Ancient Tomb, Adept

This week's map is the Ancient Tomb (11x16), another tiny map for your convenience. While this whole series of mini-maps is intended to be evergreen, this one especially could likely be used in more locations than the rest. Tombs can be present just about anywhere, can be full of loot, and come with obvious potential enemies. If your party is greedy enough you won't even need to give them a reason to explore a random tomb, especially if it seems like it might belong to some rich dude and no one's looking. It's a victimless crime and it'll probably make for all sorts of trouble later on if you're crafty!

Oh also, I made another variant here called 'Stark', which I was going to scrap for being not different enough from the base version of the map but instead I figured I might as well give it to you as a treat. It's not all that interesting, but it's more than you would have gotten otherwise!

1. I tried out a few layouts here before settling on this 'one hallway' design, figuring it might be nice to make a mini-map with a bit of extra space to fight in. Similarly I wanted to give the 'boss room' a little more room for maneuvering as well, so I tried to use up as much of the grid as possible.

As you can see, these decisions made for a surprisingly ugly little map which I decided had to be changed after I drew up most of the wall lines. I think the part that threw me the most was how large the final chamber was compared to the rest, it just looks silly.

2. This layout felt a little more natural while still having a unique design. Here we've got individual chambers (perhaps with locked doors), hallways with nooks to explore (maybe trapped), and a final chamber which almost certainly has a scary boss enemy and triggers everything else in the tomb to arise, emerge, and block the halls. Sadly I did also decide to resize the final chamber for the sake of aesthetics which ultimately cut out 8 grid squares worth of room, but I felt that appearances were more important here.

For the floors this time I also decided to mix and match a few different types of tiles, going with slightly shattered 5' squares for the majority and a strip fitted stones in the middle for contrast. The lines of trim in various areas of the map are just there to break up spaces in ways that feel meaningful, I'm still working on using those in interesting ways.

3. Sigh. It's always a shame to get to the coloring portion of a map and realize that I'm going to have to paint everything in near-monotone. What basic tomb has big splashes of color, murals, or glowing orbs? Nope, this is vanilla content we're dealing with here, it has to be tomb-colored and shadowy. It's really a shame, plain maps like these are useful but are almost always visually uninteresting for the sake of being usable anywhere and maybe repeatedly.

At least I can add some contrast by coloring the background. Not much of a consolation prize but it does make it a little more interesting to look at.