Mossy Hollow, Adept

Hello there, Adepts! This is The Mossy Hollow (11x16), a map that can be as hard for your players to enter as you want—lead them through flooded tunnels deep underground (a personal favorite obstacle), dark pits in the forest filled only with the sound of dripping water and the smell of mold, or violent and territorial local animals with nests at the entrance—geese, perhaps. And that’s just getting inside. There could be hundreds more geese in here, so I hope the reward is worth it.

1. I especially wanted to play around with ramps and ledges in this one, which I thought would be great for making a cave feel larger—or at least more tactically interesting. Now, this also makes the cave look a little less naturally formed, but sometimes that's just how it goes with battlemaps, you know?

I'm not sure if you can tell, but this map started life as a sketch for last week's Secluded Cove, which I initially planned on being a cave before I felt inspired to make a forest map instead. You can see the resemblance in the shape and orientation of the water at the bottom of the frame. I assume the similarities would be more obvious in landscape, but even so, I made sure to keep the layout unique.

2. The outlining took a very long time for this map. I just kept looking at it and thinking it looked too boring. The initial sketch didn't even have any grass in it—which was probably the first addition I made—then I drew in huge roots (which I later deleted), mushrooms, rocks, more mushrooms, more water by the first rock wall, and finally small roots. I think after I added the grass, the map started leaning toward being a jungle map, so I leaned into it and tried to fully populate it with all the proper trimmings. I imagine if I had left the map as a regular cave map with just some rocks, I would have finished it two days earlier—but when you get caught on an idea, sometimes you just have to follow it through to completion.

3. Holy cow, I struggled with the lighting and colors. Ever since I drew the Cultist Hideout a month ago, I’ve been extremely careful about making the maps bright enough. I found that, when seen on other screens than the monitor I use for drawing, some maps look waaaay too dark. I've taken to throwing my maps onto my phone to check the lighting before posting, and I’ve found that the levels and saturation are wildly different when viewed on mobile.

Now, should I care about that? It’s not like people are using their phones to fight on my maps (probably? Maybe someone out there is doing it), so shouldn’t I instead be optimizing for desktop rather than mobile? In a perfect world, yes—but I also need to advertise my maps by posting online, which means I need to ensure they look appealing when seen on Reddit or Instagram. Note that this doesn't really come into play when I'm making maps of well-lit spaces, so there normally isn't a conflict here.