Fantasy Map Generators: Why Dungeon Scrawl is the Best Place to Start

21st Oct 2025

When it comes to creating your own fantasy maps, there are plenty of map generators out there. A quick search will land you on dozens of tools, and each one promises speed and quality, whether you’re looking to spin up a dungeon, battle map, or world map for your next D&D session.

Dungeon Scrawl was built to solve a very specific problem: our community needed battle maps for their online D&D games, and they needed them fast.

Along the way, we've learned a lot about what makes a map generator actually useful for people who just want to run a game. Here’s why we think Dungeon Scrawl is one of the best fantasy map generators available online right now.

Why is Dungeon Scrawl the Best Tool for Fantasy Map Generation?

Building a 60-Second Battle Map

Here’s the lesson that all veteran DMs learn: your players will derail most carefully planned dungeon crawls within the first ten minutes. What you need is the ability to create creative maps fast, while still having the same creative power and control as a traditional map-making tool.

So we set out to design Dungeon Scrawl with this in mind – and now you can use Dungeon Scrawl to build a perfectly serviceable battle map in about 60 seconds in six steps:

Load Dungeon Scrawl (5 seconds)

Choose a style preset

Block out the basic shape with the rectangle tool (23 seconds)

Add some detail with circles for columns (22 seconds)

Slap down an entrance with the door tool (10 seconds)

Export as PNG (10 seconds)

With those few steps, you’ve got a map! It may not be the most detailed, artistic masterpiece, but it’ll get you through your session tonight while your players inevitably pick a fight in the random room you spent the least amount of time building!

No Sign-Up Required

The best part of Dungeon Scrawl? You don't need to create an account to use the tools! You don’t even need to hand over your email address. You just go to dungeonscrawl.com, and you can start making maps right now.

You can hop on, create unlimited maps, export them as images, save them to your computer as .ds files to work on them again later or edit over time, and generally do everything you need without ever creating an account.

We do offer a Pro tier ($5/month) for people who want a bit more functionality. It includes autosave, cloud storage, PDF export, and commercial use rights for folks who publish adventures or other TTRPG or fantasy supplements. But the core tool is free and always will be.

Dungeon Scrawl Works Well in Your Browser

Dungeon Scrawl V1 was built as a “get-a-map-built-fast” tool, and we broke a lot of things along the way! Dungeon Scrawl V2 is a complete rewrite of the system built for end users. This new version uses your graphics card properly, and everything is faster: drawing, panning, zooming, and loading.

The point is, Dungeon Scrawl runs smoothly in any modern browser. You're not going to be frustrated sitting there waiting for things to render or dealing with lag every time you try to draw a corridor. It just works!

The Learning Curve is a Gentle Slope

Here’s where Dungeon Scrawl really stands out. While some of the big-name map generators out there are stunning and impressive, they often come with a learning curve that many new mapmakers find overwhelming. Plus, many will cost you some money upfront.

Dungeon Scrawl's approach is different. We built it with basic tools that are intuitive from the start:

The rectangle tool draws rooms (it's selected by default)

The regular polygon tool makes circles

The wall tool draws walls

The door tool adds doors

It seems simple, but this matters when you are trying to figure out how to create dungeons and town maps. You can literally start clicking around and figure it out in about 30 seconds.

And once you're comfortable with the basics, you can dive into the layers system, start experimenting with custom colours and styles, try isometric projections, or push the tool to its limits like the talented folks in the #map-showoff channel on our Discord.

Import from Generators, Then Make It Yours

What if you are using other generators and want to move over to Dungeon Scrawl? Just like we allow you to export your maps, we also made it easy to bring other maps in.

You can import from procedural generators like Watabou's One Page Dungeon or Donjon's Random Dungeon Generator, which are great for generating interesting layouts, but they're not great for customization.

Dungeon Scrawl bridges the gap. You can generate a dungeon layout in Watabou, import it into Dungeon Scrawl, then customise it to your heart's content.

What About the Limitations?

We didn’t build Dungeon Scrawl to be the ultimate replacement for dedicated software. The included asset library is growing, but not massive.

But here's what Dungeon Scrawl does do really well: it gets you from "I need a map" to "I have a map" faster than anything else out there.

It's free, it's fast, it works in your browser, and it doesn't demand anything other than a bit of creative bravery!

Ready to Give It a Go? Build Your First Map Now!

If you’re here and thinking, “Hey, I could use this to make a map!”, you’re right!

Hop online and give Dungeon Scrawl a try. Click here and start clicking around and you’ll see how easy it is to build maps of all kinds in a few clicks.

And if you create something you're proud of, share it in the Discord. We'd love to see it, offer more ideas, and keep the fun coming.