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.
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In our weekly live mapping series on YouTube I’ve been revisiting the first styles that I created for the Cartographer’s Annual back in 2007. Sue Daniel took it upon herself to create new maps with these styles as examples and here are the next two beautiful results!
Sarah Wroot Overland
April saw the first style by a freelance artist which we converted into an Annual style. Saraw Wroot had been producing maps for Pelgrane Press’ Dying Earth RPG and her handdrawn style and watercoloury look translated well into the new sheet effect-powered visuals of CC3+.
(Download the FCW file)
Cave and Cavern Maps
The May Annual issue of 2007 saw me delving into natural caves, using noth Dungeon Designer 3’s style and a new modern map look, which I had kind of pioneered in the Source Maps: Temples, Tombs and Catacombs collection. Sue took the DD3 version to produce this great spiral cave layout.
(Download the FCW file)
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Gosh, I really love this annual. This style is my own personal preference for player handouts. I love parchment – everything about it just screams medieval fantasy and makes me happy. Also, l LOVE the bitmap fill for the ocean/sea. I mean LOVE it. I’ve used it in countless maps in my personal homebrew campaign and for commissioned works. It gives me that pop of color I need without breaking the ink bank, and that old world fantasy look my players love in my handouts.
(Download the FCW file; Check out the Annual issue)
Once again, as most of my overland maps, I just start…..first land, then mountains/rivers, forests, structures, flavor and text. No need for my usual color manipulation, as everything about this parchment is perfect. So easy and so simply pretty. That ocean….the text and it’s effects….the parchment…..oh yes, this is one of my favorites, for sure.
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.
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One rather standard feature of most CC3+ maps that I see many people are somewhat confused over or fail to use properly is the screen. For example, I get a lot of atlas submissions that have things sticking out on the outside of the screen. Thus, I thought I would dedicate a small article to talk a little bit about this feature.
The screen is that white polygon that can be found right outside the map border on most maps. But why is it there? What is the intended functionality of it? And how to best manipulate it? And how to avoid it being part of our output when we export our map to an image? I’ll talk about all these things here, to hopefully give you a bit more insight into this feature.
Note that this article is about the screen entity found on most maps, and not the Screen Border sheet effect.
For this Annual, since I noticed a few of my fellow cartographers have put out maps in the more commonly known Mercator Globe template in recent days, so I decided to do a standard map, such as Ralf does in the Mapping Guide. In fact, I followed along and made no special adjustments to this map. It’s a great style, especially if you add some frame embellishments like I’ve seen some mappers do on the forums by adding some of their own textures and fills.
(Download the FCW file)
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.
Need a quick city? Dislike (like myself) laying out a city grid and dotting it with houses? Well the Random Cities Annual is for you. This annual is available for anyone who has City Designer 3. The Random City command allows you some creative license with the houses you place, though in this example, I did not make any adjustments and just used the basic CD3 Bitmap B set.
(Download the FCW-File)
After starting a map in either the Bitmap A or B styles (I chose B) you choose Random City from the City menu or just enter on the command line CITY – this brings up the City Wizard and make any adjustments to the settings you’d like, hitting next at each option. For this map, the only changes I made, were to mute the colors by adding a RGB Matrix to several sheets with different settings (I got those settings by just playing around with the adjustments one .1 at a time till it was the right shade). A quick city name at the bottom and done. A map such as this can easily be done last minute before a gaming session – this one took me 15 minutes.
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 of the most powerful effects in CC3+ is also the least used one. And that is kind of understandable, because it is also one of the more complicated ones. So in this article, I’m going to give you a bit of an introduction to the Spatial Matrix Process (SMP) effect (Not to be confused with the RGB Matrix Effect).
SMP is a custom filter where you have a lot of control over what the effect will do, it doesn’t have a pre-defined purpose like the other effects, but can be used to create a variety of different effects. Note that some of the results you can accomplish using this effect is already implemented as separate effects, such as blur.
This month’s annual, by fellow mapper Jon C. Munson II, was meant to be used alone or in conjunction with Symbol Set 4. I decided to map out a small abandoned mine using only the symbols provided in the annual, since I realize not everyone has Symbol Set 4 available to them.
This map is pretty basic, with no special bells or whistles. Though I can be known for using some original, creative techniques with this program, I wanted to showcase some maps with those tricks and others with nothing but the basics, I’ve done this for the average mapper, to show that you can still produce quality maps for your gaming needs and not need the skill that some of the Master Mappers and longtime, proficient users out there.
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.
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While most CC3+ styles have a good selection of symbols, including multiple variations of the same symbols, such as multiple different trees, mountains, tables or statues, you can get into an issue of repetition if you need lots of these symbols.
One of the ways to alleviate this is to apply different scaling, rotation and mirroring to these symbols. Just a subtle change of scale or orientation helps reduce the monotony of a lot of the same symbols. This can of course be done manually, but CC3+ symbol catalogs contain a cool feature for helping with this, namely random transformations. Random transformations are a configurable way to automate this process on a symbol by symbol basis, ensuring that it makes sense for each symbol it is applied to. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to have a random rotation of a mountain in an overland map, that would probably look weird given the isometric view of these symbols in most styles, while a table in a tavern may benefit from free rotation. The same mountain may find use in random scaling to vary it that way instead.
You’ll find that many of the official symbol catalog already use this technique by default, but it is easy to set up yourself, either to apply it to your own custom symbols, or to existing symbols when using them.
In our weekly live mapping series on YouTube I’ve recently begun to revisit the first styles that I created for the Cartographer’s Annual back in 2007. Sue Daniel was inspired to use these herself for some example maps, and as you’d expect the resulting maps are gorgeous pieces of art. See for yourself!
Mercator Historical
The very first Annual issue took the maps of perhaps the most famous cartographer of history as inspiration for some large-scale overland mapping. You can see me using it here.
Here is the map Sue came up with using the default Mercator style.
(Download the FCW file)
Not satisfied with the looks, she expanded on the style with colours and effects to produce this beautiful variant.
(Download the FCW file)
If you want to recreate Sue’s version, you can take a look at her sheets to see the effects she implemented, and you’ll need this little symbol catalog for the decorations on the map border.
John Speed City
The second Annual style was inspired by another historical cartographer: John Speed. The live video showing its use is here.
Sue used the John Speed City style to create a map of the early modern town of Dorchester.
(Download the FCW file)
Again, there is a symbol catalog with the extra material that Sue created for the map.
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