Bringing your environments to life with presets, textures, custom artwork, and more.
When it comes to map-making, there’s a subtle art between designing a dungeon that plays well and an environment that feels real. Put too much emphasis on the gameplay elements, and your dungeons won’t feel any different than a set of connected rooms. Put too much focus on decoration and design, and your dungeons will feel more like fragile dioramas threatening to crumble under player scrutiny/inspection.
Here, the strength of Dungeon Scrawl’s old-school pen and paper-inspired design tools outshines others. Providing everything you need to quickly define and convey the setting and environment to your players, while keeping the focus on the traditional pillars of dungeon design. In the old school days, adventures that took players into haunted forests or ancient tombs could take the players through every corner of the realm, provided the GM had enough paper and a good pencil sharpener. Dungeon Scrawl mimics that simplicity, with lightweight map-making tools designed to bring your ideas to life in as few steps as possible. Plus, Dungeon Scrawl Pro Subscribers unlock an Unlimited Cloud Library and Autosave, meaning, unlike the old days, you’ll never run out of space in your notebook.
Somewhere in between the black and white simplicity of a dungeon penned on paper and the decadent and intricately crafted details of modern software, Dungeon Scrawl offers flexible tools that will engage players with fun dungeon layouts, complemented by vivid imagery and art. More than just a dungeon designer, Dungeon Scrawl can be a canvas for fully realized environments that hold great secrets within. But how do you expand your design process from building dungeons to building environments?
To answer that question, there’s no better place to start than by establishing the fundamentals of environmental design.
Environment Design Fundamentals
Background and Floor Textures
For Pro Subscribers, the Textures are a fundamental part of designing different environments, and one of the first options you should experiment with to find the tone for your setting. They offer more variety than meets the eye.
When using any geometric shape tools, Pro Subscribers can use Floor Textures, which are automatically applied within your shapes, allowing you to add detail that would otherwise require hand-drawing. Choose from options like Dirt, Stone, Marble, and Wood in the dropdown, each available in color or black and white. You can adjust the scale and rotation of each texture, and, to get a little more variety in your background, play with the color settings to create different tones and vibes.
Similarly, Background Textures define the environment of your map at a glance, applying surface materials such as Grass, Water, or Snow across the entire background layer of your map. Grass A with a white or gray color undertone will give the environment a lifeless feel, or a purple or blue undertone will give the environment an alien feel.
Using grass as an example, consider the type of background texture and how it would be affected by its environment's temperature and weather conditions. For instance, grass in a sunlit landscape might have yellowish undertones, potentially resembling wheat fields, while grass in colder regions might be white, to reflect frost or snowfall. Once you’ve landed on your look, make sure to lock the background layer, so it won’t be affected by future changes.
Treat Layers Like a Timeline
Building environments is all about understanding the conditions of a habitat and how they lead to the interplay of various natural phenomena. When designing an environment, think more like a worldbuilder than a level designer. That means seeing the background layer as more than just the defined “playable area”. Instead, picture your environment, whether arctic tundra, desert, swampland, or forest, and think about what goes under the surface. When walking through grass, you’ll find that in truth, you’re walking upon soil. When walking over the bogs of a swamp, in reality, you’re really walking through water.
The key to building environments is to use your layers as a timeline of the environment, showing how various natural events have impacted the region over time. If an area is sandswept, don’t start with a sand colored base layer. Instead, set the background to reflect the environment's original material, say, stone or grass, and then start drawing in sand on the layer above, or even changing the color of the background texture to reflect sand.
How to Simulate Organic Environments
Wall Tricks, Snapping & Roughness
Here’s a game-changing perspective shift that will truly level up your outdoor environments and set them apart from the rest. Instead of designing an arctic cavern following the conventions of man-made construction, creating a visual that tells a story of a changing climate and evolving landscape is 10x more immersive than an oddly four-walled room in the middle of the icy tundra.
My goal is to create an organic environment that makes the players feel as if they’ve stumbled upon something that predates the adventure or even the adventurers themselves. Environments, like forests, swamps, and even cities, are more often than not, strongholds of history, having existed through hundreds, if not thousands of years, long before appearing in your players' path. To reflect that, our environment should provide some indicators of age, wear and tear, and a naturally evolving layout.
In almost any environment, from tavern lodgings to ancient crypts, the walls hold secrets untold. Picture the walls of an old cabin in the woods. Time has taken its toll on the cabin, aging the wood and perhaps even splintering in some places, but the logger who built it anticipated such weather and buttressed the home with thick logs to withstand the elements. In a vibrant forest environment, the dwellings of both man and beast are likely to be tended to and intentionally designed to withstand most conditions.
