Here's a collage of all four seasons all together. (In retrospect, I should have widened the other borders to match Winter's.)

Revisiting my ancient town of Kukaar. Now that I'm working on a tiny sliver of the Atlas, I found a place where I would like to place this (once the parent maps are complete). However, my first just-for-fun map was just the wealthier northside district, but to put it in the Atlas, I really needed to map the entire city. I had to expand it southwards, but I didn't like how it looked as a vertical map, so I also expanded east to make it square. That forced me to also add some more residential neighborhoods in the northside, and I decided that a city this size would have a governing noble of some sort, so I also added a palace there.

Using two of Ralf's recent tutorials, Modern Journeys and Real-World Vector Data, I was finally able to create a condensed map of a 71-day vacation my parents took me and my twin on when we were 4 years old. (The images for the icon symbols are all public domain or CC-BY. Photo credits below.)

Like Ralf's Real-World Data tutorial, I had weird gaps in the middle of my map when I tried to convert the vector lines to land. Unlike Ralf, I didn't have the skills to be able to resolve it (despite watching the tutorial three times)...so I kludged a solution by drawing more land over the gaps. There was some other weirdness on the eastern side of the map that I didn't even have to worry about once I realized that I only had to show the part of the U.S. where we traveled.

Also, because I wasn't shading each state differently, I didn't have to trace the boundaries the way Ralf did. I simply moved the lines to a Border sheet and changed their properties to be the color and line thickness that I wanted.

I originally was going to source the photos from the U.S. National Park Service's website, where they have a database of images from their parks that are all in the public domain. (In the United States, all intellectual property published by the government is automatically in the public domain.) I was struggling to find images I liked, so instead I resorted to Wikimedia Commons. I made a point of only using photos that were either in the public domain or were published by a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Those licenses allow for commercial use, unlike the CC-BY-NC licenses (even though this isn't for commercial purposes), and allow for derivatives (unlike the CC-NY-ND "no derivatives" licenses). That allowed me to edit the images to be in sepia and cropped into circles. Instead of following Ralf's approach of making them sepia in the map, I used GIMP to desaturate them to sepia and then crop them to a circle which was then exported to a PNG (with the portions outside of the circle being transparent).

I added the photo credits to a Map Note and added a hotspot in the lower right corner to open up the note. Here are the photo credits (including some I wasn't able to use because of space considerations):

San Francisco, California - Dasturias, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Big Sur, California - Brian Lopez, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Los Padres National Forest - Damian Gadal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Disneyland - Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Chiricahua National Forest - Zereshk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Carlsbed Caverns - Eric Guinther, User:Marshman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

White Sands National Park - uncredited NPS employee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Petrified National Forest - AndrewKPepper, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Canyon - Tuxyso / Wikimedia Commons

Glen Canyon Dam @ Lake Powell - Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Mesa National Forest - National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

White River National Forest - JasonC photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Rushmore - Colin.faulkingham at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Teton National Forest - US Forest Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yellowstone National Forest - Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Glacier National Park - TaikiMcTaikiface, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Banff National Park - Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

Mt. Baker National Forest - Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Falls View, Olympic National Forest - Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Crater Lake, Oregon - DSparrow14, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Redwood National Park - m01229 from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Oops, I forgot to add a compass and scale.

Here is the top floor of the basement, above the crypts.

The outside is still shown because this floor is only partially underground. The front steps show that the first floor is elevated, allowing for the upper part of the basement walls to be above ground. This allows for windows to let in light. These windows are clear panes, not stained glass, and there are bars over the windows as well.

The spiral stairs in the base of the square towers end here, and do not descend to the crypts. Going up the passageway, the first room is used for small groups to study scriptures together. The next room is the Muniment Room, used for storing parish records: births, marriages, deaths, ordinations, and the like.

Continuing up: on the left, you'll find stairs ascending to the first floor, but no stairs going down. This area also has a small, windowless chamber behind two sets of metal doors. In between the doors, a sigil is engraved in brass on the floor -- perhaps a magical ward or other protection. The chamber has a rune-inscribed reliquary.

On the right side is the morgue, for preparing the dead. There are two sets of stairs here, one leading up to the area outside of the side chapel above, and the other leading down -- the only access to the crypts.

Continuing up, there's a ramp leading to a metal door providing access to the graveyard. This is the only door to the outside from this level; the basement is normally accessed through internal stairs from the first floor,

At the far end, beneath the altar above, is a chamber used for honored decedents to rest in state before funeral and internment.

