The June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is now available. It expands last month’s Fantasy Hand-drawn style with lots more symbols, new drawing tools and a new fill style. You can build near-eastern and Egyptian settings with the oriental buildings included, put sea monsters and creatures into your oceans, and add many little details to your landscapes.
Last month, I had a look at how to embed notes into your map, and make clickable links to show these. Such notes are great, since they are embedded into the map and thus part of the map file itself. But they also have their downsides, one of them being that they only support plain text. What if you want rich formatted text, maybe with some images?
Well, we can’t embed that into the map, but we can make the same kind of clickable hotspots that can link to either websites or external files. The notes are no longer part of the map, but they can easily be accessed from it.
If you’ve missed any of the live mapping sessions we do on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+, you’ll find them archived and organized into playlists on YouTube. Here is the most recent one on the May Annual issue:
Welcome dear cartographers to the latest monthly community maps, i.e. the Maps of the Month from April. Thank you for all your great contributions to our forum and the Facebook group!
I always love maps with lots of forest on them, so let’s start with this great example by Ricko Hasche, using Mike Schley’s overland style. Continue reading »
Mike Schley created a new set of dungeon symbols for the free monthly content and your pleasure. Take a seat on one of these symbols to feel like royalty, but beware, the throne might crumble beneath you and dump you unceremoniously on the floor! The April symbol pack “Royal Seating” contains 20 new symbols for the Dungeons of Schley style, and provides a range of sumptuous thrones to seat that royalty – or show its decline and fall with the destroyed versions.
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is available for purchase here.
To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to April 2025) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is now available. This month brings you a new overland style, by yours truly. I’ve been inspired to sit down with pencil and inks, create some hand-drawn symbols and then create a fresh new style from them. In addition to giving you a nice and easy-to-use overland style, it will allow me to show the whole process of creating and using your own artwork in CC3+. I will also be able to easily expand the style with additional symbols in the future.
Last month, I looked at how to add information to your city map by using demographic coloring. Today, let us see how we can add descriptions for map features, like a building, that can be shown with a click.
For example, this can be used to add a note to each house describing who lives here, or if it is a business, what they do, what they sell, opening hours, prices, and more.
The basic idea here is that we will use CC3+’s map notes to store the actual information, and then we will add a hotspot to the relevant buildings to make it clickable and display the text. There are several variants around this, like making the hotspot open up a webpage or hide/show text placed in the map itself, but let us stick with map notes for now. Continue reading »
Humble Bundle has just extended the current super-bundle of our software, so there’s still a chance for you to grab this amazing offer of CC3+, FT3+, all of the add-ons and symbol sets, as well as almost all of the Annuals for an unprecedented low price.
If you were waiting to jump into CC3+, this is a great opportunity to get it at an awesome price. Even if you already own CC3+, this can be well worth it to fill out your selection of add-ons. Part of the cost goes toward charity, Save the Children.
