Snowy Road, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts, this week your map is the Snowy Road (25x25)! I know it's a simple one, but this sort of map is realistically the bulk of your average campaign- perfect for surprise encounters mid-journey, or as a planned roadside side adventure. For example, despite being cliché, I will almost always use a straightforward map like this for early battles/encounters against bandits/goblins when beginning a new campaign, just to give my returning players a chance to mess around with their new characters and get new players a feel for playing on a map.

Also, your alternate version of this one is a Fey recoloring- a first for winter maps! Unless I'm forgetting something, I'm fairly certain this is the first time I've applied my 'Fey' effects to a winter map, featuring layers of hazy pinks and purples on top of more cyan/purple colors below. I'm not 100% certain it feels quite right, but it does look interesting, so I'll have to at least think about it a little before I try it again. 

1. Just judging by the sketch, this one looks like it was one of my more rushed maps. I made the Snowy Road back in the first week of November, when I had a strange burst of speed and nocked out multiple maps in a single week and set them aside for paternity leave. 

This map was partially inspired by a snowy bridge in the Wayfarer Foothills, an early Norn map in Guild Wars 2. A while back, around when I started Neutral Party, I was strapped for map inspiration and decided to run around one of my favorite games for a while and see if it could give me any ideas, taking screenshots along the way of anything that caught my eye or felt like it would be cool in a battlemap. Many of my early maps came about this way, but this one never ended up getting made for one reason or another, probably because I got it in my head that, instead of rock walls, there needed to be a highly detailed rocky slope leading down into the water. I don't know where I got that notion (it was probably how it was in the game), but I'm glad I finally got around to taking it off of my list!

2. As always, maps like this can come around very quickly when I'm feeling crafty. At the time of its creation I was just trying to put together as many maps and put them aside for later, so I was working fairly quickly. With that in mind, I believe just about everything other than the water, the path, and the snow are all reused assets from previous maps, meaning I probably only spent an afternoon putting all of the outlines in place before I started coloring. Not a bad turnaround, I think! 

3. Thinking back, I think I used the Viking Port as my color reference for this map. I feel like I colored that one a bit more 'cold' than I usually make my winter maps, so I get why I tried it again here, but I kinda feel like it results in an overly monotone map- the greens of the trees don't get much of a chance to shine through unfortunately. I think, in the future, I'll just make the snow a bit more blue and let everything else go back to normal? I'm tempted to see how this one would look if I just put the trees on top of the tint layer, but that feels like a lazy solution. I'll think about this for my next winter map.