8 ms·

Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

235 points by webmaven 4y ago

wincy 4y ago
It’s been fun playing with an online DM that has been stretching and upping his game. When he pulled out Dungeon Alchemist especially we were super impressed. I’ve stopped playing video games for the most part as the impact and sense of wonder just isn’t there for me the same way it is when I play D&D with my online compatriots. We’re even meeting up later this year! It’s been a fantastic experience. On the topic of D&D tabletop becoming more advanced, Stable Diffusion now has models that can be used to take a simple Donjon map and make it more detailed and add a theme and colorize it. Type a theme like “in hell”, use the model, and use Controlnet’s edge detection. Boom, mostly automated D&D maps that look pretty dang good for a DM. A few more steps and you’ll be able to automate most of the process, provided interesting NPCs and everything in a self contained adventure that the DM can then tweak.
- mlesniak 4y ago
  How did you find your online role-playing group? There are a lot of sites (after a quick google search) and I'd love to have some suggestions.
  - jzig 4y ago
    startplaying.games
- ajacksified 4y ago
  Do you have a link to any of these models? I was just wondering if any existed a few days ago.
xbpx 4y ago
Amen, real person role playing will remain superior to video games until AIs are more capable and fantastically deprived than humans. Until then, people bring the surprise, serendipity and wonder that makes a new game unique
- Alan_Dillman 4y ago
  Depraved, even.
vhodges 4y ago
I can attest to the utility of Dungeon Alchemist... very fast. In an hour or so I had made a small inn/tavern my players will start at and a wilderness encounter map they will do after that, before getting into the manor I built the day before (my first map, so it took a bit longer) in a couple of hours. And they are very nice to look at too.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  It does have the awkward missing element of no round-walled rooms, though.
  - vhodges 4y ago
    Yes! I had to compromise with the manor map as it should have had a round room. You can make them I think but it's very awkward. Running http://blog.trilemma.com/2018/09/the-sorcerers-feast.html http://blog.trilemma.com/2018/09/the-sorcerers-feast.html this this weekend.
kelsolaar 4y ago
Foundry VTT has a steep learning curve but it has a good Javascript API and can be extended quite heavily. The community on Discord is large and super friendly: https://discord.gg/foundryvtt https://discord.gg/foundryvtt
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Foundry VTT is excellent, but it's also not a map creator, so it really doesn't fit the article. Same with Roll20.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    The article doesn’t seem to have any consistent idea of what a map maker is, including map generators, map drawing tools, and VTT that mainly let you use maps. And kind of odd not to mention CC3 or any of the rest of the ProFantasy suite when it comes to drawing tools.
    - dpezet 4y ago
      I blame ProFantasy for that. Their software has an insanely steep learning curve and the UI is extremely unintuitive. I have been using their software for 15 years and only have a basic proficiency with it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone when tools like Dungeondraft and Inkarnate can have new users creating beautiful maps on day 1.
  - drak0n1c 4y ago
    Foundry can be a very effective map decorator - as in placing of props, furniture, etc after you import a plain spartan background image. Especially if you use the Moulinette module with its access to massive catalogues and drag-and-drop. https://www.moulinette.cloud/ https://www.moulinette.cloud/
cpeterso 4y ago
I recently discovered graphic artist JP Coovert's YouTube channel where he shares tutorials for drawing D&D dungeon and city maps: https://www.youtube.com/@JPCoovert/videos https://www.youtube.com/@JPCoovert/videos
wardedVibe 4y ago
One that's not on there that's excellent for generating whole worlds: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
david2ndaccount 4y ago
I personally recommend going old school and drawing your dungeon out on graph paper. Additionally, don’t plop the map down in front of your players. Instead describe where they are as they explore the map and have them draw the map themselves based on your descriptions. In my experience this leads to much more engaged players and also opens interesting gameplay.
- sirtaj 4y ago
  I've been using Dungeon Revealer [1] a self-hosted web app. It's a simple halfway point between a fancy VTT and a paper map. It's easy to use and allows you to upload any kind of image, which makes it a rudimentary presentation tool too. 1. https://github.com/dungeon-revealer/dungeon-revealer https://github.com/dungeon-revealer/dungeon-revealer
  - geph2021 4y ago
