I love, love, love Mike Schley's new throne symbols! Had to design a little throne room to show them off.

Most of my time was spent on the grand staircase on the western side. There were several possible approaches to getting it to flare out, and also have a carpet runner. Not sure if the approach I took (with heavy use of the Color Key cutout effect) was the best, but it works.

When the King is receiving petitioners, the room is mostly empty of furniture, as courtiers and petitioners are expected to stand. The king is flanked by two smaller thrones for his Queen and Heir Apparent. The Lord Chamberlain and Minister of Protocol are seated on the northern side of the dais, with the Lord Chancellor on the south side near a desk for the Royal Scribe to transcribe proceedings and draft writs and edicts as needed.

Another throne on a small dais is on the south side. This is called the Sedd Peryglus or Siege Perilous. In Arthurian legends, the Siege Perilous was a seat at King Arthur's Round Table that was left vacant for the knight destined to recover the Holy Grail. Here, it is enchanted with a permanent Zone of Truth spell that prevents anyone seated on it from knowingly lying. It is rarely used, for to be asked to sit there is tantamount to being declared a dishonorable oath breaker: swearing an oath to tell the truth should be sufficient for anyone of honor.

In the evening, tables will be brought in for a great feast. But alas! A great calamity is about to befell the kingdom.

A few quick sequel maps to come...

Here's a first pass at the first floor of the main villa. There's more work to be done (like windows, and maybe furniture), but in the meantime, I wanted to solicit feedback on what types of rooms I'm missing. As this is a fantasy world, I'm absolutely fine blurring the lines on what would be strictly Roman, and mixing in things that would be more medieval or fantasy.

Also, bear in mind that this is just the ground floor. The basement will include a larder, wine cellar, and access to the sewers. The upper floors will have bedroom suites overlooking the courtyard. I plan to have a library on the upper floor of the baths next door.

Here's the description for the numbered labels:

1. Fortification Walls (not shown here)
2. Gatehouse (not shown here)
3. Portico - Covered porch
4. Vestibulum - entry to Atrium
5. Atrium - The central hall, where guests were greeted and the family's household gods were honored. It has an open roof (compluvium) and a rainwater pool (impluvium)
6. Impluvium - Shallow pool that collects rainwater which is then carried by pipes to the kitchen
7. Triclinium - The dining room where guests reclined on couches to eat
8. Tablinum - The office or study of the head of the household, often located between the atrium and peristyle. The floorplans I've seen always show it without doors, so the head of the household can keep an eye on things, but I have chosen to add an enclosed office next to it.
9. Culina - The kitchen
10. Cellarium - The pantry.
11. Lavatrina - Lavatories
12. Horreum - Storage rooms
13. Cubiculum - Bedrooms. I have a lot on this floor, but since the upper floors are intended to be mostly bedrooms, I am very much open to converting some to other uses if you can think of things I should add.
14. Scalae Graecae - Staircases going to second floor. (The term "scalae" referred to a staircase that was open on one side; "scalae graecae" referred staircases with walls on both sides.) You may not be able to see it, but an archway under the stairs going up is meant to lead to stairs going down to the basement.
15. Andron - In ancient Greece, this room was a room for men only, with couches arranged in a U-shape. By Roman times, it could also mean a room that was a passway between sections of the villa. (Open to changing this name if my sources are bogus.) In this villa, it provides access between the atrium, the peristylium, and the colonnade so that folks don't have to pass through the tablinum when it's in use.
16. Alae - My sources about what this is are all over the place. As far as I can tell, they were once used as chambers with windows to allow daylight to the rest of the villa, but this became less important once the compluvium was added to allow light from the sky. They later became used as storage rooms, or as rooms to honor the ancestors. I've decided to go with the "honor the gods and ancestors" meaning.
17. Peristylium - An open-air courtyard, often a garden, located at the back of the house. 
18. Piscina - Originally a fishing pond, the term later evolved to also refer to man-made pools and fountains.
19. Exhedra - Semicircular or semi-open space or room, often found in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, used for conversation and seating. I am going to put in a semicircular bench here, and maybe a cozy brazier. Nice place to sit and chat overlooking the courtyard on those warm summer evenings.
20. Colonnade - Unwalled, covered walkway lined with columns that leads to the bathhouse.
21. Posticum - I forgot to label this one, but it's the read/side exit.

What am I missing? What would you want to see in the main floor of a wealthy noble's country estate?

Okay, I think this may be done. Added a few more icons and place names.

Here's a zoom of the Republic itself, without the portions from the continents of Zraig Wessex or Lenoch.

And here's a zoom of my swamp:

Another scene using Spectrum Overlands, this time a desert community. Not sure if I should have stuck with one shade for the dunes?

On Ralf's 2025 Ancient Realms Revisited tutorial this morning, there was discussion about using the Color Key rivers tool (where a magenta river is placed on the LAND sheet, cutting through the land to reveal the sea below). It was mentioned that the terrain sheets have to go over the land, and that means that you have to draw terrain around the rivers or using the regular rivers fill instead of the cutout.

