Underdark Wilds, Adept & Expert (Patreon)

Hi Adepts/Experts, the alternate version of this week's map is the Mountain Pass, in both regular flavor and frigid! For some reason there are giant mushrooms growing in the pass, but who am I to judge? Perhaps that's why your party is here, to gather a rare fungus that only grows in this specific pass, or maybe just its spores which are only released at the full moon? But I'm not too sure what kind of enemy would be preventing you from gathering those delectable 'shrooms, maybe breathing the spores compels you to protect the mushrooms? Any number of interesting creatures could be guarding them then, I'd take the opportunity to get a fun/rarely used enemy involved. 

1. So, my original inspiration for this map is a specific area from Monster Hunter World, a glowing cave system beneath the Rotten Vale (the area you travel through to get to Vaal Hazak). I've really liked that cave ever since I played the game about a year ago and I've struggled to sketch up an area that had a similar feel to it (and honestly, I'm not sure I've quite done it yet). The idea with the area is that there's patches of dry ground surrounded by glowing blue water and mushrooms, which by itself would be an interesting map if it wasn't a very specific, and therefore rarely useful, environment. The layout I came up with this week is just inspired by it then, an adaption that makes a little more sense in the context of a cave system. 

After this step I made a couple small changes. I made the dry land at the top of the map a little more cramped by moving the top wall down 2 squares (which is why this is a 28x28" map), with the intent being that underground maps should feel a little claustrophobic. I also cut those little islands in the middle of the river, as I felt that they didn't make much sense (why are they so evenly spaced? Why are they flat and not boulders?). And of course I added many more mushrooms and rocks, just to fill space nicely. 

2. This is my first time drawing mushrooms at this scale, so I spent a decent amount of time experimenting with them. The problem I came across was that, unlike trees, its hard to understand at a glance what you're looking at with mushrooms. The scale of the things just doesn't make intuitive sense, in fact they might as well be the tree trunks from last week's Feywild Clearing map. If this was one of my grassy roadside maps I think I could get the idea across a little more with sunny shading and sharper shadows, but without context I still think mushrooms are a little bit of a dud of a prop. 

3. Cave maps are really not my favorite to shade, I still feel like I've never gotten the lighting just right and, as it turns out, glowing mushrooms don't make it much easier. At this rate I've lowered my expectations and I set out with the goals of ensuring the lighting isn't confusing and is nice to look at. Next week's map is the Mushroom Forest, not exactly my ideal map but I'll settle for outdoor lighting, despite the huge amount of mushrooms I'll have to draw of every size.