Swamp Hollow, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back again with my last swamp map for now, the Swamp Hollow (35x25)! This one has a lot going on but I wanted to give you something to work with, with potential for leading in to the other swamp cave maps I've made while giving you a crossroad to build off of beyond that. Was anyone asking for this? No, but I wouldn't be content to leave the swamp maps where there were.

Simple stuff, a cave with a stream cutting through it. I liked the image of entering, descending toward the entrance, and when you step in you find a descent even further down to a chamber with a stream passing through into darkness. As you might guess, I wasn't completely content with this layout when I moved on, it didn't feel complete quite yet but I wasn't sure how I'd improve it without adjusting the layout massively (which was something I found unacceptable at the time). The solution was to power on and hope I came up with a solution later.

The solution I ended with was this: get rid of the open-ended path to the south and branch the stream to add a little bit of complexity to the top of the map. At the end of the day it was meant to be a somewhat simple map which, ideally, should mean that it feels somewhat more realistic than a map that's made to be a battlefield. In reality it just feels awkward in a fun, new way but let's pretend I nailed it for my sake.

Continuing the theme of the last 2 maps, this one is slightly less dour than the previous, a little more 'regular swamp' and less 'unusually grim swamp'. I think it worked for each of the swamp cave maps so I'm going to pretend that this was intentional and not me feeling like I made the first look too brown and have since been working my way back from that choice. Either way, I think this one is my favoring of the series so I'm going to call it a win and move on to other things.