There will never be a straight-up “best” D&D map maker. In this article, we will explore which software is best for which purposes while making D&D maps. There are plenty of ways to use digital maps, you could print them off or use a communal screen for in-person sessions, or use them with virtual tabletops for online sessions. Mapmaking software, due to the sheer number of options, is a much less straightforward solution. Hand-drawn maps can be drawn on anything from a piece of printer paper to whiteboards, but in recent years, wet-erase grid maps have become the crème de la crème solution. These maps, most commonly used for in-person games, can be combined with terrain pieces or miniatures. Hand-drawn maps have been around since the inception of D&D. There are two primary ways to make maps they can be hand-drawn or made using online software.

Typically, they are self-contained for a single encounter, though they can grow to display the entirety of a dungeon or building that players are working their way through.īattlemaps are usually overlaid by a standard 5-foot by 5-foot grid to make player movement and scaling consistent. These maps are usually on a smaller scale than regional maps. This type of exploration is typically called a “hex crawl” and is addressed in depth in the D&D Adventure Tomb of Annihilation. If used for exploration, then these maps can contain a grid. These maps can be anything from a world map, provincial map, or city map. They show the region from a bird’s-eye view. These maps are typically on a larger scale than battlemaps.

There are two main types of maps used commonly in D&D: regional maps and battlemaps.

Whether you play in-person or online and with or without battlemaps, chances are you will be creating a map for something while playing D&D. Some groups may rely on the DM’s descriptions of the locations they find themselves in, while other groups use maps. Because it is a tabletop game, most of the visualization in D&D is left up to the imagination.

Map making programs free