Volcanic Dungeon, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week's map is the Volcanic Dungeon (30x30), a crazy dangerous place with lethal hazards aplenty. And, to really stress that, your alternate version this week is a Catastrophic recoloring, a lighting and coloring change that really stresses the danger of the dungeon with much more extreme effects than the regular version. The heightened contrast and sweltering palette should be great for stressing the severity of the location to your players, in case they weren't already a little on edge due to being in the Hells or on a volcano's mountainside. 

1. For this one I really wanted to get as much lava as possible in the map. I wasn't sure how I was going to do that while also making sure it was a 'dungeon', but I decided that a couple of dungeon-y rooms would probably be enough to warrant the title. Next up I had to make a decision about exactly how inhabitable this place was, ranging from 'Deep Dwarven Fortress' to 'Ruin-Dotted Lava Field'. I liked the idea of having it somewhat mirror the Flooded Dungeon from a while back (one of my favorites), which was about 2/3 dungeon and 1/3 caves and water, so that's what I did. 

2. As I'm still fighting to get back to my pre-holiday schedule, I knew I would have to rush a few parts of this map's outlines. So, being crafty, I snatched up chunks of last week's Sea Cliffs rock walls and stitched them together in different shapes to make up large portions of the abundant rock walls of this map. I doubt even the most discerning DM or persnickety player could pick out the reused bits, so I felt pretty good about this time save, and even better about the chunks of wall and floor I took from the Dungeon Tile pack and retouched and detailed to be even more dilapidated. 

3. The colors for this one had to be picked from scratch, unfortunately. The volcanic alternate of last week's Sea Cliffs used a unique purplish palette that I was hoping to reuse this time, but the more I worked with it the less I liked it with light-sourceless cave shading. I tried to make it work for longer than I would have liked, but in the end I dropped it and tried again with more typical rock palettes. The real shame about this is that the two maps are pretty dissimilar now, making it a little awkward to have one lead into the other, but I intend on redoing the Volcanic Cliffs to fix that issue.  

Otherwise, the only other issue I came across was the color for the shadows. Typically I try to use blues primarily, but it contrasted way too much with the lava and seemed to take away from the sweltering vibe I wanted. After a lot of tweaking, I ended with a slightly purplish brown that I thought transitioned well to yellow and orange while still helping accentuate the red in the lava.