The Garden Tower (Patreon)

Referred to in some texts as “The Pillar Of Salt” because of the white crystalline structure of the tower, this towering structure and the enclosed garden sit on a hilltop but are invisible to those who don’t climb the hill – as one approaches within a few hundred feet of the structure, it gradually comes into view as if a veil of sky opens before it. The only hint of its existence otherwise is the stone path leading to the tower, and occasionally a glint as if the sun were reflecting from something atop the hill.

While the tower and garden walls are made of a hard and rough white crystal, the doors stand out as they are a very different smooth ochre mineral imported from the yellow hells. All the doors in the tower are mage locked to only open for the residents of the structure, for someone with an ioun stone, or with the use of a knock spell. The tower splits as it ascends, breaking into three separate spires of uneven height, connected by bridges and passages at various levels.

This map was inspired by a strange tower we discovered in a small pocket-dimension we explored in our weekly Empire of the Petal Throne campaign that James Maliszewski has been running for well over 8 years now. The map itself isn’t based on that tower, but when we originally saw it it was a crystalline structure in a walled garden and the mental image completely grabbed my imagination and turned into this.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 16,800 pixels (56 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 the traditional 10′ squares) – so resizing the image to either 3,920 pixels wide or 7,840 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2023/07/10/the-garden-tower/