Winding Alleys, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week's map is the Winding Alleys (30x20), a fresh batch of alleys and roofs to pad out your cities with, just in case your players don't respect the border of the map and you need a bit more city to help finish up the encounter. 

Your extra version of this map is a nice Sunset version- ideal for setting up dramatic showdowns in the streets, or perhaps a rooftop chase as darkness falls on the city. There's just something great about a city at sunset, I think!

1. Designing the layout for tightly-packed alleys is a little tricky, I've found. I like cramming together as many roofs as possible since it sets up a nice bit of verticality, but that doesn't make for particularly interesting combat on the ground if 90% of the map is rooftops without many paths between them. With that in mind, I always try to fill the center of the map with as many branching paths as possible, if not also with a small courtyard or something that gives some fun lines of sight for ranged combatants. 

2. As with all of my most recent city maps, I've been utilizing the new tiled rooftop texture I had made around 2 months ago, which is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it's obviously great that I finally went ahead and put together a clean new patch of rooftop to work with, featuring clean lines and no excessively eye-catching features, but on the other hand I now need to assemble all kinds of new rooftop shapes out of this new patch of tile texture, cutting and screwing together all the angles and shapes needed to create a whole array of roofs that don't look too similar to each other. All considered, it had to be done, but it was an annoying process to go through again.

3. I wish I could be one of those mapmakers who are fine with making city maps where the roofs are all nearly the same colors, like entirely shades of brown or blue. That would be nice. Instead, I feel compelled to make each and every map just about as vibrant as possible without hurting my eyes, even when it doesn't make much sense for them to be that way. Well, at least this means that I'll always be able to make Subdued versions of maps, and people probably won't complain.