Stormy Big Island Shrine, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hey team, your alternate map this time is stormy once again, perhaps my favorite way to alter a map. In my own campaign, I like to use weather as part of the challenge, and during heavy rain, I give a little more leeway to everyone's stealth (including enemies). Perhaps here the rain makes the rocks slippery like in Breath of the Wind, increasing the difficulty of scaling the cliff faces and prompting the players to ascend via the path. Or maybe lightning randomly strikes the island or a lightning rod on top of the shrine, blinding nearby players who are looking in its direction if they fail a constitution save? Either way, I enjoy how the weather can drastically change the map, so hopefully, you can make use of it!

1.1 A couple of weeks back I mentioned how I often go through many iterations at the rough sketch faze, so I thought I would treat you guys to a couple of those this week. This first one was my initial plan for the map: a single steep and winding path with a secondary small island to the side. No dock, but I considered placing a boat beached on the sand. It's an OK layout, but nothing horribly interesting. 

1.2 By erasing, redrawing, and rotating chunks of the island I got to this second attempt. Island #2 is gone, and instead, there's a lot more beach to play with. I liked this one quite a lot but the shape of the island wasn't doing it for me, and at this point, I felt like I wanted the main approach to the island to include a dock. Lots of bushes and rocks here as well, gotta try it out and get a feel for how overgrown I want the island to be.

1.3 The final iteration, with some shading as it was the one I went with. You may notice that the beach area isn't actually here yet, and it won't be until pretty late into the next stage when I realize the map would be much much better with it.  

This layout was inspired by the rule of 3's. A trio is satisfying and interesting, as we've all learned from video games, so 3 distinct areas were what I aimed for: the dock, the path, and the shrine, with the beach being a secondary addition to all 3. 

2. I don't think I did anything horribly unusual this time with any portion of the map, everything is more or less stock as far as my maps are concerned. Outlines take up the vast majority of the time it takes to make a map but require the least explanation I suppose. 

3. I went with a very basic color palette here: rocks are brown, the grass is green, and water is blue. Typically I like to make my rocks grayer, my grass yellower, and my water deeper blue, but I was hankering for something bright and colorful after my last few maps so this hit the spot. 

I think the next time I draw ocean water I'll put more effort into painting waves, which it occurs to me now I completely neglected. Now that I think about it it would add a lot to this map and fill in all that pesky negative space. I can never write one of these posts without making a grocery list of things to fix, huh?