To reflect these hearty yet slightly aged cabins, I could use a number of tools to draw up the layout, but I’m going to use the Rectangle Tool to give the walls a more symmetrical and angular look. One by one, I’ll draw up four walls, connecting them at the ends to create a small room, and then, to show some wear and tear, I’ll employ a little trick to create the illusion of a cracked wall.
The Cracked Wall Fill Trick: Using the “Interior Wall Fill” option, create a wall with two sides, either with the Rectangle Tool or the Path Tool, depending on your desired shape. With the layer selected, scroll down the right-side panel to find the “Hatching” settings and set the size to 7 or lower. In my experience, less is more for this trick, so even setting the effect to 2 will sell the illusion. Now, your walls should have small lines radiating inward, resembling cracks and fault lines.
Structured vs Organic Layouts
One thing to keep in mind when building structures in outdoor environments is that hard angles are, for the most part, manmade inventions. When drawing caverns, rivers, or mountains, uniformity and symmetry are generally your enemy. Thankfully, all your tools come with Roughness settings that let you breathe life into even the most rigid shapes. You can adjust the roughness of your design while drawing simply by clicking and dragging after you’ve set your shape, or you can adjust roughness after the fact by selecting layers or individual objects and then adjusting the roughness slider on the left-hand side.
Roughness isn’t the only way to create an organic feeling shape. Snap, which appears in the left-hand panel whenever a tool is selected, is often overlooked. When designing cities, castles, and taverns, the perfect alignment of the snap tool can be satisfying, but turning your snap setting off opens the door to a world of completely inimitable shapes. Using the Polygon Tool with snap turned off allows you to draw complex shapes that can be as rigid or as smooth as you desire. An easy pick for natural features like lakes or ponds.
How to Make a Believable Cave Structure
Want to create a “room” that feels truly organic, with a natural shape that looks as if it were carefully eroded over time? The Polygon Tool is your greatest ally. First, we’ll map out the floor of the room. Start by creating a new Dungeon Preset, or for Pro subscribers, a World Building Preset. Then, using the Polygon Tool, draw a many-sided, non-symmetrical shape on the floor. While I’m here, since I’m building an arctic cavern, I’ll change the color to a light blue to create an ice-like effect. Next, using the Path Tool, trace the outline of the shape you drew on the floor layer to add walls that follow the cavern's shape. To really sell the effect, use the Polygon Tool set to erase, chipping away at the mouth of the cave to create a realistic entrance for players to discover.
Worldbuilding Presets
Perhaps the easiest way to start designing environments is with Dungeon Scrawl’s World Building Presets, available to Pro-tier subscribers. World Building Presets let you draw pre-designed textures that add key features such as foliage, water, lava, and paved roads. Plus, with a Pro subscription, World Building Presets are fully customizable, so you can adjust color and shape to match your environment.
How to Make an Ice Preset
In the case of my arctic cavern, I can invert the colors of the “Lava” worldbuilding preset to design a frozen still lake. To do that, I’ll navigate to the World Building Presets in the left-hand panel, find the “Lava” preset, and I’ll select “Add New Layer”. Next, I’ll head to the right-hand panel and change all the colors to various shades of blue to create the effect of cracked ice. Last, I’ll grab the Circle Tool and draw a small circle on the newly created layer, then I’ll add some roughness to the shape to reflect a naturally formed lake. Voila! A frozen lake.
With a Pro subscription, if I want to use this adjusted Lava preset to add more lakes and water bodies in the same custom color I’ve set, I can save this new layer as a Custom Preset. Now, with one click, I can continue drawing without having to readjust the color each time I create a new frozen body of water.
Decorating Your Environment
Dungeon Scrawl offers an incredibly dynamic Custom Image feature, allowing users to decorate their maps with anything from the included token art from DriveThruRPG, Angry Golem, and others, to their own custom art. More than just preloaded assets, custom image uploading requires no subscription, meaning users can upload and use their own token art for 100% free. Every setting is unique, and the icons and images you use to sell the effect will go a long way in your players' eyes, which is why making sure your decorating your map with props and items that bring the scene to life is tantamount. If you’re looking for some quality icon packs, the Roll20 Marketplace offers countless downloadable art packs perfect for putting the finishing touches on any map.
Environments at Your Fingertips
Strong environments and settings don’t require complex tools. Prioritizing efficiency and clarity when designing your dungeons will allow you more time to design to the details that surround the dungeon itself, and when it comes to putting pen to paper, no platform gets the job done better than Dungeon Scrawl. If you’re looking to unlock the full capability of Dungeon Scrawl try out Dungeon Scrawl Pro, with everything you need to illustrate your environments, from Lighting, and Custom Presets, to added layers & textures, and more!
Aedan Hunter is a TTRPG writer and content creator with a background in marketing and copywriting. Drawing on his experience in stand-up and improv comedy, Aedan approaches tabletop games as a social medium, creating content that strengthens table dynamics while connecting the hobby to broader cultural audiences.