Ransacked Cabin, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Ransacked Cabin (30x30), a location that's seen some fighting and might present some opportunity to the players if the story allows it. I imagine concerned adventurers might be able to identify what went down here and maybe even learn who the aggressor was, and enterprising adventurers might be able to secure payment for hunting them down!

Your alternate version of this map is one where I've tried to make it feel a bit more spooky, upping the contrast and lowering the saturation so as to give the map a scarier vibe than the original. I think this is my personal favorite version of this map, it definitely captures the energy that I wanted to achieve for a Halloween map!

1. I had somewhat bigger plans for this map when I first started it. Originally I was calling it the Bloody Cabin and I was going to make it look like a proper bloodbath inside, but I thought about it for a sec and felt that that might not be the most useful version of this map for most DMs, so I decided to step it back a little and simply make the place look turned over and only slightly bloody. 

Additionally I was originally planning on including a cellar as well (you can see the entrance to it at the top of the cabin), with a summoning circle inside. And, as these things always go, I just didn't have the time to put together an additional layer to this map- life's been busy recently.

2. I didn't think about it much before I started this map, but when I got to it I wasn't super sure how I was going to make the place look like a fight went down inside. After some thinking I felt that knocked-over chairs would be one of the best indicators, a kicked-down door too, and I guess just some stuff scattered around as the finishing touches. Just one of those things I would never have to think about if this wasn't my job haha. 

3. I was a little torn on what I should do with the colors here. Autumnal colors felt right, cause you know I'm deep in those fall vibes right now- sweaters, tea, and pumpkin bread every day, but I wanted to make sure the palette felt a little ominous as well. In a strange move, I went way back to one of my old Halloween maps, the Pumpkin Patch, and used its palette as a starting point. I'm not even going to bother linking it since I ended up tweaking the colors to the point of being unidentifiable. 

As it turns out it ended up looking more like an outright Autumn map than I was intending, so maybe I should have simply started with my most recent Autumn map as the basis for the colors. As always, hindsight is 20/20. Anyway, I don't think I'm quite done making spooky maps yet (I got off to a slow start this year), so maybe I'll have the chance to take another swing at a similar map. We'll see!