Before we get started with our conversation about mapping cities with Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus (CC3+), I should probably introduce myself. My name is Jay Johnson and I go by Texas Jake on both the ProFantasy Forum and the Cartographers Guild Forum. I have always loved maps and history and I am a bit of a perfectionist by nature. You can see examples of my maps on the ProFantasy Forum. My map of the border outpost of Tarkas was one of the ProFantasy Blog’s Maps of the Month for October 2018. You can also view the current map I am working on of the City of Melekhir. It is a map of a city that covers over one square mile of land area (that’s massive, what was I thinking when I started such a ginormous project!).

When I purchased CC3+ (to make a map for a series of books I am writing) and started down the road of mapping, I had no idea all I would discover—about the use of CC3+, about medieval cities and about the art of mapmaking. CC3+ opened up a whole new world of mapmaking to me. I started by doing some overland mapping (and was astonished by the quality of maps I could produce while still learning the basics of the program), but it wasn’t long before I ventured into the realm of city mapping. Mapping cities can be challenging, fun, sometimes frustrating, but in the end quite rewarding. I would like to take this opportunity to share some of what I have learned along the way.

First, let me define what kind of cities we are talking about. The type of cities we will be discussing are fantasy cities based on those from medieval Europe. The kind that can be found in many of the fantasy stories we have read or viewed. The purpose of our conversation is to learn not only the use of CC3+ to make maps of cities, but also to learn about the art of making city maps.

It could be argued that the art of mapmaking is more important to making good maps than the tools you use to accomplish it. I believe there is some truth to this argument. I would go on to say that a good mapmaker can make a good map whether he or she uses pen and paper, Photoshop, or CC3+. The more we understand about making a readable and believable map, the better map we will make regardless of the tools or medium we choose. Our objective is to make a map that effectively communicates to the viewer the information we desire to convey. If we fail to do this, everything else we do is pointless. We also want to make a believable map. To do this, we need to avoid pitfalls like using magic as an excuse to justify something that would be implausible in the real world. If we do deviate from the norm, there should be a good reason for doing so. We can make exceptions to reality, but they should be made for a reason, not as an excuse. Understand that the more exceptions we make, the less believable our map becomes.

As we make this journey together, I am going to assume a few things, one of them is that you have the City Designer 3 (CD3) add-on. We will be making use of tools and elements from CD3 and since I bought the Top Three bundle when I got CC3+ (which includes CD3 and Dungeon Designer 3), I am less conscious of what tool came with which product.

Let’s Get Started

Where to start? Now that is the question. Let’s start by determining what kind of city we want to map. You must think about the size of the city you plan to map and determine the size canvas you will need to map it on. If you are just starting on your journey as a mapmaker, this can be a hard question to answer accurately. I know that I have had to restart maps several times because I answered this question incorrectly. The problem of fantasy mapping is that we define what we are mapping and we create the data. If our conception of what we want is not entirely clear, we open the door for inaccurate conclusions to enter. So, take a little time and think about how big your city is going to be and then you may want to allow yourself just a bit more space than that. It is good to allow extra space so that the shape of your city is defined by design and not by the constraints of your canvas. How many times do fantasy cities end up square or rectangular because that is the boundaries of the canvas. Our cities should be defined by their terrain, not by our canvas. Do your research. Know as much as you reasonably can about your city before you start to draw it out. Understand, of course, you will learn more as you put it down on (digital) paper. Sometimes the discovery may amaze and surprise you.

A resource that may help you is this site which has many historic city maps.

If you are new to CC3+, get to know the software. You need to gain a bit of skill with your tools. One of the first things I did when I was new to CC3+ was watch the excellent videos by Joe Sweeney to get a handle on the software. You can find his videos here. After watching some of his videos I would do some mapping with CC3+. When I had a question or encountered a problem I would go back for more or break out the manual. One of the best ways to learn is by doing (at least for me it is). Make a few practice maps to develop some familiarity with the product. I have heard complaints that CC3+ is hard to learn. There is a bit of a learning curve to it, but there is with any product. I promise you if you put in the effort to learn to use the software you will be rewarded—and you will get past the steep end of the learning curve faster than you may think if you are diligent.

Another tremendous resource is the Tome of Ultimate Mapping by Remy Monsen. It is available from ProFantasy and is a wealth of knowledge. It also includes an excellent tutorial on mapping cities to help you learn the basics.

