Cliffside Village, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week I made the Cliffside Village (30x30), a dangerous map where some villagers settled down for some reason. I've made sure to include a healthy amount of empty space beyond the cliff, so you shouldn't have much trouble fitting in a whole swathe of flying enemies to harass your players and villagers alike. Also, it'll be nice to have all that extra room so you can space your players really far apart when you chuck them out into the void, no helping each other get out of this one- hope you're all packing feather fall. 

1. I didn't have much in mind when I started this one, when I put it on the poll I assumed I'd figure it out when the time came. As it turned out that time came pretty quickly, since this one got a shocking amount of votes. 

So since this is a village map, which I usually like to make much more irregular than city maps, I laid out a small and winding street with buildings rotated at all kinds of odd angles. Next I drew up a thin rock wall to follow the outside edge of the street, but I thought the layout felt a little unusual, so I moved groups of buildings around to be a little less evenly spaced.

 Also, in my first sketches I included a tall rock wall which covered the bottom part of the frame but it felt like it was wasting a lot of space. With it gone, I was able to slide down the whole map so as to give more room to the open air beyond the cliff, thus giving DMs more real estate for groups of flying enemies. A nice bonus of this was that the shift also pushed big portions of a few buildings off screen, an effect that helps give the impression that this is only part of a larger, complicated village.

2. Around this point I started to wonder how I would give the impression that this chunk of land is a cliff. I've seen mapmakers just draw a thin rock wall and some distant forests far below, but I wasn't 100% sold by this effect. I started there, and added some extra rock walls which I left partially obscured by higher walls, giving the impression of some distance, at least near the edge of the frame. I think this effect works well enough in line art, and fog effects on top helped bring it together. 

Beyond the cliff, this map might as well be one of my usual village maps, which always feel a little scattered for my taste. People enjoy them though, so I'm happy to keep providing more content. 

3. Like I mentioned, I was somewhat confident that color and lighting effects would help bring this map together. In the end, I think the fog effect was somewhat effective at giving the impression of height, but I get the feeling that there were better methods I hadn't considered. Maybe if I had more time I could have drawn some distant environments for the empty space, but I was already very far behind schedule by the time I started coloring, so I settled for a quick painting of some cresting waves far below which also could pass for clouds and sky in a pinch. 

Overall, I'd give this map a 7 out of 10 at best, and hopefully next time I try something similar I'll have picked up a few ideas on how to improve this type of terrain.