Some time last year (what is time?) a friend of mine introduced me to Inkarnate, which is an online map-making tool, useful especially for tabletop RPGs like D&D. Initially, I was primarily interested in using it to make big maps of my homebrew world: drawing the continents and nations, locating cities, etc. It actually helped me a lot in fleshing out my world: once I'd gotten, for example, the Republic of Nephimala worked out (a country that's based on America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries - essentially high fantasy meets wild west) I realized how much more there was to flesh out - once the major cities were there, I added other towns and then geographical features like rivers, mountains, forests, and deserts. Among the towns that I added was an important crossroads where the rail lines and roadways converge, called Prospect Junction, which might be the most Old-West-y sounding town name I've ever come up with.
But I was intimidated by the amount of detail that might be required to make battle maps, so I've hesitated until recently.
However, after playing around with it while planning a one-shot when many of my players couldn't make my regular game, I realized it wasn't too hard to build something. And now I've kind of become obsessed - using it to build not just battle maps, but detailed dungeons. The players in my Ravnica game are eventually going to go on what is essentially an Underdark adventure (through Ravnica's Undercity) to get to the Golgari member of the guilds-spanning Phyrexian conspiracy, and I've created a few layers of dungeon-like environments for them to explore (it's possible I've overdone it - there's a boss monster at the end of each layer).
Anyway, I just sort of wanted to sing the praises of this website. There's a bit of a learning curve, but you'll start to make some really amazing maps as you start to figure out the nuances of the system.
In fact, I can give a brief tutorial on the basic systems, which I'll put behind a cut. Anyway, enjoy the maps I've posted.
All right, so how does this system work?
When you create a new map, you can choose its dimensions and a style. The style really just filters which elements are available for your given map, but you can use elements from other styles pretty easily if you're unhappy with your options - just know that they might not fit together aesthetically if you take, say, Watercolor Battlemap elements with Fantasy Regional ones.
If you plan to upload these to Roll20 or a similar service, make note of the proportions of your map so you can fit it easily into your Roll20 map page - you can customize both to be a certain number of rows and columns, which will make it easier to snap the map into place cleanly.
The first thing to do is use the Mask tool (the shovel) to determine a Foreground and a Background. For example, when making a map of a continent, you can make the foreground land and the background water. If you're mapping out a dungeon, you can make the foreground either platforms above something or walls that overlook your dungeon's interior spaces in the background.
There are various cursor-shapes that you can re-size or alter in various ways to get different shapes. I recommend, if you're making a battle-map, showing the grid to help get the size of things right. While some of the shapes for the Mask tool simply affect wherever you drag the cursor, there are also area tools that you can use to get clean rectangles, circles, etc. These can also snap to the grid if you want everything to be very precise.
The next stage (though you can feel free to go back and forth between these stages to adjust as needed) is to use the Brush tool. This will allow you to paint various textures onto the surfaces. You can cover a surface with a single texture, but you can also use multiple textures to create dynamic looks. You can adjust these painted textures in various ways - lowering opacity, for instance, lets you blend it with another texture beneath it, and the "softness" slider on the brush tool will make the edges of the texture you're painted kind of fade into whatever's under it, giving you softer edges to blend more easily.
Getting into advanced features here, you can take the texture options and adjust them, either rotating them, changing the size of the pattern (for example, to make tiles that fit the corridor you're building) or adjusting the hue. Like with the Masking tool, you can also select areas to affect with these textures. The textures can go on the foreground or background, which will allow you to easily paint over a corridor without worrying about it affecting the "foreground" segments that represent thick walls and the like.
Then, we get to the nitty-gritty - the Stamp Tool. Inkarnate has a ton of stamps that represent any sort of things you might find in a battle-map. They're broken up by category, so you might have something like an ancient temple, and you can pick out various wall, statue, fountain, altar, etc. stamps that can be placed on the map. These can be rotated, re-sized, and manipulated in various ways to best suit your purposes. There's even an option to have the stamps get a random rotation each time you place one, which is great if you want to have a room with a bunch of scattered notes or books (many stamps also come in sets with multiple options, and you can choose to have it pick random options from within that category.)
Anyway, this is just scratching the surface. They seem to be constantly improving and innovating on the system, as well as adding new content. I've spent the last several days futzing with it and have made like 10 different maps.
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