Jungle Temple, Adept- a Collaboration with the Boy King of Idaho (Patreon)

This week's map is the Jungle Temple (34x34), my first collaboration with Alex, the Boy King of Idaho, who made music to accompany it! I highly recommend checking out his music, it's great stuff, perfect background music for adventurin'.  

Also, your alternate version of this map is a Fey recoloring, which seems perfect for how wild the environment is. And don't think you need to be in the Feywild to use this one, any kind of enchanted or ancient forest would be a fitting setting for this version. And, of course, I made a night version of it as well, which features a little less pizzazz and more mellow vibes for your more subtle encounters.

1. The idea for this map was an open-concept overgrown temple, with walls and passages but many paths you can take through and around it. Also, I liked the thought of it being somewhat reminiscent of Ta Prohm temple, which similarly features many columns, stairs, and open spaces, as well as some very impressive trees growing atop it. In general, I mostly wanted to toe the line between abandoned and occupied, with enough plant life and crumbling stone to make the place feel ancient and empty, while with more than enough standing walls and altars to give the impression that it's still being somewhat maintained. 

2. Between the 1st and 2nd steps I decided to keep the walls of the structure almost entirely intact, again stressing how this building might be manned by some druids or something like that.  Other prominent additions include obilisks which I placed at key points around the halls, which I felt could be interesting structures to include in whatever story takes place here- like needing to interact with each one in order to open the door to the North chamber, probably while being attacked by treasure hunters/wildlife/traps the whole time. 

Also, against my better judgement, I decided to use 5' square tiles again for the main structure. I wanted to do some sort of irregular pattern of fitted, squarish stones, but as I continued detailing stairs, walls, and roots I knew I just wouldn't have the time to whip up something like that for such a large space. It's probably time I take a moment to draw up a pattern like that and save it for later, honestly. 

3. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the Jungle Ledge map was actually made as practice for this one, after I decided that I needed to do a little work on my jungle palette and lighting. I ended up making a few more tweaks to the ground color and some lighting effects, specifically adding a vignette to help emphasize the temple more.

One big roadblock I ran into while coloring this map was the stone palette I was using for the temple. I originally wanted to imitate the colors of the ground somewhat, with just a bit more brightness, but it looked pretty terrible- it didn't stand out at all and made for a pretty confusing image. I ended up having to swap to a fairly boring light gray stone, which I disliked, but it successfully helped the building stand out against the grass and red ground.  I really would have rather kept gray out of the palette, but I couldn't find any better solution that did the job, so I stuck to it.