Razed Temple, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week's map is the Razed Temple (26x26), which probably was once a nice place to worship miscellaneous gods before I got my hands on it. Notice that there aren't any signifiers as to which god was worshipped here, so you should have no problem fitting this map to whichever god you want to piss off.

Your alternate version for this map is a Fey recoloring, in the style of the various Fey forest maps I've made in the past! I'm pretty sure I hadn't applied the same treatment to a city street until now, and I'm kinda into it- it feels a little Underdark-y and a bit magical with those sparkles floating around. I hope you find a use for it, I felt it was neat enough to share!

1. As you can see, the only aspects of my original design which remained was the floor layout of the temple, almost everything else got changed along the way. The buildings around the edges were always going to be mostly window dressing, offering a little bit of cover for those who need it and some height advantages to crafty players who like climbing. With that in mind, I went for somewhat simple buildings and scooched them a little bit further to the edges of the map, to add additional emphasis to the rubble.

I think the most pertinent change I made was the swap from a big stairway at the entrance into a smaller design, which left enough room for a fountain a short distance away. I figured that the fountain would offer a little more interesting terrain than a somewhat larger staircase, which honestly wasn't doing much for the map anyway.

2. As it turned out, most of my time was spent drawing rubble for this map. I was hopeful that I would be able to grab some previously drawn rubble from the Razed Street (my first destroyed city map), but I wasn't a fan of how much wooden rubble was mixed in, since it made more sense to me that the temple's rubble would be mostly stone. This also allowed me to draw wooden and stone rubble on two separate layers, which made coloring each different colors infinitely easier, a major plus.

You know what's the hardest thing about making a map like this? Placing rubble and pillars and fallen walls in such a way that it looks natural. It's a tricky puzzle, figuring out just how to place 'random' rocks so that they don't look symmetrical or too evenly placed, while also dropping in a few that actually are symmetrical and evenly placed because sometimes that's just how 'random' things work out. I spent much too long nudging and rotating pebbles and bricks so that they wouldn't accidentally create easily-identifiable patterns, I wish I could hit a button and shuffle them and save myself a little time.

3. I decided to do a couple things different with this map's colors. Starting off, I wanted to make it similar in appearance the the Razed Street, which is a nice map to use as a centerpoint for a destroyed city, while simultaneously imitating the colors of my regular city maps since most of the buildings featured here are still intact. I decided to cut the difference, while leaning towards less destroyed colors, though I did use the palette of the Razed Street as a jumping off point. I think it turned out allright, though I kinda wish I had paid a little more attention to some of the smaller details here, like how some of the puddles stand out bit more than they should, and also how I missed adding more burnt effects to the destroyed building on the right side. City maps are complicated like that, you know? Lots of small details to keep in mind.