, drums)
• Ancient Tombs - Think Indiana Jones-style stuff, like idols

Exterior

• Gardens - Varicolor flowers, rose bushes, berry bushes, exotic/carnivorous plants
• Tiltyard - Quintain, pell, horse armor
• Topiary - Bushes trimmed to form the shape of animals and mythical creatures
• Statues - Riding and standing free. Royalty plus archetypical character types (sword fighters, archers, mages)

Building Construction

• Flagpoles - Upright and on their side, separate from flags for flexibility
• Flags - Varicolor top-down and on their side
• Gargoyles and Grotesques
• Clocktower - Clock hands on side of building; bells for belltower
• Spires
• Façade Ornamentation - I don't know the proper term, but here are some pics I took to illustrate

I wanted to share and get feedback on the third of three monasteries that @Ricko and I have been collaborating on. This is the only one where I have also mapped interior parts of the monastery.

For context, here is the description that Ricko wrote:

Situated in a hidden valley where the morning mist never quite dissipates, Zhao Guang Si (Temple of the Morning Glow) is a place where deceptive beauty hides a dark core. Despite its poetic name, the temple is synonymous with silent death and lethal precision. Here, under the first rays of dawn, apprentices learn the art of killing. The morning glow symbolizes the last moment many see before their silent and ordered death.

The Dark Environment

The temple, with its angular and austere architecture, is surrounded by twisted trees and a river of dark waters that flows silently like clotted blood. The black stone walls are decorated with murals depicting stories of betrayal, revenge and glory gained by force. The only constant sound is the echo of calculated footsteps in the cold corridors. Lanterns covered with red veils create a blood-red glow, making the environment even more somber and oppressive. Life and Training

Those who come to Zhao Guang Si are desperate, rejected, or ambitious, seeking a new identity. Under the watchful eye of their masters, known as the Shadows of Dawn, the apprentices undergo intense and cruel training.

• Physical Training: They climb cliffs without ropes, traverse fields filled with deadly traps, and duel to exhaustion, all to strengthen their bodies and reflexes.

• Mental Training: They are taught to hide emotions, manipulate the minds of their targets, and plan assassinations with surgical precision.

• Practice of Forbidden Magic: The temple houses ancient grimoires containing magics that grant temporary invisibility, silencing voices, and even cursing the senses. These spells demand sacrifices, often blood, making the price of power high.

The Bond with the Emperor

Although few would admit it, rumors persist that the temple has deep ties to the imperial throne. Men of the Emperor’s Personal Guard, known for their lethality and unquestioning loyalty, are said to have received secret training at Zhao Guang Si. Some claim that the emperor himself is the temple’s greatest patron, using its resources to eliminate rivals and consolidate power.

Legends and Intrigues

The temple is shrouded in dark tales:

• The Ritual of the Scarlet Mist: It is said that an assassin can sacrifice his soul to merge with the shadows, becoming invincible for a night. But few return from this ritual unharmed.

• The Echo of the Morning Glow: Legend has it that those who hear a whisper at dawn are marked for death by a blade that will emerge from the temple.

• The Faceless Master: A mysterious leader who never reveals his identity rules the temple. Some say he is an ancient spirit who has ruled the place for centuries.

A Haven of Questionable Morality

Zhao Guang Si is not just a temple; it is a training ground, a storehouse of forbidden knowledge, and a center for the trade of death. Those who enter rarely leave, but for those who survive the rigorous training, life outside the shadows becomes irrelevant.

In the dim light of dawn, under the treacherous glow of morning, Zhao Guang Si molds assassins, manipulates destinies, and remains a dark pillar in the region's balance of power.

And here is the exterior:

I will post the interior maps as follow-up comments in this thread.

Okay, here are the rest of the upper stories of the chape.

Floor 3

On Floor 3, we’re now on the flat part of the chapel’s roof. The pitched metal roof (shown earlier in this thread) is removed to reveal the short walls with stained glass windows to allow extra light to enter the nave and the transepts. We’re looking down at the floor of the transepts one story below, and the floor of the nave two stories below. 

The square towers flanking the entrance to the chapel are connected by a five-foot wide passageway, with a great stained-glass window looking out and clear-paned windows looking down into the balcony entrance chamber of the second floor. The spiral stairs in these towers continue up, and there are metal doors that lead to the crenellated roof.

The round towers also have metal doors providing access to the rooftop. These rooms have a cabinet and chests with bows, arrows, and other munitions in the hopefully unlikely event that the chapel needs to be defended. The spiral staircases continue up.

Floor 4

On Floor 4, we’re now inside the towers looking down at the roof of the chapel. In the square towers, the spiral staircases end here even though the towers continue up another story. There are metal doors providing access to a parapet that is one story above the rest of the roof. Both towers have metal rungs in the wall that allow for climbing to the upper parts of the tower for maintenance. The right tower has a rope dangling from a bell at the top of the tower.

The round towers over the transept have clear glass windows, but I can change that to stained glass if that makes more sense for visual continuity looking at the chapel. In both towers, the spiral staircases end here but there are metal rungs leading up to the top story. The right tower is used for storage. The left tower is supposedly used for storage but actually is a private sanctum for the head priest. 

