Winterhaven Revisited

A mini-post, for Saturday:

Between my writing here, the several games of Keep on the Shadowfell I've played in or run, and the discussion I've had about it on forums, I feel like I know Winterhaven pretty well by now.

Which makes it very odd to see Winterhaven rendered artistically from the original KoTS map and find it recognisable. Like it's a place that actually existed, and that I've been to.

Some of you, I know, are already well acquainted with D&D Doodles - particularly its author Crazyred, who's an Eleven Foot Pole reader! Somehow Crazyred's failed to heavily promote his site here at EFP so I'll do it for him. All of you who haven't been there before, go give it a quick click.

Relevantly to the focus of Eleven Foot Pole, D&D Doodles features an awesome series of Nentir-vale related sketch art and maps. They do a great job of bringing 4th Edition's "default setting" to life and making it seem like a real place that people live in. If you've not seen it before, go and check out his Winterhaven, his Fallcrest, and the wealth of other excellent doodling and cartography that's on display.

Keep on the Shadowfell Maps

I don't normally post on a Sunday, so as to save my work for when people are actually reading, but seeing as people seemed to appreciate being linked to the Prince of Undeath conversion, I thought it wouldn't hurt to direct you to some other resources for the H series modules.

For today it's Loyd Blankenship's fantastic battlemaps for Keep on the Shadowfell, based on the originals by Mike Schley. These are remakes of the printed maps, with the monsters, traps and secret doors helpfully cleaned off, leaving them ready to be printed off for use at your next game or imported into MapTool or other virtual tabletops.

It's just the Keep - for the kobolds, the burial site and the interludes you'll have to use the poster maps included with the published module. If you bought the original PDF or downloaded the free one you're out of luck.

The links all point to Loyd's threads on the Cartographer's Guild forums. The first floor of the Keep is here (encounters 1 to 5), here (encounters 6 to 8), and here (9 to 12), and the second level of the Keep is here.

Naturally, you're all well and truly done with Keep by now and these are of no use to you. But just in case - enjoy!

The Labyrinth

Thunderspire Labyrinth's titular maze may well not meet player expectations. Those who have seen the module's title may be imagining a kind of classic mega-dungeon, with level upon level of sprawling, mappable corridors. In the alternative, it would seem reasonable for the Labyrinth to pose some kind of direct challenge to the ingenuity of players and their characters.

In practice, the Labyrinth has little to no mechanical effect. It "covers nearly a square mile, with hundreds of chambers and passages", and "is too convoluted to be completely mapped". A rough outline (above) is provided to the DM, although it bears no relationship to any of the descriptions of distance and location scattered throughout the module. Moreover, "hundreds of small chambers and halls [...] aren't shown", and "even the major roads include countless intersections and smaller passages".

The way this works in practice is that players will need guides or accurate directions to reach a destination. Much like a computer game, players can visit new areas only once they are "added to the map".

If players try to explore without guidance, they risk wandering lost for hours before eventually ending up at a random choice of one of the module's major quest destinations. Interestingly, this can have the effect of bringing them straight to the penultimate mini-dungeon, bypassing the majority of the module's content. That's probably an effect of the module as-written that DMs should feel free to completely ignore.