One reason to import an image into your map is to use it as a guideline for your mapping. For example, maybe you want to import that scan of your old hand-drawn map, or importing a real world city map to re-map it in CC3+. Inserting the image is easy enough (Insert File from the Draw menu), but one of the important things when you want to use an image for reference (or using it as part of the final drawing) is to get it to scale. You could wing it, but that often comes back to bite you later, as a lot of the default sizes for effects, line widths and so on assume your map is to scale. I’ve talked about the importance of scale in an earlier article, but for this one, I’ll just focusing on scaling imported images.
Anders Bergström – known as Lillhans on the ProFantasy forum – has astounded us at ProFantasy and the whole CC3+ community with his aquarelle-style drawings for a while now, with many of us having trouble believing that they were done in CC3+. Look at this map:
It’s so different from the usual battlemap styles (varied as they are), that everybody was wondering “how did he do it?”.
After creating an Annual style based on his work in September 2019, he’s now spilling even more secrets in the following article “Doodles & Drawings”. Let’s hand over to him:
Doodles & Drawings
A while back, it was suggested that I write an article about the train of thought and process of using Campaign Cartographer in what has to be among the least time-efficient ways possible. That is, using it to the best of my abilities. Not too long after, there was also a request for a tutorial being made and while a completely different script was already in the making for the first article, I figured I might as well splice thoughts and ideas. Then, a third request for popping the hood of my faux hand-drawn endeavours prompted yet another consideration of focus and approach and – would you believe it – a third iteration seemed more appropriate after all.
Anyway, here is the rather lengthy introduction. Don’t worry: there will also be some kind-of-technical stuff further down the line. And that stuff is going to be rather lengthy as well, I guess.
Continue reading the pdf article…
About the author: Occasional map-finisher, sometimes character sheet filler, and at least once every two decades talking with the others about putting the band back together. It’s probably for the best not to mention I one time was in the jury (when they still had those) for the Eurovision song contest national selections.
In this article in the development series, I’ll start putting the things we have learned into some proper useful commands for CC3+. I’ll be going for designing a set of dynamic dungeon tools that focuses on making the drawing of a dungeon quick and easy. In particular, I am aiming at making a set of tools that lets you draw the floorplan in a more fluid manner, and easily do things like changing the shape of a room by adding a small alcove or similar, without manually manipulating the entities. I am also making sure that the floor will always be merged to a single polygon so we avoid breaks in the fill pattern.
This will be a series of several articles, so in this first article we will be getting started with the basics. We will start by writing the code for drawing polygons, and we will see how we can merge them automatically to a larger polygon. This should give us a great starting point, which we will build upon in future articles. This short YouTube video shows a demo of what the code below achieves in CC3+.
To be able to follow this article series, you should have read my earlier articles in the series.
The latest CC3+ update is currently in beta, and you can download it from your registration page over at the main ProFantasy website if you wish to try it out. Of course, this is a beta, so only install it if you don’t mind potentially running into glitches and other issues (this is why we test new versions before releasing them after all)
In this article, I will take a short look at the new features that appear in this version. If you have the beta installed, you will have them right now, but if not, you will get access to them when we release the finished version of the update. In any case, there are several nice new features waiting for you in this update.
When mapping, there are times when precision matters a lot, and times when it doesn’t matter at all and simply eyeballing sizes and positions gives the best result. But in this article, I am going to talk a bit about the former, when we want perfect precision in our work, when we need that road to be exactly 10 feet wide, or entities needs to line up perfectly with each other. In CC3+ we have multiple tools available for that purpose, such as snap grid, modifiers and coordinates. I’ve talked about these things in other places before, but I’ll put all these into the context of precision work here.
Continue reading »
Following the Live Mapping: Repeating Textures session, recently presented by Ralf Schemmann, I will be writing a short series of blogs, or a series of short blogs, illustrating how I go about generating my own seamless tiles. My methods are similar to those described by Ralf in the Live Mapping session, but I thought you might like to know a bit more about the workflow I use.
