I am ready to submit the FCW for the Eknapata Desert for the Atlas, knowing that it won't be processed until after the contest ends (though it is a parent map for a village I am submitting to the contest).

Here is the FCW, along with a PDF Description and a plain text file (with accents replaced with standard ASCII characters).

Tyr Alomere Township

Tyr Alomere Township

Population: 1,259

Nestled in the foothills of Mt. Alomere, the sleepy village of Alomere was primarily notable for being a local lord’s vacation villa. Generations ago, it grew to become a prosperous, bustling town when the powerful wizard Marius built a mighty tower there for his retirement.

The wizard, now known as Marius of Alomere, quickly developed a prosperous business. Adventurers flocked to his tower to seek his counsel about their quests, and to purchase scrolls and potions that Marius and his apprentices created. The adventurers then returned after their quests to have curses removed and magical items identified.

Tyr Alomere Tower was later inherited by Marius’ daughter, a powerful wizard in her own right. She bypassed her own children to leave the tower to her most powerful apprentice, and thus began the tradition of keeping the tower in the hands of a mage. 

The town grew to support the influx of visitors, with local retailers well-stocked in the supplies that many adventurers need.

1. Tyr Alomere Tower: The tower is the present home of Madeleine Eyraux, a mighty enchantress, and her husband. The grounds include a cottage where the staff live, and a barn where visitors can stable their mounts.

2. Villa Citri: The vacation villa for the Earls of Westford, Villa Citri is currently occupied by Lady Amfiri Prelcort, Dowager Countess of Westford, widow of the seventh Earl of Westford and mother of the eighth. The villa is known for its orchards of orange trees and its vineyards of wine grapes. 

3. Town Hall: Virtually all government functions operate from the Town Hall, including registering businesses, paying taxes, and registering records of births, weddings, and deaths. Two courtrooms are also in the Town Hall, with one generally dedicated to criminal proceedings and the other for civil lawsuits.

4. Market Square: Local farmers and traveling merchants set up carts and stalls in the Market Square three days a week. 

5. Merry Sprite’s Tavern: The tavern does a bustling business every night of the week, catering to travelers and locals alike. On many nights, minstrels and bards passing through may be found performing for a few extra coins.

6. Draper/Mercer: Customers can buy bolts of fabric as well as items of clothing here.

7. General Store: In addition to selling foodstuff, the store is unusually well stocked for the typical items needed by adventurers, including torches, lamp oil, and simple tools. 

8. Butcher/Fishmonger: In addition to selling fresh meat, jerked meat preserved with salt is available for sale to adventurers.

9. Apothecary: Herbalism and medicine kits are available here, as well as basic ingredients for simple potions. For more exotic ingredients, adventurers will probably have to find a larger city or perhaps go on a quest to find them. The apothecary may have simple, common potions for sale, but the availability is erratic based on what they have been able to purchase from adventurers passing through.

10. Tailor: For the mending and sale of clothing.

11. Cobbler: For the mending and sale of shoes and boots.

12. Jeweler: The jeweler buys and sells both jewelry and individual gemstones. A town this size normally would not be able to sustain a business of this nature, but the wizard’s presence has brought in a lot of travelers with loot to sell, as well as spellcasters who need specialty items for their more complex rituals.

13. Bakery: For the sale of fresh bread, pastries, cakes, and pies.

14. Scrivener: This is another business that is unexpected in a town of this size. In addition to being able to transcribe and notarize documents, the clerks who work here can sell parchment, ink, and books with blank pages suitable for use as a spellbook.

15. Blacksmith: Like most village blacksmiths, the smiths here spend a fair amount of time making horseshoes and making and repairing farm tools. Although they tend not to make arms and armor, they are trained in repairing them. From time to time, they may have armaments for sale that have been purchased from adventurers who have upgraded their equipment.

16. Kotaran Monastery: The Kotaran faith is as much a philosophy as it is a religion. Followers believe that there is strength and power when the universe is balanced, and that that most things in nature are symmetrical for a reason. Kotaran Monasteries are famous for providing support for travelers. Its knights help keep the roads safe from bandits, its priests tend to the injured and sick, and its temples serve as moneylenders and banks in many communities. Adventurers will be able to exchange exotic coins here, and may be able to deposit their excess gold for safekeeping.

