Field notes
Map Craft & Worldbuilding
Everything we learned building a map engine: river logic, naming, scale, settlement, and how to get a finished map onto your table. Written for Dungeon Masters, authors and worldbuilders.
- Map Craft11 min read
Mountains, Deserts and Biomes: Getting Your Fantasy Map's Climate Right
Your rivers flow the right way now. The next thing readers notice is a rainforest next to a desert with nothing in between. Here is how climate actually decides what grows where, and how to use it.
Read the guide → - Tools9 min read
Can You Use a Fantasy Map Generator Commercially? Licensing, Explained
Selling a novel, running a Patreon, publishing an adventure: each one counts as commercial use, and every map tool answers the question differently. Here is how to read the licenses, what this site allows, and what nobody tells you about owning a generated map.
Read the guide → - Worldbuilding9 min read
How to Make a Fantasy Map for Your Novel (Without Hiring an Artist)
A map at the front of a novel is a promise to the reader. Here is how to decide whether your book needs one, how to build it yourself in an afternoon, and how to get it print-ready for a 6×9 paperback.
Read the guide → - Tools8 min read
AI Fantasy Map Generators vs Procedural
Everyone still says AI map generators produce gibberish text. In 2026 that is mostly no longer true, and repeating it means missing the three problems that genuinely have not been solved.
Read the guide → - Worldbuilding7 min read
How to Name Fantasy Kingdoms, Cities and Seas
Most fantasy maps fall apart at the labels. Here is a working system for naming kingdoms, cities and seas so they sound like they come from the same world, with example sets you can steal.
Read the guide → - Map Craft7 min read
Where to Put Cities on a Fantasy Map (And Why It Matters)
Every real city is an answer to a question about moving goods. Learn the six sites that create settlements, and your map stops looking like dots sprinkled on a continent.
Read the guide → - Tools7 min read
Fantasy Map Generator vs Inkarnate vs Azgaar vs Wonderdraft
Four tools, four different jobs. What Azgaar's, Inkarnate, Wonderdraft and ours are each actually good at, including the parts where we lose.
Read the guide → - Map Craft10 min read
7 River Mistakes That Break Your Fantasy Map (And How to Fix Them)
Splitting rivers, channels that join two oceans, lakes with no way out. Seven river errors that quietly tell your readers the map was drawn rather than discovered, and the fix for each.
Read the guide → - At the Table6 min read
How to Use a Fantasy Map in Roll20 and Foundry VTT
Export settings, upload steps for both platforms, and the grid decision most guides get wrong: an overland map is not a battle map, and treating it like one is why your continent ends up 900 miles wide.
Read the guide → - Map Craft6 min read
Fantasy Map Scale: How Big Should Your World Be?
Scale is not a measurement problem, it is a pacing problem. Work out how long you want a journey to take, then size the map to fit, using the distances people actually covered.
Read the guide →
Skip the theory, make a map
Coastlines, rivers that flow downhill, named kingdoms and cities. One click, about five seconds, free forever.
Generate a Map