In this first blog I will be covering how I make seamless textures in CC3 using the available symbols from a chosen style. This is one of the quickest ways to make a new seamless tile since it involves no drawing or any kind of work in any app other than CC3.
To make things even easier I have made a new template, which you can download from the link below and place in your C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus\Templates\Other folder:
This is a very simple template, consisting of a black square on the BACKGROUND sheet, and the frozen MAP BORDER layer. This black square is where you will be making your new seamless tile and will automatically define the extent of the export when it is time to export your new tile.
There is a series of red lines on a sheet and layer that are both called CROP MARKS. These are also frozen so that you don’t end up picking them at any point and moving them around. They are helpful guides intended to show you the extent of the tile you are making once the black square is all but covered in symbols.
The template is loosely based on the Mike Schley Overland style, and is designed to generate tiles that are 1000 px x 1000 px, but it can be used to generate symbol tiles in any style if you locate the relevant symbol catalogue by browsing the directory and adjust the export size.
For this example I will use the MS overland trees to create a seamless tile that I can use in conjunction with the published tree fills that come with the style. This will help to break up any unwanted tile patterns caused by mapping extensive areas of unbroken forest using only the published tree fills.
The first step is to pick the set of symbols you want to use, and start pasting them all over the black square at the default symbol size (usually 1) until there is no more black to be seen between the symbols. Don’t worry about pasting them so that they are in the correct order. Just cover the black square.
Use Symbols-Sort Symbols In Map , right click in the view window and pick All, then press D for do it.
Now to move this block of trees and copy it so that we move the edges to the centre, just as Ralf did with his sand texture in the Live Mapping session referenced at the top of this blog.
Turn the SNAP and GRID buttons on and make sure you have the 50 mile, 2 snap grid selected when you right click the GRID button.
Pick the Move tool and select all the trees with a box selection and press D for do it. Then pick the trees at the central snap point and move that point to one of the four corners. It doesn’t matter which one, as long as you snap the central point to one of the corners, like this.
Using the Copy tool, copy and paste this block of trees 3 times from this corner to all the other corners.
Once you have done this sort the symbols again as above, and hopefully you will have something that looks a bit like this
Now for the magical part.
File-Save as… Pick the PNG Bitmap file option in the Save as type: box, and open the Options dialog. The template you are using has been set up to generate 1000 x 1000 pixel sized tiles, so set the height and width of the export to 1000 x 1000. Make sure the checkboxes are ticked as shown, and CC3 will automatically export just the area covered by the black square, and no more or less than that.
I exported my example fill to a subfolder within the Bitmaps\Tiles folder. I called my personal folder User, but you can call yours whatever you like. It’s yours.
Ralf covered how to import your new fills in the Live Mapping session linked to at the top of this article, so I won’t make this article any longer than it needs to be by repeating it again right here.
This is the result of importing my new fill and drawing my first polygon with it. Remember that I said the template is designed to give you a tile that is 1000 x 1000 map units? Combine this information with the fact that symbols and fills are ideally imported to overland maps at a resolution of 20 pixels per map unit, and you get a scale of 50 map units to set for your new fill. this should perfectly match the scale of the original symbols you used to create the fill in the first place.
When you have had a practice using just one random collection, try mixing collections, or even using a background texture and spacing out your trees. You can also do this with other symbols, so you could try hills or mountains
Love a world with monsters, mystery, and supernatural horror around every corner? Love the 1920s? Dying to run a campaign speaking in Old Tyme radio announcer voice? Oh, yes, then this annual should be the inspiration you need for your next Cthulhu themed tabletop game. You guessed it readers, I’ve been trying to get my gaming group to play Cthulhu for a few years now. Maybe this latest map will finally help them along to love and crave the Lovecraftian universe I have for so many years.
