Shady Brewery, Adept (Patreon)

This week I made the Shady Brewery (24x35), a grimy little place with a bigger basement than it appears at first glance. Also, your alternate version for this one is a nice Sunset version, which also would work well in a more arid environment, like in a Western-themed campaign.

1. I really don't know much about old-timey brewing, but I do know that big ol' barrels sound about right. I felt that looks would be more important than accuracy anyway, so I decided early on that I wouldn't be too worried about realism. 

One thing I do sorta regret however is scrapping the walkway leading over the brewing barrels, I forgot to consider how cool and treacherous it would make combat over an open barrel and the fun scenes that it might lead to. At the time I was caught up in imagining how annoying it would be to have an overlay for just that little bit of terrain, and I felt it would be worth it to cut it out for simplicity's sake. Oh well, maybe I'll come back later and whip up some rooftops to accompany this 3rd layer. 

2. It's pretty nice how I have so many inn-themed props these days, I've made more than enough of those kinds of maps that populating this building wasn't terribly difficult. In fact, I think only a 3rd of all props in this map are actually new, which turned out to be a primo time-saver. The only issue that came from this is I realized after coloring and shading that there are 3 different styles of crates throughout the map, 3 slightly different designs that probably wouldn't make much sense to see side-by-side. It's a small thing, but I felt silly for not catching it earlier. I'll have to be a little more careful about that in the future. 

3. I think I'm getting much better at coloring interiors! I think I took just about half as much time coloring and shading than I did for the Roadside Tavern, which I also think doesn't look nearly as nice as this one. It helps that I was aiming to make this map look grimier than my usual interior since dirty and rough shadows are great for adding interest to empty spaces while also lending a 'dirty' vibe. Not a bad map, I think, it definitely gets me hyped up to make some more buildings!