We’ve been working hard on the new Token Treasury product line and are happy to make the first set available as a pre-release offer.

We’ve expanded the range of monsters in the first set to 100, and created them both in a round and a square variant, so you can choose you’re preferred token look. Both come with a set of frames depicting the monster’s combat role (melee, ranged, magic-user or captain). These can be freely mixed and matched, creating hundreds of possible combinations.

The CC3+ version of the token set comes with everything neatly organized in sets of symbol catalogs and contains templates on which you can easily combine monsters and frames and then export them to you jpg or png format for use in the virtual tabletop software or your choice. Of course you can also simply plop them into your Dungeon Designer 3 map!

The pre-release version will install only if you own Campaign Cartographer 3+, but the full version (to be released early next year) will offer you the option to install it separately, for direct use in any virtual tabletop software or the graphics package of your choice. There will be no need to re-purchase the full version; you will receive a new setup file. There may be a few other changes and additions in the full version.

The Token Treasury – Monsters is now available at a special pre-release discount of 15%. Just follow this link to order it.

Welcome to the December round up of user maps that caught our eye. As usual this is based as much on random chance as anything else. If you want to see more, join the Facebook community group or sign up in our forum!

Christina Trani (Lorelei) produced a set of wonderful building floorplans based on a single symbol in a city map: The Blue House.

Continue reading »

Part II: Symbols for special places

“Over the day-smitten towers and walls of Shudm (uglier by day, all its black filth and spiritual garbage too openly displayed), the air began to sing and to ripple, and then grow oppressively silent and motionless. And then the air hardened, like cooling lava. And like lava, the air darkened, until it let in the fierce glare of the sun, but nothing else. Nothing – no lesser light, no noise, no breath of wind or vapor, neither dust nor rain – no wisp of anything. Even the vagrant corpse-eater birds could no longer get in, or out. Like a tomb. Above and also beneath. Inside – not simply a dome but an egg of leaden crystal, there was Shudm now, and the afternoon went by, and sunset, which was true dawn to the ghouls, and night, and midnight. And in the first overcast minutes of the new morning, there was not one sensible thing in the city that did not know it had been trapped.”
Tanith Lee, Delirium’s Mistress

And so, the last days of the ghouls of Shudm began – trapped by this spell of Sovaz, the daughter of Ashrarn, Lord of the Night. In Tanith Lee’s novel these ghouls were an amalgam of ghouls and classical vampires, dependent on eating flesh and drinking blood but not harmed by sunlight. As they became trapped, they had only each other left as food and after the last had eaten himself, their fate was sealed. Sovaz had chosen her very special way of revenge for what they did to her before… Maybe it was inspired by this story of Tanith Lee, that in one of the sourcebooks of RdW the players started their adventure, waking up trapped under an invisible force dome in the house of a mighty vampire.

This chapter of my map-making article will be about making symbols for special places of the campaign. For those who read the WIP thread in the forum, this chapter may contain redundancies, but nevertheless for my understanding of fantasy maps it is maybe the most important chapter.
I like it a lot when a map for an RPG campaign contains parts of the narrative of the world. That means that I like to build dedicated symbols, or scenarios on the map which tell stories, giving more information than just the landscape.

In this chapter I show several symbols I’ve made for the map, along with the explanation of how I made the symbol with the background as written in the original RdW sourcebooks.

Let’s start with the symbol for the magic force dome I mentioned above, protecting a powerful vampire who is looking for fresh blood and trapped a group of players in his home:

Continue reading »

We continue Jay Johnson’t city mapping article with part 2. Go here for part 1.

Building Construction Techniques

I think we are at the point where I should talk about some of my building construction methods. Here are some techniques for making complex structures utilizing the HBT.

Splicing

The first building we will construct is what I will call the Building with Enclosed Courtyard. The technique I used for this can be used to construct all kinds of variations and is also what I used to construct the city walls around Melekhir. We will refer to this technique as splicing.

First choose the building style you want in the HBT. Ensure the House shape is set to option nine which is the trapezoid shape and the Roof type to option one which is gable.

Continue reading »

A new version of CC3+ is available now, fixing a few bugs and preparing CC3+ for the next releases.