Only one floor left: the crypts!

Half of my co-workers (scattered around the U.S. and the world) are either snowed-in or have temporarily left their homes for safer weather conditions. Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, it's a not unpleasant 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14.4 C).

But cold weather is on my mind, and it inspired me to create ruins with the Ice Cave annual. This is the ruins of a dwarven temple that has been overcome by the weather, perhaps magically conjured. (Elsa, are you there?) All of the entrance staircases have been snowed-in. Although the rest of the temple remains snow-free, the walls have turned to ice, and icy frost creeps along the floor from the edges of the walls. Even the geothermal baths in the southeast corner have turned to ice.

(I originally had the entrance to those baths coming from the east, but the cutout ended up looking distractingly like a copyright symbol.)

The ten sarcophagi in the crypts have their lids pushed aside, and their contents are empty. Not so coincidentally, there are also ten skeletons in the antechamber of the Great Tomb -- perhaps rising to defend the remains of whomever lies in rest there?

On the northern side, a break in a wall leads to icy caverns and a cluster of large crystals, swirling with magic. Perhaps the source of this icy disturbance?

First pass of the outdoor areas of the Forest Hags' lair, the Withering Glade. The premise is that elves once used it as a shrine, but the hags drove them out, poisoning the Great Tree in the center of the glade.

I've been experimenting with using the Forest Trails cliff symbols back to back to make ridges. One other thing I tried, inspired by something I saw Ricko do: instead of using the grass and dirt fills with the grass and dirt patches symbols to make the edges more raggedy, I only used the dirt and grass patches. There are also two sets of all of the tree sheets (including tree parts for stumps and tree shadows), so that some could be beneath cliffs and others above. I thought I would need multiple sheets for the cliffs to show ascending elevation, but I didn't. Had to keep reminding myself that it's all an optical illusion. Amazing how things you can trick the eye, especially when, like the cliffs in Forest Trails, you draw in the shadows instead of relying on sheet effects.

Zooming in, here's one of the three caves used by the coven of hags as bedrooms.

Here's a zoom in on the henge (which operates as a teleportation circle). The gray tree at the cliff base in an Animated Tree. It was a dryad's tree, but the dryad was turned into one of the hags, corrupting her tree. You might notice some vines growing out of the cliff wall near the tree. They are animated, grasping at the hags' captives and serving as organic shackles. This is the only one above ground but there are more within the caves.

Oh, and in the southeast corner, a trio of harpies have set up a nest.

Because I always have at least three mapping projects going on at once, I decided to work on the interior of my Wizard's Tower while I work through experimenting with three different approaches for cliff shadows for the Hei Shan Si monastery.

I decided to start with the third floor, because that's where the main entrance is. Here, visitors can ring a bell at an outer gate to be admitted into an entry foyer, which has a wardrobe for storing cloaks and such, as well as access to a water closet (complete with a wash basin with water pumped up through an interior well). From there, guests can wait in a waiting room (complete with fireplace) until the wizard is ready to receive them in a more comfortable

Arrow slits allow the wizard or other defenders to guard the tower. The arrow slit that is immediately counterclockwise to the entrance is about waist-high to people on the stairs. The next two counterclockwise would be above anyone on the stairs; the others clockwise would be below the stairs as they continue to ascend. Plenty of magical torches keep the interior bright. In D&D terms, they have been enchanted with a Continual Flame spell that produces a smokeless, heatless flame forever, or until dismissed. (Sure, you have to spend 50 gp in spell components for each, but you'll never have to replace them.) In addition to the exterior stairs, an interior spiral staircase provides interior access to both levels two and four.

This uses Creepy Crypts as the base, with extensive use of Beaumaris Castle assets (plus vegetation from Japanese Temple and furnishings from DD3. And a few tidbits from Forest Trail.

I have been working on a "small" wizard's tower that uses CA186/188 Creepy Crypts as the base (to facilitate doing the below-ground portions later) with heavy use of the fills and symbols from CA149 Beaumaris Castle.

I put "small" in quotes because it was intended to be the small one, but has been the victim of scope creep. I was working on a much larger wizard's tower that was the center of a much larger fortification, but put it on pause to do this one as a proof of concept. My "small" tower ended up being 80 feet in diameter with at least six stories in the main structure and at least two more stories rising above that. (There are also plans for at least three basement levels, including the sewers.)

