Pumpkin Patch, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week I made the Pumpkin Patch (25x30), a very standard map that will fit perfectly into your spooky campaigns. I imagine a party being sent off to plunder a witch's magically-enhanced pumpkin patch in the forest so that the townspeople can make a giant jack-o-lantern to appease some angry, but festive, spirit who really loves Halloween. 

Your alternate version for this map is a much more cheerful color swap, retouched to fit in with many of my other forest maps. I'd recommend using this in conjunction with the Small Farm map I recently made, which has a similar vibe and feels like it should be easy enough to tie into a single story line. 

1. When I first started sketching this one I liked the thought of a farm's pumpkin patch, but after a few different attempts I decided that plain ol' farmland doesn't make for very interesting combat, even with giant pumpkins offering some interesting obstacles. I felt that, instead, a patch of giant pumpkins tucked away in the forest felt much more like a fairy tale and would probably make for spookier and more engaging scenarios, at the cost of being less versatile than a dedicated patch of pumpkins that stretches across the entire map.

On top of that, I would have been bored drawing a flat map occupied by 100% pumpkins. Forests are definitely a lot more fun to draw.

2. Pumpkins! I don't know when, but I apparently did draw up a pile of small ones and saved them as a PNG, which ended up being my reference for the rest I drew. I realize now that I probably could have gotten away with much less detailed pumps, but as always I get into a trance and end up hyper-focusing on something a little pointless, such as ensuring that every one is properly plump, without stepping back and considering if there might be a cleaner way to draw them. Not that they're terrible, but I think I could have done a better job if the thought had crossed my mind. 

Also, recognize these trees? They're the new ones I drew for the Feywild Encampment! A little less messy than the previous batch, with somewhat darker lines which stand out above the grass. Still considering if I need to make another batch with a little more detail, but for now they're perfectly fine. 

3. Colors! I wanted to go for a different vibe for this one, something a little more verdant than my typical spooky maps, like the color of trees in the early-middle of fall rather than bare branches and heavy fog. I felt that this would be a nice middle-ground between my summery palette and the ghostly palette I used for the Misty Graveyard.  This feels appropriate for leading into a spooky campaign or anything with a more grim tone than my usual maps. 

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to imitate here, but I feel like there's an environment in some game I've played that has a very similar vibe. Probably somewhere in Guild Wars 2 or Witcher 3, but I've recently played Divinity 2 and there are a lot of fun environments that feel pretty similar too.