In a personal flashback to a some very old vector symbols, I sat down to recreate the alien structures symbols from the original Dark Fantasy symbol set, this time for the Hand-drawn Fantasy style. Do you need settlements for a hive-like insectoid species? Or something weirder even? The Alien Structures give you all the options to place them on the map!
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 from August 2025 to January 2026 is included in the one download. All previous content has been folded into the latest update for CC3+ (Update 28).
We are proud to present a new contributor to the Cartographer’s Annual: Ute Gundacker, longtime community member and prolific sharer of wonderful maps with a modern or future theme to them. One of her latest endeavors, a scientific underwater site, caught our eye and Ute agreed to make it a proper style for the Annual. The style is based on the Modern Blueprints style from Symbol Set 3 – Modern but goes beyond it by using bitmap fills and symbols and adding effects and decorations that make the maps into proper thematic handouts. We hope you enjoy the style!
The February issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about using the random dungeon feature for a map depicting the innards of a magical artifact.
I decided that just randomly exploring it could end up being a bit boring, so I decided to give the players a bit of guidance, to give them targets to search for without giving them too much information about the dungeon. And what better medium for this than a player handout that is a hastily drawn partial map of the dungeon found on the corpse of some poor adventurer who never made it?
So, I dug into the list of styles available to see what could be useful for something like this. I was looking for something that looked hand-drawn, but also something that looked like it was done somewhat quickly, maybe with a bit of care, but not some map drawn by a cartographer sitting at his desk for hours. In the end, I decided on the Sticky Note Dungeons from the 2024 annual. It might sound like a weird choice initially as sticky notes don’t really scream medieval dungeon, especially since this was an in-game map supposedly drawn by an NPC. But that makes this style really work for this purpose is the fact that it has drawing tools and effects that allow you to draw lines that look hand-drawn, and the included symbols also looks like something someone could draw quickly. So I decided to used that as a base and customize it for my needs to get what I needed.
Here we go, taking a look at the last maps of 2025. All of these were shared by our community on the ProFantasy forum, enjoy!
Stephen Nentwig‘s “Sinister Convictions” map is – if I got it correctly – a rework of a map from the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas, and a wonderful one at that! Continue reading »
Do you need a nice cliff for your adventurer to scale or to fall off from? How about some impressive seaside settlements that rise up those cliffs? The January monthly symbols add these features to the Hand-drawn Fantasy set, further expanding this overland 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 from August 2025 to January 2026 is included in the one download. All previous content has been folded into the latest update for CC3+ (Update 28).
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:
If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you are – like me – a fan of maps for role-playing maps. If you are also present on social media platforms at least a little, it is also highly likely you have been – like me – presented with many ads for collections of thousands of rpg maps, promising the right kind of map for every occasion in your games. It’s always been obvious to me, though not expressively stated in those ads, that those maps were AI generated, as otherwise it is basically impossible to create such numbers of maps and not sell them at less what they cost to produce. While your opinion may differ, this always ruled them out for me as a possible purchase, because if I buy anything, I want to pay a real artist for their work and not support the creation of heaps and heaps of AI generated art. Even those who use AI generated art can create it themselves – they don’t need someone to do it for them, and disguise it as human-created work.
More recently, with the further expansion of generative AI into text-based areas, more and more full game publications have appeared among those same kind of advertisements, and the method to create them is perhaps a little less obvious. I do not intend to grace or support any of these publications with a direct link, but “Orkenspalter TV“, a German rpg YouTube channel, recently reviewed (and rightly panned) one of these products. They very rarely do negative reviews (instead focusing on a positive attitude towards the hobby), but decided it was necessary to make people aware of this new trend, because it borders on scamming, if not crossing over into that territory.
Orkenspalter cited an excellent blog article on Grimm’s Grimoire on the subject, which led me back to the aforementioned map bundles, because the article also looks at one of those products in detail. Not only does it confirm my impression that the content is obviously AI-generated, but also finds that some of the map designs in the bundle are clearly stolen from real human artists. As the creators of these bundles are obfuscated and/or sitting in hard to legally reach places, it is highly unlikely anything can be done about this, but I felt it was an important topic to talk about. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the article yourself: The 1 Million Dollar RPG Maps Bundle Scam
There is no need to run this setup, if you followed the Annual as the monthly issues were released, but if you skipped some or are only now purchasing the Annual Vol 5, you only need to use this one download.
Until next week the new year’s Annual, the Cartographer’s Annual 2026, is still available at an early-subscriber discount of 15%. Check it out here.
Welcome to a new year and a new Cartographer’s Annual, dear mappers! We start of January with a new city style, completing the trilogy od hand-drawn style that we started last year. The Hand-drawn City style combines hand-drawn symbols with bitmap textures, symbol fills and the powerful city-drawing tools of City Designer 3.
The January issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.
The early-subscriber discount is still available for a few days, so you can get it at 15% discount. If you subscribed to the 2025 Cartographer’s Annual and missed the re-subscription offer, let us and we’ll resend the link to you.
