ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

There is no getting around the fact that CC3+ contains a huge number of symbols, especially if you own all the add-ons, symbol sets and annuals, and even more if you have installed some of the available free community made sets, or maybe even imported images you have found yourself as symbols.

We have different ways in how we like to go looking for symbols, but one way some people like is having a kind of symbol book they can flip through. I still have memories of software in the last millennium that often came with such printed books in their box, for example a clipart book showing all the clipart available in the software. These days, such books are not quite as useful, because as computers evolved and became more powerful, they started offering on-screen preview and search features. Still, sometimes flipping through a book, either in physical form, or a pdf on your screen can be nice. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can even keep that book on one screen and work with CC3+ on another.

Now, CC3+ doesn’t come with any such books, neither printed nor digital, but it contains the tools that allow you to make one for yourself.

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Maps have been an integral part of the fantasy role-playing hobby since its inception, but often we think of the classic gridded dungeon map as the basic map that is used during the game. The overland map is secondary, showing the overall lay of the land, and is perhaps just used to find out the travel distance between the town the adventures starts in and the next dungeon.

But there is another type of map that can see heavy use during the game session: the overland hex map used for a so-called hexcrawl. What is a hexcrawl do you ask? It is a type of game where the adventure consists not of an overarching plot or a specific dungeon that the heroes follow or delve into, but of a region that they can freely explore via a hex map. They go from hex to hex, encountering what the GM or adventure has in store there and then decide where to go next.

I first encountered this type of game (and the accompanying hex maps) not in fantasy gaming, but in science fiction. We used to play Traveller in the day, and hex maps where a big part of the game. Since then, I’ve always loved them but admittedly used them in my games fairly rarely. But now I am starting a new campaign game, and guess what it is in large parts a hexcrawl game. That means I’m looking at creating my own hex maps again, as you can see in our latest YouTube live mapping session.

Hex grids have been a part of Campaign Cartographer for a long time, and in CC3 we introduced special hex symbol functionality to make creating such maps even quicker and easier. Check out the Overland Hex Map style from the Annual Vol. 4, Overland CC3 Hex Maps in Vol. 7, Mike Schley Hex maps in Vol 12, and of course a large variety of hex styles in Cosmographer 3.

None of these are exactly what I’m looking for, so I’ll be creating a new style for my own use, fitting for the Cloud Empress game I’ll be running for a while. That way I can expand the published game world with my own content without breaking the visual style.

I’m looking forward to sharing my progress here and on the ProFantasy forum. Have you used and created hex maps yourself? Do you like creating them, or is their layout too abstract for your liking. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The current bi-weekly roleplaying campaign I am running is the excellent “Borellus Connection” for Pelgrane Press’ Fall of Delta Green game. I had the pleasure to create some of the maps in the published book, from the heroin smuggling routes of the 1960s, via a drug lords compound to a Beirut warehouse floorplan.

More maps were created by other talented mappers, meaning the book has plenty of material, but I still found myself wanting more as our campaign progressed – you can never have enough maps!

Especially one location in Marseille tickled my fancy, as it is very interesting geographically, but at the same time difficult to put into a map – and the book didn’t have one. So I sat down, fired up CC3+ and used my trusty Dracula Dossier modern floorplan style to map the villain’s lair in Marseille.

Now, the location has some otherworlds components and the description is vague enough to make any mapper question their sanity, so I decided to not try to pin down everything to the inch. Instead I focused on the relative position to things to each other and convey the atmosphere of the place (one of a claustrophic maze). It worked quite well in practice during the game.

So in case you need a labyrinthine hideout for your games, or you are even running the Borellus Connection campaign (which I highly recommend), you can grab the FCW map here.

by Ralf Schemmann

If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you are – like me – a fan of maps for role-playing maps. If you are also present on social media platforms at least a little, it is also highly likely you have been – like me – presented with many ads for collections of thousands of rpg maps, promising the right kind of map for every occasion in your games. It’s always been obvious to me, though not expressively stated in those ads, that those maps were AI generated, as otherwise it is basically impossible to create such numbers of maps and not sell them at less what they cost to produce. While your opinion may differ, this always ruled them out for me as a possible purchase, because if I buy anything, I want to pay a real artist for their work and not support the creation of heaps and heaps of AI generated art. Even those who use AI generated art can create it themselves – they don’t need someone to do it for them, and disguise it as human-created work.

More recently, with the further expansion of generative AI into text-based areas, more and more full game publications have appeared among those same kind of advertisements, and the method to create them is perhaps a little less obvious. I do not intend to grace or support any of these publications with a direct link, but “Orkenspalter TV“, a German rpg YouTube channel, recently reviewed (and rightly panned) one of these products. They very rarely do negative reviews (instead focusing on a positive attitude towards the hobby), but decided it was necessary to make people aware of this new trend, because it borders on scamming, if not crossing over into that territory.

Orkenspalter cited an excellent blog article on Grimm’s Grimoire on the subject, which led me back to the aforementioned map bundles, because the article also looks at one of those products in detail. Not only does it confirm my impression that the content is obviously AI-generated, but also finds that some of the map designs in the bundle are clearly stolen from real human artists. As the creators of these bundles are obfuscated and/or sitting in hard to legally reach places, it is highly unlikely anything can be done about this, but I felt it was an important topic to talk about. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the article yourself: The 1 Million Dollar RPG Maps Bundle Scam

Public Domain image taken from Wikipedia

A story about modern maps and ancient geography appeared in my newsfeed recently, and I found it very inspiring for my own map-making. A scientific project has assembled the latest archaelogical and historical finds about the road system of the Roman Empire into the most comprehensive digital atlas yet (there have been others previously).