I tried to do an experiment. On the left, I drew blue rivers over a swampy terrain. Not bad, but you do have to connect it properly to the coast for it to look right. But then on the right, I tried a different approach. I used the Color Key Cutout rivers on the land. Then I drew a swamp over it. Then I added the COLOR KEY effect to the LAND FEATURES (SWAMP) sheet (moving it to be the first effect), and then copied my magenta rivers to that sheet as well.

Both work well but I really like how the river pops in the swamp on the right. Quenten's CC4 wishlist idea in the chat of allowing color cutouts to cut through multiple sheets is a great idea, but in the meantime, copying the cutout to multiple sheets seems to work well.

Okay, I think this is set before starting on the interiors. For the daytime version, I removed the stained glass window reflections and the fog. For the nighttime version, I copied in the walkways, fountain, benches, statues, ivy (on the northern side of the northern wall), and flower box that I had added to the daytime version of the church plaza.

Daytime

Nighttime

I’ve been working on a temple inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, and while I think I’ve made some decisions in areas where I was vacillating, I’m open to feedback.

The temple is for a fictional religion in my campaign that shares elements from Ancient Greece and Rome (in architecture and in how the gods are depicted, like their attire). This temple is therefore not intended to be historically accurate: it intentionally mixes elements that were unique to Greek temples with those unique to Roman temples, and it intentionally deviates from both in certain ways.

I got to learn some new techniques as part of this. I used the Marine Dungeon from the 2021 Annual in large part because they include my favorite pillars, an essential part of a Greco-Roman temple. I used the color key effect for the first time in an actual dungeon (love the bronze inlay symbols). I made an effective use of layers for the first time, combining all of the roof elements from different sheets onto a single “roof” layer (called the “pediment”), which allows me to show or hide the entire roof by hiding or revealing a single layer – basic stuff, but it’s the first time I really paid attention to layers effectively. I also created my own custom symbols for the first time (for reflections from mosaics on the walls illuminated with luminescent crystals used by dwarves in my world to light their subterranean homes). And I played with lighting effects for the first time.

Both Greek and Roman temples used the temple’s pillars provide the ratio for the size of the temple. The space between pillars was always double the diameter of the pillars (except that the middle pillars might have an extra gap between them, sufficient to let two people walk through them side by side). The height of the pillars was ten times the diameter. (In my temple, the pillars are five feet wide, so there’s a ten-foot gap between each and each are 50 feet high.) There were always an even number of pillars in the front, from four to twelve, and the number of columns on the sides was based on the number in front. The Greek formula was double the number in front plus one, while the Roman formula was twice the number of pillars on the front minus one. (For the eight pillars in front of mine, the Greeks would have 17 on the side and the Romans would have 15.)

Greek temples were set on a series of three steps called stylobates, which surrounded the temple on all four sides. The Romans instead had the temple sit on a raised platform called a podium, with an impressive staircase entrance in the front (like the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building).

I intentionally mixed and matched Greek and Roman features to suit my fancy. I put the three stylobate steps at the base but extended it far in front of the temple to create a plaza area where temple priests in my fictitious religion could ritually sacrifice a wild auroch or boar so that the gods could feast on the aromas before the remains were used to feed the poor. I put then put my temple on a large, marble podium, but then used the Greek formula for the number of columns. (I used marble a lot -- are there any styles with granite fills?) I also used double rows columns because it looked cool, though I have no idea whether I used them in a “proper” Greek or Roman manner.

I also created a fountain or reflecting pool in the plaza, mostly so that I could play with the fun water effects (like the ripples at the fountain walls and the pedestals in the fountain with statues of the gods of the sea). That also gave me a chance to use the submerged bronze inlay effect. The inner wall with ripples had ripples on the outside of the wall, too. I wasn’t sure how to handle that, but I ended up adding an outer wall without ripples as a lower step, and that seems to have worked.

And I created three “barbecue” pits that temple clerics would use for their rituals.

The enclosed building of the temple is called a “cella,” from which we get the word “cell” used for where monks sleep (and later prison cells, and eventually the biological term for plant and animal cells). I added a door to the back room to allow priests to go back there without having to circle to the temple’s back entrance. And I added stairs going down to not-yet-designed crypts, which will include a tunnel connecting the crypts to the basement of the rectory, the building in the lower right. (If there’s a more appropriate Greek or Roman term for a rectory, please advise.)

The niches inside the cella are not historically accurate, to my knowledge. The Greeks and Romans both had rectangular rooms. They niches aren’t meant to be stained glass windows. They have mosaics on the walls that reflect light because they use luminescent crystals that naturally glow.

Here are some areas where I experimented with different approaches:

The Pediment, or Roof

Originally, I wasn’t going to show the roof, but I realized that players might not realize that the portions within the pillars were all under a roof, even the parts not enclosed by walls. So I added a shadow over the portion that would be under the roof, an effect inspired by the trees of the Forest Trail (where you can hide the trees but still show the stumps and the trees’ shadows, so players can know when they are under a tree or hiding behind it).

