When I was coming up with "spooky season" mapping ideas, I was debating between a haunted house or a witch's lair in a swamp. Why not both?

That required experimenting with some different styles to try to create a swamp. (Let this serve as another plug for a jungle/swamp annual compatible with annuals like Creepy Crypts, Forest Trail, and Marine Dungeons.)

I wasn't sure which way to go...so I ended up doing three versions. One is in the Mike Schley Dungeon (SS4) style, the second used Forest Trails as the basis, and the third used Marine Dungeons (though the second two had to borrow a bit from DD3 and other styles).

I don't know a lot about swamps, but the images I've seen show a lot of trees both on dry land and in the water. In all three versions, I made it so that the tree tops could be hidden, both to create a battlemap version and also to show that some of the trees were growing out of the water and not just from patches of solid land.

Here are all three side by side, and then in the comments I will show each one in more detail.

It's really great. I particularly like how you did the fence posts and railing. I can't think of anything I'd change or add.

And here's the third and fourth levels of the church. The main part of the church is covered by a dome, but it's all open air from the balconies up. The only portions with stairs going higher than the second floor balconies are the two towers on the southern side.

Level three of the towers has a light source shining through the windows, like mini-lighthouses. I like the look of the brazier on the right, but it didn't quite make sense unless it was on the top floor (where I put bells). Even if it were something like the DND Continual Flame spell, where the magical fire emits light but not heat or smoke, it still doesn't make sense if it engulfs the inner wall of a stairwell that is continuing up. So I did an alternate version on the left side using luminescent crystals.

And then there are great bells on the fourth floor of the towers, which come from Dundjinni Archives.

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.

Top story of the tower. On to the wine cellar (and the rest of the basement).

I used to work for a community-written search directory. Never underestimate the power of intangible psychological rewards! They work on me. 😉

I met Anne McCaffrey some years ago and she urged those in attendance to compile and keep a list of names which we could draw upon whenever we needed one. That practice has stuck with me all these years later, and I have lists of thousands of names I can use.

That's what I do, too. Unusual last names are good fodder for fantasy realm names of people or geographic places, though I sometimes tweak the spelling. I keep a notepad list on my phone that jot down names as I encounter them. Every so often, I paste the list into Excel where I can make notations when I use a name.

Thank you for the tip -- I will check out Fandom.com. I actually started my own wiki about my world of Adnati on my WordPress-powered website. I use a plugin called Yadawiki for the wiki functionality. The Religion section is the most developed, followed by Geoscience. (History so far covers ancient history but not so much "modern" history.) I have tons more plotted out in MS Word docs that have not yet made it onto the wiki, much of which would have to be kept private until players learn those elements of the world.

Now that I am finally starting to learn CC3+ and FT+ (after owning the software for about six years but being too intimidated to learn it), I can finally start doing some mapping. (I decided about six months ago to start watching the tutorials and surprise, surprise, learned so much more than I did on my own with the PDF manuals.)

I don't actually have any players at the moment. Just having fun worldbuilding. But I have a fully fleshed out concept of how the players will meet, the circumstances that get them into a group and kick-off the story, and the major elements (and end goal) of their campaign arc.

Moat is a water fill from Vol 13 but you could substitute any water fill you want.

Well, I was going to make a twist of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") phrased more like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"):

A secret grand design is indistinguishable from stupidity.

The truth is...just a clumsy attempt to recreate from a much bigger parent map that was itself derived from a much, much bigger parent map.

This is the parent map I took it from (Gongodûr is in the lower right):

And this is the section parent map that this whole 1,000 x 1,000 mile section comes from:

When I downloaded the FCW for the parent map, it said there were green mountains there, which I took to mean vegetation-covered hills and small mountains.

So no real grand design, just an over-exuberance in trying to add more detail from the parent map and slip in some mapping/adventure hooks.