Empty Inn, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hey there Adepts/Experts, as you can see your alternate version of this map is completely devoid of all props (I kept the fireplace in there, I dug too deep a hole with my layers to remove it without causing problems). This way the map is a nice blank template for dropping in tokens, hopefully some of you find it handy. Oh, and I made sure to make the lighting for this one a little versatile, halfway between nighttime and daytime, so there's only one version of it to juggle. 

Anyway, let's talk about the map!

1. This rough sketch represents several hours of work, as I deeply underestimated how much work something like this would be. The sketch you see here is the final draft, but there were a handful of others that didn't make the cut, the one that nearly got made was all one floor but it felt like cheating in the end (we all know that inns are supposed to be 2 floors, come on). 

If you look carefully, you can see many changes were made on the fly after this step. I took out 5 feet from the bottom of the map so there would be a bit less space (gotta be a cozy inn after all); I shuffled the tables around; I added pillars on the ground floor (makes sense to me, they also broke the space up well). There are a lot of small details to keep in mind for indoors maps, and since they aren't my forte I wanted to make sure everything was well thought out (God, I hate trying to figure out the proper scale of everything. You can guess how that went, I'm posting this a day later than normal. 

2. As I suspected, the floorboard lines were what brought this map together. It's like how an outdoor map doesn't feel right until the grass lines are added, even the least exciting areas always have to have something to catch the eye. 

Speaking of which, I got hung up for quite a while on whether or not to add any small props to the inn's common room, such as mugs. It seems a little off to presume that the place is bustling in the context of anyone's campaign; what if I wanted this inn to be nearly abandoned? In the end my instincts won and I added them for eye-candy, but I'm still not too sure about it. 

The upstairs area didn't take too much consideration, I wanted several rooms with stock items included: bed, wardrobe, chair, window. One of my conditions for the upstairs however was that there would have to be multiple levels of room quality. For example one room has three beds and no wardrobe so it would likely be the cheapest (perhaps you have to share the other beds with strangers), two rooms have one bed but are quite small, and another has a lot of space and a large bed. I think its only reasonable that inns have a range of prices for there rooms and better yet the quality of the rooms themselves can have implications about the people who occupy them.

3. The lighting was a bit tough, I like a darkened inn as much as the next guy but how shadowy is too shadowy? The backroom, of course, has to be the darkest possible, while the common room has to be the brightest, but how well lit should the bedrooms be? I tried to give each room a twilight-state of brightness, where it could be interpreted as well-lit or darkened depending on how you look at it. Kinda a neat lighting effect, if I say so myself.

I don't think there's too much to say about the rest of the colors, shades of brown get boring quickly when the shadows are the only thing to add excitement.