Battle maps are everywhere. City maps are the scarce resource. The party always ends up in a town, the town always needs streets, districts, and a tavern with a name, and drawing a believable city by hand is a weekend you don’t have. Fortunately this is the one map genre where the generators got so good that “just generate it” is a legitimate answer, and where a few dedicated artists give away work that would’ve cost a fortune ten years ago.
The generators
1. Medieval Fantasy City Generator by Watabou. The undisputed king. One click produces a walled city with wards, a citadel, a market, sprawl outside the gates, the works. You can reshape it by dragging, relabel districts, flip to a 3D view, and export. When someone on Reddit asks for a free city tool, this link is the whole top comment, every time.
2. Village Generator, also Watabou. The rural sibling for the hamlet, the crossroads settlement, the fishing village the party burns down by accident. Same interface, smaller stakes.
3. Fantasy Town Generator. This one goes past geography. It populates the town: buildings have owners, shops have inventories, NPCs have names. A Redditor pitched it as “even more complete than medieval fantasy city generator” for exactly that reason. Generate in Watabou when you need a pretty map, generate here when the party is about to spend three sessions in town.
4. Azgaar’s burgs. If you built your world in Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator (covered in our map makers post), every settlement on your continent is clickable and can hand you a street map that matches its size and location. Your players pick a random dot on the map, and the dot has streets. Feels like cheating. Isn’t.
5. donjon’s town generator. Less pretty, more practical: a layout plus a full list of shops, temples, and NPCs in one shot. It’s the “I need this town to exist before the pizza arrives” option.
6. The quick hits. Kassoon’s town map generator builds a labeled town with a building list. Inkwell Ideas’ random city generator is a solid old workhorse from the people behind Worldographer. Dave’s Mapper assembles city maps from tiles drawn by a rotating cast of community artists, which gives it a charm the pure algorithms can’t fake. And Oskar Stålberg’s City Generator is technically a toy, but it’s a gorgeous toy, and screenshotting it has saved more than one session.
The artists
Generators do layout. Humans do character. These are the city specialists whose free work is worth following on its own.
7. Borough Bound. A whole project dedicated to city content: maps, districts, and the buildings inside them, with a Patreon that feeds free material out regularly. If your campaign is urban, this is the follow.
8. Daniel’s Maps. Daniel Hasenbos draws the kind of city maps that end up as posters. His work shows up free on r/dndmaps (his City of Sturdjal made our original maps list), with more through his Patreon.
9. The Cartographer’s Guild. An old-internet forum full of people who make maps for the love of it, heavy on the city and regional scale that battle map creators skip. The finished-map galleries go back years and reward digging.
10. r/dndmaps, city flair. The subreddit has a City Map filter, which turns it into a scrolling gallery of free urban cartography. Ten minutes of scrolling beats an hour of googling.
The move that works at the table
Generate the city in Watabou for the handout, run the same town through Fantasy Town Generator or donjon for the shops and names, and steal one gorgeous human-drawn map from the artists above for your capital city, the one place that deserves to feel designed. Three tools, zero dollars, and your players think you’ve been worldbuilding for months.
They’ll want something to do in that city, of course. The Big Book of Little Adventures is 200+ short adventures for $9.99, and a good third of them start in exactly the kind of town you just generated.
Sources
- All tools and links verified live on September 6, 2026.
- Community threads: r/DMAcademy “Does anyone have any good free dnd map maker for cities or towns?”, r/rpg_generators “Map Generators for Fantasy Cities and Towns (Day 22 of 31 Days of RPG Map Gens),” r/worldbuilding “Free City Map Making Websites/Programmes?”, r/DnDBehindTheScreen “Medieval Fantasy City Generator.”
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