Here's my submission for the 500th Map and 4-Year Anniversary Competition.

The forgotten Cloister of the Order of the Frigid Path is a level for the mega-dungeon where some chilled out monks once did some chilly things. It's been mostly looted since it was in regular use but there are still a few dangers (beware the ice sneks! health and safety would like to remind you of the dangers of slick stairs!) and some goodies to be found as you pass down (or up?) from one level of the mega-dungeon to another.

I worked a bit more on my walls and added a crevasse under my broken bridge. The section beyond the broken bridge in the upper left is going to be the exit down eventually and the top of the long room to the upper right will be the location of the exit up. I also added some broken/missing tile sections, a bit of rubble and a couple pools of scary green water.

My pillars don't have shadows at the moment since I won't add lighting effects until near the end.

Here's the crevasse under the broken bridge:

And here's the lower left rooms showing the cracks and puddles:

It's not much so far - I still have to add a lot to all the rooms - but feedback would be appreciated. ?

I made a couple more updates during my morning conference call. ?

Here's the entrance/exit areas:

Here's the finished rooms from the lower left:

I imagine that top room was a library at some point and has clearly already been looted by someone. The lower room contains a few deadly ice slimes (that's a thing, right?) and the remains of some prior adventurers, along with their collected loot just waiting for someone else to come along and pick it up.

I particularly like how the treasure under the puddle of water came out.

I think this is pretty much done but I'll let it sit for a few days and then come back to it to see if there are any last minute tweaks I want to make before entering it in the contest thread.

I've been continuing to tinker with this world and after a long time of trial and error have settled on a style I really like and thought I'd share an update!

I recreated my map in Fractal Terrains and used Wilbur to add some more realistic erosion following the tutorials in The One Day World Builder from the 2019 Annual. After playing around a bit more with the climates I have been exporting it back to CC3+ where I have come up with my own style using a bunch of assets from CC3+ and various annuals and some heavily customized sheets and layers.

The compass rose and the mists covering the island-nation of Nimduin were made in Photoshop then imported to CC3+ as PNGs. The banner on the compass reads (more or less) in one of Tolkien's Elvish scripts "Under a broken moon, a new age of heroes begins" which is sort of the mission statement for the setting. The shields for the various nations were made in CC3+ and a paint filter was applied to them in Photoshop then they were brought back to CC3+ as PNGs.

This is the full world of Runimar as it currently stands:

This is the nation of Talista, the main region of my D&D campaign:

You can see how dramatically they have both evolved from my early maps in the first post of this thread!

This is the small nation of Sintierre, Talista's closest neighbor and ally:

And the latest addition, the nation of Kir-Nith. This one is a WIP; if you look at the larger version you will likely notice that many of the towns are just named "Market Town" and there are spots labeled "Geo Feature" and rivers that are just alled "Water." ?

Got a quick start on my entry just to see if some of my ideas would work at all. I'm planning to add an ice level to the megadungeon.

I made the floor tiles and walls out of assorted shapes right within the map and just copied them around to create my floor and walls; I'd normally have just created a tiling design in Photoshop but the rules don't allow that and this actually gives some neat looking variation to it. I think I may turn down the "reflection" on the tiles a bit since that's on another sheet and I still want to add a little more color variation and some melting ice puddles in spots but I need to figure out what some of these rooms are for first. ?

I'm particularly happy with how the border frame came out (it's three sheets: a base color, a floor tile texture with the tiling turned up and a blend mode applied, and a blurred highlight on top) and may apply some of that look to the walls too.

Here's the full map so far:

And a zoomed in view of the lower right corner:

You can see the floor tile reflections better here - those are just zig-zag shapes drawn with the polygon tool and a blur sheet effect.

I still need to tighten up my walls a bit and figure out where the one entrance and one exit are going to be but I think it's a good start.

OK, I lied. One more!

I couldn't stop thinking about this so I started playing with the lights a little bit. I found some good crystals in the Annual 64 Herwin Wielink style for my halls and just ended up drawing the big ones above the pool.

Here's a quick test render with the lights turned on.

I'll probably set this as my desktop at work next week so I can look at it during meetings and think about what to put in those rooms along the lower left.

This is probably my final update for the weekend - it's been a productive morning!

Here's the full map as it stands right now:

Closer view of the pool and the cells on the right side (including SNEKS!):

I won't have time to work on it again for a few days, but next on my to-do list:

• Add some traps and items of interest to the left side of the map
• Add some color variation to the blue floor tiles
• Add some giant crystals to the two stone "islands" in the middle of the pool
• Add lights and light effects (biggest lights will be the braziers above the pool, but I plan to add some small glowing "ice" crystals in a few spots too

I'm not sure what the "best" solution for the glow issue is, but when I have glows going places I don't want them, I create a new sheet above the one with the glow called something like GLOW COVERUP and just put a rectangle filled with the floor fill wherever I don't want the glow.

This sometimes requires playing around with the sheet order and I frequently end up with multiple "coverup" sheets, but it works. ?

When you enable creating multiple levels at the start, it creates all the .FCW files at the same time with the same dimensions and background and adds links between them so you can switch back and forth by just clicking the level name on each map.

You get a list of the levels with automatically created links like this:

You can do the same thing manually, it's just a time-saver.

Since the problem as identified by @jslayton is the anti-aliasing, I wonder if redoing your overlay image with much thicker lines would solve the issue?