Gamers tend to be a generous lot. It’s all about having fun, so they host parties at their own expense for the sole purpose of gaming with friends, or create hilarious games and just give them away.

And so it was that this British tabletop roleplayer Zatnikotel set himself the incredible challenge to produce one million square feet of original battle maps. These are maps that can be used on virtual tabletops systems like Astral, Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds or which can be printed out and used on a traditional table (though he admits that since they were made for virtual game table use, they may not make the best printouts). He succeeded in his quest, and is now giving all the art away for free.

The million square feet of battle maps are available from Zatnikotel’s Deviant Art page.

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There are 16 downloads. Each one is a grid of 50×50 one inch squares. One inch of gaming battle map is equivalent to 5-feet in the world of the dungeon. That’s enough to make the million needed for the challenge – 16 x 62,500 square feet of adventurous settings!

There are four main settings in the dungeon map settings which can be arranged as shown in this guide.

• Row A includes: A1 as the River Entrance, A2 as the Portal, A3 as the Chasm and A4 the Lava Caves.

• Row B makes use of: B1 the Spider Lair, B2 the Underground Village, B3 for River Crossings and B4 as Natural Caves.

• Row C is composed of: C1 Swamping Roots, C2 of Fungus Infestation, C3 for an Underground Lake and C4 for Mines.

• Lastly, Row D uses: D1 for the Roadway Passage, D2 for Burrows, D3 as the Wizard’s Lair and D4 for Tombs.

Amazingly, Zatnikotel creates and gives his dungeon maps a way for free. There isn’t even a Patreon page. On Reddit, he explained;

Please remember, all of my maps, including these (and the gridded versions) are completely free (I don’t do Patreon, marketplace, etc.), it’s way to give back to a hobby that I have enjoyed so much for over 36 years.

Gamers are encouraged to share Zatnikotel work with other gamers but not to pass it off as their own. Link back to the original Deviant Art page, with a credit, whenever possible.

This is a tremendous resource for gamers, and even for fantasy writers who want to create a map of their fantasy world – though it’s likely that just dungeons and underground realms aren’t enough for a whole world and would have to be supplemented with overland maps (an exercise for the determined reader). It’s a great jumping-off point for the imagination, however.

What world will you create?

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