Hello Adepts! This is the Shadowed Ruins (35x30), a Shadowfell map! I haven't made many of these and I'm pretty sure those I do have were only bonus variants, so I think it'll be interesting to make make these to be Shadowfell maps from the ground up. This won't be an extended run though, so don't worry about seeing only grayscale maps for 3 months, I'll try to keep it short.
When I think of Shadowfell, I imagine blasted landscapes with jagged cliffsides, crumbling ruins, and twisted trees. Since making this sketch I've been hunting for more reference on Shadowfell and found that isn't always the case, sometimes it's just a spooky grayscale forest. I don't plan on leaning into the grayscale forest aesthetic more than once though, so don't worry. But anyway, I've learned that there's a bit more variety in this environment than I expected! For the rest of this run I'll try to keep the terrain spooky and dynamic and not just remove the saturation from a regular map, but for this week it's blasted, jagged landscapes with twisting trees and crumbling architecture.
Unfortunately for me, landscapes like this need that personal touch and largely can't be assembled with pieces from previous maps. That's fine, just a little slower to make than other maps. The small cliffs were actually surprisingly quick to draw and look pretty nice- it's the ruins that always trip me up. Whenever I draw ruins I get terribly stuck imagining the stinking point of them, like what did the finished building actually look like and what was it used for? In contrast, I think I give other artists a lot of leeway, I never think these thoughts about the ruins in their maps, "nice ruins!" I say to myself. With that in mind, I tried my best to not overthink this and attempted to get to work without worrying about where the previous residents would have kept their clothes.
When it comes to Shadowfell maps you have to pick your flavor of choice- magic purple tint, devastatingly flat grays, or spooky scary colors bumped to 150%. I felt that magic purple was the right flavor for this map, though that will likely change for the next one.
Side note: I just paused here to completely rerender the JPGs for this map because I noticed that the grass seen in this image is lacking its shading. A silly mistake and a lot of lost time, but that's what I get for working during other players' turns during DnD last night.
Anyway, I'll probably go grayscale for the next map with some spooky fog, just to include more flavors of Shadowfell. Or not, there's a chance that I'll dislike it enough that I'll scrap it entirely- you'll know by next week!