Whether it’s a carefully crafted dungeon full of intrigue, or a surprise ambush because your players accidentally set the king’s cloak on fire, a good map can add to the fun of a thrilling encounter or make a city feel so real your players will smell the dwarven bakery. Now that online role-playing games over Virtual Tabletops (VTTs) are more popular than ever, digital mapmakers have become one of the most essential tools in a GM’s arsenal. This means more emerge from the ether all the time, spanning the full spectrum of features, price points, integrations, and learning curves. From old-school and sketchy to fully isometric works of art, here are some of our favorite mapmakers and generators out there.
DonJon
DonJon is among the most popular collection of randomness generators for GMs for a reason. It hosts everything from random inns to random worlds, towns, or entire adventures. But its free Random Dungeon Generator is one of the cleanest, most straightforward options. If all you care about is generating a quick and easy, bare-bones dungeon map with tons of available tweaks, this is the tool for you. Simply name your map and choose your parameters, like dungeon size, terrain type, and so on, and then generate the map. Once this is done, you can either download it in the image or print format you like, or download in a data format like JSON and import it into your map editor of choice.
Dungeon Scrawl
A popular digital mapmaking website with an old-school art style, Dungeon Scrawl was recently officially added to Roll20, one of the most widely used VTTs available with many features available on its free tier. Making a room is as easy as dragging your mouse to make a box. The Roll20 integration is really cool, allowing you to live-edit your map while your players are exploring it. If you decide to start with a randomly generated map from DonJon, you can import your JSON file, and then edit to your liking, adding furniture, secret passages, sunken treasure, and maybe a gelatinous blob or two.
Watabou’s Procgen Arcana
Like DonJon, Procgen Arcana by Watabou is an online suite of randomness generators, but in this case offers only tools for mapmaking. Also like DonJon, Procgen is completely free. It distinguishes itself by having a more artistic approach to its maps, creating everything from beautiful overworld realms to cozy buildings, villages, and forest glades. Its One Page Dungeon feature is a quick and easy single click, or you can adjust it via parameters in the generator menu. One of its coolest features is that it provides the generated content with a name, background, possible hook, and a few key features scattered around the map.
Dungeon Alchemist
One of the most exciting new dungeon generators on the block is the successfully Kickstarted Dungeon Alchemist, a powerful downloadable app that creates high-quality maps in seconds. Simply choose a size and theme, draw some shapes, and everything else gets filled in automatically. The object library is vast, and rooms can be edited, painted, or re-themed to your heart’s content. Rather than going on explaining, check out their promo from last year. It’s impressive stuff!
Wonderdraft
Wonderdraft is a powerful mapmaking app that focuses on brush-style artistry. Most popular with worldbuilders, it’s a downloadable, one-time purchase that generates logical and realistic landmasses, coastlines, and bodies of water. Rivers, trees, mountains, and roads can be drawn with a few clicks. Aside from its ability to create world, town, and encounter maps that are as much works of art as they are tools for gaming, it has an active community of established creators who regularly help newer users out with support questions. Artists of all levels regularly share their creations as maps, custom modules, and asset packs.
Dungeondraft
Made by the same developer, Dungeondraft is the companion software to Wonderdraft, but with a focus on dungeons instead of worlds. It boasts a community just as big and supportive, with a similarly intuitive interface. With fun features like object scattering, tiling, and a built-in dungeon and cave generator, it’s the first choice for many GMs in the online gaming world today, and produces truly exciting maps your players will love.
Inkarnate
Rather than a desktop app like Dungeondraft or Wonderdraft, Inkarnate is entirely web-based. With a great free option and a subreddit of nearly 100,000 users, it’s currently the most widely used map painter. It’s the one of the OGs, considered an early pioneer of the now-ubiquitous, hand-drawn, brush-painterly aesthetic of digital fantasy maps. It also has perhaps the strongest claim to being a one-stop-shop for world, city, and encounter maps, with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and enormous asset library. These days, it offers a variety of art styles, including watercolor and monochrome. It even recently added a sci-fi option. If you really want to let your artistic flair go wild while building worlds and encounters, this is the choice for you.
DungeonFog
Have you noticed a consistent theme for every tool we’ve discussed so far? They’re all either mostly or entirely oriented toward creating a fantasy setting. But if you’re looking for a mapmaker for all genres and situations, consider DungeonFog, part of the Circle of Worldbuilders collective along with Great Gamemaster, WorldAnvil, and Caeora. Its themes and massive asset library can cover not just fantasy, but also cyberpunk, horror, outer space, you name it. Based on overall utility, this option is probably the most robust. It simply does more than most other web-based dungeon map painters, and even offers its own lightweight VTT directly in your browser. That said, it uses a freemium pay model, meaning you’ll want to pay the $5/month ($50/year) subscription to really unlock its potential.
Lightweight Options
There are many other mapmaking tools out there, each with its own aesthetic, functionality, and appeal. These include Dungeon Painter Studio, MapForge, Tiled, DunGen, Dave's Mapper, GM Friend, HexTML, RPG Map Editor 2, Mipui, RPG Engine, Worldographer, Campaign Cartographer 3, Arcane Mapper, Hobbyte’s Dungeon Builder, Worldspinner, Dungeon Map Doodler, and Illwinter's Floorplan Generator. Talespire, which is still in early access, has a lot of people excited. For sci-fi, there’s the super fun Windows-only Station Architect on Steam, which allows you to build or generate a space station map on a grid. MapTool is an awesome free and open-source downloadable app focusing on indepence from any one gaming system, which means break it out for your homebrew or GURPS campaign.
Honorable Mentions
Unlike Roll20, several VTTs also have built-in mapmakers, meaning they don’t require a module or third-party integration. The most well-known of these are Foundry and Arkenforge, the former being the more popular all-in-one premium option, the latter being a bit better for mapmaking with a truly massive asset library. It’s important to remember that, while something like DungeonFog is a mapmaker with a lightweight built-in VTT, these are the other way around––VTTs with some ability to make maps. There’s Fantasy Grounds, which boasts more official licenses than any other VTT. Even Owlbear Rodeo has a simple mapmaker tool for groups who just want to skip the fluff and get to murder-hoboin’.
The advantage of these is that your maps will already be fully integrated into your play platform, meaning no hassling with importing and exporting, file formats, redrawing your dynamic lighting, and so on. The con is that they will not have the same breadth of options as other, more dedicated mapmaking tools. The Foundry FAQ page probably says it best:
- “At its heart, Foundry VTT is a virtual tabletop, not an image editor or map-maker. While Foundry VTT offers many powerful tools to enhance and supplement battlemaps or landscapes, its primary purpose is not to create battlemap images from scratch.”
If you’re already running games on such a VTT, this might be your preferred option for no other reason than it’s quick, intuitive, and won’t require additional subscriptions (although you may need to buy themes and asset packs). As usual, it’s rarely a question of which option is “better,” but rather which suits a group’s particular needs and budgetary considerations.
Whether it’s a few amorphous blobs scribbled in GIMP or a 3D masterpiece that belongs in the Louvre, maps are an essential part of helping your players enjoy the game. A clear battlemap will help them utilize their characters’ powers as intended, and beautiful artistry will help them feel truly immersed in the adventure. And of course, new mapmaking tools are constantly breaking the mold as online TTRPGs become more accessible and commonplace. Whatever your choice, every map is a story. Now, go tell yours!
Paul is an author and forever DM with a traditionally published sci-fi novel on the way. He’s a fan of all things narrative, especially when it involves dice and a lot of math. Find him on Instagram discussing the general state of the world.
