The dirty secret of the official hardcovers is that the maps inside them are for you, not your players. They’re small, they’re labeled with secrets, and half of them were never drawn at battle map scale at all. So a cottage industry of very generous people has spent years redrawing them, and a shocking amount of that work is free. Here’s where it lives.
One ground rule: these are fan-made maps meant to be used alongside a book you own. They replace the cartography, not the adventure.
Lost Mine of Phandelver
The starter set adventure is the best served module in all of D&D, which makes sense, since more tables have run it than anything else ever printed.
1. Tessa Presents Maps, the 30-map set. A complete, matching-style set of thirty maps covering the module, posted free to a public Google Drive. This is the one to grab if you play in person too. One first-time DM in the thread printed and laminated a map at their local library for five dollars.
2. The Foundry compendium by uchideshi34. The same idea, packaged for Foundry VTT users as an installable module (paste that manifest link into Foundry’s install-module box) with a Drive folder for everyone else. Walls and scenes come pre-configured, which saves hours.
3. Dransky’s animated 4K set. Yes, the entire module as animated battle maps, free, with a Foundry module and the files on his site. Water moves, torches flicker, players lose their minds. More on animated maps in our animated battle maps post.
4. Advent’s Amazing Advice. Not a map pack, but the famous prep-notes series on r/LostMinesOfPhandelver bundles per-chapter resources, maps included, into ready-to-run packages. If you’re running LMoP for the first time, start there and take the maps as you go.
Curse of Strahd
5. Dungeons LAB. The current champion. Their free Curse of Strahd work, built over hundreds of hours, now lives as a Patreon collection of Foundry-ready content: over fifty prepared maps at last count, with music, macros, interactive traps, and multiple variants per scene. The full module download is huge, so follow the instructions on their page rather than the manifest link. Their own advice for a test drive: open Death House first, it’s the one they polished to set the tone. Two separate r/CurseofStrahd threads greeted these releases with over seventeen hundred combined upvotes and the phrase “you are an actual hero,” which tracks.
6. The subreddit itself. r/CurseofStrahd has a deeper bench of free fan cartography than any other module community, because Barovia does things to people. Search the location name and something good comes up.
Everything else
7. The Fateful Force. Their battle map collections are organized by adventure, so you can pull the pack for the module you’re running instead of hunting map by map. They were in our original free maps list and they’ve only grown since.
8. Mike Schley, the actual cartographer. Schley drew the official maps for a pile of the hardcovers, and sells hi-res, player-safe versions of his archive for a few dollars each. Not free, but when you want the exact map from the book without the DM labels, this is the legitimate source, and it’s cheaper than a coffee order.
9. Lost Atlas, for the gaps. For the adventure nobody has systematically covered, Lost Atlas indexes thousands of free battle maps with search. “Ruined tower snow” gets you a stand-in for that Icewind Dale encounter faster than any module-specific hunt.
The fastest way to level up a published adventure is somebody else’s free map and your own prep time. And when your table finishes the hardcover and wants something short before the next one, that’s what the Big Book of Little Adventures is for: 200+ one-session adventures, $9.99, maps optional but encouraged.
Sources
- All links verified live on September 6, 2026. Free status checked on each creator’s page; Patreon collections can change terms, so check before you build a whole campaign on one.
- Community threads: r/LostMinesOfPhandelver “30 maps for Lost Mines of Phandelver (free!)”, r/FoundryVTT “Free Lost Mine of Phandelver Map Compendium,” r/dndmaps “Lost Mine of Phandelver Animated 4K Battlemaps,” r/CurseofStrahd “I spend 300+ hours build this map pack for Curse of Strahd” and “53 Fully Prepared Curse of Strahd Maps,” r/LostMinesOfPhandelver “Advent’s Amazing Advice.”
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