    Cool, I'll be sure to check that out, thanks for sharing. Seems similar to Owl Bear Rodeo. https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ Very simple, easy to use, and can play online.
hresvelgr 4y ago
I feel that list articles don't meet the standard for a good HN submission. In the interest of discussing tabletop map tools, one that isn't mentioned which is frankly amazing is: TaleSpire[1]. The quality of their asset packs for building maps is fantastic and you can actually play with friends using it. [1] https://talespire.com/ https://talespire.com/
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Does it have automation or is it more of a model viewer? Looks like the devs clocked out after hitting EA.
  - hresvelgr 4y ago
    > Does it have automation or is it more of a model viewer? It has automation as far as it can in terms of being agnostic to other systems outside of D&D5E. It's pretty useful but if you want full automation Foundry VTT might be better suited. > Looks like the devs clocked out after hitting EA. Could not be further from the truth. They have been churning out features and content consistently since EA. Their dev blog is filled to the brim with updates.
- xnorswap 4y ago
  I wish they had a system where the DM could buy up to N seats and a free "player only" client for connecting in. Requiring the players to make that kind of upfront investment can put people off from engaging at all.
  - vhodges 4y ago
    Not a mapmaker but Foundry VTT is a onetime purchase of 50USD (and a pretty flexible license at that) that is free to players. You do have to self host (LAN is easy of course) or pay a hosting partner a monthly fee on top of the license cost. We've done a bit of experimenting with Tailscale sharing and seemed to work okay (but does require a bit of technical skill). Tailscale funnels would probably also work and be easier for players. ngrok would be an option as well or a vps.
voodoocode 4y ago
This person was using Donjon generated maps and passed them to a specialized Stable Diffusion model: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11kpesp/dnd_map_generator_controlnet_donjon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11kpesp/dn...
TaygaHoshi 4y ago
To make importable square-tiled 3D maps for Tabletop Simulator, I use Illwinter's Floorplan Generator to first create 2D maps and convert them to 3D using Blender. This workflow allows me to prepare both indoor and outdoor maps very quickly. If I feel like putting in more work, I can model props like bridges, buildings, platforms etc. separately and link them to the maps in Tabletop Simulator. I have a small tutorial here: https://wiki.tyghsh.net/creating_3d_maps_tabletop_simulator https://wiki.tyghsh.net/creating_3d_maps_tabletop_simulator.
xnorswap 4y ago
I've recently started DMing, and my biggest surprise when I looked into this is just how poor the general tooling was when I looked for it. I found the user experience of Roll 20 horrible. I fumbled my way around the interface, eventually sort-of getting some maps going but the scene "transitions" were me just deleting the previous tiles because I couldn't work out how to set out proper scenes. A lot of the other tools were random "download this .jar" applications which didn't run well at all. I was fully prepared to throw £20 at a good solution for designing a few maps I could then easily put into roll20 to coordinate a session or print out for offline sessions. But while there were a few good open sets of raw tilesets, the actual tools for putting together tilesets into dungeons seemed completely missing. For such an established market I expected to be inundated with mature tooling, but even the official stuff like "d&d beyond" is only just coming together and still mostly lacks the tools for actually running a session.
- stavros 4y ago
  Our group uses TaleSpire and the DMs have mostly been happy with it.
- ipsi 4y ago
  I think a lot of HN readers would find Foundry VTT to be a good choice - one-off fee, self-hostable, very, very extensible. I think it's worth pointing out that VTTs (Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc) don't tend to be good at actual map-making, since the program design and the target users are pretty different, and you're better off with other tools for that. Some of them export into a format that's easily importable into your VTT of choice, complete with walls and such, which helps getting started.
  - sshagent 4y ago
    foundry is glorious. Dungeondraft is an excellent companion for quickly creating dungeons and exporting to foundry.
BerislavLopac 4y ago
I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find: * Cave/Glade Generator * Neighbourhood Generator * Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator * One page dungeon generator * And my favourite: Village Generator
- mhitza 4y ago
  Came here to share the same One page dungeon generator, direct link https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon
