About Torchlight Mapper

A mapping app for the player holding the graph paper.

Why I built it

Playing with my friends, I was assigned to be the map maker of the group. It is a genuinely fun job. You are the one turning “a corridor runs about thirty feet north and then turns east” into something the whole table can look at, and you are the reason nobody walks into the same collapsed hallway twice.

But I would always run out of paper. A dungeon never respects the edge of a sheet, so I would end up taping another page onto the north side, then another onto the east, until the map was a creased patchwork that did not survive being folded into a backpack.

And then there was sharing it. If I could not make the next session, the map could not either — it was wherever the paper was. Same problem in reverse when somebody else missed a night and wanted to see what the party had found. There was no good way to hand the map to another player.

Torchlight Mapper is my answer to both problems. The grid never runs out, so the dungeon can sprawl in every direction and go down as many floors as it wants. Nothing gets creased or lost. And when someone cannot make it, you send them the file.

It is a player-side tool

This is worth stating plainly, because most tabletop software is aimed at the person running the game. Torchlight Mapper is not. It is built for the player at the table who is drawing the map of the caves, caverns, castles, and dungeons the party is exploring, in real time, from what is being described out loud.

That focus shows up all over the app:

• Rooms auto-place against the last thing you drew, because you are keeping up with narration, not designing a level at your leisure.
• Corridors are painted with a finger and rubber-band automatically when you learn a room was actually bigger than you thought.
• Rooms and corridors lock by default, so a shaky hand pans the map instead of dragging your dungeon apart.
• Everything is undoable, including group moves, and you can shake to undo when your hands are full of dice.
• Notes and an adventure log live with the map, so “the lever we never pulled” is searchable three sessions later.
• There is a torch timer, because in the kind of game this was built for, light is a resource somebody has to track.

What it deliberately is not

Torchlight Mapper is a mapping tool and nothing else. It contains no game rules, no stat blocks, no spells, no monsters, no adventure text, and no publisher artwork, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by any game publisher. It draws on a 5-foot square grid, which fits most dungeon-crawling systems, and stays out of the way of whatever you are actually playing.

It also has no account, no server, no analytics, and no ads. It makes no network requests at all. That is partly a privacy stance and partly practical: the room you play in may well have terrible reception, and the app should not care. See the Privacy Policy for specifics.

Who makes it

Torchlight Mapper is built and maintained by me, James Frink, as an independent individual developer. It is free, there is no company behind it, and there is no roadmap committee — just a player who wanted a better map. If something is broken or missing, telling me is the whole process: jkfrink@icloud.com.

Built with

Native SwiftUI and SwiftData for iPhone and iPad, iOS 18 and later. No third-party SDKs. All rendering, geometry, and export are done on device.