Forked Road Ambush, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Welcome back, my most wonderful patrons, and feast your eyes upon a wagon!  That's right, a wagon has been placed smack dab right in the dang pass, surely something nefarious is behind this event?! My money is always on highwaymen but maybe it's more benign than that, it could just be someone in need of a hand or a merchant who's being assaulted by bandits from the cliffs on either side. 

Anywho, let's talk about it!

1. My plan for this map was to make a split environment where each section offered different advantages. The forest has some old crumbling stone pillars among the trees which will offer plenty of cover, the cliffs to the right are tallest but aren't easy to scale, and the cliffs at the top have some height advantage as well as some cover. I like this kind of design, it's a little game-y and has potential for a ton of different setups.  My only regret is that I didn't have the time to make it bigger as I've been working on a couple of other maps this week as well. I think this would be drastically improved by having more space to work with, it would open up fighting entirely on the cliffs and letting the fight move to other parts of the map. One more thing for the backburner I suppose.

2. Recognize those pillars? I didn't take them directly from my old Crumbling Throneroom map but I practically redrew them as a cheeky little callback. I added them because I wanted there to be more cover in the forest without adding rocky ledges like I usually do. I don't know about you guys but I'm always willing to through together a loose backstory for ruins in my campaign,  and maybe your players will be interested enough in them to look deeper into it. 

Continuing last week's work, I've continued to draw the rock walls slightly more detailed than I used to. As I suspected I don't quite like how the more detailed style looks on large cliff faces, but it really looks excellent on the smaller rock ledges. Next up, I'll be looking at different ways to draw the grass, specifically the borders of grass and dirt. It just seems out of place as it is and it's been a long time coming. 

3. This map was meant as a continuation of last week's Forest Shack map, and as such it has a very similar palette though with minor differences. Honestly, this was the fastest I've ever colored a map, so there's not much to discuss here. Either way, I think I'm ready to step away from forests and cliffs for a while and work on something I'm not as familiar with, urban maps. I've got a couple of ideas for the one I'll be doing next week and I'm excited to give them a try, so make sure to check it out ;)