  - sklargh 4y ago
    These tools are invaluable. Combined with Azgar’s world making tools and DonJon’s demographics generator (see link) a dm/ref can generate an entire environment with fairly detailed religious, political and economic data in an hour. https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/ https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
    - BerislavLopac 4y ago
      The Fantasy Map Generator already integrates with the City Generator - if you zoom in on the former and click on a city, it will be generated in the latter.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    Just realised that glades in Against the Storm are basically this.
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are that GPT-4 is nearly as competent as a human DM, and much faster and more flexible. Also, unlike GPT-3, it will roll dice for you, and it knows the rules just as well as most players. These maps + GPT-4 could = infinite campaigns. Perhaps it's just a matter of time -- and just a few years, at that -- before generative text and graphic AIs merge, and games like Baldur's Gate can quite literally be made on the fly.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > Also, unlike GPT-3, it will roll dice for you I'd question the fairness of those rolls. But yeah, DMing seems like an excellent fit for these models. But you probably need to track hitpoints and stats separately, GPT-4 can't do math either. Or I guess it not doing math might be a feature, that way it will tell you what reasonably happens with fuzzy logic, might be a more immersive experience.
  - hhjinks 4y ago
    It would be interesting to see the dsitribution of dice rolls when asking GPT-3 and 4 to roll a dice repeatedly.
    - simonh 4y ago
      I hope they didn't train it on transcripts of XKCD. https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    You don't need it to be fair, you need it to be fun. Most video games play with randomness so that the distribution serves the gameplay, sometimes bypassing completely the RNG to balance frustration/satisfaction. GPT can learn do to that: not providing true randomness, but the illusion of it to serve the game.
MEMORYC_RRUPTED 4y ago
Another recommendation for Dungeon Alchemist, simply because it saves me time. I love drawing intricate maps, but I just don't have the time for it any more (though DA definitely allows you to still do that, just not what I use it for). It doesn't help that I'm a bit of a perfectionist and even quickly hand drawing maps is somewhat frustrating to me. DA can spit out nice looking maps quickly enough that I've even used it on the fly if my group went in a completely different direction than I expected them to go.
mwilliamson 4y ago
I GM an online TTRPG, and I wanted to replicate the experience of the players drawing the map themselves as they go along. We use Roll20, but didn't find the tools particularly well suited to updating the map in the moment. So, I had a go at making a little tool that lets you quickly make rough sketches of the map, as well letting you move tokens (for the characters) around. It's not particularly fancy, but it seems to work for us! https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher
cruhr 4y ago
That's a great list. A while ago I wrote my own Dungeon Generator [1] since I thought it would be a nice, small project. Little did I know how complicated it can get :D I thought about a rewrite and making it open source recently. But it's a daunting task... [1] https://mythical.ink/rpg-tools/dungeon-generator https://mythical.ink/rpg-tools/dungeon-generator
bovermyer 4y ago
I'll take a moment to note that if you're interested in this kind of thing, there's a whole community of people who build generators for RPGs. I built a web directory to find them here: https://rpggen.dev/ https://rpggen.dev/
toddrossdiy 4y ago
I've been working on a dungeon map making tool for a while as well. It was originally intended for whipping up a really quick map, but it's expanded a fair bit since then, and I'm currently working on adding tools for world maps as well. Check it out here if you're interested! https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/ https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/
mikepk 4y ago
I also wrote a small free application for drawing (quick) maps, real-time collab, moving tokens around etc. It has a small but happy user base :) GameScape (https://gamescape.app https://gamescape.app) Basically I wanted something to approximate pen, grid paper and physical tokens during the pandemic when I was playing with some old high school friends remotely. Roll20 was just too clunky. I’ve got a new startup now (unrelated) so I haven’t had much time to work on it. If anyone wants to work on TTRPG tools (I’ve considered OSS this, or maybe even paying for dev) let me know!
andreareina 4y ago
> we care about your privacy > link different devices > always active

