Village Chapel, Adept

This week's map is the Village Chapel (12x17), another lovely little building map for filling out your towns and cities. I don't think I've ever thrown a party into a village without mentioning a chapel, temple, or shrine, and I think I would almost always slot one in if a player would go searching for one, so I expect this will be a great map to have on hand- especially considering that your alternate version is Abandoned!

I put a bit more effort into this one and altered many of the props to look a bit more worn or skewed, and I also took a more reserved approach to the colors and lighting than my previous Abandoned buildings. That is to say, it's not tinted green like it's at the bottom of a lake and covered in spider webs. I think this approach will make the map a bit more practical than the others and is a big improvement in this type of variant, so I think it's a good thing I kept working on this style.

1. It's always a little disheartening to see the final sketch after spending a ton of time on it since it doesn't show all the previous iterations and minor tweaks it progressed through. I probably drew 10 different chapels, churches, and temples before landing on this, which is by far the simplest design of the whole batch. The issue with the others, invariably, was the balance of usefulness, intricacy, and realism. Realistic church designs are fun if you recognize their realism, but the layout can often be awkward and sometimes don't even read as realistic somehow; intricate designs are interesting but often the extra details/rooms/areas aren't adding much of worth (and lord knows I don't have all the time in the world to flesh out hugely intricate maps); and finally useful maps are really my bread and butter so ultimately I tend to lean in this direction when sorting through building layouts and making sketches.

This sketch is about as straightforward as a building can be. We've got an entrance chamber which I felt was necessary to split up the space and provide any break in sight-lines, and then the sanctuary. I wanted to fit in pillars but the building isn't big enough to warrant them. I also tried out adding little rounded half-circle cubbies to the walls of the sanctuary, but I realized that I would probably have to draw statues for those and I didn't want to add any iconography that would imply what exactly was being worshiped here. Also, that kind of architecture would be pretty high-brow for the size of chapel we're working with here, so again I opted to keep it simple.

In short, I believe simple layouts are better for simple concepts.

2. Gosh, I miss the days when I would just grab all the props from and old map and slot them into a new one, that was a real nice time-saver. Not that there are all that many props here, but I still have to stop and consider which are appropriate, their scale and orientation, and how many should realistically be in a space. It's tricky for me, I was never great at interior design and I've known it since the first time I played the Sims, I just have no clue what should be inside a building and what should go where. It's something I'm working on.

Oh also, I decided not to include any outside spaces in this map, not even a staircase leading to the door, it just didn't feel particularly necessary. An added bonus of that was I didn't have to put any thought into how the lighting might be different in an outdoor space, so that was nice!

3. Simple stuff, not a lot of huge props or corners to shade around. I wanted to keep the lighting for this one pleasant and a little angelic with minimal deep shadows. Looking back at last week's Village Jailhouse I felt that I went a little too dramatic with the shadows, unnecessary for a small space with a decent amount of windows, so I put extra thought into how I'd light this one. I've been dabbling with adding an extra layer of shadows on top of the map, like how I'd add fog to a spooky map on top of the outlines, which I think adds a bit of atmosphere. Usually I'd place the shadows underneath the outlines and lighting, but I feel like the shadows often get a bit lost down there and pick up some unintended vibrancy along the way from some of the effects I layer on, so this new bonus shadow layer is my attempt at maintaining some amount of depth in the darker areas of the map. Did any of that make sense? If not, just know I'm trying out new ways to arrange my lighting and shadows and I like how it looks, hopefully you do too even if you don't know why.