What it’s in the works here are Profantasy HQ at the moment do you ask? Well, apart from behind the scenes work on Campaign Cartographer itself, the ongoing Annual development and the daily routine, we are getting close to finishing the next installment of the Token Treasury series.
The artist, Rich Longmore, has delivered as wonderful new collection of nasties (and not so nasties) for your games and maps, and I am now converting them to CC3+ format, creating varicolor versions and building catalogs. Look for the release later this month! You can check out the first installment of the Token Treasury here.
Recently, I completed a large-scale city map over the course of about three months. It is only my second map with City Designer 3, so I am by no means an expert, but between the two maps I’ve recently spent a lot of hours with the tools, learning some of the ins and outs of the how as well as the why.
Both of the cities (well, one city and one town) I’ve built have been quite large for their size. I’d specifically like to consider these kinds of settlements, as opposed to a quaint fishing village or a small farming hamlet. Because these are smaller settlements, by definition less time will go into them. Also, when I was doing my research on how to start mapping a large city or town, I found very few resources on how to tackle such an ambitious project. Continue reading »
The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available and brings you an amazing local area style by Sue Daniel, who painstakingly recreated the style of early modern cartographer Joseph de Ferraris.
Ferraris was one of the first map-makers to map whole regions in exquisite detail and high accuracy and his maps of today’s Belgium are works of art. With Sue’s Ferraris style you can recreate this wonderful type of map in CC3+ for real-world or imaginary locations. The detailed 12-page mapping guide that is included with the Annual issue takes you through all the steps of assembling the dozens of fill styles and hundreds of symbols into your own little piece of cartographic art.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the February issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
As is our tradition for the Cartographer’s Annual we produce an extra issue each year and make one of them available for anyone. For 2019, the bonus issue IS the free one.
The Bonus issue “Symbol Drawing Tools” takes advantage of some recent updates to add drawing tools for mountain ranges, scattered woodlands and other terrain types to the overland styles of CC3+. The updates allow the creation of drawing tools that place randomized symbols along paths and fill polygons with a random scattering of symbols. The included mapping guide teaches you how to set up these kind of tools yourself. The example map as shown on the right was drawn with drawing tools only. No individual symbols were placed.
The bonus issue is available as a free issue and can be used by anyone with Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Download it from the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 13 web site.
A Happy New year and welcome to 2020! We hope you had great holidays and are as eager as we to start into a new year of mapping goodness. But let’s take a quick look back at December and what happened at the end of last year. We start out with the new Cartographer’s Annual, set a challenge to bring the Community Atlas to 400 maps, learn about the color palette and multi-sheet symbols and present beautiful user maps from the forum and Facebook communities.
So your New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was to finally start (or re-start) using Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus, but you don’t know where to begin? Let us help you out with a selection of great tutorials and starting points.
Video Tutorials
If you are a visual learner and want to follow video tutorials, here are some we would recommend to start out with.
Josh Plunkett does a great job at introducing you to the basics of CC3+ as a newcomer in his first video.
Follow that up with his tutorial on overland mapping and you’ve got the basics down for any overland map straight out of CC3+:
For a longer look at creating a whole overland map, check our own video with Ralf describing the process of creating a map.
PDF Guides
If you prefer reading your tutorials and follow a pdf guide, there are some great choices too.
Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus comes with a pdf Manual, that is probably still one of the best ways to learn the software. Check it out here, and follow the instructions starting on page 24 to draw your first map.
A slightly less detailed, but still very useful step by step guide to creating a map, comes with the mapping guide for the Herwin Wielink style, that comes with CC3+, available in the Documentation folder or from this link.
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Remy Monsen has challenged the community to create maps of snow and ice (i.e. winter-themed) for the Community Atlas Project. Already two beautiful maps have been created by Shessar and Lorelei, but there are a few more to go before the Atlas reaches the goal of 400 maps! There are still three weeks to go on this challenge, so hop over, check the forum thread, and whip out those ice and snow textures!
Varmstadt Springs by Lorelei
Staggering Moose Inn and Tavern by Shessar
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We are already a good bit into the new year and January, but we still like to take a quick look back at the some of the beautiful maps created by our user community in December.
André Franke created this fantastic map of a hypothetical Antarctica (without the ice) with the help of Fractal Terrain 3, Wilbur and the November Annual issue. Continue reading »
The January issue for the new Cartographer’s Annual (Vol 14) is now available for download. We are taking a look at the wonderful medieval fantasy city generator by Watabou and how to import its results into CC3+. The Watabou Cities style allows you create beautiful city maps with an easy-to-learn conversion process all on its own, and you can then use City Designer’s tools and resources to build upon the result for even more elaborate maps.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the January issue from your registration page. If not, for a few more days you can still take advantage of the early subscriber discount. Just follow the Subscribe Now button on the Annual website.
The December Annual issue is now available. It expands on January’s Worlds of Wonder 2 to give you many more symbols, drawing tools and alternative bitmap fills to make the style’s maps much more widely useful and customizable.
Instead of repeating another overland mapping guide, this month includes a detailed (7-page) Sheets & Effects guide, listing all the included sheets, their use and the attached effects, teaching you a lot about these features in CC3+ in the process.
If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the December issue is available for download on your registration page now.
Re-subscription to next year’s Annual will happen in mid-December and we’ll make sure to let anyone know when it goes live.
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What it’s in the works here are Profantasy HQ at the moment do you ask? Well, apart from behind the scenes work on Campaign Cartographer itself, the ongoing Annual development and the daily routine, we are getting close to finishing the next installment of the Token Treasury series. 
