Creepy Chasm, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This is the Creepy Chasm (50x50), a big map with a big chasm in the middle- please be careful to not let anyone fall in because I have no clue how far a drop it is and what you'll find down there. I'm also a little concerned about what might come out of this thing, probably things that evolved to not have eyes anymore and are all pale and soft and hate the surface things with all their precious eyes they're so attached to. Anyway, you're getting a bonus Arid variant that's all stony and cold-looking, nice!

Yup, a chasm in a field, that's where I'm at this week. I was thinking about what I wanted to do for the spooky month and I ended up wondering what exactly is an innately creepy landscape, and I kept coming back to the chasms from Tears of the Kingdom. Very spooky. I remember when I was playing that game for the first time and I wondered if there could possibly be something inside one of those holes, I hadn't yet learned about the lower level of that map so I figured I was going to find some small treasure. Imagine my surprise haha.

Anyway, this is one of the creepiest concepts I came up with when considering naturally spooky, naturally occurring landscapes. Perfect for an adventure, I think, and I decided that I would like it to have the spotlight here, so I kept the rest of the map about as minimal as possible. A bit of dense forest to one side or a few rocky ledges ringing it might have been nice for making the map feel more complete but I tried those out and I felt it only took away from the focus while also reducing the generic usability of this map. Simplicity is better.

The chasm was a bit of a pain to draw, but what's new? I tried to make my life easier by adding in several layers, like Topside -> -1 Ledge -> -2 Ledge, which honestly was a bit less useful than I expected as I ended up coloring/shading each of the levels very similarly. Next time I make a huge chasm map I'll think twice about diligently making a dozen layers to make my life simpler. I digress.

I decided on 4 layers to the chasm, Top, -1, -2, and a fairly small -3 which doesn't include any ledges but rather is just here to show depth. It was all very unexciting to draw and I'm getting bored just thinking about it. Oh, but I did originally draw the ledges with patches of grass on them which I later cut because I didn't like how it made it look like the chasm has been here for a long time- the presence of grass implied that this thing hasn't suddenly appeared and also that there isn't invisible toxic gas billowing from it, so obviously it had to go. Look, if your adventure setup needs this thing to have been here for 500 years then it works with or without grass, yeah? If it was supposed to have opened yesterday then the grass really shouldn't be here, so there you go.

Originally I was planning on trying to imitate the colors and shading of last week's Gloomy Gorge map which several of you were very complimentary of (thank you very much!), but frankly those colors looked wrong here. I can't quite explain it, but it just didn't work. I wasted a good bit of time trying to force it but I knew that something a bit more similar to my old Haunted maps would have to be the move. So it goes, so it goes. I didn't pull up one of those old maps and drag over the colors and effects though, I wanted there to be a little more depth to the grass/trees' colors than that, not just vibrantly green/blue. I put a bit of effort into painting the grass to be visually exciting and I think it worked out! Looking at it now I'm reminded of the poster for Creature from the Black Lagoon, which had some interesting colors splashed in a water colored sort of way:

See what I mean? Honestly, if I had made mine a little more vibrant then it would have been shockingly similar I think! Funny that just came to mind now. Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with coloring these spooky maps recently so I'm pumped to try out something new next time!