Hidden Mausoleum, Adept

This week's map is the Hidden Mausoleum (20x30)! It's a chapel that's only accessible by cave, which feels spooky but was hard to name (Buried Shrine? Entombed Tomb? Remote Vault? Cloistered Crypt?). No matter the name, this was a lot of fun to make, mostly because it's a rare treat to make small maps again, especially dungeon-y ones. Maybe I'll play in this space a little more before getting back to village maps (and soon, city maps).

1. Often with small maps like this I try a little too hard to fill in every inch of the space, which can lead to the map feeling cramped or just unnatural like it's a designed space (which it is of course, but I don't want it to feel that way). So, I didn't try to expand the cave upward into the spaces on either side of the chapel, though I did make a few sketches where the walls were crumbling a bit and a little tunnel wound upwards to the middle of the chapel. It would have been fine, but it was too awkward for my taste.

As for the chapel/mausoleum, I wanted to leave it fairly open for combat, just a couple pillars to break up the space and a ominous coffin on a platform. Honestly though, I had a bit of trouble finding a decent spot for the coffin and arranging the platforms so that they made any kind of sense. The placement in the sketch here felt nonsensical after I started drawing, so I merged the top platform with the middle one and left the center of the room open for DMs to play with.

2. Outlines! I ended up making a new batch of brick walls for this one, as well as drawing fresh floor tiles , actually I don't think I reused anything in this map other than rocks and lil' mushrooms. I would have saved a lot of time if I had, but sometimes my old props don't feel right in a map. Or rather, something about them strikes as wrong and that leads me to drawing them up fresh again. I think my old brick walls looked a bit boring to me this time, so I took another pass at them, this time leaving the internal side of the walls flat while giving some texture to the outside. I've seen other mapmakers play around with this look and I generally enjoy it though I don't exactly know why I like it.

Same with the floor tiles- it's been a really long time since I've drawn up big ol' floor tiles like this and so when I dropped in my old 1" tile png it just struck me as kinda sloppy and in desperate need of a refresh. The tiles I've drawn in here are sketched in extremely lightly, with only the dirty details getting stronger lines because they're more important than the tiles' lines themselves (which mostly won't be necessary once I add in color anyway). Additionally, I wanted to keep these lines light because they never interact well with the overlaid grid lines, though I haven't found a better solution.

3. Colors! I had a little fun here, I gave the cave a very murky and eerie combination of green/cyan/yellow that should make anyone feel a little uneasy. In contrast, I gave the mausoleum space an almost inviting candle glow with just a touch of that cave palette inching in the door. And if you don't mind, I'm going to pat myself on the back a little here and say I really love the gradient inside the mausoleum, the gentle changes from green to blue to gray to yellow is extremely appealing to me and if nothing else I'm very pleased with how the colors developed here- very shadowy and melancholy.