The castle map generator draws a castle from above, the way a module cartographer or a siege engineer would: a curtain wall of stone with a tower at every corner, a gatehouse facing the road, and a keep across the courtyard from it. More than half of the castles sit inside a moat with a drawbridge at the gate. Inside the walls the working buildings of the castle stand against the wall: always a great hall, and a selection of chapel, barracks, stables, smithy, kitchens and granary, with a well and a garden out in the yard. Every building is numbered and keyed under the map, and the castle gets a name.
How the castle is laid out
The layout follows the way real castles were built, because that's what makes the plan easy to read and fun to attack. The curtain wall is a ring of four to seven sides with a tower at every corner, and long stretches of wall get an extra tower half way along so no part of the wall is out of bowshot. The gate goes on the side facing the road, flanked by two towers of its own, and the road winds away from it to the edge of the map.
The keep is the last line of defence, so it stands across the courtyard from the gate, as far from attackers as the walls allow. It's a square tower with a turret at each corner, or sometimes a round donjon. The castle's other buildings are built against the inside of the curtain wall rather than in the middle of the yard, which is how castles kept their courtyards clear for drilling, deliveries and the last fight if the gate fell. The chapel has a slate roof and a bell tower, the smithy has its forge fire outside the door, and the rest have red tiled roofs.
Towers and walls
Each castle picks a style. Round towers are capped with slate cones; square towers with flat tops and crossed timbers. A wall-walk runs along the top of the curtain wall between them, drawn as a lighter dashed line, so players can see where defenders would stand. Some castles stand in open fields; others are ringed with a moat wide enough that the drawbridge is the only way across.
Using it at the table
A castle map earns its place whenever the party has to get in, get out or hold the place against someone else. Use it for a siege: the keyed plan tells you where the defenders sleep, where the food is kept and which tower guards the gate. Use it for a heist: the well, the stables and the chapel are all ways in that don't go through the front. Or use it as the seat of the local lord, the place the party is summoned to for the next quest.
The plan is not drawn to a fixed scale, which makes it easy to fit to whatever size of castle your setting needs, from a border fort to a royal seat. For a fight inside one of the buildings, roll a battle map and treat it as the interior.
Free SVG and PNG downloads
Both formats are free for your games, streams and published adventures. The PNG is a 1920-pixel render for a VTT or a handout, and the Print button saves a black-and-white version for a home printer. The SVG is the original vector file: open it in Inkscape, Affinity or Figma to rename buildings, add a postern gate or draw in the siege lines. 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 the ground plan of one castle with a single curtain wall. It doesn't draw interiors, upper floors, or concentric castles with several rings of walls, and it doesn't draw the town that usually grows up outside the gate. For the town, roll a city map; for the region around it, roll a hex map.
Name it, then fill it
The castle name generator writes the castle's history and draws this same map beside its result, with the generated name in the title. The kingdom name generator tells you whose banner flies over the keep, and the coat of arms generator draws it.