Underdark Rise, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back! This map is the Underdark Rise (40x40), a classic rocky ascent sort of map, if you follow any number of mapmakers beyond me you will likely find this type to be familiar, personally I've made at least 3 like it but never in a cave!

Your alternate version of this map is Tainted, which you may notice looks a little different than the Tainted you received previously of the Underdark Crossing. I took another look at the palette for the crystal-filled half of that map and decided that the colors I used didn't look quite as sickly as I would have liked, so this time I took another crack at making it look real nasty. Pretty solid, I think.

1. Ledges, you know how it goes.. right? That's what I would say, but actually I originally made this map flipped upside down with convex ledges. It looked fine but I wasn't completely happy with it so, as I sometimes do, I tried rotating it and stretching/squashing it in order to see if I could get a fresh take on the layout. The last thing I tried was flipping it around and I immediately thought the layout made muuuuuch more sense somehow, it's so strange how that is.

Well, all I had to do then was sketch in the major rocks/crystals.. right? Actually I was sick of sketching so I just got on with it, choosing instead to add any relevant details to the sketch later when I had a better feel for the map- not usually how I would do this sort of thing but it went fairly well! Maybe I'll do it again next time I'm feeling impatient/indecisive.

2. Rock walls, rocks, grass, you've seen it all before from me. The crystals are carryovers from the Crystal Grotto and I'm still pretty content with how they look, that is to say I'm not thinking about redrawing a fresh batch quite yet. Similarly the rocks and mini mushrooms all came from the Underdark Crossing, rearranged so that the most sharp-eyed players would (hopefully) not recognize any repeats unless they're looking for them.

3. I've been trying to hone in on this palette I'm using for this series of Underdark maps and I'm still not 100% sure this is how I want it to look- the bluish purple ground plus the pinkish grass and the glowing blue crystals. It's a decent look that gets the idea across but I can't help but think there's a better way to depict it while keeping it readable. That's my main concern really, that the colors I use won't read well, and while the current colors read well they don't exactly feel correct to me yet. Maybe a more subdued combination of colors would read a little better, less strong blues and purples in the ground and grass at least? I'll get it eventually.