Scattered Island Maps, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

I hope you like islands, Adepts/Experts, because this week you're getting a bunch of them. Your alt version is a series of islands split up from Bullseye Island, enough to populate a small ocean with unique little encounters. Next week's Pirate Ship map might be handy for traveling from one to another, so I hope you're looking forward to it!

1. What I like about designing islands is that you can really push a certain flow to the map. If you want, you can designate a starting point, like a dungeon, and provide a path that most players will likely follow. Of course, being an RPG map, this also allows players to defiantly travel to anywhere on the map as long as they're capable, but that's just part of the fun of it.  

For this one, I wanted to make it so that there were several key points that could potentially be focused upon, each offering its advantages and disadvantages as terrain. The small center island has one clear ramp to be scaled and offers cover from any other island; the tall island on the bottom with its great height provides some innate danger to climbing its sides but gives a clear view of the others; the bridging island to the left is a clear path to the others but offers little cover; the top island offers middling cover and height advantage.

In all, this has the feel of an arena with the added fun of environmental hazards, difficult terrain, and great changes in height that must be overcome. I think it's neat.

2. Rock walls, grass, rocks, bushes, and now for the first time ever, palm trees! Previously, I've started several maps with the intention of using different kinds of trees but always backed off after failing to come up with designs that I thought fit the style I've grown accustomed to using. I'm still not too sure of these palm leaves (they're a little too clean still,  not quite fitting in perfectly), but I had to start somewhere. 

3. The palette I used here isn't the one I last used for my islands, but an adaption of my verdant forest colors I typically use. I took a look at the colors I last used for islands and realized that I didn't like them very much any more, and the overlay effects I used were completely nonsensical to the point of making the maps extremely unhelpful for color matching. Instead I dug up my palette reference picture (included below), a version of Ancient Altar minus effects, overlays, and lighting, and then tweaked most everything to a slightly more tropical palette (more vibrant, deeper blues, lighter sand). In hindsight, I think I could have made the colors somewhat more tropical, maybe with some small red flowers scattered about for splashes color, but I'm certainly not unhappy with the end result.