A map for tonight's session, not next month's
Every Dungeon Master knows the feeling: it is 6 PM, the session starts at 7, and your players are about to sail off the edge of the map you prepared. This generator exists for exactly that moment. One click gives you a complete continent: coastlines, mountain ranges, rivers that flow to the sea, forests, a named realm and a scatter of port and river cities, drawn in a parchment style that looks like it came out of a published campaign setting.
This page opens in Continent mode on purpose. A single landmass with coast on every side is the scale a campaign actually runs at: a few weeks of overland travel from end to end, room for rival realms, and no second continent your players will never reach. The world map generator is the right tool when you want the whole planet; this one is for the part of it your party will walk across.
What the map gives you to play with
A random map is only useful if its geography suggests play. The engine places features with a little logic so the map reads like a place with history rather than a coloured blob.
- A named realm to start from. Each major landmass gets a kingdom name (a continent with big offshore islands can get up to three). The engine does not draw political borders, and that is deliberate: split the realm along its rivers and ranges yourself, and the line you choose is your first border dispute.
- Cities where trade would put them. Settlements sit on harbours and river mouths, so the biggest port is obviously the trade hub and the inland river city is obviously where the grain comes from.
- Rivers you can travel. Water runs from the ranges to the sea without forking or climbing, which means a river is a road, a barge route and a natural frontier all at once.
- Mountains as walls. Ranges divide the map into regions. Whatever lives on the far side of the biggest range is the thing your players have only heard rumours about.
- Forests as unknowns. Dense interior woodland is where the missing caravan went, where the druid circle meets, and where you can drop a dungeon without having to justify it.
Two maps from one seed: the DM copy and the player copy
The single most useful trick on this page is the Labels toggle in the Advanced panel. Untick it and every kingdom, sea and city name disappears while the land, the city dots, the compass and the title stay. Export that as the player map. Tick it again, export a second time, and you have the DM copy with every name in place. Both come from the same seed, so they line up pixel for pixel in your VTT.
Hand the unlabelled version out at session zero and let your players fill in names as they learn them. When they reach a city, click its label on your copy, rename it to whatever the tavern keeper called it, and the next handout reflects what they know. The naming guide helps when the generator's names do not fit your setting's language.
Getting the scale right for travel
Decide how wide the continent is before your players ask. A useful default for a campaign region is about 1,000 miles across, which puts a fortnight of travel between the two biggest cities and makes a single kingdom roughly the size of France. At the 5e normal travel pace of 24 miles a day, that turns the map into a travel table: count the distance, divide, and you know how many random encounters to prepare.
The map's scale bar is drawn to match whatever width you decide, and thescale post walks through the arithmetic for hex overlays. If you want hexes on the map itself, export the PNG and let Foundry or Roll20 draw the grid; a 6-mile hex on the Large export is a comfortable overland scale.
Built for how DMs actually prep
- Seeds are your campaign log. Note one seed per region in your notes. Generate a dozen continents on Sunday and reveal them as the party explores; the same seed always rebuilds the same world.
- 2× PNG for the table. Crisp on Roll20, Foundry VTT, Owlbear Rodeo and a TV laid flat on the table. Our VTT guide covers page sizes and upload limits.
- SVG for the print shop. The vector file scales to poster size for the game-room wall and opens in Inkscape if you want to redraw a coastline yourself.
- Marks for what happened. Add a castle, tower, ruin or town wherever the party did something memorable, so the map grows with the campaign instead of staying a static handout.
- System agnostic. Nothing here is tied to 5e. It works for Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, Dragonbane and whatever you run next year.
From map to campaign in three steps
Pick the kingdom whose name sparks something. Generate until one does. That realm is where the party starts, and its neighbour is the one it has a treaty with that nobody trusts.
Choose two port cities, one friendly and one rival. Trace the river or the coast road between them. That route is a trade artery, a border, a smuggling problem and the spine of your first story arc, all without writing a paragraph of lore.
Put one thing in the forest and one thing in the mountains. A dungeon in the woods for levels 1 to 4, a stronghold in the range for later. Now the map has a direction of travel and your players will find it themselves. Our post on where cities belongexplains why the settlements are already where they are.
Where this tool stops: it does not draw battle maps, dungeons or street-level city maps. It draws the region that holds them. For a one-shot on a single landmass try theisland map generator, or return to the mainfantasy map generator.