Poisonous Pools, Adept (Patreon)

Hi! This map is the Poisonous Pools (30x40), a serious of stone platforms around some yucky green liquid (probably poison). Anyone in their right mind will assume this stuff is dangerous but be prepared for a player attempting to drink it, in my experience there's always one. Alternately, you should also be prepared for a player planning to use this as an endless source of free poison/acid, I have one of those players too. 

Your alternate version for this map is Spectral, featuring more blueish lighting and more magical water; as a bonus I also made a Dark Spectral version, which is darker, blue-er, and feels a little less spooky somehow. 

1. Caves are hard to design. I often make them very limiting, just a handful of hallways with a few larger rooms scattered around. This time I wanted to make something more open with very few corridors, kinda like that series of water-filled caves I did a while back but with a better flow to it. That is to say, I wanted this to feel like a mini dungeon and not just a big, empty room. Too often I think my caves feel unfocused, so this time I wanted at least the layout to have a design that prompted an encounter.

2. Despite how simple this map may seem, I really shot myself in the foot with the outlines. Walls, rocks, water, that's all fine, but I gave myself a real project with the ground. Normally I'd just make the ground adjacent to the water a sort of rough and small rock wall, but I thought that style looked lazy this week- probably because there's a lot more of those little ledges here than usual and the old style is quick and ugly but easier to ignore when it's used sparingly. The style I used this time is similar to what I used on the Lava map series (maybe a little more detailed than them, actually), which turned out to be a real project. 

Another little change- I tried putting little cracks in the outer walls again. I tried this when I first started drawing cave walls this way but eventually decided it wasn't really worth the extra effort. I decided that it might be worth the effort if I barely put any time into it, haha.

3. Colors? Strangely enough, this wasn't intended to be the main version of this map. Poisonous was originally intended to be your Adept variant, but when it came out looking cooler than the base version (a slightly less flashy take on the Spectral variant you actually received) I decided to make the swap. The way I see it, a poisonous cave will probably get a little bit more use than a spectral cave, so why not make sure as many people get their hands on it as possible?