Infested Orchard, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week I made the Infested Orchard (25x35), a dark and web-clogged place where your low-level parties can face off against a couple giant spiders and your high-level parties can battle a squadron of driders backed up by phase spiders. 

But every once-in-a-while you don't want a haunted orchard, but rather an idyllic orchard where you can battle more happy creatures, like drunken ogres or something, in which case your alternate version is a Sunny Orchard, which uses my typical forest palette and lighting! 

1. Orchards are a little boring, kinda by design. I spent some time trying to find ways to spice up the layout, adding fences and rock ledges to offer some cover, but I eventually decided that part of the fun of the location is how open it is. Not every map has to be covered in paths from one elevation to another amid mazes of ruins and boulders.  On top of that, I felt that the addition of webs clogging certain paths might allow for DMs to restrict movement (at their discretion, they could alternately decide that the webs aren't thick or strong enough to restrict passage though the trees), allowing for some amount of strategy mid-combat. 

Another issue I had was deciding if this would be the map I make an extra version of with only tree trunks instead of the canopy of leaves. Personally, I've never needed to mark out tree trunks when DMing- I usually quickly explain to my players that the trunk is precisely in the center of the tree and wide enough for a character to take cover behind if they so choose. After that, I've never had any real issues, so I felt it wasn't vital enough to include in the map. 

2. Webs, yuck. I didn't think it would be appropriate to copy and paste webs to save some time, since they're very easy to identify as unique and duplicates would stand out. Then again, one web look a lot like another, so I put the time in and drew up a whole bunch of similarly simple webs, which wasn't as annoying as you might think (at least it was more interesting than drawing grass, which I am 100% sick of as I move into my 3rd year of mapmaking). 

I whipped up this batch of trees by grabbing some of the smaller ones from the Feywild Encampment, duplicating them all, and redrawing their centers and outer lines. In my mind, those are the most easily identified parts of tree props, so I  felt that would be more than enough alternate detail to make each duplicate feel different. 

3. Color! You might recognize this palette from the 'Eerie' versions of my recent Revisted post, though with significantly less fog. Part of what made this map's coloring so tricky was balancing the webs against the fog against the light web texture I overlayed on the grass and  trees, which was a puzzle that took me most of a day to figure out. 

The fog, while not required for this map, felt so right that I couldn't make myself remove it, even going so far as to reduce it down to around 20% opacity in an attempt to stop it from completely obscuring the webs, which I felt were too important to let fall away. 

The web texture I mentioned was an idea that occurred to me while I was working on the webs' outlines- there needed to be some detail in the trees' coloring that implied that there were webs clogging up the branches as well. Here's the thing though- I was way too short on time to be drawing webbing in the treetops, so I tried to work smarter, not harder. What I did was, I grabbed a marble texture, tweaked the contrast and levels, tinted the veins, overlayed it lightly on the trees, and even more lightly overlayed it on the grass. It isn't perfect, I would rather I had the time to really get in there and draw the webs by hand, but it does the job and holds up perfectly well at a glance, so it's good enough for government work.