The Cartographer’s Annual November issue is now available. Seeing the popularity of the Hand-drawn Fantasy style from May and June, we decided to expand this kind of symbols to the Floorplans and Dungeons map types, and the result is this new set. Use more than 140 new, hand-crafted symbols to map building and underground lairs.
The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.
I recently started a new role-playing campaign with my group. It is set in my existing campaign world of Virana, so I already have some higher overview maps and maps of various locations, but as often is the case with new campaigns, they take place in a small local area somewhere.
So, instead of making the map up front, I decided to go for a slightly different approach this time, starting with a blank map and adding stuff to it as players explore. This gives me a lot more freedom to accommodate the various whims of players, and it gives them a greater sense of being explorers as they simply don’t have a complete map of the area.
I thought I should share some of my thoughts and experiences around this with you, maybe you can use this idea in your own campaigns?
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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 are the most recent ones:
Welcome dear cartographer’s to another wonderful selection of community maps. Their owners and makers shared them in the community forum or on our Facebook group, an we’re collecting a selection here for your pleasure. Enjoy!
Steven Nentwig‘s Kendai Relay Station for his Alternity game uses the Retro Starship style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2020.
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While the dwarves dig deep into the mountains and build their subterranean palaces into the roots of the world, the orcs settle the wastes and steppes of the world, always to fight and plunder the settlements of their enemies. Now you can add their realms to the maps in the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 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. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to September 2025) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
Last weekend I was away for a role-playing retreat with my old gaming group from high school (yes, from almost 40 years ago). We meet up once or twice a year and re-visit that imaginary world we started our rpg hobby in: the world of Aventuria of Germany’s most successful role-playing game, Das Schwarze Auge (the Dark Eye).
This time I dug out the opening scenario of the most famous campaign ever published for this game, the “Die Sieben Gezeichneten” (the Seven Marked) also known as the “Borbarad Campaign” after the main antagonist. As the game world has an ongoing history and metaplot, this campaign takes place in its past, which suits me just fine. It’s gonna be a long time until we manage to finish this campaign (if we ever do), but it was a great start and worked surprisingly well.
I created a version of the first adventure’s travel map in Campaign Cartographer and marked the steps of the heroes’ journey afterwards. Here they are for you to check out.
[Download the FCW File over on the Profantasy forum]
The Cartographer’s Annual October issue is now available. Explore the 10 levels of Delomoro Keep mapped in glorious detaul by Kevin Goebel (Royal Scribe). Make it your adventuring base, assault it to defeat the evil baran living there, or sneak into its cellars to steal its treasures.
The October issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.
In Informative Maps 01 – City Demographics I tackled how you can use demographics coloring to visually show the demographics of your city. Another very useful way to add information to city maps is the use of a map index. While an index can technically benefit any map type, it is especially useful in city maps because the density of information typically found in city maps, such as street and location names.
CC3+ has the ability to automatically generate such indexes from your map files, and show with a grid reference to make it easy to find the feature in the map itself. The command itself is extremely easy to use, but we can also improve things by being smart about our layers.
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