Secluded Village, Adept

Hello again, Adepts! This week's map is the Secluded Village (40x40), a nice and big map of a nice and small village. Not even a garden or stable in sight, just a ring of houses surrounding a little pond in the forest. Which of course got me thinking, whats the deal with that pond? No way it's just a pond, there's got to be a story there. Well, your alternate version makes a story of it, because apparently some nights it pops off and the villagers definitely have something to do with it or are getting something out of it because it doesn't look like they've got much else going for them out here. I'm sure your party will have fun ruining their good time!

 1. It's a simple concept, a pond in the forest with houses built in a ring around it. I wanted to make it a little more interesting by breaking up paths between houses with trees, but that looked a little awkward when I sketched it out, and anyway I liked how the arrangement of houses made the pond seem suspicious. Instead I added placed the roads leading into town in such a way that you could try to sneak around the back of the village instead of cutting through, which I felt could be a fun way to approach the encounter. Alternately I considered having only 1 road leading into town, which I thought would make the village feel more hidden away and strange, but in the end I didn't want to pigeonhole you into my 'suspicious village/pond' idea, so I added the second road.

 2. I'm glad I decided to give thatch roofs another try, they're starting to look better to me than shingled roofs. They have a nice level of detail in this new style which doesn't look too eyecatching and feels appropriately textured. I think I'll have to try to draw them a little more beat up soon though, just to get a feel for how I can make them look a bit less pristine- the ones in this map are on the borderline of looking a little too clean and crisp for the setting. Maybe a destroyed/razed thatched roof inn at a crossroad could be fun?

I'm really liking how I've reduced the detail in the grass/dirt recently as well, it's done a lot for making maps feel less cluttered and over-complicated. For a while in this map I did end up detailing the grass as I used to, as you can see here and there, but that's just some muscle memory I'll have to work on fighting back for a while.

3. I tried to imitate the colors and lighting from the last map (Village Green), but I had a hard time matching the same vibe. I ended up changing the color of the ground and roofs to be much more subdued and bringing the shadows up to be more bold to help keep everything from looking too flat. In the end I also raised the whole map's vibrancy a fair bit as well, which I'm starting to feel may have been a mistake but at the time it struck me as a little too similar to my classic 'Subdued' variants (my beloved). This is a typical case of 'I don't know if I like it or not because I've been staring at it for days and I don't know what I'm looking at anymore'. I think I'll just shrug, move on, and try to improve on it for the next one, what else can I do?