Winding Mountainside Trail, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hello Adepts/Experts, your special alternate versions this week are a stormy and gray-stone version! If you've been an adept patron for a little while you'll recognize the grayer version as the 'subdued' version that I've been including for just about every map, though this time I think it also does a nice job doubling as a colder version. The stormy version should be an easy way to torment your players after they've been scaling a mountain for a few hours- maybe make them roll to keep their footing on the wet and windy slopes/make dex saves to dodge lightning strikes/keep an eye out for falling rocks. 

1. These mountainous maps can be a little tricky due to the odd perspective. For my typical map I try to avoid any perspective other than from directly above, but no matter how I draw these mountainside maps my mind always chooses to look at it from an angle. This time I tried to work with it, instead worrying about drawing the rock walls so that they didn't mess with your eyes (too much (it's tricky)). At the rough sketch phase I gave myself some guides to follow when drawing the rocks' striations and cleavage. I drew these while zoomed far away from the image in an attempt to make them look somewhat natural, and I think it came out much better than these usually do!

2. Something I knew I would have to be careful about for this one is over-complication. With so much detail necessary for the rock walls (let alone the shading that comes with them), I expected that it would end up being way too much for the eye to take in. After coming to peace with that I decided that, in order to keep what's important in your eye's forefront, I would leave the horizontal areas, the paths, somewhat less detailed than I would on a different map. This way, I figured that at the very least you or your players shouldn't have too much trouble picking out 'intended' paths and stable ground. 

3. I know it's silly but I really prefer to shade with the light source coming from the top left corner. Unfortunately that doesn't look quite right for a map like this, so I settled for imitating the lighting for the outside portion of the Mountainside Dungeon map I made back in June. In fact, I used a that map as an example here, matching the rock and shadow colors for the sake of keeping my mountainous maps semi-consistent in case you want to run them into each other.