There’s a review of CC3 over on PlayDevil.com 9/10.
Below is the first map that I made using the software, and it only took me about 20 minutes- a similar drawing in Photoshop from scratch would have taken me several hours!
“…for a budding cartographer there is nothing else quite like it out there. Once you have broken into the software, creating a good standard of map becomes not only easy, but a pleasure, as you behold your beautiful creations, which can be made quickly and simply.”
Ralf created this map with Cosmographer 3 for Pelgrane Press’s forthcoming SF game, Ashen Stars, now on pre-order.
Mike Riddle, CAD pioneer and creator of FastCAD the software on which CC3 is based, has released a free iPad/iPhone app for FastCAD. It does not support bitmap art – only vector styles, nor does it yet support effects. It’s called CADView.
Campaign Cartographer drawings tend to be much bigger than the usual CAD drawings, and on an iPad 1, detailed overland drawings are a little slow. That said, I’d love to hear how fast CADView is on iPad 2, and get other feedback. Who knows, we might have a full-blown CC3 viewer in a year or two’s time.
We’d added sheared and rotated bitmap fills for Perspectives 3 support, and we’ve been working on a full set of Perspectives 3 symbols.
Cities are one of the greatest environments for RPG adventuring. In a tight space, players can reasonably encounter every type of roleplaying challenge and meet each with a dizzying array of strategies and tactics. Cities can also be a gamemaster’s (GM) nightmare. It’s difficult to know where players will go next, detailed preparation is almost impossible, and everything should be available. To be successful, GMs need overall planning and a good city map. This series will get you started on the map and support your planning.
This is the first of a short series of articles on mapping cities for fantasy roleplaying games. I’ll show you the main considerations as you place, design, detail, and then play in the city. When we’re done, you’ll be able to draw out a reasonable city with confidence and present your players with an experience they won’t forget. I use ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer as my main mapping tool, and all of the maps are drawn with it. There is no post-processing on any of the maps.
I recommend that as you build your own city, that you keep a notepad at your elbow to record your thoughts and designs. Mapping is a creative process, and you will find that you generate many ideas for future adventures as you create your maps. Write the ideas down, and transfer as many of them to the map itself as you can. That way you can find them when you need them. So if you’ve just mapped a narrow pass that would be perfect for an ambush, add that encounter idea as a “GM-only” hidden note. If you don’t write them down in the moment, it’s often tough to remember or recreate the ideas later. And it’s great to be preparing for a gaming session and pull up the notes as a way through creative blocks. You will find that in city building, these notes are critical to make the city come alive later.
Cities in the middle ages were rare. Fewer than a dozen true metropolises existed before the modern era. That is because a city needs the following things to grow and flourish:
The first task for anyone mapping a city is to find a suitable site for the city. On the map below, I’ve mapped the most likely places for a city to grow:
If you’ve read our previous article, Mapping Cities 1, welcome back. If you just joined us, look at that first article, or just follow along from here. So far, we’ve found a place for the city, determined its size and laid out the general geography and boundaries.
Next, we’re going to add details to work up to an overview map of the city.
First, we need to place the major features of the city: Points of interest, major districts, entry points, roads, and other trade points. I generally cycle through these one by one, and continue going through the list until I am out of ideas. I’ll place these items on the map as labels or symbols to guide my further development. Here are some design considerations:
Another Perspectives 3 preview. The excellent Kai-Uwe Allner is creating the 3D symbols. In Perspectives Pro, we offer four symbol angles, in Per 3, it will be eight. You can me tabbing through the different angles in the clip.
In answer to comments in the previous thread:
Yes, we’ll have wall textures. We haven’t decided how to do wall shading.
Our plan is to have flat doors but with “indent” symbols to give them depth. The advantage of flat symbols is that they can align to walls at any angle. We might do 3D ones limited to fixed directions though. We still have to decide.
This beautiful map was made using the Cartographer’s Annual Fantasy Map style found here by forum user Medio. You can follow its development on the forum.
Close up:
The political map:
Sven Lugar has created some excellent historical maps with CC3 at both miniature and non-minature scale. You can see a wide selection here on his website.
Here is Waterloo:
Naseby (English Civil War)
And Salerno
I’ve been dealing with general customer queries for a couple of weeks while Ralf is on a well deserved holiday. Aside from the odd bit of tech support and registration enquiries I’ve had a few emails about licensing – that is, whether you can publish and/or sell the maps you create with Campaign Cartographer 3. The answer is simple: Yes, you can. You hold all the rights to the artwork you create with ProFantasy’s Software.
What you may not do, is re-distributing the artwork that we provide, i.e. the symbols and catalogs that come with the software. This includes maps that are created solely for the purpose of distributing symbols. We also include floorplan-resolution exports (eg PDFs) consisting predominantly of our artwork in this proviso.
Think of the symbols as a True Type font you have bought. You may create and sell documents created with that font, but you may not redistribute the font itself, or create a book of fonts.
