Snowy Bridges, Adept (Patreon)

Welcome back, Adepts! This week's map is the Snowy Bridges (35x35), a simple but effective winter map with a straightforward design- the type of thing you'll see during the majority of your party's travels, creeks, bridges and scarcely travels paths.

Your alternate version of this map is Snowstorm, a frequent and highly useful variant for snowy maps. Swap in this one when you think your players have had it too easy recently, reducing visibility and potentially dealing cold damage to anyone insufficiently prepared. Also, I made a simple little iced over variant for you as well, making the water into dangerous terrain instead of an easy way to get frostbite.

 1. It's been a while since I last made a winter map and I wanted to try out something with a slightly different vibe, a little more barren than fully forested, like a tundra. Still, I wanted to make sure that you had something to work with, so I tried to cut the difference by adding a small path and a few bridges.

With that as the concept, the only real consideration was the shape of the stream. Whenever I draw a bridged stream I want to make sure that the terrain makes sense for someone to have placed a bridge- why would someone put a bridge in one spot of the map when there's an obviously better spot (the river is somewhat less wide, there aren't obstacles in the way, there's better height to work with) on the edge of the frame? Here, I made the stream wider at the edges of the frame and provided a small island in the middle, making the wide river into two smaller and more easily bridged streams. Perhaps this isn't very interesting to hear about, but it's little considerations like this that make up my job.

 2. Fairly low on outlines, right? In previous snowy maps I tended to be a little overzealous with my linework, putting too many little details in patches of smooth snow than was necessary. I took a step back here with the expectation that the colors and shading would do most of the legwork.

Additionally, the trees here and a little different than usual. My typical trees, which I have in a PNG with 30 of varying sizes, are drawn with a similar level of detail to these but with slightly different topology that is intended to give the impression of more rounded foliage. I took a handful of those and erased many of the details near the centers and instead tried to give the impression of them coming to points like fir trees. Again, I wasn't expecting this to come across 100% but the shading would make it all come together.

Last, I'm not really happy with the shoreline. I have to do some thinking and experimenting, but for now I just don't like it and I can't quite picture what I would rather it look like. Maybe I'll look at what other artists have done and I'll see if anyone has done what I'm looking for.

 3. For the colors here I started from scratch, I didn't start by opening up my last winter map and color picking. I felt that this time I would try to keep the colors of the snow light and the textures smooth- I didn't want it to feel as complicated or over-detailed. I also darkened the water a lot and went with a more natural evergreen color for the trees, keeping the lighting sorta glowy at the same time in order to imitate the look of the sun reflecting off of the snow.

My impression here is that this is a good but not dazzling map, the lighting and colors are effective but not impressive. I think my next winter map will need to have a little bit more going on in order for me to work with the colors more, but we'll see.