Marsh Bridges, Adept (Patreon)

I return this week with my final swamp map, the Marsh Bridges (25x30)! At least, I think it'll be the last I make for a long time because I'm so tired of looking at shading these things and also bored of laying them out. Arranging patches of ground in a swamp hasn't been the most entertaining project, as you might expect, and as a result I've been losing time on each of these maps- I'm somehow posting on a Wednesday instead of Monday. I'll have to whip up something fun, small, and vibrant to get me out of this funk and fix my schedule before the holidays.

So, for your variant I fixed up that stinkin' bridge! No one would be realistically crossing that thing before, at least not regularly or with a cart or much of anything heavy. This fixed variant feels cared for and used rather than abandoned and decaying, so it'll fit in better near established villages and roads, I think.

Swamp. As opposed to the other marsh maps I wanted this one to feel like it really needed this bridge, so I only put in a few and spaced them out a bit. Along those lines I made the bridge nice and wide since it's probably a pretty important route through the swamp.

After this step I did a lot of fiddling with the orientation of the islands because this initial sketch felt a bit too staged- the cluster of islands in the middle looked a bit unnatural. I expanded a few, removed a couple, and shifted most of them to be a little more irregularly placed. Anything to make a swamp map feel less intentionally made.

As you could imagine, the bridge was the majority of the work for this map's outlines. Grass and shorelines are quick, the trees, rocks, and reeds are all pulled from previous maps and rearranged as necessary, but that bridge needed to be whipped up from scratch. So I drew up 10 planks, copied them into the shape of the bridge I wanted, and roughed them up with little detailed and grime. I wish it was that simple but the arranged phase actually took a lot of trial and error before I ended up with a layout I liked. Again, making something look like it wasn't planned is one of the hardest things for me to do since I tend to overthink the layout of a map. But anyway, then I cut out chunks of the bridge to make the regular version of the map, adding in rubble to help build the illusion of it sinking into the water.

I don't know the last time I spent so much time coloring and shading a map. I wish I had a timelapse or took a screenshot of each version I made of this map because I tried dozens and dozens of different palettes before I gave up and just tried to imitate the colors in last week's Marsh Platform. Honestly it felt like I was losing my mind, I would make something I was kinda happy with and go eat lunch, then I'd come back and find the colors unacceptable and start over. Every time I'd look away and come back I started over, and that goes for the other variants I made as well, they all went through the ringer this week.

So, next week I won't be making swamps anymore. Maybe a nice little Feywild grove with some ruins, just as a treat for me to help get my head right again? You wouldn't mind, right?