Your city should have a reason for being. What resources are available: minerals, lumber, stone, etc.? There must be sources of food and water (unless, of course, your inhabitants are stone statues that do not eat or drink, but I think they are probably not). What about trade routes? Think about these things and their locations in relation to your city and what impact they have on it.

After you have determined the size of your city and have achieved some degree of proficiency in the use of CC3+, you need to determine what CC3+ style you want to use for your city. Understand you can
borrow elements from other styles to supplement your choice. You can even create your own style if you care to. If you are unfamiliar with CC3+ city styles I would recommend making a small sample map with the styles you are considering to see which one will best suit your needs.

Time to Make a Map

Okay, now let’s get into my process for mapping cities (finally, you say). The first thing I do is define the terrain. If you’re mapping a city that is on an overland map, you can look to that map for information. Locate the hills, the mountains, and very importantly, the rivers. After you define the terrain, determine the location of the city on the terrain.

The next thing I do is lay out the major roads. The roads that connect the cities to the rest of the world and resources and the roads that are the major arteries inside your city. This will give you a skeleton, so to speak, to work off of and flesh out. At this stage I determine where the main marketplace will be. If there is a castle or palace, this would be a good time to locate it. It will influence your roads and was probably there before, or near to the beginning of, the city. During this stage it is also good to consider what important structures, locations and features you want to include in your city—maybe an important temple, or a large arena where chariots race or gladiators fight. Now would be a good time to place them on the map. That way you make sure there is a place for them, and major sites like these will have a great influence on your road network.

When you place buildings, you can put roads down first then add the buildings or you can add the buildings then place the roads. I have done it both ways and either will work. It is a matter of preference and, at different points in your mapping, one way may prove better for you than the other.

Talking about buildings. If you look at historic maps and at old sections of cities that have survived from the medieval period, buildings tend to be built right up against each other. They are also right on the street, not set back as is common in the residential neighborhoods many of us are familiar with. This will be the preferred situation in our map. Because of this, the random street tool (which is great for laying down houses fast) will not be our preferred method of adding buildings. I also don’t use the premade buildings very often in my maps. I prefer to make my own using the House Builder Tool (which we will henceforth refer to as the HBT). This allows us to have much greater flexibility concerning the design of the buildings we are placing on our map.

When I was early in the process of mapping out Melekhir, I struggled to come up with convincing-looking buildings and building clusters. After several attempts (which I quickly deleted) I stumbled on an ingenious idea (okay, maybe ingenious is a bit much). I decided to bring up the city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Google Earth and copy some buildings. Why Rothenburg? Because I had visited the city a few times when I was living in Germany and I knew it was an authentic walled city that had maintained its medieval charm. I replicated a few buildings—they weren’t exact copies—but I liked the results. I copied a block of buildings and I really liked the results. Hey, this felt authentic (of course it felt authentic because it was authentic). I copied several more sections of the old city. And you know what? After this exercise in replication, I was able to create buildings and clusters of my own that felt authentic. I had acquired a feel for it.

Let’s take a step back. Before I made this amazing discovery (okay, maybe amazing is a bit much also), I had used Google Earth to take measurements of streets and buildings and blocks of several historic cities. I recorded my findings and developed some standards to guide me in my mapping.

Did you know Google Earth has a nifty measure tool that will measure distance in meters (and also feet for us backwards Americans).

My measurements told me that main streets were usually between 16-18 meters (52-59 feet) wide, building face to building face. So, to keep it simple, I set my main streets at a width of fifty feet. Side streets were 6-8 meters (20-26 feet) wide, so I set my side streets at 20 or 25 feet wide. Alleys were as narrow as 4 meters (13 feet) so alleys would be approximately 12 feet wide. I also used my building measurements as a guide to how big buildings should be. Based on the measurement of several marketplaces I determined my main marketplace would be approximately 100 feet by 300 feet.

Grids

One of the first things I do when setting up a map in CC3+ is create several square grids on their own sheets, but on a common layer. This way I can turn them on and off individually. For a city map, I create the following grids: 5 feet, 25 feet, 100 feet, 250 feet, and 1000 feet (if the map is very large like Melekhir). I set the transparency of these grids to 50% or less so I can see through them and make sure they are contrasting colors (so I can distinguish between them). If you make sure they are all on the same layer you can turn on and off whatever combination is active via layers. These grids prove very valuable in keeping everything scaled properly. That said, I often map with them off once I get a feel for scale. If you do this, be sure to zoom out every once in a while. If you are working zoomed-in, things can get out of proportion to the rest of the map. I have stayed zoomed-in for extended periods of mapping only to zoom out and realize I have gotten dreadfully out of scale. That said, don’t be afraid to redo something that is off. If you fix it early it is usually a fairly simple and relatively painless operation (and you will be able to sleep at night knowing it is fixed).