This is Itiner-e, a zoomable road map that can be displayed as an overlay over contemporary maps. It paints an amazing picture of the transportation network of the Roman Empire and for our purposes can serve as wonderful inspiration for fictitious places of similar technological level.

It also great fun to look around places where you live and have traveled too. While I live in a part of Germany that the Romans never colonized, and therefore none of their roads a close by, I did find an old Roman road in Wales that I have hiked on a few years back.

Brughmans, T., de Soto, P., Pažout, A. and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup, P. (2024) Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads. https://itiner-e.org/

Last weekend I was away for a role-playing retreat with my old gaming group from high school (yes, from almost 40 years ago). We meet up once or twice a year and re-visit that imaginary world we started our rpg hobby in: the world of Aventuria of Germany’s most successful role-playing game, Das Schwarze Auge (the Dark Eye).

This time I dug out the opening scenario of the most famous campaign ever published for this game, the “Die Sieben Gezeichneten” (the Seven Marked) also known as the “Borbarad Campaign” after the main antagonist. As the game world has an ongoing history and metaplot, this campaign takes place in its past, which suits me just fine. It’s gonna be a long time until we manage to finish this campaign (if we ever do), but it was a great start and worked surprisingly well.

I created a version of the first adventure’s travel map in Campaign Cartographer and marked the steps of the heroes’ journey afterwards. Here they are for you to check out.


[Download the FCW File over on the Profantasy forum]

Earlier this year I was in Portugal, hiking on the Rota Vicentina or the Fishermen’s Trail. It’s a great coastal hike with beautiful towns, stunning cliffs and amazing beaches, but it is also an area of special interest for us map-makers. Fraught and problematic as the following era of European colonization and exploitation is, there is no denying that one of its starting points was here in Portugal where sailors and explorers set off to go beyond the edges of the maps – and hopefully get rich and famous in the process.

The Fisherman’s Trail starts just a bit south of the town of Sines. It’s not a big tourist destination and more important as an oil terminal nowawadays, but it is also the birthplace of Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India via the sea route around Africa. His statue overlooks the bay and harbour of Sines today.

I stopped in Sines on my way back to Lisbon after the hike and took the opportunity to visit the excellent little local museum in Sines’s castle.

While pondering the history of the town and the voyages of its most famous resident, it occurred to me that this kind of exploration – finding new routes to important destinations – is one that lends itself very well to our kind of hobby. The map – and the process of creating a map – is the focal point of the activity. In a way, the map IS the plot of a grand adventure. I’ve played in role-playing game campaigns, where the player characters were members of a grand expedition to reach the other side of the world, past enemies and obstances who were blocking the easier, existing routes.

So, if you ever find yourself in that part of the world, I recommend not speeding by the seaport of Sines, but stop, take a break and visit the birthplace of Vasca da Gama, whose successful voyage certainly played a part in shaping the following centuries.

• The August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available, adding a set of awesome battle maps created by Kevin Gobel showing the pirate haven of Fort Morgan.
• August’s free monthly symbols expand the Hand-drawn Fantasy style with elven settlements.

Resources

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

Articles

• Remy Monsen takes a look at the text command in CC3+ and how to leverage the insertion point functionality.
• Take a look at some images from ProFantasy’s presence at GenCon 2025 in Indianapolis.

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.

[Download the FCW file and custom symbol]

Oh Mappers, my least favorite map…..Overland. As usual, I get my typical anxiety when mapping an overland map. There’s something about where the mountains, rivers, desserts and grasslands go that get my head in a tizzy. And, as usual, I just dug in and came up with something. Is it great? No. Is it good? Debatable. Is it passable? Yes. Will my players care or notice if a river is somewhere that is typically geographically impossible? Absolutely not. So, with this in mind I give you…..this map 😀

I’ve not anything to say about what I did, or how I did it, because frankly even a beginner can put together an overland map just as well as I can. What I will say that I really like about this annual (although the 2015 year has two, Ancient Realms and Ancient Realms II both by TJ Vandel) is, the first gives you the basics (fills, symbols, tools, location icons, tools, etc. ). It’s lovely style, artistically speaking. Now the second, Ancient Realms II gives you a template to make your own location icons, so for this installment, I made one location icon from a public domain png, following the Mapping Guide, and included it in the map. I found one thing I really liked using this style….i really like the location icons instead of specific symbols. This can be useful when you are providing a larger area map, but still want your players to know where key locations are, then if you want, you can break it down further using the Local Area Maps, which also comes with this Annual.

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.

One nice thing you can do with CC3+ maps is to have multiple views embedded in one map. For example, in the Forest Trail annual style, you can choose if you want to see the treetops, like you would normally see a location in a forest if viewed from above, or if you want to hide the canopies so you can see what actually goes on under the trees, quite important for a battle map.

There are also cases where you want to make a map with private information for the gamemaster, and a public version of the map for the players.

Or maybe you need an overland map with a lot of information, perhaps showing both political information, economical information and climate information, but showing it all at the same time looks pretty messy.

Of course, if you have used CC3+ even just a little bit, you know that I am talking about hiding and showing sheets here. For the overland map, you can have one sheet with a political overlay, one with economic information, and one with a climate overlay, and only show the desired sheet, simple enough. For your GM’s secrets, just put them on a sheet by themselves that you hide when you export the player map.

But, what if your view requires switching on and off multiple sheets? Due to different effects, that political overlay may actually consist of one sheet with political borders, one sheet with the text associated with the information, and maybe another sheet with symbols related to this overlay. Once you have multiple sheets involved, it can get a bit harder to turn on/off the right sheets for any given occasion, which is what we’ll have a short look at today.

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