Shady Alleys, Adept (Patreon)

Hello there, Adepts! This week's map is the Shady Alleys (40x40), one of my most complicated city maps yet. This mess of rooftops really pushed me, and all of the small details around the map kept me particularly busy over the last 2 weeks. All in all, I think I'll be making something a little simpler for my next one, a sewer tunnel or a little dungeon perhaps. 

Your alternate version of this map is a Rainy variant, featuring darker and stormier effects, paler lighting, and a light rain overlay to help get the point across. As I've mentioned before, I particularly like making rainy/stormy versions of city maps as a big fan of rainy cities in real life. Also, rain can alter the terrain in several ways however the DM wishes: fewer people crowding the streets, slipperier rooftiles/cobblestones, the risk of lightning strikes for those wielding metal weapons on rooftops, easier stealth checks (as long as you avoid stepping in puddles). In short, it's just a nice and easy way to slip in some extra complexity!

1. Tricky map, tricky tricky.  I don't usually like making city maps with dead ends, but I made an exception this time. A few dead ends are nice for setting up traps, fighting discreetly, and creating scenarios where players will have to be crafty and take advantage of their terrain in order to continue moving. With that in mind, I allowed the map to be somewhat framed by rooftops in some locations, which isn't great for providing you or your players with available vertical terrain to play with but is great for setting up lanes on the ground for players/enemies/NPCs to follow. So, compromises were allowed this time. 

Since I was trying to incorporate dead ends into the street/alley layout, I decided that I would do something I also try to keep to a minimum- stacking roofs. I almost never stack buildings 3 high, but I wanted to achieve a jumbled vibe, like this isn't a very pleasant part of town, and I felt that this would be one way to do that. The downside of this was that I had a hell of a time coloring/lighting this map due to the layered roofs and their various heights.

2. I spent 2 weeks working on this map, and I think I ended the first week with just plane rooftops in position, no props or additional details. I kept remembering, when I felt that I was nearly ready to start coloring, that I wanted this map to feel crazy and ramshackle, and I would go back and add 30 more props around the map- assortments of barrels, boards on the roofs, puddles, wagons, additional balconies, more patches of grass. And after I added them I would go back and realize that the place still looked too clean and well-maintained, so I would jump back in and add damage to rooftops, grime to the streets, grime to the roof ridges, little details which expressed age and neglect wherever I could think to add them. 

I went through this cycle a few times before I decided that I probably could just do that for an additional week, so I called it quits and tried to throw in colors.

3. I wasn't entirely sure how I wanted to express the shadiness and griminess of the map. If I remember correctly, the Patron who suggested this map mentioned that they wanted some grimy streets to go along with the Grimy Inn map I made back in 2020. So, I felt that this map should, in some way, reflect the palette in that one- however I really can't stand the colors and lighting in used in the Grimy Inn, so I decided my best move would be to try to capture the vibe however I could.

I mostly tried to imitate the mishmash of colors and dirt I had used in the Inn, but the level of contrast I used wouldn't work well for the Alleys. I think I found a decent middle ground, using several of the same colors with much less extreme lighting, but I still feel like I could have gotten a little closer maybe. Maybe not without risking the shady/grimy vibe of the
Alleys, however, so who can say?