The Ailing Tree (30x30, 200px) - Phased Battle Map

An ancient tree
overlooking the sea
begins to pass through time;
it slips through the seasons,
ages, withers,
and dies before your eyes.

During my brief run as a DM for Curse of Strahd, one of my players rolled a warlock who had begun adventuring after losing their wife. The first time the warlock spoke to their patron, it took place in a memory from their childhood together, only it was distorted somewhat.

In the vision, their Patron took the form of their wife, standing by the ancient tree on the cliffs they had visited as children. Their Patron spoke to them of the challenges and the horrors that awaited them, but as they spoke, the vision began to fall apart; all withered and faded, until both the great tree and the form of his wife before him died and turned to ash.

I always wanted to come back to the scene at some point, to have the great tree on the cliffs pass through the seasons and dye before the party's eyes - I like the idea of using it in a simple vision, but I imagine it could also work quite well for battle against a foe with some control over life, death, or time.

I think this is my first wholly original map posted on this Patreon - it's not taken from an adventure, and it's not quite as simple as just being a forest road encounter map. It's a little frightening, honestly, especially as this is the first map I've ever released for Patrons only. So, I really hope you like it!

After so long posting all of my maps for free, I'm going to experiment a little with paywalled content - only my original maps (of which I hope there will be many more) may be paywalled of course (Wizards of the Coast and 3rd party content will always be available for free unless I have a specific arrangement with the original creator), and I may also look into the possibility of taking some commission work in the near future, but that has yet to be fleshed out. I will likely release the Gridded Day versions of maps for free, so folk can still sample my work and decide if they'd like to sign up.

Bear with me, folks - it should be interesting!

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My maps are made with assets from Forgotten Adventures and AoA (bolstered with assets of my own making here and there), and they come with grid/gridless, day/night, edited/unedited, and light/lightless variants, plus JPEGs, WebPs with transparent backgrounds, and UVTT (DD2VTT) files for Foundry VTT.