Haunted Farm, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This one is the Haunted Farm (35x35), a bustling farmhouse with a big red barn, lots of chickens, and lush fields full of plump vegetables. But actually it's a dingy little place with dead crops, a stable with holes in the roof, and a damp little house. Probably not the kind of place where you could expect a little hospitality, really, and in fact you could much more likely expect a fight.

Also, a made a little bonus variant for you! Sunset versions are often very quick for me to make, and this one took half that time, so I figured I'd call it a freebie. Enjoy!

1. Not much to it, really. Once I had the farmhouse's layout figured out, I really just had to determine how much of the map would be taken up by fields. The fields, I figured, probably wouldn't make for particularly interesting combat terrain, but they are necessary to the setting and add a fun, bustling vibe to the map. I settled for a handful of fields on the edges of the map in order to imply more beyond the frame, and left the rest as trees, so as to help tie in to the rest of the Haunted forest maps I've been making. 

The rock ledge to the right got cut fairly early on. I initially had an image in my head of a shadowy figure standing on the ledge as a dramatic entrance to the encounter, but after shifting around fields and cropping the image down slightly I felt that the ledge was too small to bother including in the map- it just felt tacked-on and unnecessary. An easy cut.

2. Farm fields are surprisingly tricky. I know what they look like, at least in cartoons and in real life, but how do you depict them with a few lines? I felt that a plain, wiggly straight line per row would probably do the job if supported by little details (I call them greebles but that term might be specific to sci-fi models), to add a little intrigue and imply the texture. I think the result is fine, not great but fine, but I'm always on watch for pointless over-detailing. 

Houses are houses, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I have any talent for laying out building interiors- I just go down the checklist of things that ought to be in a little fantasy house: fireplace, tables, shelves, barrels, firewood, beds, chairs, and then I place them all wherever they seem to make sense. Lots of mapmakers could come up with a very interesting house here, but I simply draw a blank when I try to design a unique DnD house. 

3. Colors! This isn't the first building interior I've colored in this Haunted palette, so I had a little something to work with here. The last one, the Haunted Cabin, was a little dark for my taste, however, and I've made a few more Haunted maps since then, so the palette has shifted a bit. This interior is a bit easier to read, a little less cluttered, and tinted to be more greenish- a touch which I felt would give the building the grimy/dreary vibe I was aiming for. 

The outside is still using the same palette as the Haunted Chasm, just with a touch less purple around the edges. I've been trying not to lean too hard on the vignette so much recently as well, an old habit of mine that tends to make some of the map unusably dark/obfuscated by fog.