Dusty Saloon, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is t he Dusty Saloon (26x26), a rare western map of my own choosing! This one is just a little bar in the desert, with just a few natural features outside which should offer a scarce amount of cover to anyone planning an ambush or keeping an eye on people entering and leaving the building. 

Your extra version of this map is one I'm calling 'Eerie', which features more dramatic, high contrast lighting and a spooky greener palette. I made this map as a nod to the Necrotic version of a Desert Ruins map I made a little while ago, but this one is a little more subdued than that. I think it's perfect for an encounter where the players are holding out inside the saloon against zombies or spirits approaching from the wastes- that sounds pretty neat to me! 

1. As you can see, I started out this map with a somewhat different plan for the area outside of the saloon. I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do with it, whether I should add some old ruined buildings next door or just lots of rocky terrain, and the whole look felt way too busy and a bit too scattered. In the end, I decided to cut out the majority of the props and terrain I had placed outside, instead going for a more typical desert vibe- empty. In hindsight, I think I could have left the next-door ruins and been happy, but whenever I'm split between adding more features or leaving them out, I usually decide to cut them. In my mind, it's better to leave room for DMs to make their own decisions than to make the decision for them.

2. As I said, I cut a fair amount of outdoor props. Whenever I make a sandy map, I like to really emphasize how empty deserts are- it's a big feature of the terrain. I often feel like battle map makers are unwilling to leave big areas empty, since it doesn't offer great cover to players and doesn't build dynamic battlefields, but that's just the way deserts are. Right? 

Anyway, the bar. I based it off of a bar in Final Fantasy 14, the Coffer and Coffin, which I felt had a simple and effective design. It made sense to me that a saloon would have a particularly straightforward layout, just a big rectangle full of tables, barrels, and a bar, no frills. In all, a very easy location to make, and I'm pretty satisfied with it!

3. As for colors, I went with my regular desert palette, though maybe a little more subdued than usual. It's amazing how, every time I color and shade a desert location, I feel like I keep taking off some of the vignette and some of the glare, but afterwards it still seems to me like I did almost nothing. Honestly, the vignette still looks too heavy to me, and I think I backed off pretty hard with it. Ah well, next time I'll just go nuts on it then. 

I tried to keep the inside lighting a little distinct over the outside, but still allow it to feature lots of warm colors. I initially was planning on going pretty gray/blue with the inside (to give it a shady vibe), but that looked pretty terrible and made the building feel like I cut it out of a different map and dropped it in here. Instead, I decided to go more orange with it rather than the yellows and magentas of the outside- still feels deserty, still feels welcoming, still feels different than the outside.