Hill of Swords (30x30, 200px) - Berserk
Added 2022-05-06 14:29:19 +0000 UTCThis day last year Kentaro Miura, the artist behind Berserk, passed away. I've wanted to make a battle map for the Hill of Swords since his passing, but never made the time. Yesterday, after uploading the Old Gravesite map, I realised the anniversary of Miura's passing was coming up, and flew into a map-making frenzy, and even then, I stayed up far too late after last night's Elden Ring stream working on this.
So, here it is - my tribute to Kentaro Miura and the twisted fantasy tale he told through Berserk.
If you're not familiar with the manga or the anime adaptations, the Hill of Swords is a tribute to the fallen members of the Band of the Hawk - each sword forged and thrust into the earth in honor of a fallen friend. It always struck me as a beautiful idea in a manga that revels in brutality.
My feelings towards Berserk are... complicated. On one hand it's impossible to deny its influence on me and I still have a lot of love for the characters and the story, but on the other hand, it's not something I can recommend very easily. Miura's handling of Guts' childhood trauma struck me as incredibly ahead of its time when I first read the manga, but simultaneously, the manga's treatment of women that share Guts' trauma is... a little problematic at best.
Still, I can't deny its influence on me or a lot of the media I love.
-----
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.
