A totally custom, one-off D&D battle map, made by ChatGPT and prompted by Claude

Here’s another, totally custom and one-off battle-map AI made for me:

This was just a random encounter in a D&D adventure I was doing with solo role-playing with AI (Claude). I asked it to generate a prompt to give to ChatGPT to generate the battle-map, and the results were amazing.

Here’s the prompt that generated this battle-map in ChatGPT:

Create a Dungeons & Dragons battle map. A battle map is a top-down, directly overhead, bird's-eye view of terrain, like an architectural floor plan - NOT a landscape painting, NOT an isometric or angled view, NO horizon, NO sky. It is used as a game board, so it must be flat, clean, and readable, with a square grid overlaid across the entire image (light grey lines). Each grid square represents 5 feet. The map should be about 30 squares wide by 30 squares tall. No text labels, no characters, no creatures, no miniatures - terrain only.
The scene: a night-time arctic tundra camp on flat snow. Render:
Most of the map is flat white-blue snowfield, subtle texture only.
Running diagonally across the middle third of the map, a collapsed trench in the snow about 2 squares wide and 24 squares long - dark broken ground, steam rising rendered as faint white wisps, edges cracked and sunken. Two points along this trench, roughly 8 squares apart, have large ragged holes with glowing orange-red light coming from below, each hole about 3 squares across.
Near the trench's northeast end, a cluster of wooden sleds (4-5 small rectangles) and scattered debris.
South of the trench center, two small campfires with bedrolls around them and a patch of trampled, dirty snow.
Northwest corner, a large scorched burn area about 8 squares across - blackened, melted ground with charred animal carcasses, contrasting hard against the snow.
Scattered small items: a couple of barrels, a tarp with dark shapes under it near the sleds.
Style: flat colors, high contrast, painted-map aesthetic like a published RPG module map. Lighting implied from the fires and the orange holes, but keep the whole map evenly readable - no deep shadows obscuring terrain.

After the first generation, I just added:

That’s fantastic! Can you double the size of it, keep the center, but just expand in each direction, give some random terrain features, but mostly just flat.

And it did just that, expanding the map, and then adding the terrain on the edges.

When I gave it Claude, who was acting as my DM, I asked Claude to add horizontal and vertical axes so it could number the squares – numbers on top, letters down the side (I guess I should have done the opposite to make it like a spreadsheet). This was fantastic for having Claude kind of VTT it and tell me where various NPCs (six or so of them!), the monsters, and my two PCs are. I used that in the dndbeyond VTT. Typing this now, though: I bet I could also ask Claude to make a Claude artifact that visualized this all, or was an entire VTT…and then move the tokens around as we played.

Anyhow, here’s some more on making crude but highly functional battle-maps in Claude, and then more of how I make battle-maps with Midjourney, really big ones.

This is an example of using AI to do something that you would have never done in the past: one off, custom-made battle-maps tuned to an exact scene. I would love to have opened Dungeondraft and spent a few hours making and messing with a map for this encounter. And I’ve done that many times over the years. But, this time, I was idly playing on the couch in some spare time and excited to keep “in game.”

And good thing. The druid I had simply cast charm monster on the two remorhaz that had burrowed up those holes, and the encounter was over in six seconds.