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Marsh Platform, Adept
🕑 Added 2025-10-22 20:49:08 +0000 UTCHi Adepts! This is the Marsh Platform (24x30), a big structure in the swamp with unknown purpose- unless you're using your Portal variant in which case the purpose is the huge portal. I had a bit of fun with the portal, giving it a bit of a galactic vibe which I thought was magical enough to imply that this old platform involves some serious magik. However, if you're feeling saucy and don't much like the look of this one you could instead drop in the portal PNG from my old Forest Portal map- it isn't quite as massive as this one but it contrasts massively against the palette of the swamp, which I feel gives it a bit of shock value. Could be cool!
Starting at the initial sketch, you can see how the bones of the swamp haven't changed much, but the platform itself has gone through some alterations. I would have stuck with it, but I felt that it was a bit too similar in design to many of my existing Ruins maps, specifically the Druidic Ruins, which I suddenly recalled just as I was beginning on the outlines. In an attempt to make the design more unique I stuck with the shapes from this initial sketch but went with an empty ring, which I think has a sorta mysterious energy that might intrigue your players and prompt them to dig a little deeper.
Around that platform is the swamp, which might feel like an afterthought beside such strange ruins but you know someone will end up stomping around the edges of this map mid-fight. I mostly wanted the design to be swampy, but my secondary desire was for there to be a few good bits of land near the platform for someone to gain solid footing. Nothing huge, but some.
Outlines! So I mentioned how I remembered the Druidic Ruins, I noticed that the dead trees I drew in that one are unique to that map, meaning that I never saved them in a PNG for later reuse. On further inspection I found that that was because I had apparently ruined my PSD for that map by accidentally saving it at 1/2 my regular resolution, making the outlines half the size of what they should be. Bummer, but I feel like I could probably take a moment to recover some of that effort with a little more effort. Probably not worth it, but I really do hate drawing dead trees so it's a possibility.
The ruins were fun to draw! Rouging up old stone structures is always mildly entertaining for me, and lately I've also enjoyed adding small bits of other types of wear and tear to my ruins, like mushrooms and moss, which add a nice secondary form of visual aging that these types of things desperately need. I don't doubt that I've been adding little details like these for forever but it feels more satisfying lately for whatever reason, you know?
So, you know how I can't settle on anything? I very nearly completely altered the swamp palette I've been using as I made this map. The grass, water, trees, nearly everything here was very nearly different, all shifted to being more green and vibrant. Fortunately I slept on the decision before deciding to take a step back and stick with the colors I've already established. The problem is that I get this urge to iterate on everything and I can't help but spend hours trying out new and different color combinations just to see if I can definitively say it's an improvement. This time I decided that it wasn't necessarily an outright improvement, otherwise this very well could have looked wildly different from the previous 3 marsh maps. Close calls this week.
