Remy Monsen has published two new video tutorials on creating your own symbols in CC3+ on his own YouTube channel.
Symbols – Part 1: Finding and Preparing Images
Symbols – Part 2: Creating a Symbol Catalog
For this map, I took my Ancient Tombs map of the Tomb of Nefertari and followed the mapping guide provided with this annual. I’m not very proficient with Perspectives, and like the Beaumaris Castle Annual map, I decided to follow the Mapping Guide for this map, and boy am I glad I did!
Getting my top down floorplan/dungeon map of the tomb into an isometric map style was very easy with the Mapping Guide reminding me of the 3D Projection button and it’s ability to take a 2D layout and projecting the result in perspective. I used the wall symbols for this map, as I really liked the design options – and knowing what the interior of the real tomb looks like (there is that amazing site Osirisnet.net) I was able to make this map as close to the real tomb as I could – with some of my own embellishments, of course.
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
[Download the FCW file of “Ancient Rome” example map.]
Cities. Not being a fan of mapping cities, I will admit I wasn’t looking forward to another one. Laying out a city is mostly my issue, so for this map I decided to use a cheat – I decided to loosely trace over an existing map – one where I wouldn’t be infringing upon copyrights. Enter a lovely map of ancient Rome I came across is my many hours of just searching through the internet for old maps. Come on, you know you other cartographers out there do it, too! I had come across this map I had found and it really reminded me of the style of Pär Lindström’s Renaissance City Annual, so I decided I would trace it.
After importing the .png into my map using Draw>Insert File and placing it on a new sheet, then applying a transparency to it, I began tracing out my roads first. Once I had my roads placed, I set about placing buildings, rather haphazardly, as I wanted it to look unfinished in some areas, unkempt or sparse than a regularly crowded Renaissance city.
On this map, once again, I applied some of my favorite effects such as Texturize, RGB Matrix and Hue/Sat Adjustment to give it a more antiqued look and my own personal choice of palettes tend to be more muted hues. Once I was satisfied with my placement of buildings, vegetation, etc. I set about adding any little “extras”, etc. On more than one occasion I had to use the SYMSORT command, which sorts out the symbols you choose on a sheet, setting them in proper back to front order if they are layered over each other within the same sheet, as my ADD gets the best of me when mapping anything isometric in nature.
All in all, this was a relatively easy set to work with. I like the clean lines and style of this Annual and I could actually see myself using it again for my own campaign.
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
Welcome to the second half of the year, dear fellow map-makers. June has been an amazing month with many new mappers joining our community via the Humble Bundle campaign. Thank you all for joining in and supporting Doctors without borders.
News
- The July Annual issue presents the Spectrum Overland style by Sue Daniel.
Resources
- The archived live mapping videos of the last month are available on YouTube.
- Enjoy all the beautiful Maps of the Month created by our users in June.
- Christian Trani continues her “All the Annuals“ series , where she creates a map for each of the Annual issues, starting with the Annual 2019. Check out the maps for April, May, and June of that year.
Articles
- Ari Gilder continues his series on city building with a look at some special features of the city’s districts.
- In part 2 of his Perspectives article Remy Monsen looks at creating battlements for his ruined buildings.
We’ve continued our weekly live mapping sessions to great fun and success. Here is a list of the new videos on available on YouTube:
Modern Streets with Symbol Set 3 (by Remy Monsen)
Starship with Cosmographer 3
The Watabou City style from the January Annual 2020
The Spectrum Overland style from the June Annual 2020
Fractal Terrains 3 to CC3+
June was another great month with amazing user maps being posted both on the ProFantasy forum and the Facebook community. Let’s take a look at just a few examples!
Wyvern created this amazingly detailed map of an ant hive, using an old “modern cave” style from the Annual Vol 1.
Continue reading »
This was a fun project. Knowing I have an Isometric version of this tomb in an upcoming annual to map out, led me to do a little research on just exactly how or what I was going to map. I wanted to find something simple, as I am not very familiar with the isometric/perspectives maps ProFantasy offers, although I do own them, I just haven’t found myself using them, which makes this project even better! Anyway, I found my way to a fantastic site, https://www.osirisnet.net/3d-tours/e_3d-tours.htm which led me to tomb QV66, otherwise known as the tomb of Queen Nefertari, one of the most beautiful tombs found to date. Continue reading »
The July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available for all subscribers. Create wonderful sprawling and detailed overland maps with Sue Daniel’s new style “Spectrum Overland”.
More than 150 highly detailed symbols of mountains, hills, trees and towns make each map a little masterpiece to explore. We will expanding the style with another set of gorgeous symbols in a second issue later this year to give you even more options.
If you want to see a Spectrum Overland being created, check out this Live Mapping session from last Thursday, where Ralf goes through the whole map creation process, just as if following the pdf mapping guide.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the July issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
Hello again mappers! Welcome back to this series on weaving the cartography and tale of a city or town using CC3+ and City Designer 3. I hope you’ve read the back issues (part1, part2, part3a, part3b, part4). Last time we delved deep into the Random Street tool, an essential part of large city mapping. There’s still more to say about the particulars of that tool – we’ll cover that later.
Today I’d like to continue the discussion from Part 4 about district style. I’ll of course continue using my example map of New Cassia to demonstrate. We talked last time about what makes a district unique from its neighbor, and we explored using building style to differentiate. Today we’ll cover other flourishes that can be sprinkled strategically throughout a map.
One thing to note: for all of these suggestions of unique or common elements, don’t feel limited only to my suggestions here! Find things that are applicable to the particular characteristics of your city.
Common Elements Checklist
Before we cover that which makes districts different, let’s talk about what makes them similar. Take some time and think about what buildings you want to be present in all/most districts. What kinds of things do all walks of life tend to have? Maybe your city has some unique elements based on its government (maybe a major magistrate’s office per district and smaller satellite branches throughout), its geography (perhaps regular watering stations for pack animals in a desert trade city) or its religious history (statues of Orcus throughout a city of necromancers). Think carefully back to your notes about why the city exists and what its primary function is to guide you.
Once you come up with this list (some of this may be trial and error in your first few districts), you’ll actually have a checklist for every district to make sure you’ve appropriately placed these elements (or not – perhaps no taverns allowed in the religious district). Decide if each district needs one or multiple of these elements, and in what concentration. Doing this will bring a beautiful unifying theme across your map, emphasizing that it is one city. I use color to highlight these elements, but they can be done with other methods (certain buildings, effects or spacing).
Here are some examples of common elements I’ve used in New Cassia:
Inns & Taverns
Most cities will be full of houses of lodging, food, recreation and of course drinking. You can easily consider those to be some of the buildings laid down by the Random Street tool, but I wanted to specially call out these buildings by having a unique brown-colored roof (a rarity in the city) as helpful waypoints wherever adventurers may be – they always know they can stop nearby. I tried to ensure that at any given point, there is a tavern close by, except for some of the poorer districts, or the religious district. Continue reading »
Well THIS was a challenge. As usual, mapping outside of dungeon mapping gives me a little anxiety, but I dug in a think the end result wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and I rather like it. I opted to do the 3d perspective of a castle, as this, I think is the most challenging map to create in this series. We are all pretty used to mapping top-down, so that didn’t seem like it would be useful to as many people as another 3d map in this style would.
(Download the FCW file of the castle.) (See the more info on the Annual “Beaumaris Castle” here.) Continue reading »
