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Making DND maps
As someone who DM's a lot of short, casual sessions with rotating members, I burn through a lot of maps. I'd love to hear some of your recommendations for how you guys either find or create maps that suit your situations.
For me: r/battlemaps has some really high quality stuff and gets me 90% of the time. I usually type in a key word or two (e.g. bridge; throne room) and usually I'll find something that gets close to the mark.
I know that some have been using generative AI to delve into this space as well, so if anyone has any experience there, I'd love to hear it!
I picked up Dungeon Alchemist on a Steam sale a while back, and I've been very happy with it. It took about a half day learning curve of youtube tutorials, but between the tutorial and assets/maps available in the workshop, I've been able to turn out some great maps for what we needed them for. Bonus points that it can do dynamic lighting and such for Foundry.
My group uses this too - it's quick and flexible. It has limitations, but great for what it does.
Before I started my current multi-year campaign in the Underdark, I went on Patreon and found about a dozen map creators who listed having Underdark maps, threw five bucks at each of them, and collected them all into a big folder.
They are of varying quality and style, but it has allowed me to make up pretty much every situation that I could want in Foundry.
I will say that nobody had a good map for an ever-changing labyrinth with prebuilt walls that shifted as players moved. Also nobody had a good 3D map for a beholder fight in a long vertical shaft. Maybe I am asking too much to use the tool in ways it is explicitly not designed for, though.
Wow the vertical beholder fight sounds like such an interesting challenge environment I dont often see in d&d. Would you be interested in sharing more on that one?
I didn't come up with it. It was stolen directly from Out of the Abyss. The premise is that the party finds themselves in a beholder's lair, which is a long vertical shaft with a bunch of hallways all coming out of it at random heights with rope bridges connecting them. As they fight, the beholder will use eye rays to break the bridges that the players are on, forcing them to get creative with placement and figure out how to get within range.
The fight is not fun for a melee heavy party.
I imagine not. Plus it would make fall damage a real issue to work around, interesting positioning requirements, all of which is tough for melee users. Gonna have to check out Out of the Abyss to see if there is any other neat things to snag.
I did a fight like this in a Starfinder game. There was a mcguffin in this ancient tomb at the bottom of a deep shaft. They get in there at the same time as mercenaries hired by the big bad guys and a group of space pirates who are also after it.
The shaft starts filling with lava and there's a running three way fight as everyone is trying to survive while also trying to steal the artifact from whomever currently has it.
I built a 3d battle mat out of cardboard boxes covered in graph paper. I'll try to dig up a picture of it
Edit: https://imgur.com/a/4fmcwre
I personally have used Dungeondraft (https://dungeondraft.net/) and supporting random Patreon’s with map packs (and Dungeondraft assets) for a month or two and grabbing from their backlog (usually I support for more than 1 month so I don’t feel like I’m ripping them off, but also I think they know people will do that and factor it in to their tiers).
Dungeondraft can be pretty quick for basic maps, but you can make “prettier” maps with fancier things with more time. I believe there’s also a way to export maps directly into a format that you can import in FoundryVTT with lighting and walls already set up, if that’s something you use, that could save some time too (it may require a plugin, or not work anymore - it’s been a few years since I’ve used it).
The creators of Dungeondraft also have Wonderdraft for more “overworld”/large scale maps, but I haven’t used it.
The UI of Wonderdraft is an acquired taste, but it's a great tool imo
I'm not typically artistically inclined at all, but I'm pretty proud of some of my Wonderdraft maps.
One of my players even printed one out and applied coffee grounds to the paper to give it a proper parchment-style.
For another alternative specifically for quick sketches without a lot of styling, I have used https://www.dungeonscrawl.com/, which is a mostly (for the basics) free web-tool.
Yep, Dungeon Scrawl + Wonderdraft (which you mentioned in another comment) are two thirds of my mapping combo for my game. I make the world and region maps in Wonderdraft and then scrappy battle maps in Dungeon Scrawl. I also use Watabou's Procgen Arcana for cities and towns.