Burnt Down Farm, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

I'll be real with you guys, I didn't realize how much I enjoyed last week's throneroom, but I wasn't pumped to be back to drawing dirt roads and grass again. I think it came out well, but I felt a bit less inspiration than usual (maybe I'm just in a mood, who can say?) 

1. Very very little changed after my initial sketch, which is not unexpected. I've had this map in mind for a long time now, so I had the layout pretty solidified. The careful observer will notice 2 small rock ledges, 1 to the right of the house and another in the bottom left corner. Honestly, I cut these because I didn't think they added enough to make them worthwhile. Sometimes you have to trust your gut about this kind of thing.

2. My big decision at this step involved the fields. What kind of crop would I draw here? Should the fields be empty? Or should I draw some vague plant and leave it to the DM to say what's growing? I ended up going with the plant that would make the most interesting terrain: wheat. I never think of wheat as a particularly fantasy-y plant, but someone's gotta grow it, right? Either way, I think it make for an interesting bit of cover that you can walk and sneak through, so I'm curious as to how it plays out.

I look up a lot of reference in video games I enjoy, and a lot came from Witcher 3 for this map. An aspiring map-maker could do a lot worse than to turn most areas in the Witcher 3 into maps. 

3. My palette this week is reminiscent of the Mountain checkpoint, but a bit more autumn-y. I've prepared green grass in the PSD however, so you can toggle that on if that makes more sense for your campaign. A problem I didn't foresee was contrast between the wheat and grass, which comes up more in the next step.  

4. Have you ever worked on something for a while and every time you look at it you find something you don't like, so you try to fix it but even after you do this a couple times you still aren't happy with the results? That's how I'm feeling here. I just had to call it finished and I'm still not sure what I could do to make it feel better. You win some, you lose some I suppose.