Tiered Hill, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Welcome back, Adepts and Experts! This week your alternate map is slightly different than usual, a complete swap of terrain from waterfalls to a nice rolling hill, perfect if your players are afraid to get their feet wet. 

Anyway, let's talk about the way this one unfolded!

1. As you can tell, the rough sketch got a bit out of hand this time. If it looks like a mess to you, it only looks slightly less like a mess to me. The biggest contributor to that messiness is the huge pile of rocks in the back. While that might make for somewhat interesting terrain to fight on, I assumed it would be too confusing to look at and also take a very long time to draw. I cut the boulders for my usual rock walls (not exciting but they get the job done), and it was a clear improvement. 

It was at this step that I realized that it would be a little tricky to get across the different tiers in the waterfall I had planned. I knew it wasn't going to be easy, but I trusted that while the outlines might not get the idea across, the coloring would likely do the job. 

2. I tried out a couple of things that I usually avoid for this map: perspective and multiple pen sizes. 

The reason why I try to avoid drawing maps from perspectives other than top-down is that I would like the map to look right from any direction. If you're sitting around the kitchen table with your group and the map is laid out, someone will be looking at it from the wrong direction and it'll look funky to them. This week I leaned into it though, because I think waterfalls need a bit of perspective to look right. 

I also avoid using multiple pen sizes, but that's probably just me being weird. When I see a map and the outlines are super thick for some things and super thin for others I think it looks off. I'm sure I'm being nitpicking but I tried to cut the difference this time, making the outlines for the rocks slightly bigger than the rest, 25px rather than 20px (at this scale, that's pretty small). I'll keep toying around with this in the coming weeks.

3. I wasn't really sure which direction I wanted to take the colors. I tried out a more orangey fall palette that I like a lot and a kinda fey purple, pink, and blue palette that was pretty neat (either of those were contenders for the adept version). I still prioritize making maps that can be used by the most people however, so an average green, brown, and blue palette won out. 

I'm not sure I've mentioned it before, but I always color my rocks and boulders slightly lighter than the rock walls. It reminds me of in older cartoons like Scooby-Doo when you can tell that a bookcase is a trap door because it's drawn cartoony. I don't draw the rocks like that to imply you can interact with (which you can) but I do want them to stand out a little bit so they catch the eye.