So, where is that Perspectives 3 you are talking about so much, you ask, and rightfully so. The truth is, I was a bit hasty with my previous assessment. We ran into some hiccups with the central Perspectives dialogs and to sort them out before we could move on. The good news is, we’ve now got the beta version out to the testers now. I’m now working on the documentation (Essentials guide and help files), but we might still do a pre-release for alpha users before Perspectives 3 gets its full public release. Watch this space.

You can see in the dialog screenshots (click them for larger versions) that we’ve significantly enlarged the previews for the isometric rooms and buildings. We’ve also simplified the setup. Where in Perspectives Pro you had a separate color setting that combined with Perspective and House settings in a way that could be a bit confusion, now the color settings are built into the others. That became possible because the wall shading is now handled through shaded polygon entities, instead of different colors. That also means that you can adjust lighting and shadows globally on the map, in a similar way to City Designer 3’s roof shading.

Here’s a little preview of the other Perspectives 3 bitmap style, created by Kai-Uwe Wallner. It is based on the artwork for Dungeon Designer 3, and Kai-Uwe did a magnificent job in converting the dungeon artwork by Dave Allsop into 3d objects. Because he created full models of the objects, we were able to create 8 views of each symbols, doubling the number of orientations you can show them on the map.

Here is the Evil Idol symbol from the Statues catalog in its 8 variations:

Apart from Perspectives 3 the Cartographer’s Annual 2016 is now full underway with the Here be Monsters and Empire of the Sun styles available for subscribers. But the coming month needs their attention too. Next month will see an isometric style, compatible with both the Herwin Wielink Isometric Dungeons from the Annual and Perspectives 3 itself. And then we have some historical houses/villas/manors floorplans in the work, as well as a woodcut-style for overland maps.

Also – even if it is hard to believe – the year’s conventions (GenCon in August and Spiel in October) already need attention. GenCon hotel bookings for exhibitors is coming in only a couple weeks, and that is a stressful time, as rooms are becomings increasingly sparse in downtown Indy. For Spiel, we are looking in what kind of anti-harassment policies are in effect at German conventions, a topic that’s not been talked about much here.

With that I leave you with a bit from the current Perspectives example map that is on my screen, a little farm or village scene created mainly with the Isometric House tool.

The Vintyri Project released their enormous content collection for City Designer. Here is the announcement from Mark Oliva.

We now have completed release of the entire Vintyri (TM) Cartographic Collection for ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3+ and 3. This is a collection 974 CC3+ and CC3 raster symbols in the VH, HI, LO and VL resolutions and 122 fill styles along with templates and drawing tools, also in the VH, HI, LO and VL resolutions. Additional templates and drawing tools can be downloaded and installed by users of City Designer 3 and Dungeon Designer 3 with CC3+ or CC3.

Mark Oliva
Webmaster, the Vintyri Project (TM)
Internet: http://www.vintyri.org
E-Mail: info@vintyri.org
The Vintyri Project is a non-commercial service

Over at Pelgrane Press and Fire Opal Media, they’ve been working hard on a new supplement for 13th Age code-named Battle Scenes. It is a collection of icon-themed encounters for all levels of play, packed with dangerous hand-picked foes on terrifying terrain, and I’ve been one of the people to help bring this “terrifying terrain” to life, not least because I’ve been using the playtest version of the book for my own games, as seen here.

For me these battle maps required a lot of special terrain effects, for which I had to import new bitmap fills, create lots of new sheets with specialized effects, and generally had to think outside the box of a specific drawing style. Naturally we’d like to make these ideas and tools available to more CC3+ users, so we created the December Annual issue to make that happen.

In addition to a tutorial with chapters on combining assets from different styles, custom artwork, working with water effects, showing elevation and cliff faces, creating multiple layers in one map, and lighting effects, the December Annual also contains 4 highly detailed example maps (2 of them straight out of Battle Scenes). Here is anther scaled-down example out of
High Magic & Low Cunning: Battles Scenes for Five Icons.

“Have you read the manual?” We know this can be an annoying question, and many of us would much rather dive into a new piece of software without such hassle. That’s a bit like learning to drive a car without any instructions – certainly possible, but likely to cause frustration (luckily it’s not as dangerous). Trust us, the CC3+ manual is easy to follow along and extremely helpful to familiarize yourself with CC3+.

In fact, we have (or actually Remy Monsen has) been silently updating manual will all the new features and changes to the interface that have arrived with CC3+ and made the book even better. If you own CC3+, you can download the fully-indexed and hyperlinked, 97-page manual from your registration page right now.

If you don’t own CC3+ yet, and want to check out either some of the differences to CC3, or just want to an impression of how our software works, we’ve got a 12-page excerpt for your, the chapter on creating “Our First Map.” You can download the pdf from this link:
CC3+ Manual – Our First Map.

