Rathenau’s Lakeside Tower (Patreon)

Today we have a small tower on a lakeside hill, with an attached wooden structure used as a small barracks.

A thaumaturge of some renown, Rathenau maintains this quiet retreat near enough to Winterspire to be able to run errands there and to be in the safe zone around the major urban centre, but far enough away that they don’t deal with frequent visitors.

The structure looks off-balance – with a single-storey wooden add-on to the west, and a turret starting on the second level (directly above the front door) on the right. Rathenau’s tower is currently set up with the magic-user’s bedroom on the third floor with a further quiet meeting room in the top floor of the attached turret.

Sitting on the shores of a small brackish lake just barely separated from the nearby sea, competition to work for Rathenau and be housed here is fairly fierce – as few would challenge the thaumaturge directly, and the lake does provide for an idyllic place to while away the afternoons fishing. Generally there are a pair of mercenaries here (living in the room with two beds in the wooden side structure), and Rathenau’s “lieutenant” (a long-trusted younger adventurer) in the next room. Rathenau and the lieutenant both enjoy gardening as a hobby, so the window boxes on the south and east faces of the barracks are well-populated with fragrant herbs and flowers.

Yes, some grid lines are missing in this one. Dunno how that happened, must have been really distracted when I was finishing this piece off – they are all on the upper right of the terrain part of the map, so shouldn’t have much impact on your use.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,200 x 13,200 pixels in size (34 x 44 squares). 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 recommended 10′ squares that work with this design) – so resizing it to either 2,380 x 3,080 or 4,760 x 6,160 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/02/19/rathenaus-lakeside-tower/