235 points by webmaven 4y ago

It’s been fun playing with an online DM that has been stretching and upping his game. When he pulled out Dungeon Alchemist especially we were super impressed. I’ve stopped playing video games for the most part as the impact and sense of wonder just isn’t there for me the same way it is when I play D&D with my online compatriots. We’re even meeting up later this year! It’s been a fantastic experience. On the topic of D&D tabletop becoming more advanced, Stable Diffusion now has models that can be used to take a simple Donjon map and make it more detailed and add a theme and colorize it. Type a theme like “in hell”, use the model, and use Controlnet’s edge detection. Boom, mostly automated D&D maps that look pretty dang good for a DM. A few more steps and you’ll be able to automate most of the process, provided interesting NPCs and everything in a self contained adventure that the DM can then tweak.

mlesniak 4y ago
How did you find your online role-playing group? There are a lot of sites (after a quick google search) and I'd love to have some suggestions.
- jzig 4y ago
  startplaying.games
ajacksified 4y ago
Do you have a link to any of these models? I was just wondering if any existed a few days ago.

xbpx 4y ago

Amen, real person role playing will remain superior to video games until AIs are more capable and fantastically deprived than humans. Until then, people bring the surprise, serendipity and wonder that makes a new game unique

Alan_Dillman 4y ago
Depraved, even.

vhodges 4y ago

I can attest to the utility of Dungeon Alchemist... very fast. In an hour or so I had made a small inn/tavern my players will start at and a wilderness encounter map they will do after that, before getting into the manor I built the day before (my first map, so it took a bit longer) in a couple of hours. And they are very nice to look at too.

crooked-v 4y ago
It does have the awkward missing element of no round-walled rooms, though.
- vhodges 4y ago
  Yes! I had to compromise with the manor map as it should have had a round room. You can make them I think but it's very awkward. Running http://blog.trilemma.com/2018/09/the-sorcerers-feast.html http://blog.trilemma.com/2018/09/the-sorcerers-feast.html this this weekend.

kelsolaar 4y ago

Foundry VTT has a steep learning curve but it has a good Javascript API and can be extended quite heavily. The community on Discord is large and super friendly: https://discord.gg/foundryvtt https://discord.gg/foundryvtt

crooked-v 4y ago
Foundry VTT is excellent, but it's also not a map creator, so it really doesn't fit the article. Same with Roll20.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  The article doesn’t seem to have any consistent idea of what a map maker is, including map generators, map drawing tools, and VTT that mainly let you use maps. And kind of odd not to mention CC3 or any of the rest of the ProFantasy suite when it comes to drawing tools.
  - dpezet 4y ago
    I blame ProFantasy for that. Their software has an insanely steep learning curve and the UI is extremely unintuitive. I have been using their software for 15 years and only have a basic proficiency with it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone when tools like Dungeondraft and Inkarnate can have new users creating beautiful maps on day 1.
- drak0n1c 4y ago
  Foundry can be a very effective map decorator - as in placing of props, furniture, etc after you import a plain spartan background image. Especially if you use the Moulinette module with its access to massive catalogues and drag-and-drop. https://www.moulinette.cloud/ https://www.moulinette.cloud/

cpeterso 4y ago

I recently discovered graphic artist JP Coovert's YouTube channel where he shares tutorials for drawing D&D dungeon and city maps: https://www.youtube.com/@JPCoovert/videos https://www.youtube.com/@JPCoovert/videos

wardedVibe 4y ago

One that's not on there that's excellent for generating whole worlds: Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator: https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

david2ndaccount 4y ago

I personally recommend going old school and drawing your dungeon out on graph paper. Additionally, don’t plop the map down in front of your players. Instead describe where they are as they explore the map and have them draw the map themselves based on your descriptions. In my experience this leads to much more engaged players and also opens interesting gameplay.

sirtaj 4y ago
I've been using Dungeon Revealer [1] a self-hosted web app. It's a simple halfway point between a fancy VTT and a paper map. It's easy to use and allows you to upload any kind of image, which makes it a rudimentary presentation tool too. 1. https://github.com/dungeon-revealer/dungeon-revealer https://github.com/dungeon-revealer/dungeon-revealer
- geph2021 4y ago
  Cool, I'll be sure to check that out, thanks for sharing. Seems similar to Owl Bear Rodeo. https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ Very simple, easy to use, and can play online.

