Palace Fountain, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, Adepts- this week's map is the Palace Fountain (31x35), a straightforward courtyard on the palace grounds for your players to sneak carefully past guards on set patrol routes. Your alternate version of this map is a 'Grim' recoloring, which feels appropriate for the castles of bad guys who maybe aren't super evil, or at least not known to be super evil. You following me?

1. Initial sketch. My job for this map was simple- make the map that last week's map could have been if I had thought about the prompt a little more. As it turns out the title 'Castle Courtyard' can imply a lot of things, and I only realized after I nearly finished it that anyone who voted for it in the poll might have expected a courtyard within a palace with fountains/gardens. Realizing that, I decided to go ahead and make a map that checked all of those boxes, featuring: hedges, a fountain, a ring of rooftops, footpaths, statues, and only that. 

The roofs were easy enough to lay out, particularly because I could get away with making them symmetrical for once in my life, and I kinda liked the look of a strip of grass separating the buildings from the footpaths- I think it feels fancy! The original design for the hedges came from some concept art I found online, which I later overcomplicated in an attempt to give a little more cover for sneaky folks to hide behind. And as always, I refuse to draw any small details in the starting sketch, so the fountain and the surrounding area get to be circles until I can force myself to whip up a design.

2. Outlines. I think I'm starting to figure out what exactly I hate about making city maps- the buildings aren't symmetrical and they're often crooked, which makes my life very difficult later on. Since these buildings are both symmetrical and square with the grid, I almost had fun while assembling them or at least I didn't have a bad time, which is just as good. 

Careful readers will notice that I implemented the idea for 2 colors of cobblestone that I talked about in last week's Behind the Scenes post. It turned out really well, I think! I probably could have pulled off the execution a little nicer, but honestly it isn't bad at all. I don't know how often this will be something I can use, but it's a nice option to have available.

Side note: the hedges gave me flashbacks to my Halloween hedge maze map. I can't even imagine what I was thinking, what a stupid idea for a map and a terrible idea to try to make in a single week. I slaved over that awful map and people genuinely hated it, surprise surprise. I'm in awe of my own bad ideas sometimes. 

3. Color. This week I felt like going vivid with this map- I grabbed the colors from the Castle Courtyard and decided they just weren't colorful enough, and I tweaked everything until they were only a half-step away from being horribly over-saturated. It just goes to show that I should never render the map into JPGs and package up my files the same day I color it- my eyes can't identify the mistakes I made until I've stepped away for a day. Well, I know I'm my biggest critic, so maybe you all won't find it as blindingly hyper-colorful as I do. Cheers!