The dragon lair map generator draws a dragon's cave on five-foot squares. The cave grows naturally out of the rock, with wide chambers, narrow throats and dead ends, and the passages are blackened where the dragon has breathed down them. The way in is the scorched entrance. Somewhere deeper there's a kobold warren of bedrolls round a fire, the gnawed remains of the last heroes who tried this, an altar where someone still leaves tribute, a seam of raw gems in the wall, a steaming pool or a rockfall, a handful of them on each map. At the far end, in the roomiest chamber of the deep half of the cave, is the hoard: a spill of gold and silver coin, chests and plate, with the dragon itself curled asleep on top. Every area is numbered and keyed.
How the lair is built
The cave starts the same way as the cave map generator's: a cellular automaton carves rock into a connected system and keeps the largest. Points of interest are spread through it, well apart from one another. The hoard goes where a dragon would want it: deep in the cave, in the widest open space, clear of the other areas, so the dragon has room to turn and the party has nowhere to hide. Everything else in the lair is drawn from the things that collect around a dragon, and the dressing stays on the cave floor rather than spilling into the rock.
The dragon comes in five colours, so a red, green, blue, black or brass beast fits whatever your campaign needs. The hoard isn't a single heap of coins: it's scattered gold and silver with chests half-buried in it, which matters when someone wants to grab something and run.
Running the lair
A dragon fight is about distance and timing. The long passages from the entrance are the approach, and the scorch marks tell the party what happens to people who walk them carelessly. The kobold warren is the dragon's early warning, or an ally if the party can make a better offer. The remains of heroes are a clue and a warning at once. The chamber with the hoard is wide on purpose: a dragon in a narrow tunnel is an easy fight, and this is not that. Whether the party sneaks in to steal, comes to negotiate, or kicks the door in, the map gives each plan somewhere to go wrong.
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 hoard, wake the dragon or add a second way out. 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 lair, not the dragon's statistics or the mountain around it. For the mountain above the cave mouth, roll a mountain map; for an ordinary cave without a dragon in it, the cave map generator.
Name the dragon, then wake it
The dragon name generator names the beast and writes its history, the ancient dragon name generator handles the old ones, and the kobold name generator names the servants in the warren.