Welcome back! This week's map is the Jungle Hollow (35x35), a big ol' bowl-shaped furrow in the jungle with a little island at the bottom, perfect for placing whatever dramatic set-pieces you require for the current adventure- statues, tablets, glowing crystals, sleeping dinosaurs, petrified bad guys, you name it. To enhance those jungle-y vibes I'm providing you with a mistier variant of this map, inspired by Jurassic park, go nuts with it.
As always, I feel like simple concepts are best for battle maps. The name of the game is versatility, and nothing is more versatile than straight up land forms with interesting layouts. No portals, no glowing orbs, no flaming craters, just a unique design with terrain for DMs to play with and players to get creative with. The idea for this map: a big bowl-shaped depression in the jungle with some water at the bottom, throw some roots around the sides just to be fancy and that's a map! Complicated maps are obviously fun if well executed but simple ones will be what stand the test of time.
And here comes trouble. I always do it to myself, I always find ways to make more work. I found the base concept to be fun but it needed some things to be really good, like perhaps significantly more rock walls, a creek, and a little island. And I guess while I'm at it I should also draw 4 new palm trees from scratch and scrap the previous batch I just made a few weeks ago (these are a little more irregular and less polished) aaaaand maybe start considering new regular trees as well. So that's what we've got here, the trees on the borders are a new attempt at simpler trees, since I've been thinking that the old trees I've been using for 3 years are looking a little rough and are in need of replacement.. yikes.
This map was a lot of work but the outlines turned out really nice, I think. I continue to practice using quick and slightly messy linework in my maps and in this case it worked out nicely, it's a nice change of pace from how I tend to overthink my linework and waste a bunch of time and overall it has largely looked great!
Yep, another palette change. I'm starting to embrace how I'll never settle on a single color palette for maps in the same biome and instead tailor the colors to the map based off of the vibe I'm getting from it. For this map I wanted a more tropical vibe with some grounded colors here and there. The water is a more subtle blue while the greens are vibrant and the browns are fairly mild. This is another aspect of my maps I'm trying to overthink less, just do what feels right and make it look nice.