[WIP] Swamp Witch
Royal Scribe
🖼️ 250 images Mapmaker
When I was coming up with "spooky season" mapping ideas, I was debating between a haunted house or a witch's lair in a swamp. Why not both?
That required experimenting with some different styles to try to create a swamp. (Let this serve as another plug for a jungle/swamp annual compatible with annuals like Creepy Crypts, Forest Trail, and Marine Dungeons.)
I wasn't sure which way to go...so I ended up doing three versions. One is in the Mike Schley Dungeon (SS4) style, the second used Forest Trails as the basis, and the third used Marine Dungeons (though the second two had to borrow a bit from DD3 and other styles).
I don't know a lot about swamps, but the images I've seen show a lot of trees both on dry land and in the water. In all three versions, I made it so that the tree tops could be hidden, both to create a battlemap version and also to show that some of the trees were growing out of the water and not just from patches of solid land.
Here are all three side by side, and then in the comments I will show each one in more detail.
Comments
This is the Mike Schley version. For the water, I used two different shades of his "sludge" water to show that it was muddy. For the shadows under the trees, I copied all of the trees to a "Tree Shadow" layer, used the RGB Matrix effect to turn it grayscale, and then added a transparency effect. The stumps come from Mike Schley's Woodcutter monthly, though I might have gotten the roots portion from Creepy Crypts. I can't remember! The cottage is supposed to be elevated on posts so that it doesn't get flooded during storms.
With Tree Canopy Shown
With Tree Canopy Hidden
For Forest Trail, I had to bring in the cottage from Darklands City, and the bones/debris from DD3. I struggled with two things: the riverbed and the ripples around trees growing in the water. For the ripples, I used the rapids symbols that come with the annual. For the riverbed, I tried three different versions.
Here are all three together:
The first version uses the riverbed fill from the annual. It doesn't look particularly swampy to me, though.
The second version uses a mud fill from the Forest Trail annual:
The third version uses a mud from Creepy Crypts:
I like the mud from the second two, but I'm not sure it's clear that the trees are growing out of muddy water and not just mud. Maybe if I added more waves, or played with the water effects?
The third version uses Marine Dungeons as the basis, with stumps (and snakes) coming in from Creepy Crypts and trees coming in from Forest Trail. This has the best waves and ripples, naturally. I tried to darken the water a bit by using patches of the Water Deep and Water Deepest drawing tools, and then applying some effects to that sheet (specifically, using the RGB Matrix to make the deeper waters sepia toned, and then the Adjust Hue/Saturation effect to change the lightness by -15%. I should probably add more algae floating on top.
Anyway, these more mostly just for fun. I don't currently have a specific plan for them, but I wanted to see if I could create a swamp with current assets/techniques. Still hoping for a Jungle/Swamp annual some day. 😉
Love the maps and the ideas. Just an idea - if there are trees in water for a long while - could there be dead ones?
I know the Forest Trail symbols include fallen trees, and I think barren ones, too. Not sure about the Schley symbols but I can check.
Amazing mangrove/beach environment. The colors are very beautiful 😍
Tweaked the Marine Dungeons version a bit: darkened the deeper water a little more, added a few dead trees, added more algae, and a few more bones.
I love that you have made good use of the cutout on the ripples sheet around the trunks.
Yes, those ripples are my favorite effect ever! They're so cool. I like my swamps done in the Forest Trail and Mike Schley versions, but without the proper ripples, they're just not the same. The ripples in Marine Dungeons are indispensable for any semi-aquatic dungeon.