This is a trinket with a lot of possibilities for a side quest. A player could win this trinket in a card game, or find it while pilfering the skeletal remains of some poor lost soul found out in the wilderness, or even wake up with it on their person after a blackout drunk night of carousing, allowing for a hot start to your game.

Finding half of a floor plan for a temple, castle or some other structure can plant a seed for character interest in places such as Tresendar Manor, Cragmaw Castle, Wave Echo Cave, Axeholm, the Dwarven Excavation, Icespire Hold, the Dragon Barrow, or the Woodland Manse before there’s even a reason to go to any of these places. That way, when there‘s a reason the characters need to go to one of these sites, there’s likely to be more enthusiasm around the quest because they already have a fragment of the map.

You could also use it as an adventure seed for a site like the Tower of Storms, which doesn’t actually have an adventure seed for Dragon of Icespire Peak. Rather, the Tower of Storms has a “lure” on the Phandalin Tales table in in the module which, if I’m being honest, isn’t a very good lure.

Adventurer’s discovering a map of an adventure site apropos of nothing? Now that sounds like a lure to me.

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