The village map generator draws a small country village from above, the kind of place a party rides into at dusk looking for a bed. A road winds across the sheet and a stream crosses it under a stone bridge. The village grows along the road: a green with a well at its heart, the inn and the chapel near it, a smithy with its forge glowing by the door, a mill on the stream bank with its wheel turning in the water, and a string of thatched and tiled cottages along the road and the lane that branches off it. Hedged fields, an orchard and scattered trees fill the land round about. The important places are numbered and keyed, and the village gets a name.
How the village grows
Villages aren't planned; they grow along the roads, and the map follows that. The road comes first, entering on one side of the sheet and leaving on the other, with a lane branching off toward the farms. The stream crosses the road at roughly a right angle, and the bridge goes exactly where they meet.
The green is open ground beside the road near the middle of the village, kept clear of the stream. The inn and the chapel are placed facing it when there's room, because that's where travellers and congregations gather. The smithy stands by the road where the trade passes, the mill sits on the stream bank with its wheel in the current, and the reeve's or elder's house is the largest cottage on the road. The rest of the cottages line both sides of the road and the lane, never on top of each other and never in the water.
Fields, orchards and the land around
Beyond the houses the land is farmed. Up to eight hedged fields are laid out in the open ground at different angles, each a different crop colour, and kept off the roads, the stream and the houses. There's an orchard planted in rows somewhere on the edge of the village, and trees scattered through the rest. On the green, there's either a maypole with its ribbons or an old tree to sit under.
Using it at the table
A village is where most campaigns start and where the party comes back to rest, so it's worth having a map players can point at. Use the key as a cast list: the innkeeper, the priest, the smith, the miller and the reeve are the five people the party is most likely to talk to, and the map shows where to find each of them. The bridge, the mill race and the orchard are good places for a quiet meeting or an ambush.
It's not on a battle grid; the scale bar is in feet, and the map is a reference for where things are rather than a place to fight. When a fight breaks out in the inn, roll a tavern map for the inside.
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 house or burn one down. 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 open village with no walls. It doesn't draw walled towns or cities, and it doesn't draw the insides of buildings. For a walled town, roll the city map in its town size; for the inn's ground floor, the tavern map.
Name it, then fill it
The town name generator gives the village a history and a problem, and the tavern name generator names its inn with a landlord and a rumour. For the region the village sits in, roll a hex map; for the inside of the inn, a tavern map.