One of my Christmas presents this year was Dungeondraft, an encounter map application made by Megasploot ¹. The same developer who makes my favorite world map application, Wonderdraft. Dungeondraft is pre-release software, so bugs and crashes are expected, but the app’s capabilities are well worth dealing with with some crashes and glitches–and you will experience these.

As near as I can tell, the current release of Dungeondraft ² is the first which runs on the Mac platform. As such, even though Windows users of the application are reporting very few crashes in the application at present the Mac is a different story. I’ve noticed it tends to crash when I try to switch tools too quickly, as well as when I reach the limit of my undo queue. And when Dungeondraft crashes, it crashes hard–to the point where I will need to reboot my MacBook to get my system running well again ³. Even after a short while using the program, however, I’ve learned how to anticipate the types of changes which tend to cause crashes and have managed to avoid them. Other glitches I’ve encountered are a bug which causes floors to not be rendered at certain zoom levels and the scatter tool sometimes not working when activated. Neither of these are show-stoppers, and I’ve already figured out work-arounds ⁴. These bugs are a tad annoying, but not insurmountable.

Typical MacBook gestures which work in Wonderdraft, such as pinch zoom or two fingered swiping for panning through the application, do not work in Dungeondraft as of this writing. I attempted to use Better Touch Tool to emulate a two button wheel mouse, but for some reason the calls aren’t being passed to the application. Thankfully, using ⌘= or ⌘- will zoom the map, and holding down the space bar and swiping with one finger will pan though the map. I expect some of the current incompatibilities with the MacBook touchpad will be fixed at some point, as Megasploot already has them active elsewhere, until then an external mouse might be the best option for an optimal experience. Even so, using the Touchpad was far from limiting, I’ve managed to make several maps already and have not felt constricted. Again, this is pre-release software and a very early release on my platform of choice. The bugs and oddities with usage are not unexpected.

But what about the results? Well, to call the output I can get with Dungeondraft an “upgrade” is a significant understatement.

As I planned out my Howlmark adventure for my neighbors I wanted to try my hand at creating some maps to use for encounters. They were playable. Nothing flashy, but they got the job done and I even managed to run a beta dungeon crawl on two of them. My tutorial map, which I’ll be using for my session zero this week, is the first map I made. It’s playable, and I’m particularly happy with the texture for the paths and the simple tree assets I made. Here’s the finished map below.

And here is my Dungeondraft upgrade.

Dungeondraft doesn’t create maps which are just “playable.” Dungeondraft maps are also beautiful.

My tutorial map was redone without any guides, but for several of my map upgrades ⁵ I imported my hand-made map into Dungeondraft as an overlay and used this as a tracing guide as I recreated the maps in the application. To do this, I matched the Dungeondraft map’s grid to my personal map so my measurements wouldn’t change. The results of the upgrade, as seen above, are stunning.

Even better, Dungeondraft will allow maps to be exported into a universal virtual table top format to be imported to different applications. I used a module for Foundry VTT and imported my scenes. This brings in the background image–and also sets up walls, doors, windows, and lights ⁶. This saves me a lot of time setting up scenes!

Pre-release and a big buggy? Sure. Is it worth $19.99? It’s worth much more. If you are into making maps for your games, and are looking for an upgrade, get this application.