The City Mapping article by Jay Johnson will continue next month.

Download Mapping Cities Part 1 as a pdf.

Jay Johnson is an aspiring author working on an epic fantasy series. He has always loved maps and, like many of us, was introduced to fantasy cartography through the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. His map-making has become an integral part of his writing process — a process he says often seems more like discovery than creation.

Back in update 15, CC3+ introduced a set of exclusion commands. These commands are variations of the various symbol fill commands where you can specify an exclusion zone, a part of the entity to fill that should not be filled. For example, this can be used to have the forest fill avoid the river running through the forest.

Let us start with this simple map (100×80) showing a river running through the forest. The forest area has already been outlined using the Forest Background drawing tool. Note that the forest area is drawn using a single polygon, it is not split into individual polygons at each side of the river. For this simple example, that wouldn’t have been to much more work, but for a larger area with multiple roads, rivers, lakes and other obstructions, this is a far simpler method. Continue reading »

This week is Spiel time, i.e. the world’s biggest boardgame consumer fair takes place in Essen, Germany. ProFantasy has been exhibiting there since at least 2000 and it is always great fun, if also a busy and tiring time.

For this year, the organizer (Merz Verlag) has vastly improved the available documentation and guides. The “Spiel Guide” is an actually useful piece with the hall plans and all exhibitors listed alphabetically by hall. Hopefully that should make it easy to find our booth 6G113, which is smack in the middle of hall 6. If you are looking for board games, it also contains a list of all the new games announced for Spiel.

Yours truly (Ralf) will be there and I’ll be happy to demo you any of the software, give you a glimpse at the upcoming Token Treasure and Cities of Schley, or just chat about maps, map-making and gaming in general. Hope to see you there!

CC3+ comes with a bunch of fills, and with the official and un-official add-ons out there, you have a large amount of different fills available to you. But no matter how many fills you have, you always find yourself needing something you don’t have (or is that just me?).

In this article, we’ll take a look at some ways to get more out of your existing fills. We’ll look at using effects, layering fills, and manipulating fill scale, all in the name of producing more variety for our maps.

Note that all the techniques here uses the resources already in the map, which means you can still share your map file with others without them getting red X’es due to custom fills.

All images in this article are clickable to see larger versions. This is recommended to see the details properly.

Changing Colors

Both the ‘Adjust Hue/Saturation’ and ‘RGB Matrix Process’ effects are capable of changing the color of a fill style. You can utilize these effects to change the colors to achieve different goals. For example, you can use them to make subtly different shades of grass to break monotony, or you can use them to completely change the color of the grass, for example to make it look more brownish and dried up.

The image below shows how I’ve used the RGB Matrix Process effect to make an autumn version and a dried-up version of the standard Mike Schley style farmlands. A little color change goes a long way to provide a completely different visual look.

Continue reading »

Let’s take another look at the two products we are working on at the moment: The Token Treasury and the new symbol set by Mike Schley.

Token Treasury

For the token treasury, Rich Longmore keeps sending over his finished monster portraits for approval, and it’s a rare piece that we have to ask him a few adjustments for. For example see the Barghest here. The original version (left) looks great – but it felt a little too natural for, a wolverine came to my mind instead of a supernatural monster. So I asked Rich to make the face a little more unnatural (bony face, fiery eyes) and he produced the second version (right) in no time at all.

We’ve also decided to make the tokens available in round AND square formats, so Rich had to go back and add a little bits and pieces to existing ones here and there, but that’s all finished now and we are chugging along nicely. I am converting the artwork into symbols as we go along, which should make producing the final products once all graphics are done fairly straightforward.

Cities of Schley

I know you are all eagerly waiting for the new Symbol Set “Cities of Schley” by Mike. You’ll be happy to hear that Mike has finished all the ink outlines of the buildings and is now working on the coloring. You can see just a tiny section of his preview here. To get an idea how detailed his work is just let me tell you that the original of this graphic is 9000 pixel across!

