Molten Keep, Adept (Patreon)

Hello again, folks- this week's map is the Molten Keep (25x25), a pleasantly generic dungeon featuring plenty of hazardous trenches of lava. My intention with this map was to keep the layout somewhat open and without an implied story, though I did include a few magical-lookin' crystals to keep things a little interesting, and I also made sure to keep the lava nice and available, so your players will always be close enough to the danger to feel a little on edge.

Your alternate version of this map is Caustic, featuring dangerously glowing green ooze to replace the lava! Dangerous slime is a neat little swap, I think, since the danger level of the ooze is up to the DM to decide. As far as the players know it could spell instant death, but of course you know that it is only going to poison, mutate, or melt away the clothes of anything that comes in contact with it. Fun!

1. Wow, this was a hell of a week folks. My computer is on death's door, my tablet's pen broke, and my baby has decided that she only wants to sleep half as much this week, so it's been a bit of a trickier map than usual. So let's just say this map didn't end up being quite what I had planned when I first sketched it. 

The sketch above was my 3rd attempt, with the final version being a bit more linear than the previous. My issue with dungeons is the flow of the rooms- I feel like your typical dungeon is almost nonsensical, featuring a layout that looks like it was made by a madman. I try to make them to feel somewhat thoughtful, and while that doesn't always make for 'good' dungeon design, at least it feels intentional and not randomly generated. For example, I like the symmetry of this final version of this map, as well as the repeated diamond-shaped troughs of lava- the repeated design gives those features a sense of importance, so perhaps the players will feel like there's something here to investigate or pick up on.

2. It was at the beginning of the outlines that my tablet pen broke, which was obviously disappointing. This left me with a pen which I could place 0 pressure on without causing critical damage, so I bumped up the pen's settings to maximum sensitivity and started drawing the map by barely brushing the pen against the tablet. The result was that I couldn't alter the pressure on the lines without changing the pen's settings, so I started dumbing down the map. The walls became flat slabs, the lava became a bit simpler, and new props became squares and simple circles. I resigned myself to just getting some nice details on the floor, hoping that would help to add some sense of complexity. 

Fortunately the new pen arrived 2 days later (after a painful $40 express shipping from Wacom), so I was able to add a few finishing touches and move on to the coloring without too much more struggling. 

3. I have never tried to add lava to a darker map before, so this was something new to me. I had a hard time balancing the lighting from the lava with the darker shadows I stubbornly stuck to, but after many many many iterations I feel like I've struck some sort of balance. I think, in the future, I might try to leave the lava a bit darker and a little more flat, I feel like that might come across a bit better than this maybe. Still, it's kinda cool, right? I think that's a rad palette I ended up with.