Profane Ritual, Adept (Patreon)

I'm back again! This one is the Profane Ritual (35x35), an ominous stone circle which is both spooky enough for cultists to use for sacrifices and crunchy enough for evil druids to use for nasty little rituals. In particular, I think this would be a perfect map to slide into a Curse of Strahd campaign as an extra combat against the Yester Hill druids!

Your variant for this map is called Lit, but really it's kinda autumnal, I just didn't want to call it that because it's a bit spookier. I'm going with 'Lit' because I like it imagine this is what the base version of the map would look like if the lighting was a bit better. And, of course, I rendered this map with and without all the blood, because sometimes rituals involve dancing instead of sacrifice.

1. The concept: an ominous rock in a circle of rocks, cracks eminating away from the center, death and devastation spreading outward. I was toying around with the rock laying in a crater, but despite how interesting that might be as a concept I preferred this map as a location that was made as the site for a ritual rather than the place where a cursed (irradiated) meteor landed and started killing the forest. Just a different vibe, I might still do a meteor crater map sometime soon.

1. Lots of little additions and changes got added after the initial sketch, despite falling behind schedule I couldn't help but try to make this one a little cooler- each time I was tempted to move on to coloring I thought of something else I could do to spice things up a bit.

   First I thought to add a spiral to the map, which I felt would make whatever's happening here feel more mystical, like the circle is pulling something from the forest like water down a drain. That meant that I needed to redraw the grass and ground cracks to follow that spiral and twist the pointy rocks as well. And then I felt like adding some roots as well, which might be a bit too much for this map but I liked how spooky they felt here. I think if I were to take another pass as this map I'd make them much more subtle, or at least smaller, and slide them a little further away from the center of the map. A little over the top, maybe.

1. I feel like I say this every couple weeks but I don't remember a time when a struggled so much with a map's colors. I wanted the circle to have an aura emanating from it but I hated the weird gradient it gave the ground around it, fading from gray to brown is very unappealing. I also tried just about every combination of colors for the ground/grass/trees before giving up and settling for something similar to my old Haunted palette. I started losing hope around the 10th palette and stepped away for a while, coming back later with lower standards and a desire to finish this map no matter what. I still don't much like where I landed with this one but perfect is the enemy of good. There's always next time!