Once I get the colored versions, I will start adding the roof shading to the symbols so they will work with the automated lighting just as the other CD3 symbols.

A map in itself conveys a lot of useful information. It shows you the lay of the land, the location of terrain features, the names of various locations, and so on. But you often have lots of additional information that doesn’t fit on the map itself, such as GM-only information about the traps in the dungeon, lore information about the different places, statistics, and so on. All of this is things you may wish to have at your fingertips when using the map. So, let us explore various ways you can easily provide extra information with a map.

Map Notes

CC3+ has a built-in system for storing notes along with your map. These are not visible in the map itself, but embedded in the map file, and can be brought up when needed.

To access the list of map notes, either click the Map Notes button on the toolbar, or select Drawing Properties from the File menu and then hit the Map Notes button in the dialog. This will bring up a dialog showing the list of all map notes for this map. From here, you can select any map note and click OK to show that map note, or you can hit edit to change it. You can also create new map notes from here. Continue reading »

In the past month, I have begun to release many of the custom tiles I use. And others have begun to join me. You can find this growing collection in the Master Mapping Tile Library.

But this begs the question… why invest time in making custom tiles? And how do you make ‘em in the first place? First up, let’s answer why custom tiles are worth the effort.

Custom tiles let you add a unique WORLD flavour to your maps. Different cultures in your world will have different aesthetics. Their buildings will not only be designed differently, but will be made of different materials used in different ways with different artistic flair. Consider the Chinese Summer Palace, Westminster Abby, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, and the Villa Romana La Olmeda. As soon as you glance at any of these images, you are immediately transported to their culture – you know something about the people that made them. What they valued, how they viewed the world.

By mapping unique cultural aesthetics, you reinforce the game world and its peoples in a deeply effective way. This is true for fantasy settings, but also doubly so for science fiction! Think back to the classic TV series Babylon 5, where each species had its own ‘look’ that went all the way to their clothing and starship designs. Star Trek does the same thing. The style of these different cultures’ structures and architecture is a signature of the species itself. It conveys a lot about them.

For cartographers, this means that we can use the aesthetics of architectures we map to convey the culture that built them. And one of the most effective ways to do this is to use custom tiles. Or more specifically, sets of themed custom tiles.

In High-Space, we have dozens of alien species, each of which has a rich culture. The humans are techno-junkies, that favour chrome and cyber-circuitry plus carpets and lit metal panels. In contrast, their closest pals, the Phoxin, are bison-sized bio-smiths that favour organic spaces, with moist loam, algae blooms, and walls of living plant matter. The Psionic Soamata, having evolved on dry crystal-sand planes, favour delicate carved sandstone facades. And the grumpy iron bugs… well, heavy metal and rust would best describe their look.
Therefore, when I set out to create a set of battle maps in the High-Space universe, I first look at who built the location where the action will take place, and then set about selecting themes of textures that will match that culture.

If I can find open-source tiles that match, great. If not, it’s time to crank up specialised art software and get to work…
Which brings us to the second question… how to make seamless tiles that work well with CC3+? While photoshop can help you create seamless tiles, I do not recommend it. Creating a tile with Photoshop is akin to pulling out your own eyes with a chopstick. It may be a cool party trick, but it’s painful and often result in things that are just ugly. Instead, I strongly recommend investing in a dedicated tool.

My tool of choice for this is FilterForge. It is a programmatic art package which is really designed for 3D modellers and digital artists. It is programmatic because it allows you to create your own ‘filters’ by wiring up small chunks of graphical algorithms to create a highly customable visual effect – in our case, seamless tiles.

FilterForge has a drawback. It is expensive. I mean, really expensive. The edition I use has a list price of US$828 (though you can get it for about $600 with special offers that they run frequently).
The good news is, they have a cheaper, less functional version for about US$150. The bad news is, that solution does not support 16 or 32 color, high-precision, hi-definition output. For an average map, that’s not a big issue. But if you are planning print-ready professional maps… well… you *may* notice the difference. But for 98% of us, it won’t be an issue.

The other limitation with the cheap version of FIlterForge is that you cannot customise the filters. But given that there are literally thousands of ready-made, freely downloadable filters, the inability to customise may not be that big an issue for hobbyists.