hresvelgr 4y ago

I feel that list articles don't meet the standard for a good HN submission. In the interest of discussing tabletop map tools, one that isn't mentioned which is frankly amazing is: TaleSpire[1]. The quality of their asset packs for building maps is fantastic and you can actually play with friends using it. [1] https://talespire.com/ https://talespire.com/

intelVISA 4y ago
Does it have automation or is it more of a model viewer? Looks like the devs clocked out after hitting EA.
- hresvelgr 4y ago
  > Does it have automation or is it more of a model viewer? It has automation as far as it can in terms of being agnostic to other systems outside of D&D5E. It's pretty useful but if you want full automation Foundry VTT might be better suited. > Looks like the devs clocked out after hitting EA. Could not be further from the truth. They have been churning out features and content consistently since EA. Their dev blog is filled to the brim with updates.
xnorswap 4y ago
I wish they had a system where the DM could buy up to N seats and a free "player only" client for connecting in. Requiring the players to make that kind of upfront investment can put people off from engaging at all.
- vhodges 4y ago
  Not a mapmaker but Foundry VTT is a onetime purchase of 50USD (and a pretty flexible license at that) that is free to players. You do have to self host (LAN is easy of course) or pay a hosting partner a monthly fee on top of the license cost. We've done a bit of experimenting with Tailscale sharing and seemed to work okay (but does require a bit of technical skill). Tailscale funnels would probably also work and be easier for players. ngrok would be an option as well or a vps.

voodoocode 4y ago

This person was using Donjon generated maps and passed them to a specialized Stable Diffusion model: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11kpesp/dnd_map_generator_controlnet_donjon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11kpesp/dn...

TaygaHoshi 4y ago

To make importable square-tiled 3D maps for Tabletop Simulator, I use Illwinter's Floorplan Generator to first create 2D maps and convert them to 3D using Blender. This workflow allows me to prepare both indoor and outdoor maps very quickly. If I feel like putting in more work, I can model props like bridges, buildings, platforms etc. separately and link them to the maps in Tabletop Simulator. I have a small tutorial here: https://wiki.tyghsh.net/creating_3d_maps_tabletop_simulator https://wiki.tyghsh.net/creating_3d_maps_tabletop_simulator.

xnorswap 4y ago

I've recently started DMing, and my biggest surprise when I looked into this is just how poor the general tooling was when I looked for it. I found the user experience of Roll 20 horrible. I fumbled my way around the interface, eventually sort-of getting some maps going but the scene "transitions" were me just deleting the previous tiles because I couldn't work out how to set out proper scenes. A lot of the other tools were random "download this .jar" applications which didn't run well at all. I was fully prepared to throw £20 at a good solution for designing a few maps I could then easily put into roll20 to coordinate a session or print out for offline sessions. But while there were a few good open sets of raw tilesets, the actual tools for putting together tilesets into dungeons seemed completely missing. For such an established market I expected to be inundated with mature tooling, but even the official stuff like "d&d beyond" is only just coming together and still mostly lacks the tools for actually running a session.

stavros 4y ago
Our group uses TaleSpire and the DMs have mostly been happy with it.
ipsi 4y ago
I think a lot of HN readers would find Foundry VTT to be a good choice - one-off fee, self-hostable, very, very extensible. I think it's worth pointing out that VTTs (Foundry, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, etc) don't tend to be good at actual map-making, since the program design and the target users are pretty different, and you're better off with other tools for that. Some of them export into a format that's easily importable into your VTT of choice, complete with walls and such, which helps getting started.
- sshagent 4y ago
  foundry is glorious. Dungeondraft is an excellent companion for quickly creating dungeons and exporting to foundry.

BerislavLopac 4y ago

I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find: * Cave/Glade Generator * Neighbourhood Generator * Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator * One page dungeon generator * And my favourite: Village Generator

mhitza 4y ago
Came here to share the same One page dungeon generator, direct link https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon https://watabou.itch.io/one-page-dungeon
- sklargh 4y ago
  These tools are invaluable. Combined with Azgar’s world making tools and DonJon’s demographics generator (see link) a dm/ref can generate an entire environment with fairly detailed religious, political and economic data in an hour. https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/ https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/
  - BerislavLopac 4y ago
    The Fantasy Map Generator already integrates with the City Generator - if you zoom in on the former and click on a city, it will be generated in the latter.
- illiarian 4y ago
  Just realised that glades in Against the Storm are basically this.

