A solo dungeon crawl, drawn as you go

Solo play needs a dungeon you haven’t seen. Mapsmith draws one from a seed and keeps it dark: only the way in shows, with a question mark at each door. Click a door to go through, and the room appears with what’s in it and what you run into.

Start in the Penlow Crypt Or an old mine

A crypt four rooms in: the rooms seen so far, two doors still marked with question marks, and the card for the well chamber, where two grave robbers freeze with their sacks half full

Four rooms into the Penlow Crypt. The two doors with question marks are still dark.

How a crawl goes

Go through a door. The room is drawn with its furniture, a line on what’s there, and what you found: nothing, a sign of what’s ahead, a trap, or something waiting for you. Deeper dungeons roll worse.
Search for secret doors. Some rooms hide one. Click a room you’ve been in and search: a 5 or 6 on a d6 finds it, and the door opens like any other.
Come back later. A room always rolls the same thing, and the link keeps the rooms you’ve explored. Bookmark it and the crawl is where you left it.
Use your own rules. Mapsmith tells you what’s in the room; the fight, the roll and the oracle are yours, in whatever game you play.

Crypts, keeps and mines

Crypts are family vaults with tombs and coffins; fallen keeps are buildings in a walled yard with a tower on each corner; mines have drifts, pillar galleries, a flooded sump and the lode at the far end, and their rooms roll their own finds. Pick a lair (4 to 6 rooms) for a short session, a dungeon (8 to 10), or a deep one (13 to 16, with stairs going further down). The far room always holds treasure.

Free, and nothing to install

The crawl runs in your browser and on itch. If you keep your solo journal in Obsidian, Mapsmith is a free plugin there (Community plugins, search Mapsmith): the dungeon sits in your note, the rooms you’ve explored are saved in it, and every room can open a note of its own to write in. Buildings in a town can be explored the same way, floor by floor.

Bringing the dungeon to a group instead? Mapsmith Pro, $6 once, saves any map for Foundry VTT, Roll20 or Owlbear Rodeo with its walls, doors and lights placed. The crawl itself is free.

Start a crawl Source and docs

Mapsmith is free and open source (MIT). Made by Bananafest Destiny. The code was written with AI. The map in the picture and in these links is the Plain look, drawn by code with no generated art; the Painted look’s stone, rock and wood textures were made with an image generator. Foundry VTT, Roll20, Owlbear Rodeo and Obsidian are their owners’ trademarks, named only to say what Mapsmith works with.