ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

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 we did:

Let’s take a look back to March and examine some of the maps our community members shared that month.

Royal Scribe created another of his wonderful floorplans, this time showing a Royal Chapel. You’ll find several floors, the roof layout and – of course – hidden crypts underneath the chapel in the map’s forum thread. The maps were done with a mix of Dungeon Dungeons 3, Symbol Set 2 and Sue Daniel’s floorplan styles from the Annuals.

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The May Annual issue is available, bringing you an isometric, symbol-based style to create sewer maps. Created by Griffin Peak Productions, the symbol tiles slot together on a perspective grid to quickly create detailed layouts.

The May issue is now available to download for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.

Sometimes when you draw a box, you may wish to pretty up the corners a bit, for example by making them rounded or just cutting them off. This might be for many reasons, perhaps you are making a box to be a nice frame around your map legend, or you are making some kind of map marker. And of course, this technique doesn’t just work with boxes, but with every case where you have two lines joining in some kind of corner.

If you have been seeing some of the recent live mapping videos, you may have noticed Ralf using this command to produce simple village symbols.

We have two sets of commands that are very helpful here, the Chamfer and Fillet commands. If you right click the Trim button you’ll find two versions of each of these commands. The Fillet command is for making a rounded corner, while the Chamber command makes an angled corner. The difference between the regular and Trim version of the commands is that the regular version will add the line/curve but will not trim away the extra part of the line, while the Trim version also trims the lines to the new corner shape. You normally want to use the Trim versions of these commands, but feel free to experiment.

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You want to marvel at those lofty peaks clad in eternal ice and snow, rising up from their surroundings like frost giants among goblins? See their snowy caps glitter white under sun or moon and can been seen from far away? Then you’ll enjoy this collection of free monthly art for the Hand-drawn Overland style, as it includes a range of Snowy Mountains to use in your maps.

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 April 2026 is included in the one download. All previous content has been folded into the latest update for CC3+ (Update 28).

The April issue of the Annual 2026 has been released, giving you a second installment of content for January’s Hand-drawn City style with new symbols and drawing tools.

You can now put your cities, including castles and extensive fortifications on looming cliffs, bury the dead in proper graveyards and cemeteries, and plant lush greenery in city parks and the rural surroundings.

The April issue is now available to download for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.

There is no getting around the fact that CC3+ contains a huge number of symbols, especially if you own all the add-ons, symbol sets and annuals, and even more if you have installed some of the available free community made sets, or maybe even imported images you have found yourself as symbols.

We have different ways in how we like to go looking for symbols, but one way some people like is having a kind of symbol book they can flip through. I still have memories of software in the last millennium that often came with such printed books in their box, for example a clipart book showing all the clipart available in the software. These days, such books are not quite as useful, because as computers evolved and became more powerful, they started offering on-screen preview and search features. Still, sometimes flipping through a book, either in physical form, or a pdf on your screen can be nice. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can even keep that book on one screen and work with CC3+ on another.

Now, CC3+ doesn’t come with any such books, neither printed nor digital, but it contains the tools that allow you to make one for yourself.

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• The March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2026 is available, presenting a map pack containting a fantasy town and the detailed floorplans of the Black Cat Inn.
• The free monthly symbols of March add Mesoamerican structures and settlements to the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.

Resources

• Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping video from our playlist on YouTube.
• Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for February.

Articles

• Remy has a few tricks up his sleeve on how to quickly rearrange symbols into custom symbol catalogs.
• Ralf talks about his latest hobby project in which he prepares to create a new hex mapping style for his new rpg campaign game featuring hexcrawl-style adventuring.

Reminders

• CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
• Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.

Maps have been an integral part of the fantasy role-playing hobby since its inception, but often we think of the classic gridded dungeon map as the basic map that is used during the game. The overland map is secondary, showing the overall lay of the land, and is perhaps just used to find out the travel distance between the town the adventures starts in and the next dungeon.

But there is another type of map that can see heavy use during the game session: the overland hex map used for a so-called hexcrawl. What is a hexcrawl do you ask? It is a type of game where the adventure consists not of an overarching plot or a specific dungeon that the heroes follow or delve into, but of a region that they can freely explore via a hex map. They go from hex to hex, encountering what the GM or adventure has in store there and then decide where to go next.

I first encountered this type of game (and the accompanying hex maps) not in fantasy gaming, but in science fiction. We used to play Traveller in the day, and hex maps where a big part of the game. Since then, I’ve always loved them but admittedly used them in my games fairly rarely. But now I am starting a new campaign game, and guess what it is in large parts a hexcrawl game. That means I’m looking at creating my own hex maps again, as you can see in our latest YouTube live mapping session.

Hex grids have been a part of Campaign Cartographer for a long time, and in CC3 we introduced special hex symbol functionality to make creating such maps even quicker and easier. Check out the Overland Hex Map style from the Annual Vol. 4, Overland CC3 Hex Maps in Vol. 7, Mike Schley Hex maps in Vol 12, and of course a large variety of hex styles in Cosmographer 3.

None of these are exactly what I’m looking for, so I’ll be creating a new style for my own use, fitting for the Cloud Empress game I’ll be running for a while. That way I can expand the published game world with my own content without breaking the visual style.

I’m looking forward to sharing my progress here and on the ProFantasy forum. Have you used and created hex maps yourself? Do you like creating them, or is their layout too abstract for your liking. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You need towering structures rising from a jungle canopy or megalithic temples sitting on a lonely desert plateau? We’ve got you covered, so let’s climb the impressive step pyramids in this month’s free symbols of Mesoamerican Structures.

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).