Abandoned Village, Adept

Hello folks, this week's map is the Abandoned Village (25x25), the scattered remains of several razed hovels in a forest- exciting! Seriously though, maps of ruins are my personal favorites to make, there's a lot of interesting pathing to consider with how the ruins are laid out and the setting is perfect and useful for ton of fun encounters, just an all around solid setup I think.

Also, as you can see above I've done something a little different for your alternate version! I decided to try a somewhat new Autumn palette than usual, using more realistic Fall colors than my usual vibrant yellows and reds. I really enjoy the more reasonable colors that I used here, since it gets across a very different vibe than my usual Fall maps, but I want to hear what you think! Would you prefer that I continue to make Autumn maps in this palette, or would you rather I go back to the previous style? Let me know!

1. Since this week was American Thanksgiving, I was planning on taking at least 2 days off to spend with family, so I needed to come up with a map I could put together in the time I had. Ruins and forests are my personal favorites to make, and I've made quite a lot of these types of maps, so I was confident that I could probably fully complete one in about 3 days. However, I did end up getting my Covid booster early on in the week, which knocked me out the next day, so lost a day more than I was expecting. So, I whipped up a fairly simple layout with a nice scattered battlefield featuring some solid cover, and some less than solid cover, and was content enough with it to start working. 

2. Fortunately, as a lifelong procrastinator, I never work better than when I'm on a short deadline, so I had a fairly easy time bringing everything together in about 1 and 1/2 days, assembling it from bits and pieces of forests and ruins I've made previously. The only things I had to take some real time on were the dirt paths and the grass, which filled the gaps between the assets I had placed in position around the map. Not bad!

Would I draw things differently given extra time? Absolutely! I would have liked to add more interesting details to the ruins, some additional identifiable burnt props here and there, and maybe a half-burnt building or 2, but I truly didn't have the time for it this week. 

3. For the palette, I started by copying over the colors and effects from the Road Ambush map I made a month or 2 ago, which was based off of the 1st combat in Lost Mine of Phandelver. I got pretty far with just that, but later decided that that palette was way too yellowish for this map, which I didn't want to feel too verdant, so I reduced the vibrancy of the lighting and upped the blues in the grass and trees a bit. 

Honestly, it all still feels a little washed out. However, I was looking back at a few of my more popular maps I had made a while ago and realized that they all had a similarly washed-out look, so I'm going to throw this one out there and see what the response is. Who knows, maybe people want that look?