Tools to create maps and battle grids for your RPG

If you are a fan of Tolkien, you should know that before creating the narrative present in the books “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” he elaborated the world in which these stories would take place. Part of RPG masters and storytellers have absorbed this habit of previously preparing the scenarios and maps that will be used in their games. Even though I'm not a fan of this way of organizing an RPG table, I tried to present in this text some tools that can help you to develop maps and scenarios for your campaign.

Azgaar

This map generator provides you with a facility to create world maps for Fantasy games featuring tools such as metric calculations of travel between two points, cultural, political (depicting borders between kingdoms/states), biomes (highlighting vegetation and relief of each region) or typographic (indicating only the relief of each location).

On this site, you can generate a map randomly, or you can choose to create and customize your own map from scratch, just use the resources available there.

Azgaar

Dave's Mapper

This feature offers the possibility to generate maps of dungeons, caves, villages, medieval or futuristic cities and spaceships. This tool has an easy way to export saved images to your computer's hard drive.

Dave's Mapper

Inkarnate

The site, even in its free version, offers many options for you to create your map from scratch if you are willing to take the time to do so. On the other hand, the result ends up being visually pleasing and interesting for players.

As a last resort, there is also the possibility for you to access images created by other users of the platform, and if you are interested in using them on your gaming table.

Inkarnate

Random Dungeon Generator

Tool developed by Wizards of the Coast to randomly generate dungeons. This feature, in addition to creating a map, draws up a list of monsters and challenges according to the difficulty level selected by the GM.

Unfortunately, the rules of the 3.5 edition of the game are included on this site, but it is a kind of honorable mention on this list as it may be useful for players of this edition (or for those who have the patience to convert the information to the latest editions).

Dungeon Generator

Worldgrapher

This program allows the Storyteller to develop simple maps, but that works nicely for any hexcrawl-based fantasy campaign, even in its free version.

Worldgrapher

Watabou

Simple and useful tool to create maps of medieval cities that can be used in your campaign. Despite not offering the possibility of creating colored images, the site is very efficient and simple to use and fulfills its purpose very well.

Watabou