For a long time, my DnD sessions have been afflicted by the curse of ugly maps. Hand-drawing battle maps is an arduous process that rewards you with wonky, inconsistent, or downright hard-to-understand handouts. Luckily, someone else in the D&D community has seen this need and decided to fill it. For around a year now, TTRPG creator Arkana Tools has been developing a Paper Map Generator that makes it easy to print to-scale battlemaps - for free.
My current setup for DnD maps is a plain, dry-erase battlemap with a standard grid. Every time we plan to play, I painstakingly recreate the maps shown in my DnD book, adjusting them as needed mid-session. It's a cheap and functional way to represent the environments my players explore, but it's fiddly as heck.
Sometimes I struggle to recreate a map with accuracy from session to session. Others, I simply don't have enough space to recreate an enormous battlemap. And every single time, I lament how ugly and unclear everything looks.
The alternative to hand-drawn maps is printed ones, but it can be tough to produce these to the scale needed for your DnD miniatures. Hours of Photoshop or physical arts and crafts later, and you still might not have something satisfying to play with.
Arkana Tools attempts to address all these issues with its Paper Map Generator. The tool, currently in its beta form, allows you to upload a map of your choice. You then zoom in or out until you can highlight a five-by-five square accurately on the map.
Click on said square, and Arkana Tools instantly converts the map into a to-scale, printable PDF. The back of each is clearly labelled, and your PDF comes with a guide to assembly that'll help you put the printed pieces together.
The generator itself comes with some extra tools to make the conversion process even easier. You can choose your grid type, color, and style. If your original map doesn't have a grid, you can add one. You can also adjust everything from the page size you're printing on to the margin sizes. The beta version also offers a Room Mode which allows you to isolate rooms and recreate a fog of war effect at your table.
It's a fast way to produce quality maps that genuinely appeals to me. Community members have even suggested ways to improve your final product, such as pasting the paper onto foldable card or covering the whole thing with plexiglass for easy editing.
The only problem Arkana Tools can't solve for me is pricing. This tool may be free, but you'll naturally still need to cover the costs of printing all that paper. I used Arkana Tools' generator to create a to-scale battlemap of The Amber Temple from Curse of Strahd, and that resulted in a whopping 121 pages to print for one floor (that's about 60 pieces of map and 60 numbered sides to show you which piece is which).
I no longer feed my personal printer any ink, because it is an evil, inconsistent beast that is determined to devour all joy and money I have left. Because of that, I'll need to take my PDF to the local library, where I can print a full-color A4 page for £0.50. That means my Amber Temple map will set me back around £30 ($40) - ouch. Maybe I should resurrect that home printer after all…
None of this is Arkana Tool's fault, of course, but it felt important to paint a picture of what this free tool could end up costing. Still, for the dedicated Dungeon Master, this tool makes quality map-crafting incredibly accessible.
Arkana Tools' map generator is still in beta, but you can access it through their Discord, where feedback is being gathered during development. If you'd like to talk about D&D more generally, you can also join us in the Wargamer Discord. Or you can head to our guides to DnD classes and DnD races for easy character creation tips.