Sky Altar, Adept

I'm back this week with yet another mini map, the Sky Altar (11x16)- a small cluster of flying islands featuring some strange looking ruins. And by that I mean they're strange because I've drawn them at an angle, which is something you'll almost never catch me doing. I'll talk about that more below!

Your alternate variant of this map is Astral, with strange space-y colors and a fun nebulous background. Don't ask me how plants are growing here, but if your players push for answers just say it's magic.

1. Long time patrons will recall that I really love drawing island maps, they're lots of fun to design around. With ocean-bound islands you can lay out intended paths for people to take throughout the terrain and lay out obvious starting points for DMs to drop the party on. Sky islands are a little different since I have no idea how the party is even arriving here, but I can still assume that you DMs are going to still put the players wherever you want them when they make landfall. I gave you a few good options for that here, with a couple scattered fragments of island as a nice and precarious starting point. If the party has absolutely no control over how they got here maybe scatter them around the various fragmented islands, that sounds fun!

1. I recently saw a trailer for an upcoming indie game called Ritual of Raven, a farming sim with fun art. The trailer shows mostly a bunch of cute magical circles with a variety of different palettes and in different environments, all of which looked amazing. Anyway, I was inspired by that game to make a fun magical platform here with a lil ring of water around it and I figured I should give it a shout-out.

   Anyway, I felt like my previous ones all looked like they lacked depth, like they were a 3 foot thick slab of stone. To fix that problem I figured the simplest solution would be to give the map some depth by drawing everything at a slight tilt, showing how there is actually some stuff below the ground. That also meant that anything I put on the island also has to be slightly tilted, which isn't a problem, but since I almost never do this I figured I better give myself a chance to do it well and stick with simple shapes for the altar. Sooo, circles. Fun circles!

   

2. Yay, colors! And how about those clouds?? I'm very happy about those, it took more work than I'd like to admit but I don't often do straight-up painting in photoshop, usually I stick to outlined objects with simple shading. I was a little apprehensive about the colors I used for the sky, my desire for realism fighting my need for vibrant colors and contrast. By that I mean this: if you look out the window of an airplane and glance down you don't see sky blue, you see clouds and the ground. I tried painting a blurry approximation of the ground underneath some nice fluffy clouds, which felt somewhat realistic but also a little ugly. I was close to sticking with it too, but I figured I would probably come to regret that decision, and at the end of the day I'm usually happy going with the more visually interesting option.

   As for colors, I tried the same palette as my recent Rocky Peninsula but it just didn't feel right. I felt that the right palette would be a little start and washed out with still a fair bit of color underneath. Coming to that conclusion required a lot of trial and error. Would you believe I spent more time shading this map than drawing it?