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.

Continue reading »

[Download the FCW file]

Hello, I am back with another All the Annuals, 2015 Dracula Dossier. This map just begs to be played in some horror RPG setting, doesn’t it? So I went super simple on this one….no furniture or objects to distract, just the basic floorplan, building outline. This map, in my mind, is strictly so the players of a campaign can find their way around this hospital, which is currently abandoned, in disarray and obviously inhabited by some Great Old One, wreaking havoc on the surrounding village.

Meant to be obtained through an encounter is the old city records repository of one of my Cthulhu City maps (courtesy of the 2017 December Annual), this map was inspired by and copied over the original floorplan of an infamous asylum, in an historic city, across the pond in the UK. I’ve used the public domain prints of the original drawn new plans of the infamous Bethlem, otherwise known as Bedlam, Royal Hospital.

I’ve included in the map a copy of the front view of the hospital from the public domain file, as I think it adds something to the map – making it mirror the plans more exactly, which in turn gives the submersion into the game a little flair. I love giving my players handouts (though since I’ve moved we’ve had to move our game to online so my gifts are now in the form of pdfs and pngs), and printing up a map like this is just a favorite of mine in game play.

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)

Greetings Mappers! Christina (Lorelei) here with another All the Annuals, version 2015. This month’s annual is the well loved (by Quenten for sure 😊 ) Local Area Maps by our beloved Pär Lindström. This style is perfect for mapping smaller areas for your players or your own needs. Mapping out smaller areas of your home world is a great way to be able to include all the neat areas you’ve invented in your world in a condensed map, making navigating the region much easier for your players.

This palette, fills and symbols of the style is very story-like and whimsical, making it perfect for many different campaign settings. I especially like to play with muting some of the colors when I want a map to seem a bit darker, in nature, not only color, which is why I added a Saturation/Hue to most of the terrain Sheets, taking the green down a notch with some grey, which instantly takes the fairytale nature out of the map, if you’re dark and morose, like me 😊

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]

Well met, Mappers! We are working our way through the 2015 Annual and this month’s style is City Panoramas, by TJ Vandel. This style is modeled off the 16th century publishers and engravers, Braun and Hogenberg, famous for their “birds-eye view” maps of cities from all around the world. I will admit, I did a bit of a Google deep dive looking at their maps, and they are fantastic, and I highly recommend you all taking a look.

For this map I didn’t do anything special out side of the provided Mapping Guide. I really like this style, and think if you get yourself into an editor and have the skills (of which, I do not 😊 ), anything free will do, you could get this map to have that old, antique look of the original Braun and Hogenberg works.

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]

Hello Cartographers! It’s another monthly annual for the 2015 Annual and we have a classis … Classic Fantasy, that is. This style, Classic Fantasy, brings us back to the days of the classic fantasy novel map, usually found in the inside cover or the first few pages. I remember spending so much time pouring over the maps of my favorites novels, Wheel of Time, The Dragonlance Series, Lord of the Rings, and studying them working out where all important moments from the books happened. If a book comes without a map, it’s a huge disappointment, and not because I make them, because I love them. 😊

For this month’s map, I just made a simple environs map, depicting an area where there was a historic battle that took place between two long warring realms – the perfect setting for a short story or campaign. By following the Mapping Guide, this map took me no time at all to put together – also a plus for those last minute maps needed for any RPG 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.