Farm Crossroads, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the Farm Crossroads (25x25), a simple addition to my ever expanding library of roadside maps. I think this one will be great for bridging the gap between forest and village encounters as your players cut through all the farms just outside of town, or maybe this is where the village people catch up to your players as they get run out of town (that might be the more likely option).

Your alternate version is an Autumn recoloring, just a little too late for American Thanksgiving but with plenty of time for you to prepare for next year. 

1. I started this map early in the month in hopes of getting the last week off for Thanksgiving. With that in mind, I set out to make something simple enough to make quickly but doesn't overlap much in utility with many of my other roadside maps. Eventually I came up with a farm crossroad, the sort of place you might make a deal with the/a devil. I've only ever made a single crossroad map before (but not a particularly useful one), and I haven't made a farm map in a very-very long time. This seemed like the perfect choice!

The design is obviously very simple- meandering country roads cross between fields with varying amount of crops. I live in Northwest Indiana, so this is the type of environment I see quite a lot of, and something I really like about these farm lanes are the rows of trees that sometimes line the roads, making for a very pretty sight- I wanted to capture some of those vibes.

2. Big patches of dirt are tricky. I like to keep my dirt paths looking stylized so I don't have to get into too much detail, but farmland is a little different. I'm not sure I like the design I ended up with, but it gets the job done just fine. The rest of the props were fairly quick to whip up, I never put too much time into fencing and I try to knock out grass as quickly as possible because it's boring to draw. The tree's I've taken from Jungle Camp, the layers taken and rotated once counter-clockwise so as to make sure that anyone with an eye for detail can't pick out anything too recognizable. 

3. I wasn't expecting this, but the colors turned out to be a little tricky. The darkening around the edge of the map ended up looking too dark when it wasn't on top of the grass, giving the map a much grimmer vibe than I wanted despite being of similar opacity and color as my other maps. I think the lighting is still a little too intense, but I couldn't come up with an alternative that didn't completely wash out the map or leave it looking very dull. There's probably a way to do it right, but with the holiday and family taking up my time I just didn't have the chance to toy with it for a long as I would have liked. Still, it's a striking map with a satisfying design, so I'm not complaining.