Island Fort, Adept (Patreon)

Hello everyone! This week's map is special as I made it with Czepeku, one of my personal favorite mapmaking Patreons! I made an island and they made a 3 level fort to fit on top of it, making for a much more detailed and interesting map than usual. Also, we wanted to make sure that people who support both of us weren't getting the same content twice so we both made separate batches of alternate versions- which means there's even more content for this map over at their page! 

The alternate version for the Adepts this week has additional props scattered on the beaches, boats of different sizes scattered about as well as a number of unloaded supplies. I think this version makes the map feel much more lived-in, and the extra details will tell your players at a glance that this place is actively manned by more than just a handful of people.  Also note that the Forest versions of this map are even more variants for my patrons, which has the island setting swapped out for grass and trees. This way I think the map should be useful to just about everyone! 

1. One of my favorite things about Czepeku's maps is their indoor environments, so when we started talking about what we wanted to make together I really liked the idea of an outdoor environment of my design with an indoor environment of theirs. And, as some of you know, islands are my personal favorite maps to make, so I drew a handful of different islands, scrapped the worst, and sent the remaining to them to pick their favorite. They picked one that I thought would be too tricky to place a fort on, but you can't deny the end results!

2. My part of this map was made a few months ago actually, so I can only really comment on my most recent thoughts about the map. It seems like very little is different in style from what I would make today, though the trees I make now are somewhat less cluttered with small details, a change I made starting with the Jungle Camp map. And speaking of which, I started this map with the intention of offering a fort-less version to patrons, meaning I carefully placed props within where the fort would be without parts of them peeking out. 

The water is another thing which I drew a little unusually, with much more and heavy lines than I typically like to draw them with. I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily, but they do draw the eye more than I would prefer.

3. As with all my island maps, I aimed for vibrant and bright colors in my personal favorite. The blues and greens make for such a pleasant map, this is the ideal palette for maps are far as I'm concerned. Digging back through the files, it looks like I did set up the water's color to be a bit darker than I would typically make it, and the highlights in the center are somewhat less glaring than previous islands. Both of these add up to a slightly darker map with a little less range of brightness than I would prefer, but perhaps at the time I wanted to make the environment catch the eye slightly less than the fort centerpiece.