Tabletop Talk - Lets talk about dungeon map resources!
Dungeons & Dragons wouldn't be Dungeons & Dragons without some good old dungeons as part of it. If you're a fan of this wonderful hobby, you're probably familiar with the wide variety of ways that whoever is running the game sources their dungeons. If you're using maps, chances are you've seen all kinds of battle maps, provided in all manner of different ways. If you're playing online, you're probably used to full-colour maps in Roll20 that a DM has downloaded for free or bought or even had commissioned. If you play at a table physically, you've probably seen everything from markers on a Chessex Battle-Mat to fully 3d terrain such as provided by Dwarven Forge.
Now, since I'm not flush with storage space and I don't own a 3d Printer - I generally use either printable maps that I can lay down in front of my players or just a Chessex Battle Map when I'm playing at a table. Now, as part of this I've used a - frankly - stupid number of different programs and tools to try and make creating printable dungeons easier. On the whole, most of them are way more trouble than they're worth.
HOWEVER, I recently found a new tool and it's everything I have been looking for! So, toss out whatever bookmarks you have to lesser sites, and let me introduce you to the fucking magical world of Dungeon Scrawl.
This site... oh my god guys... this site! It's in active development and still in beta, so new options are being added all the time - but it's already got every feature you could want. A big feature for me is the ability to take a dungeon you've designed and export it to PDFs that automatically split the map so you can print them and tape them together without any hassle!!!
Further, you can do isometric maps in this! You can generate mazes in one click! You can import assets from folks like 2-MinuteTabletop so you can add slick little barrels, beds, etc to the maps super easy. You can copy and paste parts of your dungeon, mirror it, etc. It's honestly the single best tool I've ever used and it's free! I've paid for programs that didn't have HALF the features and weren't even close to as friendly to use.
I'm not super practiced at this yet, but I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and I'm loving it. Enough that I thought I'd create a post here to give it a shout-out!
So, next time you need to make a dungeon or battlemap, pop to https://probabletrain.itch.io/dungeon-scrawl and take ten minutes to make something cool! If you get used to this tool, I promise you will love it!
Happy gaming my friends!
That's a promising too, I definitely bookmarked that (even though I mostly play online).
One thing: I know that you live and breathe D&D - but there are a lot of other fish in the ocean. I nearly didn't click on your post because that game was mentioned twice in the text Gina showed me ;) I'm happy I did read it, but perhaps keep a wider frame when you're not writing explicitly about D&D. There are so few people on Hive interested in tabletop-rpg, let's be inclusive.
A very good point, and thank you! I sort of default to D&D as it's the most common for new people to the hobby, but I should be more generic! I certainly don't only play D&D and it's a tool that is useful for Monster of the Week / Dead Reign, and any other TTRPG that might require a map.
Thanks for the critique! I'll take that to heart and move to more generic TTRPG terminology!
Just today I read an Italian post where a DM told about a Dungeon World session - thank Deepl, I say ;)
I plan to do someof the RPGaDay prompts this month, let's bring some ttrpg to the blockchain (interestingly, in Germany we use the term "Pen & Paper").
I'm with you! I'd love to see more pen and paper representation on the chain!