Swamp Temple, Adept (Patreon)

Hi Adepts! This week I made the Swamp Temple (35x35), an interesting building for your more reclusive clerics to worship some niche gods. I didn't make this place particularly easy to arrive at, since there aren't any docks or pathways, but I thought that would be an interesting little detail for your players to pick up on- the people who live here are not expecting visitors. 

Your extra variant of this map is a Grim recoloring- featuring higher contrast lighting and more subdued colors. It feels like a night version where I've taken it easy on the blue, and honestly it kinda gives me the impression that it's starkly lit by moonlight. Pretty spooky, perhaps more appropriate for the worship of more evil gods?

1. Alright, when I was designing this building I really mostly wanted to find a way to integrate some swamp water into the layout. Originally I had planned on simply having the place be entirely open air, just a few implied roofs here and there, but I felt it would make more sense for there to be a bit more protection from the elements than that. Eventually I came up with an interesting compromise, a sorta open air central chamber with a basin reaching nearly all the way to the altar, and then some closed wings to the sides, which I filled with some fairly regular temple-y things. 

I felt this layout really helped to embrace the swampyness of the place. The last thing I wanted was for the temple to feel like it could have been in any environment, like a city or forest. This way, the swamp feels vital to the building, as if the swamp is the focus of the worship. The extra pools of water to the sides build on this slightly, adding more pools of swampy water deeper in the building for various enemies to emerge from as need be, such as swarms of insects, frogs, fungus-infested zombies, moss monsters, etc. 

2. Most of my time here was spent figuring out how to make the building feel more intricate without adding a ton of small details for me to flesh out later. The solution I came up with was adding and subtracting lots of little additional chunks on the walls in a regular pattern, which I feel implies some fun patterns and columns that didn't necessarily need more detailing to get the point across. At the end of the day, that's a pretty nice time saver.

Beyond that, the swamp outside was a couple hour job, nothing too tricky. I wanted to make sure that there was a fair amount of ground out there for people to play around with, but the emphasis really is the temple. 

3. Coloring swamps, once again, is tricky. I still can't help iterating between swamp maps, sometimes feeling as though everything needs to be more vibrant, or green, or yellow, or blue. This time I felt that the colors needed to be more distinct, so I made the grass somewhat more yellow, the trees more green, and the water more blue. We'll see how that plays out. 

The temple itself went through a number of palettes. I was originally planning on making it a sort of brassy orange with red trim, but it really really didn't look like it belonged in a swamp. Kinda cool, but not right (maybe I'll drop the building into a lava field sometime or something, then it would look more fitting). I felt that a somewhat dirty green/blue palette stood out well while still feeling appropriate for a swamp, so that's what I stuck with- though I'm starting to feel like I could have gone a little more grimy with it. Even so, this version reads well, so I'm pretty content with it.