Snowy Winter Ruins, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello my lovely patrons, and welcome back for another alternate map! I went into this week's map knowing I would make a more snow stormy version, though I wasn't too sure how it would come out. On one hand it definitely looks more snowy, but I'm not sure I enjoy the effect as much as I thought I would (maybe that's why I've seen no other mapmakers try it). I tend to change my mind pretty quickly about these kinds of things though, so you never know how I'll feel about it by my next wintery map. 

1. One of the first decisions I had to make was what kind of ruins these would be. My initial thought was another one like my Forest Ruins, a large crumbling altar or shrine, mostly covered in snow. However I was starting to feel I've been relying on those big set-pieces too much recently, so I decided to step it back to a more commonplace, and perhaps more useful setting. 

Once that was decided I went about placing the walls. Keeping in mind that the walls are too crumbly and old to take that much force, the idea is that they will perform more as basic (though flimsy) cover, breaking line of sight and allowing for a crafty character to utilize their stealthy skills.  So, I set up the ruins so that each one has a flow to it, areas which offer cover from multiple directions, and areas or buildings which offer less cover. I think that asymmetrical design is key to this kind of setup, so on top of that I made no effort to design the map so that one side of the path is just as strategically viable as the other. 

A little trickier than it looks at a glance, right?

2. This being my first winter map, I wasn't sure how snowy I wanted to get with it. I was very tempted to leave large patches around with piles of snow here and there, but in the end I chose instead to go all in on the wintery-ness of it (with the idea in mind that no matter where you go you'll be leaving footprints behind (I apologize to DMs who now have to keep track of that)).  I tend to rely on the small details that grass provides to make my maps feel 'complete' and complex, so without that crutch I struggled to find a way to draw the snow in a way that felt like I'd done something instead of leaving it all white (my next revisited map will be this one in an even heavier snow storm, you won't even be able to see the grid through the flurries).

Snow aside, I couldn't decide on what I wanted to do with the trees; I tried several versions of various trees but none of them fit the map well in my opinion. I think for my next token pack I'll work on a couple of those trees further, but for now I settled on the same design I've been using for a while, though colored differently and with a snow effect on top. It's worked so far, right?

3. White, the color of snow. I'm pretty used to painting grass at this point, so this was somewhat more difficult than I expected, my usual methods weren't working as well as I had hoped they would.  I struggled against my urges to add small details everywhere, which usually comes across well on grassy or rocky maps, and I altered my overlays (glare, shadows, paper textures) to be more subtle as they were standing out too much on the stark white. Even so, I feel like I could fidget with opacity and color for a couple more hours and still be unsure about this map. This is the kind of thing I have to sleep on and think about, but I'm confident that my next winter map will be better because of the lessons I learned while making this one.