Underdark Crossing, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back! This one is the Underdark Crossing (30x40), a very precarious transition from a mushroom-filled cavern to a path lined with glowing blue crystals. I don't usually like to make maps with such specific biomes, but I feel like these are common enough Underdark environments that it shouldn't be too hard to fit this into your average treks below.

And also, your alternate variant here is one which I'm calling Tainted- it features a slightly sickly color swap for the crystal area and an extremely sickly palette for the mushrooms, giving the map a strong feeling of wrongness. 

1. So, this map went through several changes after the initial sketch. The plan originally was for this to be a map of a skinny stone bridge extending over a fast-moving river with a mushroom forest on both banks. That's not a bad concept by itself and very well might be recycled for a future map (minus the skinny bridge most likely), but this fell apart a bit while I was drawing the outlines, which I'll talk about in the next section.

As for the layout, I eventually came to dislike the placement of the cave walls by the time I was wrapping up the map. I would rather I had entirely gotten rid of the ones at the bottom left and top right and maybe replaced them with more interesting terrain, the walls feel a little too restricting and make the location feel small whereas I'd rather the vibe for these Underdark maps be that these are huge caverns. It's something I'll work on if I end up making a few more of these.

2. The big changes to the map came about when I was messing around with how I'd draw the rock walls leading down to the water. I'm always on the hunt for different (and ideally faster) ways to draw rock walls, so I thought to try layering several small platforms and rock walls going downward. I was hoping that this would give them a more rough appearance but additionally it made it look much more like a cliff than anticipated. And you know what, once I realized that I decided that a drop-off into a bottomless pit was way cooler than a little river and went along with it. 

After that, I was having a hard time placing mushrooms at the bottom portion of the map in a satisfying way so I considered leaving it as an empty cave. That was fine, but it seemed a little boring with just a few rocks scattered around. I recently read Solo Leveling on a friend's recommendation and that manhwa is cram-packed with caves and well-drawn glowing crystals, so I felt inspired. 

3. You know, it seems like one of the identifying features of Underdark maps is they're almost always purple. Purple caves feel deeper than brown or gray caves, I guess? Anyway, they certainly feel more alien so I went along with it. I was using Baldur's Gate 3 as reference here for the mushrooms at least but maybe for future Underdark maps I'll try to use their palette more fully.  Either way, I think I'll do away with subtlety for these maps in favor of making something that looks cool, sound good? It's time to work with some color again, enough of these dim and foggy Haunted Forest maps.