Frozen Fountain, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello Adepts and Experts! Welcome back once again for another alternate map, this time a rare wintery version of a desert map. I styled it after the Winter Ruins map from a couple weeks back, so they should work together fairly well, though purposely I didn't add any trees. I think without trees it has a more mountainous vibe, and actually this might be the most Skyrim-y map I've ever made (complete with dragon skeleton!). Hopefully this scratches that snow-map-itch that many of you have been experiencing, though don't think this will be the last!

1. While originally I wasn't too keen on them, crumbling walls have started to grow on me. I see the merits now, they are easy but destructible cover that don't provide complete protection from all sides. And, better yet, the amount of damage they can take is completely up to the DM (a 5 foot piece of crumbling wall might have an AC from 13-16 and anywhere from 5-25 HP (in DnD's scale at least)).

Otherwise, I wanted to leave enough ruins around to allow for a stealthy approach. Perhaps there's a group of notorious bandits who've set up a camp around the fountain and your players can use the ruins to surround and ambush them. Or maybe they can fool the bandits into thinking the statue is coming alive to kill them, using a trick out of the Wizard of Oz's book.

2. Sandy and snowy lines still aren't my strong point, though I am working on it. I don't think I've quite nailed the effect yet, though the style I've got is working for now. I do think I'll be working on it more in the future, though I suspect that the key will be simply using less detail than I want. 

Beyond that, the if the ruins look somewhat familiar that's because they were chopped and stitched together from the Winter Ruins, and the temple in the center is pieced together from parts of the Desert Tomb's walls. It's easy to feel like this sort of thing is cheating, but I'm a big fan of working smarter not harder, and it's hard to feel bad about it for long when so much time is saved. 

3. The coloring was fairly straightforward, I simply copied the style of the sandy areas of Desert Tomb, though honestly I still don't think I quite duplicated the style. Sometimes I make something great in passing and think nothing of it, and when I go back and try to do it again I just can't do it. Someday I'll learn to pay attention or take notes or something. 

And here's the part of these posts where I talk about what I would fix in hindsight. I feel like I say it a lot, but I definitely overdid the vignette again. I don't know what's going through my head when I add the vignettes (the darkening around the edges of the image) but apparently I was half asleep or day dreaming because it's pretty excessive this time. Who knows, maybe it isn't as grating as I think (I'm my biggest critic), so I'll sit back and hear what people have to say.