Haunted Portal, Adept (Patreon)

This is the Haunted Portal (40x45), a pleasantly festive map for this holiday season! Maybe this portal goes directly to the elemental plane of misfit toys? Or the Santa's workshop dimension? Or just Hell, probably. 

Anyway, you're getting a bonus variant for this one! One has a new flavor of portal- blinding, scorching light, and the other depicts the portal in a less active state. Perfect for transitioning 1/3rd of the way into the fight from completely inert. Then, after enough time has passed, go ahead and swap to completely active, and maybe have some saving throws go around the table from the shockwave that the portal blasts out when activated. Anyone with any sense would have taken cover after the thing started coming online, sparking and humming, right?

1. Phew, we made it out of the top of the post. Now that it's just us true Neutral-heads (Neuties? Partybois?) here let's be real for a second- I'm absolutely exhausted and barely hanging in here. So let's keep this real casual, ok? For Christmas? Yeah? Great!

I wanted to make a new portal map, this time with a big ol' arch. Recently I learned of the mines at Rosedale, Yorkshire. There are some cool bits of old buildings there, including a neat bit of archway that juts out of the ground. After a lot of digging I found some aerial images of it, perfect reference. The map practically makes itself!

Oh also this is my second sketch of this map, the first was a lot more complicated and I did not have the time for that.

2. Lots of rock walls, much of which I unfortunately had to draw twice because I did a bad job the first time. Honestly, I probably should have redrawn more, some of the perspective is still a bit wonky.

The arch was most the the work here otherwise, rings look weird when rotated to unusual angles. Fortunately I could use failed or not-good-enough attempts for bits of extra ruins which I scattered around at a whim.

Btw the boulders I drew for Rocky River Ruins have continued to be incredibly useful, MVPs of the last month. 

3. As you could expect, painting the portal was a lot of extra work I didn't account for. Mostly because I wasn't particularly planning on doing anything for it until I remembered that this was initially supposed to be a portal map. Previous portals have been magic circles and floating spheres, but since this map features and arch I figured a fog-gate style portal would work best. Also, lightning is cool and dangerous, the perfect addition to any scary magic artifact. 

<3