Mountain Shrine, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back after a couple week stay-cation, bringing with me the Mountain Shrine (25x30)! I know this isn't the most popular opinion, but I feel like taking some time off at home is just as good as traveling- I can do all the things I've been too busy for at home and relax without having to plan anything. Most importantly, I got to read all of the Haikyu manga and cook lots of good food for my wife and me, which was great. Anyway, on with the map!

Your alternate version of this map is one which I'm calling 'Crisp'- and I'll be real with you, it's the original version of the map I made before I whipped up the new unusually-colored base version. As you can see, this one is more dreary and a little more similar to my typical palette, but mostly it's kinda a callback to one of my earliest maps, the Winding Mountain Path.

1. A sketch! I decided to be ambitious with this map, setting the size to 40x40 and including lots and lots of rock walls, not like I have much of a choice for a mountainous map. Later, I realized that the size of the map would require me to spend at least 2 weeks working on it and that would suck, so I scaled and adjusted it wildly to be more achievable in a reasonable amount of time. Don't judge, I'm a one man operation here. 

As far as layout is concerned, I wanted to maximize the amount of flat ground available while also making sure to build on the 'mountainous' prompt, so I went with the old classic 'back-and-forth winding mountain ledges', which is a little overdone when it comes to battlemaps, but that's because it uses the space well and is complicated enough terrain for a decent fight.

2. Outlines! Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't reuse any rock walls from previous maps. That meant that I'd have to whip up an enormous amount of complicated terrain from scratch as the centerpoint of the map, so that was a lot of work. Fortunately, once that was finished (after many many hours (I'm not a fast artist (or a fast anything either))), I quickly added just about everything else to the map in an afternoon, lingering only on the shrine itself which I felt had to be decently detailed. Still, this left me a day behind schedule still, and it didn't help that I started playing FF14 again during my 2 weeks off. 

3. As I've mentioned, the original colored version of this map was, in fact, the Crisp version you Adepts received. I was very happy with it too, perfectly content with it as the main version of this map, but I was messing around with different colors for the outlines and fog when I stumbled on this palette. I was planning on calling it an 'Ethereal' variant, due to the kinda ghostly palette and the mystical vibes that the multi-color fog adds, but I was just so enchanted with it that I thought it might be neat to make this the front-facing version of this map, the version which most people would likely see. To summarize, I just think it's neat and I wanted people to see it!