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"I Have No Words": D&D Player's Waterdeep Project Is Doing What Baldur's Gate 3 Couldn't

Published

3 days ago

6th July 2025

Dungeons & Dragons is known for its fantastical cities, and one player’s Waterdeep project is impressive in a way that even Baldur’s Gate 3 couldn’t manage. Known as the City of Splendors and the Crown of the North, Waterdeep is a huge metropolis that vastly outdoes most developments in the Forgotten Realms. It’s no surprise that it can be a fun campaign setting, but trying to deal with the entirety of its scale could quickly become overwhelming for any dungeon master.

Reddit user iJoanx shared their Waterdeep modeling project on Reddit, posting a screenshot of a vast map created “in real life scale.” The project is modeled in Blender, but iJoanx is also planning to make it explorable in Unreal Engine. Waterdeep is the product of two years of work, but iJoanx notes that “there is much to do yet.“

Fan-Made Waterdeep Is A Massive D&D Location To Explore

Bringing An Incredible City To Life

The scale of the Waterdeep project might make it easy to assume it lacks detail when zooming in, but an update provided by the creator on Patreon offers a closer look at affairs. The idea grew out of a plan to recreate Trollskull Manor alone, eventually growing into a much more ambitious project that retains a focus on “hand-crafted textures, props, music, and more.” While it isn’t meant to have the interactivity of a full game, it is intended to become a space worth wandering around.

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This take on Waterdeep has received an enthusiastic response from other D&D players on Reddit, like Chelos-de, who called it “absolutely mindblowing” before concluding “I have no words.” Considering that D&D has never officially offered a 3D rendition of Waterdeep on this level, it’s especially impressive to see a single fan pulling it off.

A Full-Scale Waterdeep Puts Baldur’s Gate 3 To Shame

Larian’s Massive Game Could Only Manage The Lower City

Baldurs Gate 3 Karlach and Astarian in front of Waterdeep — Custom Image by Steven Garrard

While iJoanx’s Waterdeep doesn’t have the same game-oriented ambitions as Baldur’s Gate 3, it greatly outdoes the size of the game’s city. The Upper City was considered at some point in development, but Baldur’s Gate 3 ultimately sticks to the Lower City, a more manageable area to recreate in-game. Populating the entirety of Baldur’s Gate with memorable NPCs and diverse possibilities might never have been feasible, but it’s still been a big “what if” for some fans.

D&D recently cut its support for Project Sigil, an ambitious 3D virtual tabletop program, and this Blender-made Waterdeep is a nice reassurance that Sigil isn’t the only tool for the community to make great D&D environments. I’m not expecting to see anyone else manage another Dungeons & Dragons project on such an intense scale any time soon, but I’ll definitely be following the development of Waterdeep from here.

Source: iJoanx/Reddit, Joanes Unzueta/Patreon, Chelos-de/Reddit