Neutral Party - Moldering Ruins, Adept

I'm back again with yet another spooooky map, the Moldering Ruins (35x35)! This map terrifyingly depicts a world where a house has fungus growing inside, can you even imagine? If that's not scary enough for you, imagine that house being on a farm and also mostly destroyed, that's frightening stuff. But seriously though, the mushrooms in this variant are seriously cursed, I strongly urge you to come up with big ol' consequences for players who think they're bad enough dudes to consume them.

So, a destroyed farmhouse with a shed, a stable, and some fields nearby- that's the plan. I wanted the size of the fields to be indeterminate so they're mainly offscreen, but the rest can be plainly seen. The shapes of these structures is really the important part since I planned on roughing them up, but these walls tell enough of the story to get the idea across. The terrain otherwise is regular forest, though with a few more bare trees than my typical forests so as to imply spookiness. You can see the little circles by the upper fallen tree that imply mushrooms, I obviously expanded them from that location once I decided I wanted that to be a larger theme in the map.

Many outlines, and best of all I was able to bring over many props from previous maps, including the mushrooms and rubble! This a blessing for me as I hate drawing rubble, it's mind-numbing. But, as always, it isn't ever the props that take up so much of my time, it's the landforms. The rocks, ledges, grass, and dirt are what's really important. For example, the creek, it's a small thing but I decided to try drawing it a little less wiggly than usual. What a small and silly thing I have to think about at my job, but I really deliberated how smoothly I should draw the banks of the creek and how parallel the banks should be. I chose to experiment and drew it as smoothly and parallel-ly as possible, just to see if it felt right. I think it doesn't really feel right, and now I know. This is my job, this is my life. Next week I'll draw a creek differently, just to feel something. lol

Now, the colors have a lot going on here. I tried out something fairly big here that won't work on many other maps but I suspected would go down real smooth this time- the vignette. I typically include a small to moderate amount of darkening around the edge of the frame so as to enhance contrast, draw the eye to the center, and perhaps on a subconscious level dissuade players from moving out of frame (this is speculation, I have no proof of this happening). For this map I didn't significantly darken the edges exactly, I mainly desaturated them, along with some fog around the edges, which together imply that the terrain is actually very very grim just off-screen. I don't think I can do this alternative vignette for a non-spooky map, but here it works great!