ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

CC4 News

• Simon announces the upcoming crowdfunding for CC4.
• Ralf previews the sidebar feature in CC4’s interface.
• CC4 will have an powerful new river command, which Ralf presents here.

News

• The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2026 is available, bringing you an isometric floorplan style for sewer maps by Griffin Peak Productions.
• The free monthly symbols of April add snow-covered peaks and mountains to the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.

Resources

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

Articles

• Remy takes a look at creating rounded and angled corners on polygons in his latest command spotlight.>.
• Phil “Secg” Benson presents his Alpengard TTRPG and talks about the mapping for the project where he used CC3+.

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.

We’ll shortly be crowdfunding a new version of Campaign Cartographer 4, along with new versions of Dungeon Designer and City Designer. If you are an existing user, we’ll send you a link to a secret backer level with a modest discount if you are signed up to our newsletter.

The latest version of our legendary map-making software, CC4, features:

• An updated interface with improved dialog boxes, icons and a shiny new sidebar which gives you access to settings and information to assist your work flow.
• Virtual Table Top support which includes major VTT platforms, with full support for light sources.
• Entirely new map styles with symbols and fill styles handcrafted for overland, dungeon and city maps.
• Automated creation of dungeons, villages and towns, so you can get started on your map-making in minutes – not based on generative AI.
• Automatic river creation with natural flows and tapering width,

Your backing will mean more and better features – and we have an extensive wish list! More symbols, more styles, more features.

Rivers

The new river tool of CC4 creates meandering waterways and sprawling river networks for a whole continent or island with a few mouse-clicks. Rivers get wider as they flow from their source, connect in believable ways and run into the sea where you would expect them too.

Rivers have always been a topic that could vex the amateur cartographer, and to draw them realistically can be challenging. The new river command that comes with CC4 gives you a shortcut that can create a single river or whole river systems with the push of a button. You still get full control over the output, from colour shading and texturing, through setting starting and ending width, to moving individual nodes about.

To the left is an example of an island river system created with the river too, where you can see the intricate and natural looking result. Creating the same by hand would be extremely time-consuming.
You can also draw your rivers individually, setting their starting and ending widths, connect them to existing rivers and add them to your river network.

Rivers are a new type of drawing entity that have varying width along their length and specific properties like colour and fill style for each of their spans between nodes. This makes them extremely versatile and open to expansion and additional use cases in the future.

The Sidebar

CC4 adds a sidebar to the interface that makes much more information directly accessible. You can see which entities are selected, modify that selection and do command operations directly from there.

The new sidebar, which is of course configurable and can be turned on and off, is a new area of the interface which lists information on the current command and all the entities that you have selected. You can see whether anything is not supposed to be there and remove it with a simple click.

Say you want to delete several tree symbols, but they are all mixed up with other entities like roads, rivers and background polygons. You are not sure which layers they are all on and checking that to select by layers would just be time-consuming. You can now just select everything in the general area and de-select entities by clicking on them in the list in the sidebar. See the example on the right for how this appears.

The sidebar also lists the options the current command would give you for selecting additional entities, making those options much more quickly accessible. In the example on the right, once you are happy with your selected entities, you can click on the Do It button to execute the Erase command.

If you are placing symbols, the sidebar will display all the symbol options you are usually getting by right-clicking, making them visible at a glance while the symbol itself is also still visible.

The sidebar can also display the colour palette for easy reference, and more options will be added in the future to expand its capabilities.

By Phil “Secg” Benson

As an avid gamer and self-confessed “map guy”, I’ve enjoyed ProFantasy’s mapping tools for years. When I started creating the Alpengard TTRPG back in 2011, I knew I’d need maps to help bring the game to life.

It took some time for me to deep-dive into CC3+ and DD3, and I made my fair share of mistakes along the way, which were fortunately easily correctible thanks to the user-friendliness. I really enjoy the ProFantasy programs’ flexibility and tools, such as using different styles of water for freshwater and seawater, and generating edge-faded background layers for highlands and forests.

Alpengard: Tales and Adventurers, the game’s core rulebook, contains a richly developed primary campaign world—the World of the Stonemeres. CC3+ and DD3 were ideal as I laid out the landscapes for epic Stonemeres adventures. The super-cool mapping tools helped me release my imagination through meticulous attention to detail.

You can check out maps from the World of the Stonemeres on the Alpengard “Worlds” page, including battle-encounter maps that go with a challenging intro adventure found in Chapter 13 of the core rulebook: Rattling in Clatterbone Ravine.

Released in January 2025, Alpengard is an indie fantasy TTRPG that offers you a unique d30-based roll-high system along with dynamic gaming elements:
• Enjoy character flexibility—tailor your abilities to match your character’s personality (an intelligent warrior can be every bit as effective as a strong or quick one).
• Invoke pneuma—an energy pool that enhances your odds and fuels your powers (pneuma is a limited resource you must manage wisely).
• Entwine magic objects to your soul so they grow with you throughout your quests (you don’t have to ditch your favorite wand or cloak because it became obsolete).
• Use all your lifeskills, even cooking… fricasseed troll-nuggets might be crucial to your survival (non-combat-related talents can still be key for successful adventuring).
• All magic-users—druids, exarchs, monks, wizards—are considered clerics and can take healing powers (no single class is “stuck being the healer”).

Alpengard: Tales and Adventurers is a combination Player’s Guide + Gamemaster’s Guide + Campaign World Guide. Loads of prototype monsters are available for free on the Alpengard “Foes” page, and pregenerated characters can be found on the “Friends” page.

I want to give a huge shout-out to ProFantasy Software for creating outstandingly efficient, fun-to-use mapping tools—they’re ideal whether you’re building your own campaign world or just designing adventure maps for fun.

Cheers to Great Gaming, and Keep Questing!
–Secg

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.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

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).