Desert Ruins, Adept (Patreon)

Hello folks, this week's map is the Desert Ruins (35x30), and your alternate version is a very fun Necrotic recoloring of the regular night version! As some of you might have guessed, this one is inspired by Warhammer's Necrons, a spooky robot race with Egyptian styling. If you're like me and are interested in maybe using some of your Warhammer minis for DnD purposes, this is one possibility to see that play out! Otherwise, it also looks cool, so maybe throw in some aliens or desert ghosts!

1. So, the idea for this map was to make a cover-heavy battleground for a desert map, which typically are pretty wide open. Ruins are my go-to for deserts, and along those lines I remembered some of the larger ruins in Breath of the Wild's Gerudo Desert which I thought would be absolutely perfect. Of course, I didn't copy them exactly, but I thought I got the same feel- plenty of crumbling walls and pillars with some tile peeking out of the sand for color. 

2. I really liked the idea of extremely thick brick walls, which meant I couldn't use any of my pre-drawn ruins to help speed things up. Drawing and detailing all these ruins ended up taking a little more time than I expected since, for whatever reason, I didn't feel like duplicating many walls and mirroring them to the other side of the map. Fortunately, this map doesn't have much more beyond the ruins, so some quick sand and tiles in the gaps helped make the map feel busier and more complete. 

3. You know what? So many of my previous desert maps have some pretty ugly colors. Somewhere in my Desert Bridges collaboration with Miscellanea Maps I realized that I wasn't putting as much effort into my desert coloring as I should be, and I decided that I owe you all some better content than that. Using my Desert Ziggurat map as an example of what not to do, I put a lot more depth into the shadows and also spiced up the glare with occasional patches of brighter yellow, which I think subtly adds some variety to otherwise open patches of sand and tile. I don't think I'm anywhere near done working on this palette though, so tune in for more steps forward in the future.