The hex map generator draws a wilderness region on a numbered hex grid, the kind of sheet a hexcrawl campaign is run from. Every hex has a terrain (plains, forest, hills, mountains, swamp or water) and a four-digit number printed at its top edge. Rivers run down from the high ground, roads join the settlements along the easiest route, and a handful of sites wait off the road: a keep, a ruin, a cave, a tower, a ring of standing stones. Every settlement and site is numbered on the map and keyed underneath with its hex number, so your notes can say "0408: the ruins" and everyone knows where that is.
How the region is drawn
Each hex gets its terrain from two layers of noise, one for elevation and one for moisture. The lowest hexes become water, along a coast on one side of the map, around a lake in the middle, or in a scatter of ponds. The highest become mountains, with a band of hills around them. The land between becomes plains, forest or swamp depending on how wet it is, so forests clump together and swamps gather in the wet lowlands instead of appearing at random.
Rivers start in the hills and mountains and run downhill hex by hex until they reach water or the edge of the map, wandering a little on the way. Settlements are placed on the best land, which means plains and hills, by rivers and coasts, and never too close to each other. One is a walled city, a couple are towns, and the rest are villages. Roads are then laid as a network joining them all, each road taking the cheapest route through the terrain: straight over plains, around mountains, and across rivers only where it has to.
Sites worth the ride
Between three and five sites are placed on the terrain where they belong. Keeps sit on hills and plains, caves in the hills and mountains, towers on high ground or in the swamp, standing stones on open land and shrines in the forest. Some maps have a lair, marked in red, somewhere nobody wants to go. Each site gets a name, from Ruins of Kaldra to the Hollin Stones, ready for you to fill in.
Using it at the table
A hexcrawl runs on a map like this one. The party picks a direction, you check the hex they enter, and the terrain tells you how long it takes and what they might meet. Forest and swamp slow them down, roads speed them up, and every keyed site is a reason to leave the road. Each hex is six miles across, the common scale for overland travel in D&D and its relatives, which makes a hex roughly a few hours on foot.
It works just as well as a region map for a regular campaign: the city is where the party starts, the keep is where the trouble is, and the lair is where it ends. The hex numbers make it easy to keep notes per hex and to tell players exactly where a rumour points.
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 places, add a road or recolour a hex. 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 region of fifteen by eleven hexes. It doesn't draw a whole continent, and it doesn't stock the hexes with encounters. For a painted overview of a whole kingdom, roll the fantasy map; for the inside of a town on this map, roll the city map.
Name it, then explore it
The kingdom name generator gives the region a ruler and a history. For the places on the map, the city map generator draws the streets of the city, the cave map generator the caves, and the tavern map generator the inn where the party hears about the lair.