Devastated Forest Border, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Devastated Forest Border (35x35), another map featuring a border to a haunted forest. I tried to leave this one a little vague, leaving the cause of the devastation up to you to interpret and integrate into your campaign. However, I figured I'd give you a little bit of help with your alternate version and used lighting to imply a raging fire off-screen. Or, maybe something else is glowing red over there, but as the adventurers approach they find that the flickering red light and terrible heat instead were emanating from... a portal to hell? A towering fire elemental?  A fallen star/meteorite the size of a minivan?

1. These 'border' maps can be a little trickier to design than it may seem. I'd like both halves of the map to be interesting in their own way, both visually and as terrain but neither should be the entire focus, and on top of that the transition from one to the other should also be distinct. 

I started my sketch by drawing a very nice forest clearing, featuring paths through the trees and smaller clearings branching off of the first, then replacing the trees with dead trees wiping out the grass. It worked out fairly well, I think, but it does bother me slightly that the 'devastated' part of the map is now left looking a bit empty and less detailed. But of course that's by design so I try not to dwell on it.

2. Outlines! Unsurprisingly, the forest portion of this map was really really easy to whip up (it's kinda my specialty at this rate), but the devastated half was a huge pain. I started this map with the intention of leaving the cause of the devastation up to the DM's interpretation, so I tried to make this part particularly generic, mostly just dry ground and dead, gray trees. I was tempted to lean into making this map just a 'forest fire' map, but I just can't help but feel that if I CAN make a map more generically useful then I definitely should. Leaning too hard into the forest fire concept would disqualify other causes of the destruction, like magic or blight, and that's enough reason for me to keep things simple.

So, I stuck to dead trees and rocks, reusing a few of the boulders from the Rocky River Ruins, the dead trees from the Haunted Mire, and drawing in some more fallen trees and dead branches littering the ground to help fill in space. I debated also cutting the little rock ledges as well, but after lots of thought I decided that the map felt more complete with them, even though I guarantee  I will hear complaints about how someone can't tell which is the taller side of the ledge. 

3. I spent a looong time with the colors here. The devastated portion gave me so much trouble that I eventually just settled on something that I felt was good enough. I honestly might redo this is a week, who can say. I wanted the devastation to be distinct in color from the forest with a complete palette swap in an attempt to build up the feeling of 'wrongness' here. I honestly couldn't tell you if it looks good or not anymore, my eye was definitely off this week and I've spent way too much time painting and repainting to be certain anymore. Leave your thoughts in the comments, if you have any suggestions on how to improve it I'd be happy to hear it.