One thing you could play with is adding sheet effects to the trees and land textures that desaturate them a bit. The Schley style is bright and colorful and by making those things a bit less saturated it might help them fade into a background while the rest that is bright becomes a foreground.

The Cartographers' Guild has a discord server that can probably be found with a quick Google. It's not active all the time but fairly steady occasional activity.

A lot of people there use photoshop or hand-draw but Campaign Cartographer isn't uncommon to come up either.

Very Nice. I can imagine flowy underwater vegetation, bits of shipwrecks, colorful coral decorations... I'm excited for this one.

I think one thing to keep in mind is that some maps could be pulled off just by applying a tint and effect over the whole map, if the whole thing is on the ocean floor or something - like this example I'm just pulling from Google.

I've browsed through them a couple times trying to decide what I would get first... including this years

Pretty sure it's gonna be this years.

There are no "real" limitations from this being the case - only if the players don't like it.

Kinda like if everyone sat down to play checkers and you started playing chess. Maybe everyone would love to play chess for a short change or maybe there's a reason they would rather play checkers; depends on the people and the game everyone agreed on and sat down to play.

Here is my attempt at similar not too long ago:

I mention in a later comment the sheet effects I used. I mostly just remember it took a lot of fiddling with a lot of effects to arrive at the result.

I love the city so far! I especially liked how purposeful each placement of building is. One thing that looks a bit odd to me is the straightness of that bottom left line, almost as if the city planner was tired of doing all this and just cut off the boundary of the city sharply. ;)

Just for my own knowledge, historically, I'm curious if building walls out in the water was a thing? I had the assumption that sea-walls would be built directly on the coast, and then since harbors tended to be at sheltered locations, places would float massively heavy chains with barrels between the most outer points of the coastline. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_(navigational_barrier) ) - but I would love examples where walls were built.

Whether historically accurate or not, I think it's pretty cool. I would make up reasons for the walls to be there if I had to in order to include them.

I don't know my history as well as I should but I just kind of imagine an arthurian age where most people of power are corrupt and everybody knows it but is too fearful to stand up to it, so they purposely keep that fear cycle turning with public displays of punishment. Getting in good with certain officials means you are untouchable, up to the point of your usefulness anyway, so crime is common and it is a risk to even try and prevent it from happening.

Then the players enter.

I like it a lot!

I really like all the different subtle textures of water against the sand and rock.