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.
The March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual has been released, and it brings you a wonderful new map pack by Kevin Goebel. Explore the town of Edrinbury and the Black Cat Inn on 7 detailed maps ranging from the town through the inn floorplans all the way down to the establishment’s basement. A full description gives you hooks and adventure ideas to use in your own games. And of course you can adapt the maps in CC3+ for your own settings.
The March 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.
There is no denying that there is a lot of symbols available in CC3+, especially if you have several of the various add-ons and annuals. And at times, it can be hard to find what you want.
In CC3+, all symbols are arranged in symbol catalogs, and symbol catalogs are all associated with a map style. For example, the Mike Schley overland style have it’s own set of symbol catalogs, while the CC3 Standard overland style have a different set of symbol catalogs. CC3+ is set up this way to make it easy to find and use the symbols that belong to the current style, you should be able to access them simply by hitting the various symbol catalog buttons immediately above the mapping window. Symbols are deliberately divided into different styles because these symbols are drawn by multiple artists using multiple drawing styles, and very often don’t look all that good if you try to mix them on the same map. Just look at the mountains above. They all look good when used in the map style they belong to, but mixing them makes little sense. This is why when you click the mountains catalog button in CC3+ you will be presented with a symbol catalog containing symbols that fit your current map style instead of just the same set of mountains always.
Sometimes however, you do want to use symbols not part of your current style. Some styles are more compatible with each other than others, so there are certainly cases where a symbol from another style may look good. Generally in CC3+, you can always browse for any symbol catalog you want by hitting the Open Symbol Catalog 
button right above the symbol catalog and look for the right symbol catalog (They’re all found in subfolders under the Symbols folder in the CC3+ data directory). If you want to use many symbols from other styles however, this can lead to a lot of clicking and browsing, making creating your own symbol catalog a good idea. A custom symbol catalog gives you easy access to the symbols you have included in it, without impacting the official catalogs.
News
- The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2026 is available, presenting a new modern floorplan style by Ute Gundacker.
- The February free monthly symbols add alien 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 January.
Articles
- Remy teaches you how to create hand-drawn looking handouts for your players using random dungeon generation, the Sticky Notes Dungeon style and parchment backgounds.
- Ralf shares a map done for for his private rpg campaign, but which connects to some of his work in a published campaign.
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.
The current bi-weekly roleplaying campaign I am running is the excellent “Borellus Connection” for Pelgrane Press’ Fall of Delta Green game. I had the pleasure to create some of the maps in the published book, from the heroin smuggling routes of the 1960s, via a drug lords compound to a Beirut warehouse floorplan.
More maps were created by other talented mappers, meaning the book has plenty of material, but I still found myself wanting more as our campaign progressed – you can never have enough maps!
Especially one location in Marseille tickled my fancy, as it is very interesting geographically, but at the same time difficult to put into a map – and the book didn’t have one. So I sat down, fired up CC3+ and used my trusty Dracula Dossier modern floorplan style to map the villain’s lair in Marseille.
Now, the location has some otherworlds components and the description is vague enough to make any mapper question their sanity, so I decided to not try to pin down everything to the inch. Instead I focused on the relative position to things to each other and convey the atmosphere of the place (one of a claustrophic maze). It worked quite well in practice during the game.
So in case you need a labyrinthine hideout for your games, or you are even running the Borellus Connection campaign (which I highly recommend), you can grab the FCW map here.
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. Last week’s session was unfortunately cut short due to technical problems with the Internet connection. But we will continue the topic this week and pick up where we left last Thursday.
Welcome, dear cartographers, to the user maps of January 2026, share by our amazing mappers with the community. From old-school Forgotten Realms map to the final frontier of space, we have some beautiful creations to show again.
Royal Scribe created with wonderful ice-shrouded ruin of a dwarven temple, using a variety of dungeon styles and the Ice Caverns style of the Annual 2022.
Continue reading »
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.
