Map Tile Set

[madcowchef]

Thanks all. I need to do the transitions from forest to caves, maybe a set to make extra large caves, a few more wet forest tiles, and maybe some outside ruins and buildings. Any major areas of adventure I'm missing? Here a sampler of most of the cavern Ruins/ongoing battle tiles:

[madcowchef]

If you were asking "But madcowchef, what if I need a really big cavern to house my tarrasque?" here is the answer. A sample of the majority of pieces I did for a big cave construction kit. The scale leads to less detail, and as I envisioned my map tiles being good for quick setup putting together a big cave is somewhat guaranteed to take a few tiles at least so isn't at the core of how I pictured people using them. None the less I included them for the sake of completeness and including a big cave at the end of some little tunnels seems appropriate.

[madcowchef]

Hmm I was testing to see if I set for a elven style tree city would be worth it. I'm not overly convinced with what I've come up with though. I figured I'd have elevation change only by a central spiral staircase in each tree, so you could effectively stack as many levels as you wanted linking them through the staircase vertically. For horizontal connections I was going to run rope bridges, I threw in a bad place holder for these. The easily navigable paths are laid down in a light wood with climbable branches depicted as is. I'm not sure if I'll pursue this set as its not the most common setting for adventures anyways and its so so at best.

[Jacktannery]

Excellent MadCow, that works for me.

[madcowchef]

OK did some transfers between the caves and the forest so I'm back out in the open air again adding more rivers and some random ruins and classic encounter locations. Considering if I want to produce at least a small set of tree city style tiles or move to something related to inter-planar travel that's all the rage with kids these days. Here's one of my recent favorites I did:

[madcowchef]

OK I'm revisiting the tree city just because even if a less common encounter location its one that seems to get to little attention at times., I'm wondering if I should fill the background with color, clouds, foliage, or a view of the ground? the idea is that these would be stacked several stories high so the view of the ground doesn't make a lot of sense if there is supposed to be two levels under it, but I fear the foliage fill would hide important details of the map. I think rather than rope bridges I might simply have the branches themselves join, less realistic but more visually pleasing and that way players won't constantly be trying to turn the bridges into movable scenery (which I'm trying not to map). Any thoughts on these problems are very welcome.

Edit: I hear pictures help

[Jacktannery]

The clouds looks best visually to me; however they look like ice not cloud, which is probably not a good thing. The black and green backgrounds are too similar in colour to the tree thing.

[Raptori]

I don't think the sky or the black make sense, I'd go for the other option. However, it might be better to grey it out a little by putting a semi-transparent black layer just underneath the current level, since that way the most important bits would stand out.

[madcowchef]

Thanks for the comments, gives me a direction to go in, that set is proving challenging. Less challenging in my opinion is other new area for mapping, some sort of magical wasteland/hell that sort of thing. I debated going red or green for the magical glowing writing bits, but I want the lava/heat vents to be red so I didn't want the green and red Christmas in hell look so I went with red. Not sure if the highlights on the stone outcroppings (like the mound in my sample) aren't a shade to bright but I figured I needed some contrast. Anything stand out as bad in my test for the various elements?

[Jacktannery]

Excellent background texture.