Sister’s Ford (Patreon)

A small ford across the Boasting Run, Sister’s Ford doesn’t see a lot of use as most traffic runs significantly further south along the major roads and not this far into the lands that have been slowly retaken by the wilderness. The Ford is used by rare travellers, rangers, and those who have some other reason to avoid the main roadways and a willingness to risk travelling in the wilderness.

It isn’t that the Boasting Run is very deep, quick, or even wide that makes the ford necessary, it is that the stream has cut deeply into the landscape and most approaches leave you looking down 10 feet or more to the water below. This ford is both easily accessed, and the ruins make it visible as soon as you break out of the treeline – the craggy remains of a pair of old towers and some other stone structures on both sides of the banks. The name of the structures is long lost – it was a small border fortification during the great war and hasn’t seen any upkeep since – but the name of the ford comes from the two statues on the left by the “road” – the left statue has been completely defaced by time and vandals, but the right (headless) statue still has half of the name carved into the plinth – “… Sister”.

The more intact tower (on the right bank) has walls that climb two to four storeys and a set of wooden stairs leading up to a hole in the northwest corner of the walls that can be used as a watch platform. This makes it appealing to bandits and rangers on the move, as well as the occasional raiders. The door is kept closed with a “rope lock” that also acts as a warning when someone is already using the structure or that goblins have checked it out again lately (as the lock will be undone).

The ruins on the left bank (including a smaller octagonal tower that has been reduced to a few “teeth” sticking out of the ground) are used occasionally for camping by those who don’t want to use the tower, or by raiders who hide behind the trees and rubble for those rare travellers that come through here. And by that small camp site is a set of old stairs that lead down beneath, to half-flooded dungeons…

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,200 x 9,600 pixels (34 x 32 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 make sense with the design) – so resizing the image to 2,380 x 2,240 pixels or 4,760 x 4,480 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/03/08/sisters-ford/