Continuing the process of zooming-in brings us to Sussara Village, at the heart of the Sussara area map:

This time, I chose the Desert Oasis Annual mapping style and its accompanying ArabDances font, although I also needed some trees from the Mike Schley Cities (SS5) set, as I wanted to add some cedar-ish trees, while Desert Oasis only offers palms and shrubs. To generate the base map, I combined three old village maps from the venerable Judges Guild "Village" Books 1 and 2, again adapted accordingly, as I wanted quite a scattered community. The population of Banjar overall is tiny, so there seemed little reason not to give most folks plenty of space to build on.

Some features were decided in advance, as the nature of what I'd opted for in the dungeon meant a distinct spiritual element was going to be important here, and I thought it would be fun to add to the mix a small community of monks from the vast, rather distant, but still loosely neighbouring region of Tiantang in Kumarikandam, far to the north of Banjar. Since the folk here are accepting of nomadic wanderers, it seemed natural they wouldn't balk at still more distant people wanting to settle here too. Other items were chosen from random lists in "Village Book 1" and the settlement options in "Sandbox Generator", including the fact there are naturally-occurring flower-like crystal formations "growing" out of the soil in places, especially over and around Flowerfield Peak. Hence names such as "Billawr" (one Arabic-ish variant for "Crystal") and the Village's own name (Sussara = Glass Flower). The irrigated fields were quite fun to set-up, although at this scale, most of the smaller elements (shadufs, water gates, etc.) couldn't be added, even had symbols been available, without making the map seem very cluttered. Similarly, fences, livestock pens and sheds, and small gardens near most houses weren't included. I did though add a couple of carts to the Market, and three small well-fountains, to hint at what such tiny structures might have looked like. Notes on what is visible will be in the Atlas, as ever.

Of course, we also need a means to access the dungeon map that started all these above-ground explorations, so activating the "Village Secret" toggle in the final Atlas FCW version, will reveal a couple of hidden stairwells in the cellars of two separate, and otherwise unremarkable, properties (zoomed-in here for clarity at the usual Forum-acceptable size):

Very few folks here even know they might exist (which doesn't include the current occupiers of either dwelling!), and fewer still know what potential significance the Tomb of the Prophet may hold...

Part of the reasoning in heading off next to tropical-desert Kumarikandam for my sort-of Dungeon24 project (outlined here earlier), was because by chance, that continent had come up as the next random choice for another dungeon based on more of the Inkwell Dice "Crypts" set designs. A second map had also been randomly allocated to this place later in the process, for one from the (City) "Ruins" set. It seemed sensible to tackle them together, especially because both had also been allocated to the Banjar Region map. That map is pretty large-scale however, so there isn't a lot of detail on it:

Despite that, picking a couple of suitable spots wasn't too difficult, using notes already provided from this zone for ideas (it's recently been invaded by mysterious assailants, who seem intent on slaughtering the tiny, sparse local populace, hence the ruined settlement markers and that ominous, creeping "conquest" line). It did though mean that my two selected settlements (shown by the tiny red squares on the above illustration) were going to need small area maps to better locate and describe them, aside from the "main" dungeon map. Each of those squares is really 20 miles on a side.

The "Crypts" dice map was to be first, and I opted for the inland site at the intact village in the heart of the Banjar Mountains for it, close to the headwaters of one of the two main rivers there, the one that drains into the Bay of Aqesh (my choice for the subsequent "Ruins" map was the ruined settlement near the mouth of that same river). So I began by mapping the dungeon, as that was already prepared in hand-scrawled form, and progressed outwards to the village, and then to the surrounding 20-mile area. Plus I also got distracted and did portraits for two of the main characters in the dungeon.

Here, we'll go from larger to smaller, starting with the 20-mile area map, called simply "Sussara" (which is also the name of the village):

For what perhaps should be fairly obvious reasons, I selected the Scorching Sun Annual style for this map, labelled with the Vinque font from the 2015 CA. Quite a number of features, such as the various trails, and the names of the two nearby rivers, with Cedar Woods, had already been decided when completing the Sussara Village map. The other main river, the Sagirkala, was shown, though unnamed, on the Banjar Province map, as well as the main river, what I've called the Kalabanjar. However, the intermittent rivers were added to give a more complete look, with a range of extra elements decided from a couple of sets of random tables, notably those in the Atelier Clandestin book "Sandbox Generator" that I've mentioned, and used, before, adapted accordingly to suit this environment. As normal, there'll be PDF and text notes to accompany the map once in the Atlas, to explain a little more about the various features, and what some of the names mean.

That's a good point Jim about your maps using the Alyssa Faden clouds. Reminded me I did one myself! It's the Clack Valley area in Alarius for the Community Atlas. This is the version showing the clouds in my Gallery, while this is the version without clouds so you can compare, although the map's colouring makes it difficult to spot the shadows as well (which tend to be quite close to the clouds, towards the right).

These are interesting experiments. It's something I've tinkered with a little before, and it is tricky to get the look right.

There are two further possibilities here, I think. One would be to try just using the Mike Schley clouds, and see how those work out. A possible trick might be to use some inverted dark hills for the underside of the clouds (these might need resizing, and testing out different varicolor options); not sure about this latter. The other would be to add some more clouds elsewhere over the map in the style of those you already have. Their isolated nature right now is drawing too much attention to the contrast with the ground, I suspect. More clouds might help disguise that.

You might also try using the Alyssa Faden clouds (if you have the Annual with them in, at least) as an alternative, as the shadows on those would help with the "multi-layered" cloud concept, and some would work as just darker clouds. They're more similar to the cloud forms you have now than the Mike Schley ones, certainly. The Mike Schley ones do have gaps in them though, which might make them seem more natural over a Mike Schley landscape. Those options are a bit limited though.

In terms of aerial creatures, I've a vague recollection of a winged dragon on a north pointer in one of the mapping styles (which would need work to extract just the dragon, and which in any case I can't now find, so may simply be misremembering...), but if you have Dungeon Designer 3, there's a top-down cockatrice which could just about pass for flying, I think. However, there's a greater range of options in the free Dundjinni symbols - dragons, birds, bats, other flying animals, etc. If you don't have those, you can find the link to them here, though they do need some care to install correctly.

Good luck for further progress!

I ran into the same issue that Ralf identified during the livestream when preparing my recent Monseignor District map for the Community Atlas, regarding the unscalable hatch styles, when trying to map the swamp areas there. My problem was greater though, because the area I was mapping was a lot smaller, at 10 x 15 miles.

The way I got around it was by accessing the hatch style's FCW file, and simply copying over all the constituent vector polygons, and rescaling the lot together. I then just copied and pasted those rescaled elements to where I needed them for the swamp texture, and in the forms required. This had one advantage, as I also wanted some grassland texture to represent the farmlands, and the swamp texture's polygons include those horizontal linear polygons too. Just a few more copy & paste operations.

It would be practical to use the hatch style's FCW file to set up individual symbols for use when mapping this way, so the individual pieces would be scalable like any normal symbol. Plus that would have the advantage you could also make use of techniques such as "Symbols in Area", "Fill with Symbols", etc. If you're going to be making frequent use of one of these early Annual styles, that would definitely be worth doing.