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

Okay, this is probably the right place to say this: You can't play D&D with GPT-3/3.5, but you absolutely can with GPT-4. GPT-4 is a solid DM. GPT-3 couldn't remember what it said 30 minutes ago, and was basically incapable of planning, so unless you want a simple dungeon rougelike-esque adventure, it'll lose track of things and start hallucinating. It will also sometimes forget the rules. My initial impressions are that GPT-4 is nearly as competent as a human DM, and much faster and more flexible. Also, unlike GPT-3, it will roll dice for you, and it knows the rules just as well as most players. These maps + GPT-4 could = infinite campaigns. Perhaps it's just a matter of time -- and just a few years, at that -- before generative text and graphic AIs merge, and games like Baldur's Gate can quite literally be made on the fly.

Jensson 4y ago
> Also, unlike GPT-3, it will roll dice for you I'd question the fairness of those rolls. But yeah, DMing seems like an excellent fit for these models. But you probably need to track hitpoints and stats separately, GPT-4 can't do math either. Or I guess it not doing math might be a feature, that way it will tell you what reasonably happens with fuzzy logic, might be a more immersive experience.
- hhjinks 4y ago
  It would be interesting to see the dsitribution of dice rolls when asking GPT-3 and 4 to roll a dice repeatedly.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I hope they didn't train it on transcripts of XKCD. https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  You don't need it to be fair, you need it to be fun. Most video games play with randomness so that the distribution serves the gameplay, sometimes bypassing completely the RNG to balance frustration/satisfaction. GPT can learn do to that: not providing true randomness, but the illusion of it to serve the game.

MEMORYC_RRUPTED 4y ago

Another recommendation for Dungeon Alchemist, simply because it saves me time. I love drawing intricate maps, but I just don't have the time for it any more (though DA definitely allows you to still do that, just not what I use it for). It doesn't help that I'm a bit of a perfectionist and even quickly hand drawing maps is somewhat frustrating to me. DA can spit out nice looking maps quickly enough that I've even used it on the fly if my group went in a completely different direction than I expected them to go.

mwilliamson 4y ago

I GM an online TTRPG, and I wanted to replicate the experience of the players drawing the map themselves as they go along. We use Roll20, but didn't find the tools particularly well suited to updating the map in the moment. So, I had a go at making a little tool that lets you quickly make rough sketches of the map, as well letting you move tokens (for the characters) around. It's not particularly fancy, but it seems to work for us! https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher https://github.com/mwilliamson/ttrpg-map-sketcher

cruhr 4y ago

That's a great list. A while ago I wrote my own Dungeon Generator [1] since I thought it would be a nice, small project. Little did I know how complicated it can get :D I thought about a rewrite and making it open source recently. But it's a daunting task... [1] https://mythical.ink/rpg-tools/dungeon-generator https://mythical.ink/rpg-tools/dungeon-generator

bovermyer 4y ago

I'll take a moment to note that if you're interested in this kind of thing, there's a whole community of people who build generators for RPGs. I built a web directory to find them here: https://rpggen.dev/ https://rpggen.dev/

toddrossdiy 4y ago

I've been working on a dungeon map making tool for a while as well. It was originally intended for whipping up a really quick map, but it's expanded a fair bit since then, and I'm currently working on adding tools for world maps as well. Check it out here if you're interested! https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/ https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/

mikepk 4y ago

I also wrote a small free application for drawing (quick) maps, real-time collab, moving tokens around etc. It has a small but happy user base :) GameScape (https://gamescape.app https://gamescape.app) Basically I wanted something to approximate pen, grid paper and physical tokens during the pandemic when I was playing with some old high school friends remotely. Roll20 was just too clunky. I’ve got a new startup now (unrelated) so I haven’t had much time to work on it. If anyone wants to work on TTRPG tools (I’ve considered OSS this, or maybe even paying for dev) let me know!

andreareina 4y ago

> we care about your privacy > link different devices > always active