Sunbaked Rubble, Adept (Patreon)

Hello there, Adepts! This is the Sunbaked Rubble (35x40), another large desert map featuring the remains of an old, crumbling farmhouse and paddock. I think finding a location like this in the desert can help develop the location's backstory a bit without being too heavy-handed, implying that this place used to be habitable once. I doubt you'll run into the ex-inhabitants unless they're ghosts or old sandy zombies, but maybe you'll find the offspring of their livestock or whatever killed them!

Last week's desert map was me testing the waters (or sands) of making desert maps again, and having had some fun with it I felt like I ought to develop the landscape a little further. After thinking about what did and didn't work with last week's map, I decided that this one would be less sandy and more like sun baked mud. That's more the type of desert I'm aiming for, with bits of dry brush here and there instead of huge, sweeping dunes. My inspirations for this were Fallout: New Vegas, The Dark Tower, and World of Warcraft's Thousand Needles map. I'm sure there's a name for the type of desert I'm imagining but I'm no desert-ologist so the best I've got is video games.

I don't think I would have tried making this map if I didn't have all those rocks I drew up last week. I mirrored them, rotated a few, and placed them wherever they made sense, largely sticking to the sketch. Similarly I brought over the big reedy plants, which are perfect for building the western vibe I'm aiming for without being too eyecatching. I decided later on to add a few other plants too, some small patches of leaves that I wanted to feel like bits of desert shrubs or maybe small cacti. The key is that they're not so interesting that you focus on them but they still add to the feel of the environment. Much later I also added few patches of grass after I started shading the map and decided that some more details were needed here and there. These patches of grass are on thin ice, I'm not 100% sure that they're quite right here.

The colors for last week's Dusty Crossroad didn't sit right with me a few days after finishing it, they didn't make for a particularly appealing map. I toyed around with a series of tweaks on that palette for this map which all came across as not particularly desert-y, and ultimately I decided that trying to make a desert map vibrant or flashy is probably the wrong move, so instead I worked on readability rather than making it eye-catching. I still have lots to work on with this palette but I almost never nail my colors in fewer than 3 maps so that's no surprise. We'll see how it goes next week, right?