Floor 5

Here's the rest of the fifth floor. Let's start with the belltower in the lower right. This isn't another story or floor of the tower but rather is the top part of a two-story chamber. There are metal rungs affixed to the wall allowing for climbing up to a narrow ledge for maintenance and repairs (but not for ringing the bell – there’s a rope that dangles down to the floor for that). The window opens here do not have panes in order to avoid muffling the bell’s sound. 

Dundjinni Archives has top-down bells, but they're a little too photorealistic for this style. I ended up using the bell from Marine Dungeons. It's on its side, but we can pretend it's being rung.

The tower on the left mirrors that, but without the bell. Its windows also don’t have panes, for symmetrical views from the outside. It also has rungs leading up to a maintenance ledge.

The circular tower on the right over the transept is, like the room below it, used for storage. There’s a trap door over the rungs going down. The windows have clear glass panes instead of stained glass.

The left circular tower has a secret chapel or shrine. It, too, has a trap door. If the Royal Chapel is meant to worship an entire pantheon of gods, this shrine may be for a particular god. Or if the Chapel is for a single god, this shrine could honor a revered saint or archangel associated with that god. It’s meant to be private, used only by the head priest and favored clergy. An ornate chest (which is a sarcophagus from the Ancient Tombs annual) could be a reliquary or used to hold vestments. 

Here's a closer look atthat hidden shrine:

I first joined the forums a year ago after months of watching YouTube tutorials (and years of owning the software but too intimidated to learn it). Map-making has become a soothing respite for me. The process taps into both my analytical side (figuring out all of the techniques to make things work) and my creative side (creating a work of art from a blank canvass). Thank you all for being such an important part of my year.

Apropos of Ralf's tutorial today (go "like" and subscribe!), I wanted to share my own holiday maps I designed for cards. You can see more in my galleries.

My first attempt was a country inn celebrating the Yuletide.

But I have found that for friends and family who aren't used to role-playing games or fantasy books with maps, some find the top-down maps to be a little confusing. I decided to go with a more isometric route using Spectrum Overland. This is the one I ended up putting on my cards. I call it "The Toy-Maker's North Pole Workshop."

(A friend commented that the castle is snowflake-shaped, which hadn't occurred to me. Love it!)

And for a more pagan solstice vibe, I also did this henge in a snowy forest. The henge radiates a magical purple glow.

Thank you, everyone, for your kindness and support this last year. I am very happy to have found this community.

Tweaked the second basement level. The edge fade effects that I had added to the mountain for the interior rooms (similar the effects Sue created for Creepy Crypts) had a weird effect on the cliffside steps, so I added a "Mountain Mask" layer below it to have a sharper edge to the cliff steps area.

Here's how it's progressed so far today. (Still not wed to the name.) Still need to do more in the middle area that I am mentally calling the Midwest, even if it's just adding some hills with tiny rivers coming out of them. Trying to figure out where to place my existing maps and the future ones I'm planning.

I redid the two northern forests to add rivers, a road, and a few smaller settlements...and a henge of stones. That northernmost forest will be an elven community that is outside of the kingdom. (This style doesn't have a political borders tool, does it? I may have to create one, or just rely on labeling.) There's a tepui at the northern edge of the second forest. I haven't decided what will go on top of it. Maybe a castle? Maybe a temple with an oracle, like the Oracle of Delphi?

Here's a closer look at the desert. You can see where I plan to place my ziggurat. The obelisk to the south is apparently all that remains of an ancient temple that was long-ago swallowed up by the sands.

Added some cliffs near the coast. The whirlpool on the western side is about where my Octopus' Garden will go. The upper island, as I said before, will be a playground for the rich and famous, like a Monte Carlo.

And I made a little swampy river delta with a settlement akin to New Orleans that I envision being rife with smugglers and ne'er-do-wells.

In the southern mountains, which is outside of the kingdom's borders, there's a dwarven fortress. You can't see it, but you can see the pair of towers (towards the southeast corner of the map) that guard the mountain pass leading up to the fortress.

Let me know if you have thoughts, feedback, or ideas for more adventure hooks to add.

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.

This cold weather here (which is not so cold for most of you -- it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15.6 Celsius, in San Francisco today) keeps inspiring me to do winter-themed maps. This one is my first use of the Ice Caverns dungeons from the CA189 annual from 2022.

In my campaign world, one of the human religions I've created is the Áes Camáir, a religion that is loosely inspired by Celtic mythology. The primary gods are the five "Children of Dawn" and their offspring. One of those five is Déine ap Gáeth, the goddess of winter and storms. (I realized some time after creating her that I was subconsciously recreating Elsa from Frozen.)

This temple and attached monastery is in an arctic environment, with part of the temple built above-ground and part below, which allowed me to also use some structures from Winter Village. The icy crevasse comes from Spectrum Overlands.

Here are the above and below maps, with description to follow.

For Forest Trail, I had to bring in the cottage from Darklands City, and the bones/debris from DD3. I struggled with two things: the riverbed and the ripples around trees growing in the water. For the ripples, I used the rapids symbols that come with the annual. For the riverbed, I tried three different versions.

