Can You Use a Fantasy Map Generator Commercially? Licensing, Explained

You made a map. It looks good. Now you want to put it in the front of your book, or on the cover of the adventure you are selling on DriveThruRPG, or on a Patreon tier. And somewhere in the back of your mind a small voice asks: am I actually allowed to?

Usually yes. Sometimes only if you paid. Occasionally only with a credit line. The answer depends entirely on which tool made the map, so this post walks through what “commercial use” means, what the popular generators allow as of August 2026, how student and classroom use fits in, and the part most guides skip, which is whether you own a procedurally generated map at all.

One thing up front: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. It is a careful reading of public license pages, with links so you can check the wording yourself. If real money is riding on it, spend an hour with an actual IP attorney.

What counts as commercial use

The test is simple. If the map helps you make money, directly or indirectly, it is commercial use. That is broader than most people assume. Selling the map itself is the obvious case, but so is nearly everything else you might want to do with it.

Self-published novels count: a map in the front matter of a KDP paperback is commercial use, even if the book earns forty dollars a year. So do adventures and supplements on DriveThruRPG, itch.io or DM’s Guild, paid or pay-what-you-want, because a payment link exists. So does a map behind a Patreon paywall or given as a paid-tier reward, and a map on screen in an actual-play that runs ads or takes sponsorships. Board games, posters, puzzles and other merch are commercial. Client work is commercial too: if someone paid you to make the map, the license question lands on you, even when their project is a hobby.

What is usually not commercial. Your home game. A free blog post with no ads. A school assignment. A map you share on Reddit for feedback. These fall under “personal use”, which every tool in this post allows.

What this site allows

Maps made with the fantasy map generator here are yours to use, and the terms page says so in plain language. You get a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, modify, publish and sell the maps you create, for personal and commercial purposes. That covers campaigns, novels, video games, streams, videos and print.

No attribution required. A credit is nice and we will not pretend otherwise, but nothing in the license needs one. Your book’s copyright page does not have to mention us.

No watermark, no export tier. The 2x PNG and the SVG are the same files whether you are printing a bookmark or a poster. There is no paid plan that unlocks a cleaner version.

One honest caveat. The generator works from numbered seeds, and the same seed with the same settings produces the same map for anyone. So another user could, in theory, generate the coastline you used. The terms are explicit that you cannot claim exclusive ownership of the underlying algorithm or design system. In practice this matters less than it sounds, and the section on ownership below explains why editing the map is the fix.

How the other tools compare

Every map tool writes its own rules, and the rules move. What follows was checked against each tool’s own license or FAQ page in August 2026. Re-check before you publish, because a plan rename or a pricing change can shift what you are allowed to do.

Tool	Commercial use	Condition	Attribution
Fantasy Map Generators (this site)	Yes	None	Not required
Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator	Yes	None (MIT-licensed software)	Not required
Wonderdraft	Yes	Map must be your original creation; third-party assets carry their own terms	Not required
Inkarnate	Paid tier only	Studio subscription active when you export	Not required
Campaign Cartographer 3+	Yes	Cannot redistribute the artwork itself or products that are mostly their symbols	Not required
Dungeon Scrawl	Paid tier only	Pro subscription active when the map is made	Required, plus per-asset credits

Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator. The software is released under the MIT license, which is about as permissive as open source gets. Maps, screenshots and exports are yours to sell. If you are comparing it with this site on features rather than licensing, the fantasy map generator comparison covers that.

Wonderdraft. A one-time purchase, and the official FAQ answers the commercial question with a plain yes, as long as the map is your original creation, with no fees or royalties. The catch is assets. Wonderdraft’s community sells brush and symbol packs, and many of those come in a personal-use version and a separately priced commercial version. The map is yours; the third-party mountains you painted onto it may not be.

Inkarnate. The Inkarnate FAQ puts commercial rights in the Studio tier, not the free plan. If you export a map while a Studio subscription is active, that map stays licensed for commercial use even if you cancel later. Maps made on the free plan are personal use only, and you cannot retroactively license them by upgrading afterwards, so subscribe first, then export.

Campaign Cartographer 3+. ProFantasy’s license page says you may publish your maps for commercial gain and freely distribute exported flat files such as PNG. What you cannot do is hand out their artwork as artwork. Their own analogy is a font: you can print a document in Times New Roman, but you cannot give the font file away. Products that are predominantly their symbols at floorplan resolution (dungeon tile packs, say) need written permission.