I wanted to do a tower where the stairs wind around the outside, like the Sage Tower from Mike Schley's Overland symbols:

Given the diameter I picked, the steps ended up going about three-quarters around. It has 146 steps. Since each step has a rise of 7.5 inches, the steps reach a height off the ground of 1,095 inches, or 91.25 feet. And as you can see, the exterior steps don't go all the way to the top of the tower.

Here is the exterior view and the grounds, which includes a house for servants and/or guests, a barn, an outhouse, an exotic garden, and a fruit orchard. The tower is on a rocky outcrop on a bluff overlooking a river.

Per the discussion in this Tree Shadows thread, I drew in tree shadows for each tree so that a battlemap could be made hiding the trees but still showing the shadows of where they are, so that players could battle beneath the canopy. Here it is with the trees hidden but their trunks and shadows still shown:

(Just noticed that the house disappeared. Must have been on the "Vegetation - Trees" layer. Fixed!

Onwards to the interior!

After doing a dark elf farming village and a wood elf forest treehouse village, how could I resist revisiting my sea elf outpost and using it as inspiration for a sea elf village?

This is Eilân Danaäd, a harbor and village in a rocky reef area north of an island off the coast of Dóriant. The village includes both dry ground structures on the harbor side as well as below-water residences on the other side. The sea elves created the harbor as an opportunity to trade with sailors from the Dóriant mainland, as well as sailors traveling to Dóriant. The elves sell or trade deep sea fish and marine vegetation that would be difficult or impossible for surface-dwellers to get to. They also provide ship repair services for ships damaged at sea, and help sailors navigate through the rocky reefs.

The harbor consists of a horse-shoe shaped tiered great wall, with a great tower in the center and two somewhat shorter outer towers. Each tower has a landing pad on top to accommodate aerial visitors who ride pegasi, griffons, or other flying mounts.

The Great Tower in the center extends all the way down to the sea bed. It contains the villages government, and has plenty of space both below and above the surface of the water for the sea elves to hunker down during the strongest storms. (The sea elves wouldn't drown in the storms, but they could be blown miles out to sea.)

The harbor includes an inn for sailors eager for a bit of dry land and a bed that doesn't rock. It also includes a tavern, where sea elves can imbibe with visiting sailors. (Drinking alcohol -- or any other liquids -- isn't possible below the waves, though in their marine environment, the sea elves do imbibe with hallucinogenic fungi, fermented sea cucumbers, and other intoxicants.)

There is no natural source of fresh water at the harbor, so the elves have created several cisterns to capture rainwater. Sprinkles of rain occur nearly daily, and storms (usually mild) occur frequently throughout the year.

Both the towers and the wall are in two tiers, with the lower tier rising about 50 feet above sea level and the upper tier another 30 feet above that. The wall provides protection for the above-ground part of the village for all but the strongest of storms.

Below the waves, most of the village residents live in private homes topped by either a hexagonal or octagonal turret. Each residence is either one, two, or three stories high, not including the turret. (Note the shadows of different lengths.) The entrance to each residence is through a doorway at the turrets. There's no need to swim all the way down to the seabed to disturb the coral gardens surrounding each residence, as the entrances are at the top.

The one-story residences are basically studio cottages, with sleeping and living spaces all at one level. The taller residences will have a common area off of the turret's entrance, with bedrooms in the levels below.

None of the residences have cooking facilities. Dining at home requires food that can be eaten raw, or previously-cooked food that can be served cold. Instead, cooking is done at common cooking spaces (#3), where residents bring food on long skewers to cook over geothermal sea vents. The cooked food can then be brought back home, or can be brought to one of the dining commons (#4) for a picnic.

The sea elves do have a few marine agricultural gardens. Each of these has a pillar in the middle, where gardeners can activate an enchantment that helps keep pests away. The enchantment creates the illusion of a shark swimming around the area. The illusory shark radiates a low-grade Fear spell. Elves are immune to the spell, and it's low grade enough that most intelligent creatures only experience a mild feeling of foreboding at best. But for fish and other low-intelligent sea creatures, the spell triggers a flight reflex, which helps the elves keep their crops from being nibbled away by marine pests and predators.

Farther away from the harbor, I created a few examples of the rocks and reefs. I tried a different approach to creating them. Instead of using polygons with a sharp bevel, I instead used several polygons with a "Shaded Polygon (Angled by Edge") effect, each with different angled slops. Let me know if you think I pulled it off.

Some sort of tentacled sea creature has taken up home near one of the reefs. The sea elves can help sailors navigate around it to avoid a Scylla v. Charybdis catastrophe.