Infested Tomb, Adept (Patreon)

Hello folks! This week's map is the Infested Tomb (17x25), a lil map with big problems- lots and lots of giant bug eggs. There is no chance I would ever step into a place like this, but thankfully my imagination is unable to harm me much more than keeping me up at night. 

Your alternate version of this map is one where I've cleaned out all those terrible eggs and webs- it's Uninfested! I know it's not the flashiest variant, but the effort it took to ensure that it was possible is greater than many of my typical other renditions, so I'm going to slide it over to you, smile, and shrug, hoping that you will appreciate it.

1. As always, my dungeon sketches go through many many iterations, with several featuring huge branching hallways and collapsed rooms. However, I usually find that the smaller and symmetrical maps both feel more interesting and more realistic, so I decided to draw a little dungeon with a small amount of complexity in the beginning and a larger chamber at the end (for a somewhat bigger fight arena). It's simple and effective, I think.

At this point I was picturing the final product featuring lots of big ol' eggs, but I didn't feel like it was important to sketch them in yet. I wasn't very certain how that was going to look and I figured it was going to mostly come down to how much time I would have to try out a few different styles of eggs. 

2. Outlines! I actually drew up fresh walls for this one, instead of using my dingy 1'3" (1 quarter of a grid square) wide rock walls that I made a while ago and set aside. I suppose I felt like they looked too crumbly and broken and I wanted to try out cleaner walls in a dungeon and see how they did me. I don't think I'll do it again, at least not with so little detail- it's just not my style, I guess.

The eggs were another issue. I really wasn't sure how I was going to depict them, whether they were going to be small orbs clustered around the rooms or giant mounds of stuck-together eggs, or like I settled on, huge web-wrapped spheres with sticky bits connecting them to the ground. I spent a lot of time sketching out all of these ideas and not really being very happy with any of them, but what I ended with was my favorite (not that that's saying much), and so I ran with it for the sake of time. 

3. And yes, I even wanted to try out something new at the coloring stage as well. I always start my maps by looking up reference or inspiration, checking whether other mapmakers have made similar maps to what I have in mind or looking to see if there's any fully rendered art of the concept I'm interested in. 

A lot of what I found was more subtly lit than I tend to make my dungeons and I thought it looked great, so I thought I would try something similar. As it turns out, it's very difficult to balance lighting when you are intentionally trying not to have incredibly light lights and vibrant shadows, who would have thought? I don't know what else to say, it's just tricky, like I was using a crutch before by being extravagant with my lighting. I don't even know if I pulled this off well, I feel like I need to think about this style of coloring/lighting and try a few more times. If I don't receive hate for this map I'll try it again, how about that?