But then I decided I wanted to be able to show the temple roof, like when I recreate this for a full city. I experimented with different techniques for the roof’s material, and for allowing one side to be a little shadowed.

In one version, I used two different shades of stone from the CA161 Rycroft Town template to show the shadowed side. In the other version, and this is the version I’m leaning towards, I used the stone roofing tiles from CA177 Darklands City template on both sides of the roof, but then placed a black rectangle with a transparency effect (20% opacity) over the shadowed side.

Question: Do you prefer one roof over the other?

Offering Pits

For the sacrificial offering pits, I used a molten lava fill as the base, and then piled on some burnt wood from CA177 Darklands City. That template had some great flames, too. (Originally, the only flames I could think of were Mike Schley’s, which are great but in a very different style.)

The offerings come from the free Bogies Redthorn Tavern symbols, which are great but maybe a little too realistic?

Question: Are the flames too much? Are there other “barbecue” symbols you’d recommend?

Lighting

In a previous thread, I asked if there was a way to have lighting effects without disabling the global sun so that I could have an inside and outside (without having to recreate all of my sheets to have indoor and outdoor versions).

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/13954/adding-lighting-effect-without-changing-global-sun

The answer was no, so I had three options: (1) revamp all of my sheets so that the outdoor portions were on sheets after the end of the lighting effect; (2) use semi-transparent colored circles to simulate the effect of the glow from colored lights; or (3) create a separate copy of

That’s what I have so far. Any suggestions? (It’s my birthday, so please be kind!)

Oh, here's the FCW file if you're interested.

I also drew in shadows beneath the elevated huts so that I could create battlemaps with the houses hidden, for combat underneath the houses. (They're supposed to be about 10 feet off the ground.) I was going to use tree stumps as the poles supporting the houses, but the Marine Dungeons columns were right there and I do love them -- and there are versions that conveniently already have the ripple effect added for the huts that overhang the water..

I've been using DD3 symbols for interior furnishings lately because they are a better fit as a supplement to dungeon styles like Creepy Crypts. But I just had to play with Mike Schley's latest symbols (especially the astrolabe!), including some like the cliff symbols as well as the Stairs and Steps from last year's annual. I'm calling it this tower the Wizard of Schley...

(However, I just realized that although I have interior stairs going down, I haven't designed the basement yet. I will do that tomorrow.)

From Above

On the roof of his tower, the wizard paint the landscape by day and study the stars at night. He's also planted a little herb garden up here. The stairs to reach the roof are in the western tower; the southeastern tower is a chimney.

First Floor

This floor is principally used to receive guests, especially adventurers seeking to buy potions and scrolls, or to have curses removed, magical items identified, prophesies interpreted, or their destination scried upon to scope it out. He has set it up to impress and intimate guests, with an ornate throne for himself. Most of the magical devices that he might need for the typical visitors are available here.

Second Floor

The second floor is the wizard's main living space, with a kitchen and spacious dining area. The roof of the gatehouse can be accessed from here, and the wizard has set up a table and chairs here for outdoor dining on nice afternoons and evenings.

Third Floor

This is the wizard's bedchamber, bath, and private office. The main interior stairs end here, but a spiral staircase in the western tower continues up.

Fourth Floor

This is the wizard's workshop and summoning chamber. The tower stairs continue from here to the roof.

I am diving into the interiors now, starting with the first floor (or ground floor).

At this level, the perimeter wall is mostly solid stonework. The defensive passageway with arrow slits will be one story higher. But the gatehouses do have chambers on this level with mechanisms for raising the two portcullises (I was tempted to write portculli) and open the iron gate. Internal spiral staircases allow guards to reach a chamber with access the parapet over the gate, where they can address visitors when the gates are closed.

Mostly I've been working so far on the first floor of the balneae, the bathhouse. This is what it looks like covered:

And here's the (not yet labeled) interior of the first floor:

The balneae, or bathhouse, is connected to the main villa by a colonnade, an unwalled covered walkway lined with pillars.

As you enter, there are stairs going up and down to your left, and the chimney for the hypocaust in the basement on your right. Then you see two lavatories, and then the frigidarium, the very cold pool. Next to the frigidarium is the apodyterium, the changing room where bathers could clean up before entering the communal pools. Across the courtyard is the caldarium, the hot room, where both the water and the tile floor are heated by the hypocaust furnaces in the basement. The main pool in the center, partially open to the sky, is the tepidarium, the warm room, where water is heated to a comfortable temperature but not as hot as a bath like the caldarium. On the northern wall are two saunas, the laconicum (dry sauna) on the northwest side, and the sudatorium (steam sauna) on the northeast.

Downstairs will have the hypocaust as well as the pipes for bringing water to the various pools. Upstairs will have more communal exercise areas, a library, and a balcony overlooking the tepidarium.