The library map generator draws the ground floor of a great library on five-foot squares. You come in at the front through a stone foyer with the circulation desk, where the librarian decides whether you get any further. On one side of the foyer is the catalogue room with its banks of little drawers, and on the other is a spiral stair up to the gallery. The main hall fills the middle of the building. In about two libraries out of three it's a long reading room, with tables and candles down a carpeted centre aisle and rows of free-standing stacks on either side. In the rest it's a domed rotunda, with bookcases set like the spokes of a wheel around a round table. Across the back are three rooms: the rare books vault, always there behind an iron door, and two of the scriptorium, the map room and the archivist's study. Almost half the libraries also hide a door behind one of the bookcases. Every room is numbered and keyed.
How the library is laid out
The plan follows how real libraries were built: public rooms at the front, the collection in the middle, and the valuable or private rooms at the back, where nobody wanders in by accident. The foyer is the only way in from the street. The hall is open and lit by tall windows along both side walls. The back rooms open off the hall, each through its own door. The vault's door is iron; the others are wood.
Each room is furnished for its work. The scriptorium has rows of copying desks with paper and candles. The map room has a big table with a chart spread across it and a globe in the corner. The archivist's study has a desk, a wall of shelves and a rug. The vault has shelves on three walls and a reading lectern in the middle for the one book you came for.
Running a scene in the library
Libraries are where adventures go for answers, and the layout makes the search a scene rather than a die roll. The catalogue tells you where a book should be. The stacks are where it isn't. The archivist knows where it went, the scriptorium has a copy someone made last month, and the vault has the original under lock. For a heist, the gallery stair, the tall windows and the secret door are the obvious angles. For a fight, the stacks are full cover in long corridors and the reading tables are the only open ground.
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 add a second vault, move the secret door or fill the stacks with a different colour of book. 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 floor. It doesn't draw the gallery upstairs, the cellars or the library's whole collection. For the cellars, roll a dungeon map and put its entrance under the vault; for the wizard who runs the place, a wizard tower map.
Name the library, then search it
The library name generator names the library and writes its history, and draws this same floor plan beside its result with the generated name on the sheet. The book title generator fills the vault, the scroll name generator fills the map room's drawers, and the wizard name generator names the archivist.