With Game of Thrones coming to an end you might be looking for a new fantasy series to take over your life—so why not make one yourself? If you're working on your next D&D campaign, an RPG or fantasy adventure game, or maybe writing some fantasy fiction, there's no better way to get your creative juices flowing than with a killer map.
Wonderdraft is a fantasy map creation tool that might be just what you're looking for. I started playing with it this weekend, and while I haven't produced anything remotely as cool as some of the amazing creations you'll see linked below, I still found it easy to use and bursting with options. Here's a timelapse trailer that begins with procedural generation of landmasses and then speeds through the placement of cliffs, mountains, hills, forests, rivers, lakes, towns, cities, paths, and more.
You can randomly generate an entire world map or focus on just a continent or some islands and atolls. Sliders let you choose how craggy and detailed you want the coastlines to be and how much water you want to fill your map. Once you're happy with the generated map, you can use finer tools to add or remove land, shape coastlines, add rivers and lakes, and start planting mountains and trees, either one at a time or by painting them on with a brush.
There are tons of ready-made symbols you can plop down too, to create villages, towns, and entire cities, which you can then join with roads and paths. Castles and buildings come in various art styles (there are even a handful of sci-fi structures if you're creating something futuristic) and you can import your own custom assets as well. With the various themes and color palates available you can create a distinct and original fantasy map of your own to rival Westeros and Middle-earth. Just take a quick scroll down the Wonderdraft subreddit and see what some of its users have been working on.
My only wish would be for a bit more procedural generation than just landmasses. It'd be cool if things like rivers, mountains, and forests could be randomly populated as well and then I could go in and make adjustments (this is mainly because I'm lazy). But it's all pretty intuitive to use, even if you're not particularly artistic.
Wonderdraft costs $30 and can be purchased on its official site. Its creator, Megasploot, is still adding new features and improvements. You can see more examples of some of the maps created and a few tutorials on Megasploot's YouTube channel. There's also a wiki and links to more tutorials here.
More delicious maps can be found in our roundup of the best RPGs on PC.
