Haunted Chasm, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back! This week's map is the Haunted Chasm (35x40), a spooky hole in a profoundly haunted wood which apparently features many distinctly creepy locations. This particular one is especially mysterious, as it will likely lead to your players going straight down the pit for a peek, at least if they're anything like the players I've DM'd for in the past. 

Your alternate version of this map has steam/smoke/fog billowing out from the hole, with the rest of the map remaining the same. I like to think that this might be considered the source of the creepy fog hanging over the forest, but there's always a chance it's unrelated..

1. I went through quite a few options when designing this map, I wasn't sure what the centerpiece would end up being. It's always nice to have something interesting but open-ended as the focus of a map, something to make the map feel more special. 

In the sketch here I was imagining a big evil crystal with thorny vines emanating from it, and perhaps there would be glimpses of more elsewhere on the map. However, giant evil crystals are a little too flashy for me, and anyway they aren't exactly the most common things to find in a forest, so I set it aside as a maybe. I left that area of the map open until I was nearly finished drawing everything else, hoping I'd come up with something in the meantime. 

2. I'm always making extra work for myself- these long and winding stretches of small rock walls are always giving me trouble. I always sketch them into unique shapes which means that I can't reuse old ones I've drawn previously, and of course that means whatever I draw anew won't be usable for future maps. Obnoxious. 

The rest was, thankfully, very straightforward. I drew some fresh rocks rather than dig up old ones to slot in, I got to reuse many of the bushes I drew for the Haunted Graveyard, and of course the dead trees I drew for these Haunted maps are still doing wonderfully. 

And it was about this point that I decided on a chasm as the centerpiece of the map. It felt like a nice nod to Tears of the Kingdom and can potentially lead into lots of interesting encounters with a little creativity. 

3. The nice thing about establishing a set palette is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time you make another map in that environment. Instead, I just had to balance the colors and lighting to fit the map, which is time-consuming due to how tricky it can often be. 

The pit itself was a bit of a nightmare, but not in the way you'd expect. I decided that the best way to color it would be to give each level of the pit it's own set of layers (outlines + colors). This allows me to easily adjust and shade specific layers of the pit without trying to wrangle them with the magic wand tool. The file structure for it all was madness- it's a little better now that the job is done and I could clean it up. I hate having 12 layers for the same piece of scenery, it's miserable.