Who doesn’t love a map? They help you get from A to B when your sat nav decides to send you the wrong way. They can show you interesting things in an area you’ve never been before. They hide secrets and they can paint a picture of the world you’re gaming in.
What I love about RPG’s is the creation of back stories and locations of a game. Even if the game is a Theatre of the Mind, I believe there’s great value in sharing the location of a village of orcs, seeing the street plan of an ancient city or the blueprints of an abandoned terraforming colony.
I’m a map geek at heart and love the amount of time and effort the community has put in to making some of these mapping tools for us to use.
So here’s a brief round up of some the best free map generation tools.
Watabou
One of my personal favourites are the tools created by Watabou / Oleg Dolya.
Here you’ll find a plethora of tools to help you map and plan your adventures. From fantasy city generators, to dungeons to villages and almost everything in-between. These tools are generally more suited to your fantasy and historical games, but modern cities still have old cores so they can be adapted to almost any game.
Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator
Another free and browser based tool suited to Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder or any other historical or fantasy game.
Think Google Maps but for fantasy games, the more you zoom in the more detail you see. The maps can be customised with different layers, styles and format (flat, globe or 3D) and you can export your new world to share with your players.
https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
World Anvil
A feature rich set of world building tools. World Anvil takes your games to the next level. With tools that help you create, organize and store your world setting.
With wiki-like articles, interactive maps, historical timelines, an RPG Campaign Manager and a full novel-writing software, they have all the tools you’ll need to run your RPG Campaign.
Dungeon Scrawl
A super simple dungeon drawing tool from the folks at Roll20. When you need to create a map in under a minute this is the tool for you.
It’s a battle map tool designed for D&D encounters, and features a really intuitive UI, with export options and (my favourite) the the ability to change views from flat to isometric to dimetric.
Inkarnate
Probably the most well known of the fantasy map generators. Inkarnate has a powerful intuitive user interface, ready to use maps for those times when you need something quickly and gorgeous high quality artwork created by passionate artists.
It’s such an in-depth tool that you can easily loose yourself for hours. With enough options and assets to create everything from sprawling cities to rolling countryside landscapes.