And here’s the map that you can create from just following along those 12 pages. I case you own CC3+, you can find this map in your /Tutorials/UserManual/ directory of your CC3+ program data folder.

Perspectives is clearly dominating my desk this month, so let’s take a look at what’s coming in this new edition of one of my favorite add-ons.

Four Styles

In addition to the two old vector styles that Perspectives Pro came with (vector symbols in color and in black and white) Perspectives 3 offers two new bitmap-based style. One is based on the artwork from Dungeon Designer 3. In fact the artist, Kai-Uwe Wallner, created 3D models of almost all the DD3 symbols and exported these in 8 views to serve as our isometric symbols. This means you can create matching isometric views of your DD3 dungeon maps!

The other bitmap style was created by Herwin Wielink, in the same look as his Isometric Dungeon style from the Annual Vol 6. In fact, the two can be combined for an even greater variety of available symbols. And unlike the Annual style, floors and walls can be freely created at any angle in Perspectives 3.

Aligning Bitmaps

In fact getting bitmap styles to behave properly in isometric view has been one of the major design challenges, but we are happy to report that these have (mostly) been overcome.



A little programming remains to be done, but even without it Perspectives 3 performs wonderfully in creating isometric bitmap-based maps. Doors and windows for example, just like their vector predecessors, align to angled walls by simply moving the mouse cursor over the wall baseline when placing them.

Casting Shadows

Taking a cue from City Designer 3, the Global Sun option will also create dynamic shadows and lights on the walls, allowing you to adjust these on the fly. The difference in shadows in the image on the right has been created with only a quick adjustment on the Global Sun direction.

Like in Perspectives Pro, all the these tools and styles will be available to create outdoor maps with buildings. We’ll incorporate lessons that have been learned in the Source Maps line of maps into the tools and the manual to make this even easier and quicker.

The Plan

Our plan is currently to have Perspectives 3 ready for pre-order before Christmas, and then do the full release early next year. I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I do!

ProFantasy software is a small company, but our network of contributors is incredibly international ranging from part-time editors in Australia through freelance artists in Germany and Sweden to shipping and programming in the US. While the headquarters and office are in London, much of the day-to-day work is done from a small town in Germany. To give you a little insight what goes on at that German ProFantasy office, I am starting this column on the RPGMaps blog where I intend to five you a monthly status update on what is on this cartographer’s desk at the time. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to ask any questions in the comments or over at the community forum.

Spiel’15 in Essen, the big boardgaming fair, definitely dominated the first half of October, meaning I was out of the office for a week. Prior to that, helpers had to be organized, stock brought in and assembled, and my absence to be planned for. You can read up on my time at Spiel here. Let me just say that it’s always fun, but also a very exhausting affair. Back from Essen, I was busy with putting material back into storage, settling the accounts and reporting back to HQ. Unfortunately I brought a stubborn cold back with me, which took the whole next week to leave my system. Crowds are dangerous!

Next up on the desk was getting out the CC3+ compatibility update for Symbol Set 3 – Modern. This also required preparing the next update for CC3+ (version 3.69). While the majority of work, like beta-testing and building the installations, had been done before Spiel, I still had some fine-tuning to do and the actual release to prepare. As I type this, SS3 and Update 3 should be safely out and available to our users.

But the big thing lurking on my desk is another beast: Perspectives 3. After Spiel I dived back into assembling catalogs, fine-tuning symbols, creating varicolors and all such things for an add-on with thousands of symbols. I’m currently producing a rough working version, so we can tackle some necessary programming work that using isometric bitmap artwork entails.

As you can see from the little sample, Perspectives 3 will not have one, but two new bitmap artwork styles – doubling the symbol work, yay! What you can’t see is that one styles will also have 8 directional views for each symbol, instead of the 4 in Perspectives Pro. Even more, yay! Hopefully next month the cartographer will have a couple more elaborate samples of Perspectives 3 on his desk. Until then!

This is my after-action report from this year’s Spiel convention in Essen – the biggest board game event around the world.

“Spiel was very nice, though tiring this year. I’m pretty sure they’ll be announcing a new visitor record again, but there were some problems due to so many visitors and some train troubles (due to a fire in a big rail center). Friends reported 45 minutes wait times (and more) for shuttle services from parking to the halls. Each morning the center would announce they’d be opening the doors 15 minutes early due to crowding at the entrances.

We didn’t feel the crowds so much at the Profantasy booth. Our part of the hall was relatively quiet for most of the time, and I wasn’t too thrilled that were we wedged between several mead, wine and beer booths and the big UltraPro (card sleeves and folders) stand. I’d have much preferred a space adjacent to one of the smaller German RPG publishers like Prometheus, Uhrwerk or Mantikore. That’s not to say that those exhbitors weren’t very nice – they actually were very kind and a little mead-tasting is nothing to be sneered at. It’s just that I think we supplement the rpg publishers so well.

