Village Gates, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts, your map this week is the Village Gates (30x28), a fun new map for your party to either assault a little town or defend it, their choice. With that in mind, your alternate version of this map is a spooky misty one, featuring much more grim lighting and colors as well as a thick fog creeping in from the forest. I imagine a scene here where guards on the gate platforms, are defending against zombies as they emerge from the forest while the party aids them. I feel like I often suggest missions with structures like this, but I like it when NPCs help in combat- it's a fun way to introduce interesting NPCs too!

1. A lot of the design process for this map was determining how much of it should be forest and how much should be village. I felt that it might be more important to depict more of the inside of the wall, to encourage moving the fight into short range combat (perhaps as the defense against whatever's outside the gate begins to fail), but I imagine some people would have preferred significantly more wiggle room out in the forest. At the end of the day, I don't often have the time to make maps very much bigger than this, so I have to make little decisions that keep my deadline in mind. 

Side note: this map was inspired by the gates of Bree, the human town the hobbits stop by in the night and have to talk their way in. I love that scene!

2. As I mentioned last week, I haven't really drawn anything since I took my paternity leave and I've started to miss it. So, with this one, I started off by jumping right in and drawing up some fresh trees- something that I used to pull my hair out over. After that, I pretty much drew everything else up fresh other than the small props (barrels, carts) and the little stretch of rock wall. Now, I don't exactly know if I'll keep this energy up as I get back to work fully, but I was surprised by my willingness to draw things that normally I'd blow past fairly quickly or replace with pieces of previous maps. 

Anyway, these are new trees! I remember the last time I drew trees I had a pretty hard time of it- I tend to agonize over props that I feel like shouldn't stand out too much, knowing that any unusual or eyecatching details will stick out like a sore thumb. 

3. Once again, I've made big changes to my previous village palette. This might be the 6th or 7th time I've made massive changes to the palette I use for villages, this time in response to the popularity of last week's Stone Circle map, which featured a more cheerful palette than usual and inspired me to alter some of the colors that usually wouldn't be debate, like the color of rocks and the ground. I think the changes feel fairly lateral in this map, but perhaps the difference in vibes is bigger than I think it is? Hard to say, I'll have to think about it a little more before I settle in to this new set of colors.