A Ruined Fort (Patreon)

Surely the old fort had a name when it was build and garrisoned. The various bandits that have inhabited it in recent years have tried to attach their names to it, but it is just “the fort” to those who remember the old garrison on the hill, now surrounded by enough scrub that you can only occasionally make out the structures through the bare branches of the trees in winter.

The current tenants pretend to be a small group of bandits trying to lay low. They send a few rough-looking toughs into town every week to buy supplies paid for with foreign coins that the merchants accept and look away. The actual leader of the small motley crew holed up here is Prince Eldwin Schlueter who is hiding from his uncle, regent of the Schlueter estate after the assassination of Hadwin Schlueter (which he arranged).

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is distinctly influenced by the design of the fort in the DM’s book of the 1983 Basic D&D set. Especially the old gates laying in the grass – in this case rusted iron gates that a bandit crew replaced with the current wooden gates. For an authentic Basic experience, throw a carrion crawler under those gates if they are inspected.

The 1200 dpi version of the map was drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and is 12,000 pixels (40 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,800 pixels wide or 5,600 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/02/27/a-ruined-fort/