Feywild Pass, Adept (Patreon)

Hi! This is the Feywild Pass (30x25), a bit of strange topography that I feel is unusual enough that the layout alone comes across as magical and fitting for the Feywilds. If not, your variant is a nice Swampy variant, with colors that are similar to those of the recent swamp maps.. but with a few tweaks which I felt looked nice in this map (a bit more green, mostly). It should fit in with the rest, however!

Look at that, very nearly the same as the end product! I think the main changes were the addition of mushrooms, a couple small ledges, and a few patches of sandy ground by the water, but the bones are all there. Like I mentioned, the layout is a little unusual, feeling like something you might not realistically see in the real world. I felt that a Feywild setting would be the perfect place to find unusual landscapes, and in fact slightly strange scenery could help build the tone of a Fey map just by being a little silly and uncanny. That's what I think at least, but I think too much about maps so it could be in my head.

Gosh, I keep forgetting how I haven't quite nailed down how to quickly draw these rock walls, ever since I've swapped to drawing them this way I've been a bit slower at whipping them up than I used to be. If I'm ever going to get my schedule back in order before Thanksgiving then I'd better make something particularly simple for next week. Fey clearing with something interesting in the middle, here I come.

Anyway, the majority of my time here was spent fussing over my rock walls, and then I spent too much time arranging trees, big mushrooms, bushes, ferns, little mushrooms, roots, rocks, and lily pads in that order from highest to lowest elevation. Honestly, nudging and rotating these props until they're perfectly 'randomly' placed has to be the bulk of my job.

Purple! Blue! Pink! I don't know how I ended here, but after 500 micro-adjustments of various levels and hues this is what I landed on. I think it feels ok, but I'm still not sold on the grass and mushroom colors, they're a bit less flashy than I was picturing when I started this map, but when I tried out brighter colors and tried test renders on my phone they turned into horribly oversaturated messes. Tricky. Still, I think I'll try to push them a little further for my next map, I bet I can find a slightly better middle ground.

The water turned out nice, right? I've been playing around with adding a ripple texture to water as a quick way to add a little more visual interest. I think it adds a lot of realism!