Spooky Swamp, Adept (Patreon)

Hello folks, this week I made the Spooky Swamp (30x30), another collaboration with James' RPG Art! His paintings are super useful for setting the tone of an encounter and helping your players understand the environment much better than my maps can, so I recommend checking out his  Instagram or Patreon! 

Also, your alternate version of this map is a pretty neat one- I whipped up a 'Fey' colored version of the swamp which feels much more mystical and fairy tale-y than your typical swamp. It matches the style of my other Fey maps, so I doubt you'll have any trouble crossing from one to the other. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I've made a handful of these Fay maps and I might want to tag them all so they're a little easier to come across. I'll work on it.

1. So, the idea for this one is that this map is a very spooky swamp with some sunken gravestones and a few cairn mounds. And also, James needed something like this for his personal LotR campaign, so while we were at it we designed it to fit his story (one of the perks of the biz). 

I hadn't made any swamp maps for a very long time, and that meant I had to figure some things out all over again. One thing I usually avoid in any map is having grass directly overlap water, mostly because I just don't like the look of it, but unfortunately that's kinda the thing in swamps. Even so, I chose to stick to my values and promised myself that I would make it work with the coloring.

2. Part of nailing the 'swamp' vibe is keeping things feeling patchy and a little dirty. In order to help get across the natural feel of the place, I wanted to make the grass as inconsistent as possible, which I think helps complicate the land in a way that feels more organic and detailed than simply topping it all with a single layer of grass. The reeds also helped on that front, breaking up the water and building the messy swamp vibe. 

Notice that there aren't tree trunks in the water in this one- I almost forgot those up until the very end when I was rechecking James' art for consistency and realized my mistake. 

3. So, as I mentioned in step 1, I planned on backing up my decision to separate grass from water with crafty coloring. Originally I planned on doing that with a gradient that neatly blended the ground color with the water, getting across the muddiness and inconsistent terrain of swamps. Turns out that doesn't look very nice though. It felt wrong as soon as I tried it, something about the transition really rubbed me the wrong way. Neat borders are much more satisfying, and the contrast in the colors is more pleasing to look at, so I decided to just go for it and let it be. I think I made the right decision, but it's something that's probably a matter of opinion.