Setup and all technical prep went without problems. Gordon helped with setup on Wednesday and Carsten arrived on Thursday morning (with a little delay due to the afore-mentioned shuttle service). Despite the crowds, Thursday and Friday were a bit slow, giving us time to have a look around the halls in turns and do some more leisurely demos at the PC. Traffic picked up heavily on Saturday, for one of busiest days (on our booth) in recent years. Sunday morning started extremely slow, but then came a big rush around 2pm with kept going for at least 90 minutes, where all three of us were constantly talking, demoing and selling stuff. That made Sunday a very good day too, bringing 2015 up to par with last year which was also a very good year (where the first three days were all similarly good and then saw a sharp drop off on Sunday).

Overall we had a few more individual sales than last year, but less overall product sold. Prices were a little higher due to the weak Euro, which might have contributed to people buying smaller bundles.

I had the large 13th Age map in Mike Schley’s style on the table and that was a big draw. People love his style and were (as usual) very impressed of how quickly you can put together a good-looking map with his symbols. Feedback of existing users on CC3+ was also very good, with equal praise going to the new artwork and the improved performance.

The focus at Spiel continues to be on new customers. There’s about an equal number of people who’ve never heard of Campaign Cartographer and those who’ve seen it before and are interested. Existing customers are a few less, and they usually have bought everything they want via the web store already. Some turn up with questions or problems, or to check what’s upcoming, others
just to say hello. Only a subsection of these buys stuff at the booth.

We had good fun together, especially with Gordon’s daughter at the booth. Gordon and Nicole (his wife) always take great care of me. Together with Carten and Annue we went out for the Profantasy dinner on Saturday to our usual haunt and took Cat with us. We are all looking forward to next year.

The only bad thing I took home with me is a nasty cold which is coming out now. My voice is still gone and I’m sneezing quite a bit.”

A larger gallery of pictures from Spiel can be found on G+.

P.S.: That cold lasted the week after the show, but is (mostly) gone now!

Some quick impressions from this year’s GenCon:

Pelgrane and Profantasy’s booth space before setup

CC3 community member RA jacobs wrote a detailed article on Basic Select Techniques in CC3+ on his blog Funny Shaped Dice. Check it out, it is very informative and especially helpful for new users of CC3+.

Basic Select Techniques, Part 1
Basic Select Techniques, Part 2

For my current 13th Age rpg campaign (a short break from our Ashen Stars game) I recently created several battle maps, because while the game does not use a grid movement, it profits from a good visualization of the combatant’s positions relative to each other. Looking back I realize that I used a variety of different ways to actually bring the maps to the table, as time and resources dictated. I thought it might be useful to look at the different methods.

For the first session, I had a generous time frame and needed to have some professional posters done anyway, so I went for the most luxurious way: I had the two battle maps for the game printed at a poster printing service (Posterjack.com). Click on the image on the right, to see a close up view. The paper quality is great, the colors brilliant and of course everything is in one piece. The scale can be a bit off, if you go for the cheapest poster size/format option, but this map was not meant to be printed at exact miniature scale anyway. The downside: it’s a bit more expensive of course (€10 per 80cm by 60cm poster) and takes time get printed and sent back.

For the second session I was much more pressed for time, and I also didn’t want to spend that kind of money again. So I went to my trusty home inkjet printer (a Canon Pixma iP4800) and printed the next battle map on nine pages of A4, trimmed and glued them together. You can see the result on the left.

The colors are more muted, and you can see where the pages have been glued together, but it still looks very nice. Of course it uses up a good bit of ink and still requires some time to assemble (I can do these in 10 minutes now though). Generally, this is my go to method, which I have used over the whole Deadlands Reloaded campaign that I finished last year.

Still, I had a couple more encounters planned for the evening and didn’t want to print even more stuff. So I came up with a new way to use the map at the table. I would display it on the TV screen for all the players to see and have a Noteboard on the table with a quick sketch of the same map. The TV display would provide the flavor and atmosphere for the map, while the Noteboard would allow for the tactical positioning. Click on the image on the right to see the set up.

I used Chromecast and my Android phone to quickly cast images to the screen. This turned out quite well, better than expected on my rather modestly-sized TV set, and I used it for the final two encounters of the adventure. I’m sure I’ll revisit this method in upcoming sessions. While it’s not quite as nice as having the minis on the color map, it definitely saves on money and time.

Note that the Noteboard area is a bit smaller than your A1 poster map, but with 13th Age you don’t mind really. There is no counting of squares or hexes nor any measuring of distance that would need an accurate and consistent scale.