Forest Village, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, Adepts! This week's map is the Forest Village (30x35), another little village map, this time bridging the gap between my expansive library of forest maps and my growing collection of village maps. I've received several fun recommendations for future village maps, so over the next couple weeks you should see some interesting ones!

Your alternate version of this map is 'Blighted', featuring a palette I usually reserve for dense forest maps. I thought it might be a nice way to give some tension to this map, while also providing a somewhat 'grim' version that would be more ideal (than the original) for your darker campaigns. That is to say, it would fit better in Curse of Strahd than the hyper-colorful version you're also receiving. 

1. I went through a lot of iterations of this map, many that don't look at all similar to the final product. Much of the original map was taken up by a giant mountainside with a small mining cave, but I was having a hard time figuring out how to depict the mountainside in such a way that didn't make the rooftops look wrong. The problem is that the way I draw rock walls can sometimes feel like they're being depicted from a 3/4 angle from above, depending on the configuration of the map, specifically if all of the rock walls in a map are facing the same direction. That isn't necessarily a problem, but when placed next to my roofs (which are very obviously all seen from above), it tends to look very wrong, like parts of the map are drawn at different angles. 

While that original map might have been cool, I had spent too long trying to find a solution to that problem and decided that I would have to work on it some other time. Instead, I backed away from the issue and simple slid the whole map upwards, removing the mountainside from the frame, and added a nice little forest and a camp. 

2. After spending way too long in the conceptual stage of this map, and after wasting an extra 2 days drawing elements which wouldn't end up being in this map, I was quite short on time, so I went ahead and grabbed a batch of trees and rocks from previous maps, arranged them, and dropped them into place. Despite being short on time, I still drew up several new props, including new roofs, the camp, some carts, grass, and ground, though I admit I drew many of these before I realized that I was going to fall desperately behind schedule.

3. Yes, I'm still toying around with my newest village palette, and I've gotten a fair bit of positive feedback! It seems like many of you do appreciate the pivot towards more and more vibrant colors, which is good because I'm really enjoying this new look. The only issue is that this is the most major change I've made to my forest palette since I started Neutral Party, which means that the difference between this new palette and the old one is very noticeable, maybe even a little jarring. I've been avoiding making a lot of changes in style for fear of making many of my maps incompatible with each other, but I think it's time to make a few changes, hopefully for the better.