17. The Golden Griffon Inn: The inn does a brisk business catering to travelers who seek an audience with the mage. Like at the Merry Sprite’s Tavern, traveling minstrels and bards will often be found performing here in the evenings.

18. Guildhouse: The various merchant guilds share this space for their meetings.

19. Community Baths: Free restrooms and bathing facilities are available for all as a means of controlling the spread of diseases. For those willing to spend a little coin, more luxurious bathing options are available.

20. Public School: The school provides basic reading, writing, and arithmetic instruction for the children of the town and nearby farms. Some will also attend classes at one of the local temples for religious instruction.

21. Tanner: Leathergoods are made, mended, and sold here.

22. Watermill: Locals will bring their own grain here to grind for a small fee, or may purchase ground grain from the miller.

23. Theosi Temple: This Greco-Roman style temple is for the worship of the eight greater gods and twelve lesser gods of the Theosi faith. As with the Kotaran Monastery, the temple has a small medical facility to tend to the injured and the sick,

24. Áes Camáir Temple: For the worship of the five primary gods, the Children of Dawn, and their descendants. Like the Kotaran and Theosi temples, the church has a small medical facility.

25. Town Watch & Jail: The town watch is headquartered here. A basic jail is used to hold prisoners awaiting trial in the courthouse. Those sentenced to longer incarcerations are generally transported to a bigger city to serve their sentence.  

26. Summit Stairs: This tower is home to a spiral staircase that allows ascent to the top of the cliffs, and to the observatory housed there.

27. Observatory: Scholars visit from far and wide for the opportunity to study the heavens through the observatory’s rare and valuable lens.

28. Waste Management: The town’s complex sewer systems converge here, where a giant pit allows for the disposal of other forms of rubbish. Captured gelatinous cubes and black puddings are used to dispose of the town’s waste. 

I went back to my previous save -- the last version before starting on the trees -- so that I could replace the trees individually to ensure exact placement. Having the coniferous and deciduous trees on separate sheets made it easier so that I could focus on the firs and the barren trees separately. (Another tips: make sure all of your original trees are on the Vegetation layer and then freeze the other layers -- before I did that, it was way too easy to accidentally grab other things unintentionally.)

Also (not sure if I mentioned this before), I used the effects from one of the Winter Trail sample maps on the white text. I think it makes them stand out nicely. One of the other samples used red text, which made for a nice contrast but felt a little jarring for this map. But I could do a dark blue like the legend if folks think that's better.

In fairness, it's an awfully long manual. It's great for reference, but I struggled when I tried to learn the software with just the manual. For me, the video tutorials were very helpful.

One of the things I struggled with, and this may be the same for you, was understanding how layers and sheets differ, and how layers differ from the other art design and desktop publishing software I was more experienced with.

In CC3, layers help with organizing similar things so that you can hide, reveal, or freeze them, but they have no impact on the order in which things are shown. You'll notice that the layers are all listed alphabetically because the order they appear in the list doesn't affect anything.

Sheets have the big impact here. The software renders things in order they appear on the list. In this screenshot, the BACKGROUND would render, then BACKGROUND HILL, then OUTSIDE SHADOW, etc.

This allows you to control in how your symbols and drawn polygons sort, so that your floor will always be below your furniture, for example.

The Move to Front command only affects things on the same sheet (regardless of layer). If you have two symbols on the SYMBOLS LOW sheet, then the Move to Front command could force that symbol to be on top of the other one. Both symbols, however, will be above any other symbols on the SYMBOLS FLAT sheet (because the SYMBOLS FLAT sheet would render first, and then the SYMBOLS LOW). And both symbols would be below the regular SYMBOLS sheet, because it will render after the SYMBOLS LOW sheet.

Screen captures are always helpful, but I hope this gets you on the right track.

