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.

After my village of Per-Nezahd grew too large and is rightfully now a town, I went back to the drawing board and created a new village in the same Desert Oasis style. This one is significantly smaller.

[Note: this is in an area of the Atlas that has not yet been developed. I have parent maps almost ready to submit, and will start a thread later this weekend to submit them. Just finishing up the descriptions for them.]

There are 22 buildings that are either fully residential or mixed-use business/residential. I assumed an average population of 5.2 residents per residence, giving me a population of 114. Does that sound about right? I also spread things out a little more than you would in a walled city or town, but maybe I should spread things out even more?

I used varicolor bushes of different sizes to create crops. I don't know much about desert oases form, but I thought maybe a hill would be needed. I added a darker terrain below the hill to distinguish it from the smaller patches of hills scattered around, which were meant to be sand dunes.

I was going to use a ziggurat from SS5 as the temple, but the temple symbols in this annual were too irresistible to pass over. In the end, the only symbols I used outside of this annual were two broken columns in the ruins from CA49. For a village like this, it didn't seem necessary to label much in the village itself, just the temple and the taverna. I don't think a village of this size could support too much specialization, though there are market stalls available for the use of trade caravans that pass through. I also figured that this village was too small to afford to construct a wall (though maybe I should add a tower or two?).

In the lower right on a bit of an outcrop, I set some ruins of an ancient temple and city. Near the road that reaches the ruins, I placed a cart and scattered boxes and barrels to suggest that maybe an archeological dig is underway? Adventure hooks: maybe the archeologists have disturbed an ancient malevolence that should have remained untouched? Or maybe, Indiana Jones-style, the adventurers need to race to find an ancient artifact before the opposition finds it.

For the title, I used the default font for this annual, but it was too hard to read for other place names, so I used Papyrus for those labels. Is it okay to use a different font for the title? Should I switch the title to Papyrus? I didn't use the scale bar, as pretty as it is, because it says "miles" on it and this map is only 500 x 400 feet. (Although...if I ungroup it, maybe I can delete the "miles" text? I will have to try that.)

Any advice or feedback?

I was worried that my temple wasn't looking as cohesive because I was drawing fills and symbols from so many places that didn't quite mesh. In particular, I wasn't happy with how the trees looked. (I also added a gazebo at the top and a botanical garden at the bottom.)

In the end, I decided to try the grass fills and trees from Forest Trail. Here they are without contour patches of other grass shades, at 50 and 100 scale.

And then I tried adding patches of grass of the same fill style, but with a shade higher and lower. I really don't have an eye for this sort of thing. Should I have bigger patches? More numerous small ones. Should they blend in more?

For the botanical garden, I couldn't find flowers among my symbols except for potted plants. It was supposed to be simple so as to not distract from the temple, but I got carried away.

• I made rose bushes by taking bushes from one style and then placing small varicolored bushes from another style on top as roses.
• I made flowers by using weeds from Forest Trail as the stems and then adding varicolored shrubs from another style as the flowers.
• I added a fungi garden using varicolored mushrooms of different sizes (plus a few varicolored fairy ring mushrooms from Forest Trail)
• I was going to use the anemones from Marine Dungeons as a plant, and then thought...why not use them as anemones? So I made a man-made pond for them, plus coral and a few other marine symbols.
• And I added a carnivorous plant. The only one I could find was from the Mike Schley Overland, which is in a very different style. If anyone has recommendations for other carnivorous plants, please let me know.
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Did another approach using Ricko's techniques. (Thank you!) Tried it where the waterline ended before the hills, so they had the sharper edges and edge effects. Then I redrew the water so the edges were under the hills. I rather like the softer effect of the water line. Thought about using the swamp trees but decided to stick with the palms (and a few conifers near the rocky peaks).

I am going to use this thread to officially submit my maps for the Gold Coast region of Doriant. I will have separate Work-in-Progress threads for feedback on maps as I am working on them, and then will use this thread for the official submissions so they are easy for Remy to find. I know Remy isn't processing new submissions until the contest ends, but this will queue up my future submissions for later this fall or winter, and it also provides a home for some of the villages I want to submit for the contest.

The first submission is ready! It's a 1000 x 1000 mile section on the western side of Doriant.

Here's a markup of the parent map to put it in context (the blue border represents the area I'm calling the Gold Coast.

And here is the Gold Coast with all labels but without political borders shown:

Here is the FCW file, along with a PDF description and a plain text description. (I stripped out accents and special characters in the plain text file.)