In short, if want to churn out lots of tiles are that are variations on a theme – which is the perfect scenario for us mappers – then FilterForge Standard at US$149 will be good enough most of the time.
If you don’t want the expense of making your own tiles, you can always grab some from the growing Master Mapper free community collection, here.

The next question is, how to design the tiles so they not only look good, but also PLAY WELL on the table.

When you design your tiles for a use with minis, always consider this rule: how will the tile’s texture ‘line up’ with the traditional 5f step grid for most games? Start by planning your tiles as 1200×1200 pixel images. Why 1200×1200? First of all, it is a standard size used by ProFantasy for hi-res files. Secondly, 1200 is a very flexible number – it can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Which means is can scale well as a repeating texture for many different mapping situations.

I make the assumption that my 1200×1200 pixel tile will fill a 10x10f space on my maps (or 3mx3m for sci-fi metric maps). This means each tile I create is a grid of four 5f steps. When designing the tile, I try to take into account that it will be aligned to a 5f grid, and I make sure that design enhances that grid, or at the very least does not clash with it. Check out my video on how to use the latest edition of FilterFilter to make tiles here.

Once you’ve made the tiles, it’s time to bring them into CC3+. The first thing to do is collect all the tiles of a similar theme into a single folder. Then move that folder of tiles into the CC3+ bitmap tiles folder. This can be a little tricky to find, depending on your computer’s setup. You can see how do this in the following video. The reason you put the files into this special folder is it ensure that your maps can be loaded onto other computers without incurring massive amounts of rework. Trust me. This little extra step now will save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Now fire up CC3+ and create a new map or load a map where you’d like to use your new tiles. Click on TOOLS and select Import Bitmap Fill Styles.

On the screen that pops up, make sure you have the “relative to CC3 path” set and click the Browse button to locate the folder where your tiles are located. Select and open any one tile in that folder.
Next check ‘Scaled” and then set the width and height for your tile to 10f.

Click on OK and bob’s your uncle – you’ve now added those fills to your map that you can use just like all the other standard fills. The part 2 video, above, shows you the entire process.

So, to summarize:

1. Create groups of themed custom tiles to highlight the cultural aesthetics in your world.
2. Consider using a dedicated texture / tile making solution, such as FilterForge
3. Download sets of tiles from the Master Mapping Community Library, here.
4. When creating your own tiles, make then 1200×1200 pixels and plan for them to be placed on your maps at 10fx10f scale (or 3mx3m scale for metric maps).
5. Always move your files in folders under the ProFantasy Bitmap Tiles folder.
6. Using the Tools – Import Bitmap Fill Styles function to get your tiles loaded into your maps.

Best regards, Joe

All images are by unknown authors, licensed under CC BY-SA.

One of the more common questions from CC3+ users is about how to extract a region from a large-scale map and develop this region as a more detailed local map.

The basics for doing this is already explained in the User Manual that comes with CC3+, but for this article, I am going to go a bit more into detail and explain the various tools and processes involved in doing this.

The basic principles behind this operation is to create a new map of the desired size, then copy over the entities from the existing map, trim down these entities to fit the new map size, and finally add additional detail to the new local map. Let us explore the tools and procedure for doing this.

The main tools you’ll need for doing this is Clipboard Copy, Trace, Break and Split, as well as some minor Node Editing.

Let us get started. For this article, I’ll use the example map from the User Manual. You’ll find this map in @Tutorials\UserManual\Example.fcw (remember that the @-sign refers to your CC3+ data directory). My goal is to take the area marked with the red rectangle and develop that into a local map of that area. The marked area here is 30 by 20 miles.

Note that all images in this tutorial are clickable to see higher resolution versions to more easily see what the text describes.

If you are new to this, I also highly recommend loading up the same tutorial map I use and try to follow along with this tutorial, exporting the same area, rather than try directly on your own map. Following along on this map lets you more easily see that things happens the way I describe them, and lets you build familiarity with the tools before starting on your own map.

There is also a video accompanying this article, showing me perform the steps described herein. Note that this video is not intended as a stand-alone video tutorial, but rather as a visual aid to help you see how things are supposed to work. You do not need to watch the video to take full advantage of this article, it is completely optional.

