Welcome back folks- this is the Jungle Channel (35x35), a rocky river through the forest with a large outcropping in the middle, which now features an imposing tablet and some braziers on the top just for you! And, since I can't draw braziers without putting fire in them, you'll find the Lit Night version in the files as well, which should help make this scene even more dramatic.
I like adding these big tablets to maps as a sort of alternative to altars, obelisks, or magic crystals as they have the potential to be either straight up lore, completely irrelevant writings from a past civilization, or magical knowledge (like a word wall in Skyrim). That isn't to say that altars/obelisks couldn't also grant story or knowledge, but tablets feel a little less imposing than either of those options.
Anyway, let's chat about this map!
Let me start off here by saying that this map went through some things before we ended up here. I wasted a LOT of time on completely scrapped sketches and a massive amount of outlines which I ultimately decided I hated and deleted. This sketch here adapts some of the effort I had invested in a sort of scrambled and shifted sort of way, particularly the central island which wasn't even half of what I had drawn. Some of the other bits got shifted to the sides of the frame, but I felt they were largely too ugly to use. Bummer, because I was hoping to buy myself some time off this weekend with a quickly-assembled map but that didn't quite pan out. Now I'm actually behind schedule and wondering how I'll claw my way back.
And yes, the previous version of this map was a cluster of rocky islands, if you were wondering. I think my problem was that I got too ambitious with the various tiered rock walls and it became an unacceptably confusing M. C. Escher drawing.
Finding myself slipping behind schedule, I recovered and reused what I could and tried to make the most of things. I added in a few extra sandy islets around the river the add in a little more dry land for players to navigate, which is good because otherwise there wouldn't be all that much ground here for activities. The trees/plants/rocks came over from last week's map and were a godsend but since I'm trying to improve the level of detail with these maps it still took quite a while to fully populate each area with an appropriate amount of rocks and plants.
And if all the previous roadblocks weren't enough, I also faced a crisis with the colors where I came back the next morning after a long day of coloring/shading and realized I had completely wasted my time the previous day. So, I started over. I don't remember when I've had such a hard time nailing down a color palette, but this one almost made me take a mental health day. Hopefully the next jungle map won't be so painful. I have nothing else to say about this, good riddance I suppose.