Dungeon Scrawl. Now owned by Roll20, and the commercial use policy requires a Pro subscription at the time the map is made. It also requires a credit line naming Dungeon Scrawl and the CC BY 4.0 license in the credits of the published work, and separate attribution for any contributed assets you used from the Images panel. The exact wording is on that page; copy it rather than paraphrasing it.

Read the pattern. Tools that ship hand-drawn art assets (Inkarnate, Campaign Cartographer, Dungeon Scrawl) put conditions on commercial use, because an artist drew those mountains and expects to be paid when they appear in a product. Tools that generate geometry procedurally (this site, Azgaar) have nothing of that kind to protect, so they let you do what you like. Wonderdraft sits between: the program itself is permissive, but the asset ecosystem around it is not.

Students and classrooms

Every tool above allows personal use, and a school project is personal use. A student making a map for a creative writing assignment, a geography lesson or a history project is fine on any of them, including the free tiers.

Where it gets complicated. A teacher who bundles maps into a resource they sell on Teachers Pay Teachers has crossed into commercial territory. So has a school that prints student maps into a yearbook it charges for, though nobody is realistically going to be chased over that. Apply the money test from the top of this post and you will get the right answer.

Attribution in coursework. Even when a license does not require credit, most schools do. Citing the tool you used is good academic practice, and it is a two-second habit that protects the student.

Trademarks are a different problem

A license covers the map image. It does not cover the words you put on your product.

Do not put D&D in your title. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast. You can make a map for your D&D campaign, sell an adventure that is compatible with fifth edition, and say so in the description. You cannot call the product “D&D Forest Maps” or use the ampersand logo. Look at how third-party publishers phrase it: “5e compatible” and “for the world’s most popular roleplaying game” exist precisely because of this.

The same goes for other settings. Faerûn, Golarion, Middle-earth and the Forgotten Realms are all owned by someone. A map of your own invented continent is yours. A map labelled with someone else’s place names is a derivative work, and a generator license cannot give you rights the generator never had.

The map versus the names you add

Here is the distinction that actually matters for ownership, and it is the one most guides skip.

A procedural generator creates geometry. Coastlines, rivers, mountain placement, forest patches. On this site it also invents names and places labels. All of that comes out of an algorithm running on a seed number.

Machine-generated output has weak or no copyright in the US. The US Copyright Office’s January 2025 report on copyrightability restated that human authorship is the foundation of copyright, that purely machine-generated material is not protectable, and that a prompt or a button press on its own does not make you the author. The report was written about generative AI, but the reasoning applies to any output where a machine, rather than a person, made the expressive choices. A raw, unedited map straight out of any generator sits in that category.

The UK is in flux. Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has long given computer-generated works a nominal author (the person who made the arrangements for the work’s creation), which is friendlier to generated maps than US law. The UK government has been consulting on whether to repeal that section, so do not build a business on it.

What this means in practice. Nobody is going to sue you for using an unedited generated map in your book. The risk runs the other way: if a competitor lifts your map, you may have very little to enforce. The fix is the same thing that makes the map better anyway. Rename the kingdoms. Move the cities to where your plot needs them. Add the ruined tower where the second act happens. Every human choice you layer on is a creative contribution the Copyright Office’s guidance recognises, and the more of them there are, the more of the finished map is actually yours. The post on making a map for a novel walks through that editing process, and it applies equally to a campaign setting.

Keep the seed and your edit history. If you ever need to show that the finished map is your work, the ability to say “this is the raw output, and these are the forty things I changed” is the most persuasive evidence you can have. On this site the seed is printed under the map and the share link records your settings, so screenshot both before you start editing.

Before you publish: a checklist

1. Which tool made the map, and which plan were you on when you exported it? If the tool has a paid commercial tier, was it active at that moment?
2. Does the license require a credit line? If so, copy the exact wording from the license page into your credits or copyright page.
3. Did you use any third-party assets, brushes or symbol packs? Each one has its own license, separate from the tool’s.
4. Are any trademarked names on the map or in your product title? Remove them or rephrase to “compatible with”.
5. Have you changed enough that the map is recognisably yours? If not, spend twenty minutes editing. It improves both the map and your ownership of it.
6. Have you saved the seed, the share link and a copy of the raw export, in case anyone ever asks?

If you can tick all six, publish. And if the tool was this one, you can skip most of the list: no paid tier, no credit line, no asset packs. Just make it yours and put it in the book.