The Forgotten Cloister might be the largest POI I did for Spellbreak going by footprint. The space was meant to be the former home of a long-gone order of magical scholars, so I aimed for a sort of “fantasy college quad” vibe. My hope was that having the park in the center and the four primary outbuildings all connected into one radial structure would create that feeling of cohesion you get in a campus space.

There was one particularly interesting challenge involved in this POI: how to make it feel like a space distinct from the surrounding area without having any sort of literal walls or fortifications to separate it? Our map was full of castles and forts, but a scholar’s cloister should feel more open and less imposing than that. I think between the aforementioned radial structure, the distinctly academic purposes of the buildings (there’s a library, a reliquary, a dining hall, an outdoor lecture space, and a mostly-destroyed dormitory), and the sculpting of the surrounding landscape I was able to achieve that feeling of place.