The canyon map generator draws a river canyon on five-foot squares. A river winds across the sheet from edge to edge with a strip of sandy floor along it. On both sides the rock rises in four bands of red and orange stone, each a step higher than the last, up to the flat mesa top. There's a ford of stepping stones across the river, a cluster of hoodoos standing on the floor, a natural stone arch up on one of the high shelves, and a switchback trail climbing the wall from the floor to the rim. On a little over half the maps there's also an abandoned cliff dwelling tucked into an alcove at the foot of a wall. Every landmark is numbered and keyed.
How the canyon is drawn
The river comes first. Every point on the sheet then gets a height from how far it is from the water, roughened with noise so the walls wander in and out instead of running parallel. Below a certain height is the canyon floor; above it, the rock is traced in four bands, each with its own shade and a shadow cast onto the band below. Because the edges are traced through the height field rather than along the grid, the walls bulge and pinch like real eroded stone, and every canyon has wide places and narrow ones.
The landmarks are placed where they belong. The ford goes somewhere along the river. The hoodoos stand on open floor away from the water. The arch needs high ground, so it goes on one of the upper shelves. The cliff dwelling looks for a spot where the floor meets a sudden wall, and the trail starts on the floor and climbs straight away from the river, zigzagging up the bands. Brush grows on the floor and on the mesa top, and boulders lie where they fell.
Terrain that matters
Each band of rock is a ledge: a climb up and a drop down. That gives a canyon fight real height, with archers on the shelves, a party pinned on the floor, and the switchback as the only easy way between them. The river is difficult terrain except at the ford. The hoodoos are cover on open ground. The cliff dwelling is a fortified position with one way in, which is why someone built it there in the first place, and why someone may be living in it again.
Using it at the table
Canyons suit desert and badlands campaigns, river journeys, ambushes on a trade route that runs along the floor, and any adventure about the people who carved houses into the rock and then vanished. It works with D&D 5e, Pathfinder and any other fantasy game on a grid. Roll several in a row for a journey down the river; it always enters and leaves the sheet on opposite edges, so the maps chain together.
Free SVG and PNG downloads
Both formats are free for your games, streams and published adventures. The PNG is a 1920-pixel render ready for Roll20, Foundry or Owlbear Rodeo, and the Print button gives you a black-and-white sheet for the table. The SVG is the vector original: open it in Inkscape, Affinity or Figma to move the ford, add a second dwelling or widen the trail. Everything on the map is drawn by our own code, so there's no attribution to carry and no asset licence to read.
What it won't do
It draws one stretch of one canyon at battle-map scale. It doesn't draw the whole canyon system, the inside of the cliff dwelling, or the mesa country above it. For the wider region, roll a fantasy map or a hex map; for open sand above the rim, a desert map; for the caves behind the dwelling, a cave map.
Name the canyon, then cross it
The canyon name generator names the canyon and writes its history, and draws this same map beside its result with the generated name on the sheet. The desert name generator names the badlands around it, and the ranger name generator names the guide who knows where the ford is.