Here are all three together:

The first version uses the riverbed fill from the annual. It doesn't look particularly swampy to me, though.

The second version uses a mud fill from the Forest Trail annual:

The third version uses a mud from Creepy Crypts:

I like the mud from the second two, but I'm not sure it's clear that the trees are growing out of muddy water and not just mud. Maybe if I added more waves, or played with the water effects?

These are the sewers for Elmsbrook, a town in the human kingdom of Powys in my campaign world. They’re intended to be fairly representative on the sewer systems in my kingdom – smaller villages might have a simpler system, but larger cities will have the same basic layout, but with more extensive canals.

I was hoping to get this done the same month that Sinister Sewers was released, and I barely did it. I still have work to do, and advice to collect, but thought I would post where this stands.

By the way, Sue: it worked putting everything for each level on its own layer, making it easy to display or hide different levels as needed.

In addition to using the symbols and fills from Sinister Sewers, this also uses a few things from Marine Dungeons (particularly the stairs and the bell at the bottom of the pit), and a few things from Forest Trails (leaves, the trees along the beach, and maybe some of the fills) and Creepy Crypts. Also: Sue spent a lot of time helping me come up with a technique to show clear water, but it really worked best close-up. At this scale, it made it look like black water. I ended up using a water fill from Creepy Crypts, but on its own water sheet with a 50% transparency effect added.

In my campaign world, fastidious elves have long understood at a high level the correlation between hygiene, sanitation, and the spread of diseases. (Even if they don’t have the tools to study microbiology and virology, they can study commonalities in infected populations to identify vectors of disease.) Dwarves first developed aqueducts and sewer technology. And it is said that orcs pioneered the use of flesh-eating oozes for waste management.

Oozes are amorphous creatures with an intelligence no greater than an ordinary garden slug, flowing through subterranean lairs to devour any creature or object they can dissolve while shunning things that provoke their flight reflex, like bright lights and extreme temperatures. I have made a few tweaks to oozes in my campaign world to make them better suited for deploying in sewers. I added immunity to poison and diseases. I also added a weakness: sunlight hypersensitivity where, like vampires, they can be damaged by exposure to sunlight. (This is why they avoid bright lights: a bright lantern won’t harm them, but it still triggers their flight reflex.) Sunlight can kill an ooze, causing their acids to neutralize and their bodily remains to collapse into a nutrient-rich goo that farmers often use to fertilize their crops.

Some items of note about specific oozes used in sanitation systems. Gelatinous Cubes can dissolve nonmagical soft tissue and vegetation, leaving behind undissolved bones, metal, glass, stone, and magical items of any sort, along with excess water stripped of anything edible. They cannot climb but can move up slopes with a grade of 25 degrees or less. Moving up a slope with a grade of 10 degrees or more requires the Cube to expel any indigestible materials or excess water. Black Puddings are far more dangerous. In addition to dissolving soft tissue and vegetation, they can also dissolve nonmagical bones, metal, but cannot dissolve glass, stone, or magical items. They can also climb any surface, even upside down. Sanitation workers employ bright lights to keep Black Puddings from escaping (and an ample food supply keeps them from seeking to escape). And finally, I created a new ooze called a Voracious Sullage. It’s a slow-moving, weaker version of the Gelatinous Cube, unable to maintain a cubic shape. It tends to stretch itself across small waterways so that anything edible flows to it (and anything it can’t eat gets expelled on the other side).

Here's a quick summary of how the sanitation system works. More specifics for each level of the sewer system will follow in the comments.

Surface (not shown): Storm drains at the intersections of major streets, with a manhole cover at one of the corners than allows maintenance workers to descend using rungs. There is also a large Waste Management Facility where residents can dispose of large objects that cannot be repaired or repurposed (such as items that cannot be chopped up for kindling). Maintenance workers throw these items into a giant pit nicknamed the Great Maw that is about 140 feet in diameter. The surface of this pit is in a building that is covered at night but open to the sky during the day. Bright luminescent crystals are placed near the mouth of the pit to frighten away the Black Pudding at the bottom of the pit.

Level 1: This level is immediately below the surface. Storm drains at major intersections deposit rainwater (along with other debris) here, where they run off to chutes that bring wastewater to Level 2.

Level 2: Wastewater from Level 1 is deposited here, where it helps push through human waste from outhouses and latrines that are connected to the sewer system. This sewage flows through chutes down to Level 3.

Level 3: Waste brought in from Levels 1 and 2 are treated here in two great chambers called Auditoriums. Numerous Gelatinous Cubes gobble up the waste, leaving behind items they cannot digest, and now-clean water stripped of contaminants. This purified water drops through chutes to Level 4.

Level 4: Primarily a passthrough level, and the lowest level that maintenance workers normally go.

Level 5: A Black Pudding lives at the base on the Great Maw, devouring any waste thrown into the pit. It can eat nonmagical flesh, vegetation, and metal, but cannot digest stone, glass, or magical objects of any sort. Water purified in Level 3 descends to this level, where some passes directly to the sea and the rest is used to flush out anything the Black Pudding cannot digest.

More details for each level in the comments.