Jungle Dungeon, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Jungle Dungeon (36x40), a root-filled but mostly intact series of chambers with just the barest signs of decay- a few small piles of rubble, some plants growing at the edges of the rooms, giant roots bursting from the occasional wall, you know how it goes.

Your alternate version of this map is one I'm calling Noxious, starring some hazy effects obscuring the view as well as sickly yellowish lighting over bluish shadows. The effect is intended to express that the dungeon is poisonous or harmful to intruders, perhaps due to a trap which was triggered here once upon a time or some event which is ongoing outside. Anyway, I felt like adding an ongoing effect to the map might help add some difficulty to the otherwise simple and straightforward terrain, making part of the struggle simply surviving against the environmental effects on top of any nasty enemies that intentionally live down here (ancient constructs which resist the poison perhaps and come to life as the players enter?).

1. A very strange layout for me, no hallways to speak of and no doors at all. My initial idea for the map included a whole mess of pillars, which are great for blocking sight lines but not so great at preventing people from passing by, ideal for stealth. Anyway, I just like how pillars make a dungeon feel more grand, and I thought that using them instead of hallways and doorways might make for a fun layout. 

You'll notice that I cut out the 3rd entrance to the final large chamber in the middle, which was intended to be a balcony which looked out over the lower room. I initially thought this would make for very dramatic confrontations with the boss looking down upon the players, maybe lobbing a spell or two, but I realized that that platform would actually be only 15 feet high at most with the size of the staircases on the other side. Maybe I could have rearranged the final chamber to feature a long staircase which eventually led to the balcony, but I really enjoy the center platform for giving DMs a location to place key items or inactivated enemies, so I cut the balcony without feeling that anything important was lost. 

2. Yes, I finally did it- I made a dungeon without drawing the brick walls. I thought about how annoying it would be to sketch out the bricks and arrange them with all these corners and pillars and I decided that I would simply not do it this time. I figured I'd put that same energy into drawing something actually important in the map, not and endless length of zigzagging brick walls. And what's cool about this is this decision made my life much easier in ways I didn't predict, as I was able to easily shade the inside of the dungeon now that the darkness outside of the walls was the top layer- I could simply shade the dang map instead of selecting the correct layers beforehand. 

Another fun detail of note (to me) was that I decided to go with 3 different floor textures, which I imagined would give the map a more ambiently detailed vibe and add on the jungle-y environment as well. However, the particularly detailed square cobblestone texture was too detailed for me, so I did end up copying and pasting it to the other side- a lazy strat that I usually try to avoid, but that's showbiz babe.

3. Moving along, I was very pleased with how the new layer order was working out, so I had a surprisingly pleasant time coloring and shading. I started by using the colors of the Overgrown Tomb as the basis of this map, tweaking them to be a little more vibrant and a fair bit darker as well. I made this change because I've been skewing my maps to be a little less blindingly bright recently- call it a change in taste. I can't say if it's overall an improvement, I'll only know for sure when I look back in a year or so, but I currently enjoy how it looks so I'm considering it an improvement.