Swamp Cabin, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week I made the Swamp Cabin (25x25), a somewhat friendly-lookin' house in the middle of a swamp where I'm sure you can encounter a kind, old druid who can offer some aid for your journey. Or maybe, using your Ritual version of the map, you can encounter a kind, old witch who can offer unusual and spooky aid for your journey. Both sound great to me!

1. Something I've been wanting to do with my swamp maps is make one that's mostly water, so that it'll be up to the DM to decide exactly how difficult it will be to traverse the terrain. For example, if you want this to be a pretty simple obstacle, maybe the water is only about a foot or two deep and a little muddy. Or, perhaps it's murky, 5 feet deep, and swarming with needle-toothed shrieking eels. 

The building and dock were inspired by the little outposts you sometimes come across in Sea of Thieves, just big enough for a small stall and little else. These little locations make for some tricky combat, and I can only imagine how difficult it would become if the swamp below this little cabin was poisonous or packed with bloodthirsty fish/zombies/eldritch beings.

2. Honestly, the outlines for this one almost felt like cheating. It's pretty nice every once in a while to make a map that's more than half water, which easily cuts the process by half. I wonder how many other maps I can flood..? A flooded city street might be kinda fun actually.

Otherwise, I decided once again to attempt to fill out the shoreline a little more with extra lily pads and roots, despite my worry that these additional props will over-detail and over-complicate the water. I had been purposely going very light with these additions for my recent swamp maps, but due to the relative simplicity of this map I figured it might be alright if I sparingly slipped in a few little props, for the sake of adding some color. Overall, I think it turned out perfectly fine, and in fact I might even want to go a little bit heavier on these bits for the next one. 

3. Mostly water color, this time. I did end up messing with the grass and trees once again, pushing the palette even further away from the jungle-tones I was originally planning on using for these swamp maps. For this iteration, I added a fair amount of yellow to both the grass and the trees, removing almost all of the green from the grass altogether. The yellows look pretty nice with the water's blue so I felt pretty confident about this change, and on top of that it helps push the 'blighted' swamp vibes that I've been playing with. 

I'm still playing around with these swamp palettes though, so we'll see where the next one ends up- I'm not 100% certain I'm happy with the direction I've gone with this one, so don't be surprised to see a little backpedaling for whichever I do next. I never really know how I feel about a map until several days have passed, so it's really a toss-up.