Gloomy Gorge, Adept (Patreon)

Hello there, my lovely Adept patrons- this is the Gloomy Gorge (35x35), a terribly spooky location that's likely not somewhere your party was trying to end up. Maybe there's a special slime they need that's only located in this fetid standing water? That's all I've got. Either way, they're here now and now they've got to fight the Goop Monster- I don't make the rules, I just make the maps.

Yup, sometimes it's as simple as that, folks. As you can see, those wiggles are ledges and those scratches are trees. I figured I'd come up with the rest of the important details after getting this far. The important thing for this map is the shape, a trench with standing water and bones at the bottom, presumably because of whatever nasty stuff is in the pools. The ledges add some shape to things, so they ought to make a little sense as ramps. Otherwise, the plants, rocks, and grass just needs to go where it makes sense.

As I said, just populating with props after getting the shapes down. Unfortunately I wasted much of a day on this map just working on the ledges. I realized I was drawing them all too tight, they looked a little crazy with how densely packed the lines were, so I started over on them. It was a real shame since I was already falling fairly far behind after on account of a cold killing my productivity for a week.

So, it was about at this stage that I really started to regret how many ledges I added to this map, not just because of how much time I blew on drawing them but because of how complicated they made the map. I feel like half as many ledges would have been probably a better move just for the sake of reducing this map's complexity and improving the readability. A reasonable person might have decided to take steps to implement that knowledge but I wasn't really feeling like making good decisions at this point in the process, you know?

Colors! I was inspired by the swampy cave maps I made in August, it was a nicely eerie palette but a little too green, so I moved the colors more toward orange and brown. The murky swamp water felt like a perfect addition to this map, so that largely came over just the same. In short, it's a bit more autumnal than swampy now, which I think works great for the setting. I don't know about you but it sorta feels a little Elden Ring-y now, which I'm totally fine with.