Abandoned Campsite, Adept (Patreon)

This week's map is the Abandoned Campsite (30x30), featuring some interesting and diverse terrain with a fun focus- a camp that has seen better days. I tried not to make the cause of the camp's decline too obvious, leaving a handful of potential clues for you to work with or use as red herrings if they happen to mesh with your encounter. 

Also, for your alternate variant I've returned to the Unhaunted palette! It's been a minute, but the last few I've tried didn't look quite right so I took a step back. I'm pretty happen with this, however!

1. A little sketchy, but you get the idea. I was initially planning on making the stream more of a tiered waterfall, but that's always pretty visually confusing as I've never felt waterfalls/tiered streams read well from a bird's-eye view. I didn't feel that that kind of verticality was particularly important here anyway, but I did end up adding a few little rock walls leading down to the stream as an easy way to mix up the terrain and break up otherwise flat stretches of grass. 

It's hardly worth mentioning, but I rotated the map 90 degrees at some point early in the process. It just felt better, somehow? No clue why, but I stuck with it. 

2. The outlines here weren't much of a problem, I just needed to draw up some fresh camp props mostly. I wanted to make sure that these tents felt thoroughly ragged, so I didn't want to use any of the old tents I've drawn, all of which look too fresh to have been left abandoned. It's a bit easier to draw new props quickly when you've got a library to use as reference anyway, so it wasn't that big of a task. 

Something else that struck me with this map was the scale- I haven't made a forest map this small in a little while so I was a little surprised by how all my usual props (trees, dead trees, bushes, rocks) filled the space.  I often spend much of my time making maps zoomed out and looking at the whole frame, so this felt a bit strange and honestly it made me take a closer look at some things. Kinda neat, and odd to think this is the scale I always used to make forest maps at. 

3. All the water I've been adding to my maps recently has been making me take a closer look at the palette, and I'm starting to feel like I need to spend more time shading/coloring water. It's a little flat, or is that just me? I plan on prioritizing this in future Haunted maps, as obviously I've more or less settled on the palette for everything else (not trees though, I've got my eye on them too). Tricky stuff. 

Another side note: I feel like I'm slowly fading the fog away from the edges of the map, just a couple percents at a time. A few of these maps are just a bit too hard to parse near the frame, but I also want them to feel foggy. I'll come up with a compromise here sooner or later. 

Reading back, it sure sounds like I'm getting fairly granular, huh?