That's really nice! And obviously a lot clearer!

The tree-rings discussion has made me wonder if you could simulate the look of tree-rings within the trunk as a drawn polygon using the Edge Striping Sheet Effect. That would need a specific pattern to be available in the catalogue of such items, but it would follow the edge of whatever polygon was drawn, which is clearly a key aspect to the design. Someone better-versed in such things than me could doubtless advise more usefully on the practicalities of that though.

Honestly, mushrooms are pretty much indifferent to light. They're the fruiting bodies of fungi hidden below the surface anyway, so don't have much use for sunlight either way (except secondarily, because what the fungi are feeding on often does rely on sunlight to exist - trees and such, say), and they often don't last very long given all they're doing is distributing spores into the air.

Of course, magical-land mushrooms might feel differently about that!

Smaller pieces of tree stacked on the larger ones, and on a higher Sheet in the stack with a similar shadow effect, might help with the "flat" trees.

It depends how you see the mountain range Jim, I think. Not all mountain ranges are crowded with mountains in reality, after all. Some of the "empty" spots could be hidden valleys, or even plains, with impassible mountains all-round, like the classic Shangri-La.

If the Ash Mountains are more than a name (so something like volcanic ash), maybe the valleys there could be grey with ash too, where nothing will grow, say, if you want a little more variety. Or maybe a scatter of a few trees here and there (really as much for decoration as indicating any genuine small woods, perhaps).

Well, as the trees are symbols, they can be easily resized and stacked as I suggested, just as they are now. I've worked this in some of the dungeon/small overland map styles, though of course it works better in some styles than others.

Not convinced about the scariness of ordinary worms - though the symbols are beautifully done, as we'd expect.

The maw of the "Tremors" worm is something else again though! (1990 movie - Wikipedia link for the confused!)

As for the question "Are worms creepy?", there's always the D&D Purple Worm...

Yeah, I did think about that some time ago, but there's also the problem that the text's position shifts at different resolutions, such as when you zoom in or out. I've tended to work texts at just the full-map resolution for some time now because of this, so that I know exactly where the lettering's going to be. Thus if I can't read the text clearly at that level (and I usually do an A4 test-print to double-check), something has to be tweaked. In this case, that was the size of the glow.

Thanks for the compliment!

As for the positional dot, there isn't any real point to doing this, because the village's relative position is only of potential importance when approaching the city from outside (when the direction would be obvious anyway), or when moving away from it. In one sense each Village actually IS the entire city, but at a level only visible on the Mortal plane (so it only seems to be a little settlement). In addition, GMs can opt just to pick a Village, or decide one randomly, for the players to encounter when trying to reach the Faerie version of Embra, rather than using their approach-direction, so again that would invalidate such a marker.

This reminds me of the first time I opened GIMP - OK, I have the three (what? why?) windows open; NOW what do I do? And which of the three windows do I do what in?

Glad you've managed to source a better program for creating seamless textures though. I know this is something that keeps on coming back time after time for quite a number of folks here.

If the heads are also separate, the bandless worm bodies would work well as tentacles that aren't the classic octopoid-style with suckers too, and an obvious "up and down" as a result.

It should be possible to carry out the command sequence as described Jim; you can combine arcs like this, as far as I'm aware.

I have sometimes found, rarely, that CC3+ will crash repeatedly on a specific event for no obvious reason, and that this can be overcome by simply adjusting the view on the map slightly, and/or drawing the item after which the crash has happened in a slightly different place. If you need to change the shape of a simple polygon afterwards, it's usually easy enough to move a node or two.

Not sure if that's what's happening here or not. If this doesn't help, then as Jim suggested, letting others more technically adept here try out your problematic FCW file might be the way forward.