Dwarven City of Marag Dun

[tyrlaan]

Hey all,
First time poster, long time lurker

I've done a handful of maps over the years, though until this year most work was done through Dunjinni (though I since lost the license key and they're apparently gone - anyway), relying on pre-fab textures, images, etc. I've since done some work in gimp to do some regional maps that I'm pretty content with. This map is my first attempt at a city map.

This is probably the most "off the rails" map I've done since employing Gimp; I'm using assorted layer tricks I've learned doing regional maps and overall I'm pretty happy with the results. But here's where it get's tricky. In the game I'm running, the town is soon to get sacked - literally a giant undead tree is going to sprout out of the depths of the earth and spew forth all sorts of nasties.

To really drive home the point of the scale of the damage, I want to have a "before" and "after" map. I'm cool with my before map as is (though happy for advice anyway!), but what I'm struggling with is making the "invading" tree look a) tree-like, b) like it's busting out of the ground, and c) like it belongs on the map rather than tacked on.

(I was going to attach the xcf, but it's clocking in at 65mb right now...)

Any and all thoughts, ideas, criticisms welcome!