Marsh Ruins, Adept

Hello again, Adepts- this week's map is the Marsh Ruins (25x30), a redo of the Swamp Temple Remnants, a map which strangely enough got a rare 3 word name. I've long felt like that map was a poor execution of a fun concept, a crumbling and overgrown temple in the swamp, which is a shame. This time around I wanted to take a more careful approach to the design with a more straightforward temple layout, which I'll talk more about below!

Oh also, your variant is Verdant, which might be a bit of a misnomer because it's not really all that cheery and jungley. I really just wanted to make a version of this map with a less rotten energy and more greenery, just so you know.

1. In the sketch here I toyed around with a few different forms of decay for this ruin, not really with the intent of doing all of them. First, the pit was a fun concept but didn't make much sense in a swamp, it would have crumbled in long ago. Still, worth coming back to later for another map. Second, I was tempted to have part of the temple submerged, or at least have some of the walls jutting out of the water. I nearly stuck with this one but felt that the layout of the swamp water was a little awkward and made access to the map a bit too difficult. I later tried flooding just the upper end of the temple but I was unwilling to remove the altar platform in order to make that happen, so that was entirely scrapped. Last, I was considering adding a number of fallen or crumbling pillars but that made me wonder why the pillars remained while so much of the rest of the building's rubble disappeared, like what happened to the roof? Maybe not the best reason for cutting a potentially fun set-piece but that's where my head was at this week.

   Beyond the ruins, I tried making the swamp more land than water for this map, in an attempt to give players a little more solid ground to play with. However, I ended up removing much of the ground beyond the grass in step 3 on a whim, oops.

1. Drawing ruins will never not be fun, even if drawing tile floors and brick walls can get a bit tedious. I think I could have crumbled the walls a bit further, actually, but I was less interested in that than roughing up the floor and adding signs of decay, which was way more engaging for my bored little brain.

   I also ended up drawing more dead trees, which is just the worst. Something about them drives me nuts, I just can't stand drawing these things, but unfortunately my existing dead trees are just a little too small for what I wanted for this map. To help me keep on task I enlarged one of my old ones and used it as a guide, which fortunately helped keep me going.

1. So, remember when I had shorelines for all the water? I was brainstorming how to make the ground marshier and I played around with completely blending the ground into the water, which looked kinda weird but also kinda made sense. I blended it a bit further and added some grime and scum to the water, which I think really helped sell the muddy look I was aiming for. When I put this new result side-by-side with the more crisp shoreline from before I decided it was a step in the right direction, though likely not the best possible version of this effect. I'll keep developing this, I'm confident I'll have it looking real nice by the time I move on from marshy maps.