[Download the FCW file]
This annual allows a game master to create a Cthulhu inspired city easily with pre-made city street grid symbols. After laying out a few street grid symbols, and adding a street or two using the road drawing tool to connect the grids and also finish off the outer sections, laying out the building symbols on this map was so easy, since aligning them with the roads isn’t part of this particular map style aesthetic. I placed the symbols and named them all while creating a dark adventure in mind for my players.
This setting is a particular favorite of mine, so this annual is one of my favorites of the year. Speaking of… All the Annuals 2017 has come to a close. But wait! There’s more!! Stick around for the bonus annual… Sue Daniel’s Parchments.
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.
This month’s annual, Village Battle Map, shows how you can combine multiple assets of Campaign Cartographer 3+ to create these unique, large areas of role-playing battles for your gaming fun.
I love maps like these and have quite a few for my campaign, and boy did they come in handy over the pandemic’s worst when online play was the only kind of gaming we were doing. A map this large works well with my VTT. However, if you want to print something this large out, please follow along the Large Exports edition of this year’s annual.
In this map, I combined the elements of DD3+, CD3+, the free assets available from the Vintyri Project, the CSUAC2 and Bogie’s Mapping Objects, and I even grabbed a symbol from an earlier annual, Munson’s Mines. This kind of mapping is a longtime favorite of mine, blending multiple styles and symbols. Normally, I’d add in some of my own homemade symbols and fills, but due to licensing I am unable to share them, so I left them out of this map, but you mapper, go nuts…..add symbols, create or purchase textures for fills, and make the most detailed map you like. I’m a fan of the little details and so are my players.
For your enjoyment, I decided to make it with a bit of a built in adventure hook…..notice the blood in the river? Perhaps your players approach this village and find it empty, with a few buildings looking “tossed” or perhaps there was a struggle? Or some magic where everyone just disappeared….a Thanos Snap, if you will. Whatever sets off your imagination, enjoy the map, and hopefully you’ll all share your creations with us in the Forums! Happy Mapping!
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.
You can’t make a good dungeon without having some secrets, right? Hidden traps, secret doors, concealed corridors, illusory floors, invisible enemies and fake treasure. Now, placing invisible enemies on the map is dead simple (trick being not actually placing them at all) but how can I make a map with a secret corridor that I can reveal and hide at will, and not betraying it’s existence when it is hidden?
CC3+ has nice tools for adding corridors to your map, but you have do decide if they should break the wall or not when connecting to an existing room or corridor. And this is where the challenge begins. It is easy enough to temporarily hide something by putting it on it’s own layer so toggling the visibility of the corridor is easy, but if you chose to have it break the wall when placed, you would still have that hole there when the corridor is hidden. Now, that isn’t actually a good way to keep it secret. On the other hand, if you chose to not break the walls, then there will be walls blocking the corridor even when it is revealed, which look a bit weird, and we can’t have any of that, can we?
This was different for me and I must say I am honestly happy with it being that I am vaguely familiar with marine maps, though I’ve come to rely mostly on gps these days.
(Download the FCW map)
For this map I decided to do a section of the coast near my home, though I modified it some for artistic flair and license. Here on Long Island the shore and all it has to offer are popular to the residents of this 118 mile long island with it’s outer barrier island known as Fire Island. The inlets into the Great South Bay provide great currents of fresh sea water into the bay, along with copious marine life. A popular fishing spot in the bay is The Drink, where depths can get up to 40 feet deep, providing wonderful depths for sea life. There is also a lot of boating traffic, so buoys marking the channels are scattered throughout the bay.
Being that there are several wrecks off the coast of Long Island, I thought this a good place to map. This place has a rich early American history, such as Bellport, one of the earliest fishing villages on the island founded by Captain Thomas Bell in 1664, who incidentally, found himself there by way of shipwreck 😊. There are also several WW1 and WWII shipwrecks in this area, though I’ve mapped none on this particular map.
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.
