Procrastinating on something else, so decided to do a little mapping instead. A quiet, peaceful stroll around the lake in winter.

Act I

Act II

Careful out there, looks like the ice may not be so solid...

Act III

Uh oh.....

Welcome, Jeff!

I was in a similar boat with a more truncated timeline. Bought everything except the annuals in 2017, but tried and failed to teach myself through the PDF manuals. Finally around 2023, I decided to peek at some of the video tutorials, and that’s what worked for me.

You can check them out here:

Here's my Winter Solstice Holiday celebration map for the inn's main socializing room.

The idea is that their Winter Solstice celebration is a festival of lights -- light to banish the darkness on the longest night of the year, and light to welcome back the sun as the days start to get progressively longer. Trees get decorated with lights. Some use candles chemically treated to glow with different colors, but I'm going to say that the inn uses small scraps of luminescent crystals for their ornaments, decorating the outdoor fir tree, the hedges, and a smaller fir tree that was cut down and brought inside. The ornaments are the varicolor Will-o'-Wisp symbols from Creepy Crypts, which automatically go on a Symbols Torches sheet.

With this zoomed in version, you can see more of the decorations. The "poinsettias" are potted plants from DD3, with a small varicolor red DD3 bush dropped on top. We'll pretend that the ivy symbols I used for the greenery on the mantles is actually either fir branches or boughs of holly. There are a few chests beneath the tree inside, as this is a gift-giving holiday. And on benches set at most of the windows, a candle has been lit to banish the dark and welcome back the sun.

I plan to print these as 40x40 battlemap tiles, which means that CC3's lighting effects might get wonky if the light effect extends past a tile's border. So instead, I fudged it by layering a Solid 30 polygon over everything (except the Symbols Torches sheet) to simulate dusk. I then added the Color Key sheet effect to that sheet, copied the floors from the inn, barn, and privy to the Shadow sheet, and then turned them into a magenta polygon so that the insides were shown without the dusk. The glows from the windows are DD3 symbols.

Here's a first pass at winterizing Mapleford (with the summer version as a comparison):

I am in awe of Sue's artistry in designing these annuals -- and what a tremendous gift to RPG gamers to have winter styles that match Forest Trails and Darklands City.

Here's the attic, crowded but cozy. Could be a VIP guest room, or maybe the innkeepers live up here so that the entire second floor is available to guests. But I like to think of it as the home of the innkeeper's eccentric uncle or spinster aunt whom the entire village thinks is a bit mad...until the adventurers seek them out for advice, revealing that the relative is one of the world's foremost authorities about the Abyssal Planes.

Cellar still to come...