Marshland Trail, Adept

This week's map is the Marshland Trail (40x30), not my best map name perhaps but Swamp Bridge was taken.. and needed to be updated with this map. It's interesting to see the difference in a few years of mapmaking, huh? Well, having stumbled across that map a few weeks ago I've been thinking that I probably need to take another pass at swamps in general, I just can't sit around with just about all of my existing swamp maps looking like that.

1. Well, seeing as this is kinda a remake of an older map I tried to keep the layout simple and straightforward. We're looking for a simple swamp, so no major swings or interesting inclusions that might feel out of place in any old swamp. We've got a stretch of swamp water with uneven banks, lots of little patches of ground (implying perhaps that the water isn't so deep), and just a bit of larger plant life.

   I considered for a bit whether I should leave the bridge whole or broken and eventually landed on broken. Whole would have been fine, but broken makes for a much more exciting map, even if it's classic mapmaker overreach into the DMs' plans. I feel like it's such a classic twist that it's not even a twist- the swamp bridge is broken, who would have thought?

   

2. You know, I was about to just write that I didn't do anything different for the outlines here so why don't I skip straight to step 3, but I actually did do something new. It's funny how I've written so many of these posts (is it over 300 already? My god..) and I'm still coming up with new bullshit to talk about here.

   So. I drew the grass different. I've seen it plenty of times before from many other mapmakers, they draw their grass in these sort of small mounds that help add some shape to otherwise flat ground. I wanted to try it out here and see how it feels. Looking at it now, I think it's more interesting than plan ol' flat grass but also really annoying to draw. At least this time it was annoying- no doubt it'll be less and less annoying if I keep doing it. I think this is something I'll using fairly sparingly for when a map really needs it. Like if there's a huge amount of open grass that's looking particularly boring.

   

3. You know what I just realized? My palette here is dangerously similar to my first swamp map, the Swamp Path (below). I think if I fixed the outlines to be less obnoxiously red then these maps would look fairly similar. I think the main difference is the ground color (and the outlines, holy cow), which is a bit darker but honestly was probably the right decision for that map. It's funny how I'm coming around to a palette that I whipped up so many years ago and completely forgot about until now.