Haunted Village Ruins, Adept (Patreon)

3Hello again, folks- this week's map is the Haunted Village Ruins (35x35), a spooky map coming at you several months earlier than you'd expect. I think that's just the mood I've been in though, and also I'm looking forward to Halloween, as usual (my wife and I joke that we treat Halloween like Christmas, we go all out and prep for nearly a month beforehand). 

But, of course, maybe you would rather not have a creepy map right now, so I also prepped a more traditional forest map for you as well, which I'm calling Unhaunted. Maybe your players can deal with all the ghosts here or disable whatever is making things spooky, giving you the chance to swap the map to the Unhaunted version! A little heavy-handed maybe, but it could be fun.

1. I started this map with the intention of making something that I could assemble in just a few days, thus fixing my schedule again (After last week's map I'm posting 3 days later than I'd like). That usually means I'll make a forest map, which I can typically whip up in mere days, but I've been feeling a little spicy recently so I figured I'd add at least 2 twists. 

First, the ruins. Plain ruins are nothing new, but I thought it could be fun to add in the ruins of a chapel at the crossroads, plus a little graveyard nearby. Additionally I threw in some extra rubble inside the ruins, perhaps implying that they aren't quite as old as you might think. Secondly, a spooky palette. The little graveyard prompted this pretty easily, and I figured it would be a nice change of pace from my usual vanilla forests. 

2. Ruins! I've made enough maps of ruins that I could pretty easily paste together bits of walls and rubble in the shapes I wanted, making sure to lay everything out to be not too symmetrical, which would feel.. wrong. 

I also toyed around with adding some little rock walls here and there, but I guess I wasn't feeling very creative because none of my ideas were particularly interesting. The may doesn't particularly need that bit of extra verticallity, but an extra hook like that might have been nice. 

3. It's been a long time since I made a spooky map! I hardly remembered how to color one, meaning it took me over a day to just color this base version in a way I found satisfying. That's not even the root of the problem, I made it much harder by starting with the Unhaunted version and then making it spooky. I didn't realize how tricky that would make it, but it did, it made me have to be careful with the map's colors so I wouldn't mess up the Unhaunted variant. 

Honestly, my next spooky map might not look anything like this one, sorry. I feel like this wasn't a terribly effective try, but it's good to brush up on working in different palettes like this.