Version Notes

CC3+ Version 3.89
=================
– Fixed grids not aligning correctly to snap points
– Fixed drawing tools not displaying preview
– Fixed Common sheet not being selectable in sheet dialog
– Fixed TEXPORT, TFIND, and TREPLACE not showing dialogs

CC3+ Version 3.88
=================
– Fixed bug with wall-cutting symbols not working properly

For the end of the year we blast off into space and the future with the Deckplan Geomorphs tool pack. Inspired by the work of Robert Pearce on Yet Another Traveller Blog, we’ve created the tools that allow you to create geomorphic deckplan tiles.

Of course we’ve also included a set of examples that you can modify or use straight out of the box to create large starship or space station layouts by simply assembling the tiles into various configurations. It’s as easy as importing a file, rotating it and placing it on the template adjacent to previous tiles. With Cosmographer 3, you can even just continue working on such a constructed deckplan with the normal starship tools.

Keep your eyes open for the upcoming 2018 bonus issue (by Sue Daniel) and the opportunity to resubscribe for the 2019 Cartographer’s Annual in mid-December.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the November issue is now available for download on your registration page.

Welcome, mappers, to the November newsletter. We have a focus on city mapping this month, with video tutorials by Joe Sweeney, an article by Jay Johnson and the topic of the November Annual.

News

• From this Thursday, November 22nd, until Tuesday morning, all of our cartography software is available at a 30% discount, including bundles and upgrades.

  Use this voucher in the checkout to take advantage of the offer: BLACK@30%.

  Get full versions in the store, and upgrades from your registered users page.

• ProFantasy will be at Dragonmeet in London, on December 1st.
• The November Annual is out with the wonderful Asian Town style by Sue Daniel.

Resources

• Here is another quasi-random selection of user maps in November’s Map of the Month highlights.
• Remy Monsen presents a variant of the Fill with Symbols and Symbols in Area commands that allows you to exclude entities from the area to fill.
• Joe Sweeney starts a new series of video tutorials on city mapping.

Articles

• Jay Johnson discusses the city mapping techniques he uses for his city of Melekhir.
• Jens Fuhrberg takes us along on his journey of creating a regional map for the world of Taranis.

November doesn’t let up… our users are still producing many, many new and wonderful maps. Here’s just a very short collection of examples. If you want to see more, join the Facebook community group or sign up in our forum!

Linda Böckstiegel continues to produces wonderful dungeon and floorplan maps, but the Tomb of the Troll Gods is an special highlight. Quite literally, check our her awesome lighting work!
Continue reading »

Dragonmeet, London’s friendliest gaming convention, is held again this year on the first weekend of December (December 1st) in London, at the Novotel in Hammersmith, like last year. ProFantasy will be there and you’re welcome to stop by to check our products, talk mapping or just say hello to yours truly (Ralf).

Look for us next to the Pelgrane booth. Final booth numbers have not been assigned, but the exhibitor’s hall should be small enough that we are easy to find. Look for the maps!

Part I: Foundations of the map

‘Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there as an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!’
Robert E. Howard, “Conan the Barbarian”

It was back in the 90’s: We were young, we played RPGs and we listened all evening to one album – the Soundtrack of ‘Conan, the Barbarian’. We played Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) and Ruf des Warlock (Call of the Warlock – RdW).

RdW was released in 1991 and is heavily influenced by the novels of Tanith Lee, especially by the Tales of the Flat Earth series. You can breathe the spirit of the 80’s and their special way of high fantasy, which was a ‘fantastic’ fantasy and not a ‘realistic’ fantasy, like a lot of contemporary fantasy literature tends to be, with a focus on character development instead of creating fantastic places and persons.
While Das Schwarze Auge became the big German rpg success, RdW is a niche game. As far as I know there are only a few people left playing RdW and sooner or later it will probably be forgotten. Maybe with my maps I play the role of a bard, singing the tales of a lost world. If it is so, I do my best that this song will be dignified. For this sake it is on me to be the chronicler and so I want to invite you to follow me and to let me tell you of the days of high adventure.

The map I make is a regional map of the northwestern part of the world of Tanaris, the world of RdW. When I make a new map, I usually start in the Jon Roberts Overland style, as it is my favorite one. But from the start I use the immense freedom CC3+ gives its users.

For some time I wanted to try the mountains by TJ Vandel (Annual issues 81, 84, 106, 107, 119 & 120), so I added these catalogs to the mountain symbols button to make the mapping process easier.
The next step is to choose a background. I delete the default frame and choose a parchment background. My resulting starting point is this:

It is always a great moment to see the blank parchment in front of me: The world is empty, the story unwritten, and it is on me to create. So let’s go! Continue reading »