Generate a dungeon map

How to use it#

1. Choose Rooms for a built dungeon, or Caves for natural caverns.
2. Pick a size, then how many rooms a Rooms map holds, or how much open ground a cave has.
3. Choose plain or hatched walls, and whether to show the grid, room numbers, and doors.
4. Press New map until you like one, then download it as a PDF, PNG, or SVG.

Rooms or caves#

A Rooms map is a built place, such as a crypt, a keep, or a wizard’s tower: rectangular rooms joined by corridors one square wide, with a door wherever a corridor comes through a wall. Every room can be reached, and a few rooms are joined twice, so the party is not always walking back the way it came.

A Caves map is grown rather than built. It starts as random rock and open ground, and a few rounds of smoothing turn that into caverns with ragged walls, narrow passages, and pillars of rock. Pockets too small to explore are filled in, and caverns that would be cut off are joined by short tunnels, so all of it is reachable.

For caves, Open ground takes the place of the number of rooms. Tight leaves narrow passages and small chambers, Roomy is about half open ground, and Open gives wide caverns with a few pillars of rock. Caves have no rooms, so room numbers and doors are greyed out; mark the places that matter yourself once the map is printed.

Hatched shades the rock along every wall with short diagonal strokes, the look of a hand-drawn map. Plain leaves the rock white, which saves ink and leaves room to write on the map.

Using the room numbers as a key#

Rooms are numbered across the map in rows, top to bottom and left to right, so room 1 is near the top left and the last room is near the bottom right. That makes a number quick to find on the map when a player asks where the stairs were.

Write your key on a separate sheet under the same numbers: what is in each room, who is there, and what it holds. Keep the numbered map for yourself and give players a copy printed with Room numbers turned off, so the map shows them the shape of the place and nothing else.

Printing on a grid#

The PDF fits the whole map on one page with half-inch margins, turned on its side when the map is wider than it is tall. The squares come out the size Printed square says, about a third of an inch for a small map on Letter, which suits a map for the game master but not a table of miniatures.

Most games, Dungeons & Dragons among them, count a square as five feet. Printed as a battle map with one-inch squares for miniatures, even a small map is 30 inches by 22, too large for one sheet. For that, download the PNG and print it with your printer’s poster or tiling option, which splits a large picture across several pages.

Using a map online#

The PNG has 70 pixels to every square, the grid size many virtual tabletops expect when a map is dropped in. Set the scene’s grid to 70 pixels and the squares on the map line up with it.

Turn the grid off for a cleaner picture if the tabletop draws its own, and use the SVG instead if you want to recolour the map or add to it in a drawing program, since its walls, doors, and numbers stay sharp at any size.