Today’s map is the battleground so recently fought over by the DDC and the trolls – a forge by the side of a frozen lake, surrounded by trees. I wanted to create the sense of a place that was in use for some time, if not always by the same people. In this instance this is done through an unmade bed, furniture, a wash stand, equipment outside, a snowman near the stumps of felled trees, little things like that.

When I made the map I wasn’t quite sure how the encounter was going to run – in fact, thinking about it I don’t recall really having any encounter details in mind. I was focused instead on just creating a scene and playing with some new settings in an update. Once it was done I just needed to expand the edges out a bit in case my players wanted to run around the building or something.

So here it is. The trolls were mostly inside, apart from an ice troll hidden inside the snowman. The adventurers arrived from the south (the bottom of the map) and concealed themselves in the trees while they planned what to do. It could have gone any direction from here, but in the end it devolved into a mass brawl outside the door and involved fireballs and chaos bolts, keen archery and very hungry trolls. This meant that most of the detail inside the forge wasn’t seen during the encounter itself until they broke in to ransack it later.

As usual I’ve put together a zipfile ( winterforge2.zip ) with the graphic above and the text file with lighting and boundary details for Roll20 should you want to use it.