Frozen Pond, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts, I hope you're having a nice holiday season! For Christmas I was given 'Ghost of Tsushima' by my sister's boyfriend, and let me tell you, I'm getting some fun ideas for maps from it. Maybe when I get around to it again I'll make some more Japanese-inspired maps, I remember some patrons asking for that sort of thing a while ago. Maybe some hot springs or crossroads would be fun? I'll brainstorm it.

Anyway, your extra version of this map, the Frozen Pond (25x25) features some giant jagged holes in the ice, ideal for enemies (like icy-cold water elementals) to spring out of! Otherwise, maybe utilize enemies that try to throw your players into the water, opening them up to dangerous cold exposure if they aren't careful. Stacks of Exhaustion aren't anything to mess around with.

1. So, with this map's layout I wanted to ensure that the pond remained the focus. It would have been very very easy to throw in lots of fun additional props/environmental features, such as cliffs, docks, cabins, caves, bones, or ruins, but at the end of the day I preferred this map as a quick addition to adventures through a snowy forest- anything else would have started to complicate things and limit its usefulness. Sometimes you just need a little frozen pond, right?

That said, I kept things simple: one rocky ledge (for dramatic monologuing/cover), some nearby trees (to imply the terrain of the surrounding area), and a big patch of ice. Nothing else felt necessary to the prompt, so I didn't add anything else. However, in hindsight, I think I could have increased the size of the map a little so I could expand the pond and add a little island in the middle, that might have been fun. 

2. As with my swamp maps' grass and water, I was tempted to draw some kind of solid ground between the snow and the ice, like a little border of loose rocks, something to imply a small drop in elevation. I think it might have been nice, and it probably would have looked pretty good too, but I cut it for a couple reasons: 1. That would have taken quite a bit of time, lots of little details would have needed to be drawn in, and 2. I like how the snow hides the border of the pond and perhaps implies that the pond might extend further out under the snow, which gives DMs a little wiggle room for shenanigans. 

3. I'm racking my brain for times I've drawn ice, and surprisingly I'm having a hard time coming up with anything. I thought for sure I had made an icy alternative version of the Volcanic Path, but a glance back shows that I had left it a little ambiguous. I'm like 75% sure I have, but I'm completely blanking. Either way, any time I draw something new I have to try out several different ways of depicting it, and this is what I came up with this time. I think, perhaps, I went a little to hard on the coloring/shading, so perhaps in the future I'll try to be more subtle with it, but it certainly is eye-catching, huh?