Yes! If it comes with a searchable transcript with timestamps. 😉

And here are some of the Mike Schley style:

Oh no! Calamity! In the immortal words of Nancy Sinatra:

You keep playin' where you shouldn't be playin'

And you keep thinking that you'll never get burnt, ha!

Looks like someone's been messin' where the shouldn't have been a messin'.

And it gave me an opportunity to use not only the evil and broken thrones, but also some of Mike's other symbols from this year that I haven't had a chance to use yet.

I'm ready to submit this intermediate map for the Kingdom of Enía, along the northern edge of the coast for the parent map above. This map will be the parent (or possibly grandparent) for a few villages I will be submitting to the contest.

Primary Style: Mike Schley Overland

Toggles: BORDERS/POLITICAL to show/hide political borders

Here is the FCW along with a PDF of the description:

Should I do a plain text file that strips out the accent marks? Here's the text of the description (with accent marks):

The elven kingdom of Enía is the northernmost coastal kingdom in the Gold Coast region of Dórian. The human Kingdoms of Vacuria and Travi lie to the south and east, respectively. Enía is significantly smaller in both population and geographic size than its neighboring kingdoms. The kingdom’s borders are marked by the Enía River along its southern border, and the Firessí River and edge of the Firessí Woods along its eastern border.

Enía is governed by a hereditary monarch who is advised by two political bodies: the Council of Adept Mages, and the People’s Assembly. The Council of Adepts consists of those archmages and adept mages able to cast the most powerful spells. The People’s Assembly includes a hundred citizens elected throughout the realm.

Major points of interest include:

Arynnor: The capital of Enía, called the “city of glass.” Here, elves pioneered glassblowing techniques both for ornamentation and practical purposes. This includes a technique to make glass nearly as strong as steel, which has allowed the elves to safely cover their towers with brightly colored glass domes.

Sather Academy: To the north of Arynnor, Sather Academy is an institution of higher learning with academic classes of all sorts, from history to astronomy, poetry to accounting, but it is most famous for two things: its Bardic Colleges, and its Arcane Academy for the formalized study of wizardry and arcane lore.

Lynelon: The coastal city on the northern bank of the Enía River, Lynelon is a bit smaller than the Vacurian city of the same name on the southern bank.

Firessí Woods: Much of the realm is covered by a mighty forest, the Firessí Woods. The woods are home to numerous tiny elven hamlets along with a few notable features. Towards the southern edges of the Firessí Forest lies an ancient henge of standing stones, the Firessí Temple, erected to honor the elven gods. It is the holiest place in all of Enía, and the seat of power for the Archdruid of Firessí, the most powerful religious figure in the kingdom. A small village, Yréas Kôltyn, provides a home for the elves who tend to the temple and provides accommodations for the temple’s many pilgrims. To the northwest of the temple lies the Tampuwari Ruins, the haunted ruins of a people so ancient, they disappeared long before the elves moved to the area. The ruins are best to be avoided. Farther to the north, Lathalas Glen is a town built up around a monastery of the same name.

Taenya Island: The small island is home to a few small villages and hamlets of wood elves Just to the north of the island among rocky reefs, Eilân Danaäd is a harbor village of sea elves with homes both above and below the waves.

I changed the two labels to near-white for settlements and near-black for geographical names. (Let me know if you think I should reverse that, with dark names for settlements and light ones for geography.) Playing with text-along-a-curve for some mountain ranges and rivers, and moved some to the side to make them easier to read. (For a few of them, I had to explode the text and ungroup temporarily to adjust the kerning.) Made some effects changes to the political borders but I need to redraw them to reflect the river changes. Oh, and I embiggened the compass and moved it. It also has an inner glow to make it stand out a little.

May not have more time today to work on this -- about to head out to a family function for the day. Hoping to finish it this weekend.

Still working on this. Text is slightly larger, and the glow is as well. Added more names, though I still have a few more rivers and settlements to do. Should I be naming the roads, too?

I am think about putting country names, settlement names, and geographic names each on a separate layer so that end users can toggle them on and off as desired. They're already on separate sheets, though, so maybe that's sufficient for toggling individually, and a single layer for all of them to toggle all names on/off simultaneously?