I am pretty happy with them as well.

My first attempts were using the drop shadow effect and the lighted-bevel effects, but it seemed like the drop shadow was bleeding into weird places between layers and creating random darker spots when I did the final render, though it did not do this while working with it.

So I took out the drop shadow and reworked it using a combination of things. There is a lighted bevel, a dark outer glow effect to create the feeling of depth around the base of the hills, a short inner glow effect to create the sense of gradually darkening hill sides, and a couple well placed smooth polygons with a low opacity to manually add some slight shadowing in specific areas.

I had a couple "seams" that were then hidden with varying up the textures a bit on top of them ? It seemed like the inner fade effect wasn't interacting well in some circumstances with all the glows and opacity effects.

I'm still trying to figure out which I prefer for different situations myself, but I think I've hit upon a couple preferences:

Printing it off for table-top play? I prefer simpler to save my ink when printing.

Playing in Roll20 (or other vtt)? I prefer a bit more fancy - but sometimes when there's a little too much I hesitate because some random pieces of decoration I might want to alter, and can't.

Here is a site of another person who makes a lot of cleaner layouts. I do find them pretty as well in their own way.

https://dysonlogos.blog/maps/

One thing I liked from their black and white map was that they had rotten/ruined wooden doors since they were submerged in water.

Far across the Desolation lies a chasm. It is said the chasm is home to eternal life. Of course, it is also said that there is a rift at the bottom of the chasm that leads to the Feywild. And then, some others claim a powerful artifact fuels the life from deep within a network of caves. Nobody really knows, because nobody has ever gone into the Desolation and returned with their sanity.

Let me know what you think!

(1927) In Japan, Hidemi Seno and Juzo Hori published a paper describing their new method for growing oysters by attaching them to ropes and hanging them vertically from a floating raft. The innovative method replaced a 300-year-old tradition of driving bamboo sticks or tree branches into the ground in shallow water to provide a surface on which free-swimming oyster larvae could settle. Vertical suspension allowed oysters to take in more food and grow faster, as they could feed even when the tide was out. Oysters grown above the seafloor were also safer from predators and produced higher-quality meat. People were quick to adopt this new method, and the production of cultured edible oysters in Japan tripled in about 10 years. By 1958, it was reported that over 90 percent of the oysters produced in Japan were grown using the hanging method.

To be honest, I didn't really know anything about aquaculture until I saw this. Considering what it is, it seems to be believable for me for this technology level. If the town has wizards they might have one or two modern aspects achieved through magic, like self-levitating ropes. I suspect that for anyone I play with, I would have to explain what those are even if they were 100% visually accurate. I would probably work the explanation into my summary of the area when introducing people to the location.

A vertical stick might be achieved with a branch or a tree trunk asset scaled thinner than usual, but I don't remember if/which sets might have that asset off-hand.