Swamp Cave, Adept (Patreon)

Hi all! This week's map is the Swamp Cave (25x25), my final swamp map for the time being. My next map will be something quite different, and it may or may not be coming next week (I'm going on vacation, so we'll see how much time I'll have). 

Your alternate version is Caustic, where I've swapped out the water for glowing green ooze! You can be certain that this stuff is much more damaging than the water in the regular version, but it's up to you just how much you want it to hurt. In fact, who knows if the air in here is even good to breathe, so you could get pretty mean if you felt like it. 

1. This map came as a suggestion in the comments of a recent map, and I liked the idea of a watery cave with some plant life growing inside. I knew that I'd have to imply an open roof to this cavern, however, since I decided I wanted to add a fair amount of leafy things, but I didn't need to worry about that until the coloring step. 

For the layout I decided to use a couple of platforms over the water with few great paths between them- I often receive comments from people who want the maps to be less easy to traverse, so I figured this would be a pretty good time to throw them a bone. Then again, no one's saying that the water is even particularly deep, it might be just 6 inches to the bottom for all we know, so really the danger here is left up to you. Maybe, for fun, you say that the water appears to all be 6 inches deep but mentally note a couple spots where it suddenly drops 5 feet (or more), and be ready for when someone wanders into that square. 

2. I knew I would need to post on Thursday this week (2 days earlier than usual), and yet I still decided to make a map with lots of rock walls- not the smartest choice. If it wasn't for them, say I cut out the walls and instead left the platforms in the middle of the mire somewhere, I would have had a much smoother time making this in time, but unfortunately I had signed myself up for this one. 

I saved a fair bit of time by using stretches of rock walls from the Goblin Lair map, a choice which I soon regretted due to how messy the lines were, but I'm fairly sure it ended up a time-saver. Fortunately I had some good audiobooks to listen to, so it didn't feel too painful.

3. Alright, I think I'm finally getting used to swamp coloring/lighting. This time I imitated last week's map, making very few changes other than a couple extra splashes of color here and there. It's hard to say if this is the final iteration of my swamp palette since this one is obviously not much like the rest (due to being in a cave), but I'm thinking it's probably as close as I'll get. I might take a day to bring all the rest together with these final colors, but my schedule is awful tight these days so I can make no promises on that. 

As I mentioned in step 1, I wanted to imply through the lighting that the roof of the cavern was open to sunlight. My first attempt at this captured that effect, but somehow it felt too 'summery' and not swampy enough. I decided afterwards to scale it back down, instead going for my usual cave lighting but with brighter sunlight near the center of the cave as well as some additional shadows. The 'open roof' effect isn't quite there anymore, but it reads much better and feels appropriate for the setting, so I'll call it a win.