Continue reading »

Joshua Plunkett (Josh.P. on the Profantasy community forum) is an avid CC3+ user and map-maker, and one of the instigators and organizers of the Realmworks project that incorporates a host of maps from the ProFantasy community atlas project. We’ve asked him to present the project for the rpgmaps blog and here are his words:

Campaign Cartographer 3+ is fantastic for making maps for basically anything but it tends to really appeal to a certain group. That group is Dungeon Masters. Regardless of the system or the numbers of sides on the dice we roll one thing is common… we all need beautiful maps.

The ProFantasy Community Atlas Project was such a great idea and has turned into an amazing resource for DMs across the planet. Within our CC3+ community though we have a sub demographic of users. The sub-group use CC3+ and Realm Works together!

Realm Works is campaign management software, it lets you take information from everywhere and put it all together into a single digitally cross-referenced digital DM binder. Specifically, though it has some great functionality in regards to maps. You can load maps in and pin out specific locations. You can then link those pins to topics where you can describe the area as much as you like with full text write-ups and supporting pictures. You can link regional maps to town maps and town maps to building maps all the while including the text and pictures to describe each location. It provides the templates and structure necessary to manage a large world building project.

When we saw the ProFantasy Community Atlas Project we therefore became excited with the possibilities of combining the CC3+ community project into an extension Realm Works community project. We sought permission from a handful of the Cartographers involved and got to work transferring the excellent maps already made by the CC3+ community into Realm Works. We then opened the doors to the Realm Works community encouraging them to help with creating the textual content around each map.

It came to life really quickly with people from both communities coming together to create new content for the continent of Artemisia. Before we knew it, we had entire regions, cities, towns and dungeons starting to take shape. The realm is available for free to all Realm Works users who want to check It you. You can DOWNLOAD IT FROM HERE and import it into a new or existing realm.

The project is open to anyone who wants to contribute. Be that CC3+ users contributing maps to the ProFantasy Community Atlas Project or Realm Works users who want to help build out the details of the world as part of the Realm Works Community Campaign World Project. To get involved simply follow the links and read up on how you can get involved.

I’ve made quite some styles for the annuals over the years. I actually don’t remember exactly how many but I think it is around 15 styles so far. Whenever I make my maps I always wonder if the map I make can be made into a style for CD3. Most of my styles have been made this way. Two examples are the maps I made for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG campaigns Mythos Expedition (September ’14) and Cthulhu city (December ’17). Both those mapping styles where later turned into styles for the monthly annuals. Most of the time I have to flesh out the styles with more symbols then the ones I’ve used in my maps, so that the style will work on its own.

Other times I’ve made some styles when I’ve felt that I’m missing something in Campaign cartographer 3 or any of its add-ons. One example is my latest style, City ruins for City Designer 3. One of the things I really like is to just make different versions of villages and cities. It’s actually something I can sit and play with just for fun, dreaming up different places and try to make them as good looking as possible. But sometimes I feel that the styles in the program miss some bits and pieces, for example I had an idea of a map that I originally got from an old map of Firenze in Italy where people lived among the ruins from the Roman times. After the fall of the Western part of the Roman Empire the population in many towns shrank and a lot of the old buildings started to fall apart or where used as quarries. But in the middle of those fallen cities life continued and people built new houses among the ruins. This was the kind of city I wanted to draw. But I needed more ruins.

So I started making my own ruins to be able to make the map I wanted. After a while I thought that this might be something others miss too so I decided to ask Profantasy if they might be interested in making a style out of the symbols, which they were.

So how do I make the actual style? Well first of all I have to decide on what kind of symbols I need to draw. This is usually a process that continues during the whole time I’m making the style, since I seldom come up with all ideas at once. Another way of coming up with ideas for a style is actually to ask you, the users of the program, which is possible now since I found the Campaign Cartographer 3+ Facebook User Group on Facebook. This is the perfect place to find out if there is anything the community would like to see in the style.

When I have come up with enough ideas for symbols I start to sketch them out in Photoshop. Usually I have a square grid as a bottom layer which makes it easier to make straight lines and to get the right scale on all the different symbols. After having finished the sketches it is time to ink the symbols. This I will do on a separate layer. Usually all steps will be made on different layers, which will make it much easier to change things later if necessary. After inking the symbols I add a layer for colours, sometimes I also add a layer for shadows, if needed.

When I have all my different layers done, the symbols are finished and I cut them up in different files, one per symbol, and send them over to Ralf who will do the magic of turning them into a style for all of you to use.

I hope you will like all the ruins, I sure will, and now I just have to make that map of the ruined city.