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.
The cold season is here again, at least in the northern hemisphere, and white stuff is falling down outside my window.
There are a couple of nice styles for making winter maps, such as Winter Trail and Winter Village, but what if you just want to make your overland map look a bit more seasonal?
One of my favorite effects is the RGB Matrix Process. This effects may look a bit complicated if you just look at the dialog, but this is just all about simple mathematical manipulation of the color values. Using this dialog you can strengthen or weaken an individual color component, such as adding more red or less green. You can even completely swap color components around, for example swapping the red and blue components. CC3+ has other ways of manipulating colors too, but none of the other effects can accomplish the same as the RGB Matrix process can.
I’ve already explained the effect in another article a few years back, The RGB Matrix Process Effect, so today I’ll just use it to show you how to give a quick makeover to an existing map, you can read more about the calculations in the linked article.
The December and Bonus issues of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 are available, bringing you the second part of the hand-drawn dungeon style, focusing on the outdoor aspects, and adding random dungeon functionality to the style.
The Cartographer’s Annual subscription for 2026 is now available, and you can subscribe at a reduced cost. If you are a current subscriber, be sure to check your email, as you should have received your re-subscription offer that way. Otherwise visit the Annual 2026 web page for the early subscription discount.
We have the first three issue planned out and youc an see previews of those on the page linked above. We start off with a new city style, applying the hand-drawn treatment that you’ve seen for overland and dungeon maps to cities, towns, and villages.
We then have a new style by Ute Gundacker for modern floorplans in an architectural drawing style with a special emphasis on undersea stations. But these can be used for any kind of modern facilities of course! And for March there will be a new set of detailed maps by Kevin Goebel with his signature high quality floorplans and battle maps.
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:
As usual, we close the year with the Annual’s bonus issue and make one issue available for free – this year it’s the Ancient Realms Revisited style from January.
The bonus issue adds the Random Dungeon generator for the Hand-drawn Dungeon style that we’ve been developing this year. Created randomized layouts with room, corridors, caverns and flooded areas, and then add to your random layput with the the normal tools of the style – they included mapping guide teaches you how to bridge the gap.
The Bonus issue can now be downloaded by all subscribers from their registration page, and it is also freely available from the Annual page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.
Annual 2026 subscribers should have received their re-subscription offer for the Annual 2026. Please contact us, if you haven’t received your email.
Welcome dear cartographers to another collection of beautiful community-made maps. Check out these great maps of the CC3+ community. Thank you everybody for your awesome work!
Will Mason‘s Monastery of the Toiling Lady is a very impressive floorplan of a monastery sitting on a cliff above the sea. You gotta love those cliffs! Continue reading »
Do you have areas in your world where the forces of Good or Evil hold special power? Or where Chaos and Order clash in endless battle? Do you need to mark treasure locations or places of great magic? The December monthly symbols add options for these kind of landmarks to 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.
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.
