The History of a Map

Simon Rogers | October 8, 2010 |

Back in the early 80s, I began my long-running AD&D campaign set in the Jaw Peninsula. I drew a map which slowly disintegrated, and which Mark Fulford (my now business partner) copied it out by hand, adding new details. When we started ProFantasy, this was our target map for the original Campaign Cartographer for DOS. The difficult thing initially was to get trees and mountains looking decent, and the discpline of printing only to a monochrome dot matrix helped here. This was created with line art, using the 16 colours then available:

With CC Pro for DOS we added raster fill styles which enabled us to stretch the 16 colours available into a range of shades:

Then we moved onto the Windows 95 version, which gave us the chance to redo the symbol set with a wider range of solid colours.

Up to this point, it was me, a non-artist who was doing the cartography. I asked Ralf to redo the map using the Fantasy Worlds style from the Annual 2009.

Here is a close up. This map saw service recently in a mammoth weekend session of AD&D, and I have a feeling that CC3 may need some more example maps…

8 Comments

8 Responses to “The History of a Map”

  1. Ralf, on October 8th, 2010 at 12:40 pm Said:

    It’s just great to see the progression of the maps.

  2. Joachim de Ravenbel, on October 8th, 2010 at 1:09 pm Said:

    Nostagia…
    I still got the purple box of CC DOS with that map on the cover! (the floppy disks have disappeared, though, I use the box to store old picture (nostalgia x2)).

  3. Simon Rogers, on October 8th, 2010 at 1:49 pm Said:

    That brings back memories! Before that we had a ring binder with a photocopied manual.

  4. jaerdaph, on October 8th, 2010 at 3:14 pm Said:

    I always loved those old CC ads in DRAGON Magazine, but it wasn’t until the first Windows version came out that I finally decided to reward myself by purchasing the software. That was 14 years ago now!

    Campaign Cartographer – like a fine wine, it only gets better with age. 🙂

  5. Pär Lindström, on October 8th, 2010 at 6:34 pm Said:

    Great to see the development of the map. And I’m honoured that you’ve made the new version in the Fantasy world style 🙂

  6. L Lee Saunders, on October 8th, 2010 at 7:12 pm Said:

    I, as well, remember all these maps. I purchased the mini-binder versions of both CC and DD. It was soooo hard to use that I gave up and did not try again until CC2.

    CC2 was a whole different beast though! It was so easy to use (compared to the DOS version) and so powerful that I’ve been using it ever since.

  7. Simon Rogers, on October 12th, 2010 at 11:40 am Said:

    Yes – I chose this style above all the others, and the players love it.

  8. Profantasy's Map-making Journal » Blog Archive » CC3+ – The Evolution of a Map, on January 14th, 2014 at 3:13 pm Said:

    […] The very first example map we did with Campaign Cartographer was of my campaign setting, the Jaw Peninsula, and we intend to continue this tradition with CC3+. You can see the history of the map here. […]