Primary Style: Annual Spectrum Overland

Toggles: "Borders (Political)" sheet to turn display or hide the political borders within the region.

@Monsen, please let me know if I've messed up and need to fix anything, or if you'd prefer submissions to be handled in any other way. I have lots of other local area maps within this region that will be ready to submit soon.

Playing around with the Satellite Streets annual this afternoon. I was going to do the little town I grew up in, but it had 3,000 people at the time (about 10,000 now) and was a bit too big to be a cozy little town. I ended up doing a town loosely inspired by a much smaller unincorporated town that that about 15 miles away.

Pretty pleased with how the highway onramps/offramps worked. I had an underpass at one point (by creating a "Roads Back" sheet) that worked pretty well, but couldn't really get it to fit with everything else without enlarging the size of map, so I abandoned that.

There are supposed to be hills on either side of the river, with the river in a deep canyon, but drawing the town on the hills wasn't quite to my taste.

I did have a little weirdness with the railroad tracks. They looked funny when I first drew them, and I discovered that I didn't have the Earth background fill that it used, so I was getting red X's. I checked the Bitmaps folder for this annual and it did have the earth fill, so I reimported all of the fills for this annual and got it to work.

Also discovered that while it works to draw a forest or woods over the mountains, you lose some of the beveling detail. I ended up redrawing the forests and woods in little patches.

I made a few tweaks. Changed most of the effluent to brown except for the portions from the vents (aka storm drains) that's meant to be rainwater. Added a few bunches of leaves from Forest Trail to those ones. Added some bridges for maintenance workers to use to cross canals. Left a bit of green coming from one of the canals -- a mystery for adventurers to solve? I should probably add some slime....

Okay, I made some tweaks. The Alae (#16) have been moved up to be more central in the Peristylium courtyard. Now they are going to be strictly for honoring the household's ancestors, because next to the Exhedra (#19) I have added two shrines to honor the gods, the Lararia (#20, or singularly, Lararium). It's amazing what you can learn from Google if you just ask the right questions. I thought I can gotten down the rooms for Roman villas, but when I asked Google whether Roman villas had chapels, it told me about these shrines to gods. Plus, that gave me another excuse to use the brass inlays that I love so much. (Added some inlaid shells next to the pool in the bathhouse, too.)

Also added a shaft (#22) for hot air from the basement hypocaust to reach the top floor. Across the hall, there's a shaft (puteus) for water to be piped up into a little room with a tap for the water (puteal) -- that came from Googling "what did ancient Romans call a 'well'?"

Still have to add windows and doors, and furniture. Wish we had some Roman couch symbols!

I've been toying with the idea of creating a subterranean dwarven city, and to test some approaches, I decided to revisit my village of Arbor Hollow to map our floorplans of some of the dwarven homes. When it's ready, I will submit it for the Atlas in a separate thread.

This set up maps will be limited to DD3 plus two annuals: Volume 15 from 2021 (primarily Darklands City and Marine Dungeons) and Volume 16 from 2022 (Creepy Crypts and Forest Trail). It's built on a Creepy Crypts foundation with extra fills and symbols from the others.

Open to naming suggestions instead of "Dwarven Townhouses."

Arbor Hollow was designed for the village maps as part of the 1,000 Map Contest. I did Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring versions of the map -- all are in the Atlas but only summer was submitted for the contest. It's a village at the outskirts of a dwarven kingdom. I thought the village would have a mix of dwarves and humans living there. You'll notice in the map below that there are towers embedded in the rocky hillside. My thought was that these are the entrances to dwarven homes carved inside the mountain.

This will be six towers marked in the section in yellow of this map:

I thought these would be like townhouses, where each home has a private entrance, and each home has interior stairs to get to the upper levels of the home, but it's like a condominium complex with common areas behind the homes.

Here's a first pass at the ground floor level. I have not put in doors or furniture yet, so this is just the general layout of ground floor rooms.

Of the six towers in this map, five lead to private homes but the sixth -- third from the left -- opens to a passageway leading to the communal areas in the back (allowing for other villagers to use those facilities). On this floor, those facilities include two wells, a chamber with three geothermally-heated pools, a room that will have a cold-plunge pool, and dry and steam saunas. The common area also has a great staircase heading up, which will lead to other community features like a botanical fungi garden.

Each private home uses slightly different tilework to make it easier to visually see them separately. The ground floors will have rooms like dining rooms and kitchens. Each home also has an internal staircase that will lead to bedrooms on upper floors. And of course, each home has a back door leading to the common areas of the complex.

Very nice.

Ralf shows another approach in this Height Transitions video as well