Well met, Mappers! We are working our way through the 2015 Annual and this month’s style is City Panoramas, by TJ Vandel. This style is modeled off the 16th century publishers and engravers, Braun and Hogenberg, famous for their “birds-eye view” maps of cities from all around the world. I will admit, I did a bit of a Google deep dive looking at their maps, and they are fantastic, and I highly recommend you all taking a look.
For this map I didn’t do anything special out side of the provided Mapping Guide. I really like this style, and think if you get yourself into an editor and have the skills (of which, I do not 😊 ), anything free will do, you could get this map to have that old, antique look of the original Braun and Hogenberg works.
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
The November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 is now available. This month we have a new town or local area map style for you, Satellite Streets. It takes the idea of a satellite/aerial view of a real-world area, like you would see on a modern web-based map application and gives you the tools to create your own fictional one, using City Designer 3 tools. The style is ideal for villages or small towns in modern settings. Real-world maps can easily be used by importing them as a background. The 4-page mapping guide takes you through creating a Satellite Streets map in a few easy steps.
The November issue can now be downloaded by all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.
Do strange and alien civilizations exist in the lands you are mapping? Do hives of insectoid creatures dot the wasteland of your world? Then use this month’s free symbols by Mike Schley to put them on the map!
To download the latest free symbols go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of the current year (January to October 2024 so far) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
Hello fellow map-makers. It’s time to take another look at the gorgous maps our community createst, this time the ones posted in September. Please note that I’ve left out all the wonderful contributions to the 1000th Community Atlas map competition, because they are all collected in a seperate gallery on the forum. As always, many thanks for sharing your work, and if you have not yet, please consider doing so on the forum or our Facebook group.
I can’t but start with the wonderful giant turtle Aspidochelone rendered by RoyalScribe in the Marine Dungeons style. Isn’t it just fantastic? Continue reading »
I thought I could continue on with the topic of the atlas today, and give a little overview of the macros I use in the project, both in the maps themselves, and the ones I use when processing the maps. To avoid making this a 10-part series, this will just be a basic overview of them, to give people ideas how they can utilize macros in their own mapping.
Hello Cartographers! It’s another monthly annual for the 2015 Annual and we have a classis … Classic Fantasy, that is. This style, Classic Fantasy, brings us back to the days of the classic fantasy novel map, usually found in the inside cover or the first few pages. I remember spending so much time pouring over the maps of my favorites novels, Wheel of Time, The Dragonlance Series, Lord of the Rings, and studying them working out where all important moments from the books happened. If a book comes without a map, it’s a huge disappointment, and not because I make them, because I love them. 😊
For this month’s map, I just made a simple environs map, depicting an area where there was a historic battle that took place between two long warring realms – the perfect setting for a short story or campaign. By following the Mapping Guide, this map took me no time at all to put together – also a plus for those last minute maps needed for any RPG campaign!
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
For those of you who haven’t seen them, we do a live mapping session on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+. Here are the most recent Live Mapping videos, as archived on YouTube:
The October issue of the Annual 2024 delivers a wonderfully whimsical and simple dungeon style by community mapper CC Charon, where colorful sticky notes represent dungeon rooms. Corridors drawn on the background paper connect them, and they are populated by handdrawn traps and monsters. 120 hand-drawn bitmap symbols, 18 drawing tools, 7 bitmaps styles and a 3-page mapping guide combine in the Sticky Notes Dungeon style to allow you paste together charming dungeon designs within minutes.
The October issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.
We have reached the final article in the series about making mapping tiles. In previous articles (Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4) we discussed how to design such tiles, how to print or export them for use in other software, and how to make raster symbols in CC3+ from them so we could use the tiles for assembling maps quickly.
But, as we pointed out in the earlier articles, exporting static bitmap images have some limitations. For example, if you rotate them, you change the direction of shadows and patterns in the fill. One could just call it an acceptable tradeoff and move on, but there is a better way, and that is to turn these tiles into advanced symbols in CC3+. By making symbols that contain the actual entities in the tiles instead of static images, directions of fills and effects are calculated when the tiles are used, not when you originally make them, and it also allow you to actually change the content after placing them. In short, if you are going to make maps using the tiles inside CC3+, this is the best approach, so let us dig into how to achieve this.
