The December 2019 Annual, last official one of the year, brought us back to Worlds of Wonder – expanding the first of the year’s Worlds of Wonder style. On this map I really didn’t do much other than alter a few of the Effects settings and adding an Edge Fade here and Color Key there. I used both options for land masses to depict the colder, sparser element in the southern region. Then, I added a few sheets for use on the southernmost landmass for LAND SNOW and a LAND FOREST SNOW sheet to top off some of the forests with snow closer to the Realm of the Frost Giants, where it is obviously, blustery cold.

Download the FCW source file of the map

I really enjoyed, despite some trepidation on the annuals featuring tools I’ve never used before such as the Perspectives styles or most recently using FT3 and Wilbur, taking me far from my comforts of my very own personal style of hacking DD3 to do almost anything I usually map, doing this project immensely. I think, that’s what is perfect about these annuals, trying out styles you’ve never considered before and discovering you will use them again and again in the future. Now go try one of those styles you’ve never used before….who knows, maybe the SciFi Base will inspire a space themed campaign for your gaming groups next adventure, or a Watercolour map to use as the background for your upcoming novel cover….the possibilities are endless with a 12 annuals to inspire you every year 😊

Well, I’ve completed a year’s worth of annual maps and I can tell you all, I feel pretty accomplished. I’ve always wanted to make a map with all the annuals, but never seemed to find the time or a reason when there was always a map I could be making for my long running homebrew campaign or contribute to the Community Atlas in a style I have mastered using. This year’s annual gave me the opportunity to really challenge myself and overcome many long standing, mapping anxieties I’ve had. I’ve found styles I really, really loved using and never though I would ever use, let alone love the end result so much I’d use it again on personal maps.
I challenge all of you to do the same! Map along with me, if you please 😊 I’ll be continuing along and mapping my way back to the year 2018 and would love to see what you all make along with my weekly maps.

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 features for CC3+ symbol catalogs is the ability to arrange these into groups, and then set this group to place random symbols from the group, or apply random transformations to them, like rotations or minor scaling to give variety to otherwise identical symbols.

But, what if you are making a particular map, and you need some other kind of grouping? For example, when placing trees you want to randomly place Decid, Pine and Jungle trees among each other? There are no predefined group like this in most symbol catalogs. Well, for that you can quite easily set up your own personal random collection just for the current map (or you can save it into a symbol catalog if you want it available later).

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Well, I managed to pull this one off. The One Day Worldbuilder Annual for use of Fractal Terrains 3, Wilbur and of course Campaign Cartographer 3 is designed, for the most part, with people like me in mind. Believable geography of a map, fantasy or not, has often given me headaches. Those of us that remember the great “River Debates” in other mapping forums remember how, as a mapper with little to no knowledge of what a believable map should look like, the fear was real. This isn’t really much of an issue for me, since I usually stick to dungeon and village mapping, though I do have overland map of my own homebrew fantasy – it has some of the MOST unbelievable geographical locations!

(Download the whole set of files and exports for this map.)

So, starting out with this I was a bit unsure of my skills in Fractal Terrains 3, Master Mapper or not, and decided to grab one of the ready-made worlds provided with the annual. I made some minor changes here and there, but for the most part, kept it near to the original. I was early on following along in the guide, of which I HIGHLY recommend you do, that I ran into some trouble saving as an mdr file. I ended up doing a repair on my FT3 and reinstalling Wilbur and all was well again. Also, I made sure to always open a file as administrator as recommended by Sue Daniel. Speaking of……I managed to follow along and get myself a pretty neat little world I was pretty happy with. I was even surprised with how easy I was able to use Wilbur for my intended purposes through Sue’s simple step by step instructions.

I decided to do a CC3+ map using both a vector map exported from FT3 and also an imported bitmap image background map. I did run into a bit of trouble that Sue helped sort out for me, but otherwise, I managed to complete this project on my own with the Mapping Guide. I thought it would be nice to show beginner users that by following along, step by step, anyone can create a fantastic world so I’ve included all the style maps within my one CC3+ fcw file. Just hide the style sheets and text style (I’ve done two) you don’t want. My favorites in the bunch are the Old Style and the Volcanic Style. Oh, and the dark parchment. Which are yours?

So, for this map I followed along with the Mapping Guide, for the most part; though, I did find that I had to change some settings in Effects to suit my aesthetic. That is the great thing about this program, by simply changing one or two settings can change the whole look of a map.

Download the FCW file of the map.

As usual, my go to for names of the unusual kind is the internet and the many name generators out there. I simply searched for Mayan and Aztec names and went from there. Though, if you notice… I used mostly the Aztec symbols on the map (I just liked them better). I thought, hey, why not mix it up and create some hybrid Mayan/Aztec civilization map?

I will admit, this annual had me intimidated a bit. Unlike some actual artists employed by ProFantasy, I am mediocre, at best, with my drawing skills. That being said, I decided to follow Hans Anders’ guide that accompanies this month’s Annual. It was a life saver! His simple instructions on how to use his incredibly unique technique help set the mapper up to easily navigate this style and create lovely watercolor maps.

Following the mapping guide, after deciding the layout of my map, this map took me just a few hours. It likely would have taken a bit less time for me, but I inadvertently turned off the Autosave last week and my rapidly firing mouse trigger finger caused a crash. Let my flub be a reminder to you all to KEEP Autosave ON. If it bothers you too often, you can change the time between saves, but KEEP IT ON 😊

(Download the FCW version of the map)

There really isn’t much for me to say about this one, as I didn’t deviate from the guide. All in all, I am so happy with this little map and this style. Hans Anders has done something so unique and just so darn pretty. This one is getting printed up and hung on the wall 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. 

Hello again mappers! Thanks for coming back to my series on infusing your city or town maps with a rich milieu as the backdrop for your stories. If you need to refer back to previous articles in the series, check them out here: part1, part2, part3a, part3b, part4, and part5. Last time we did a thorough deep dive on how to make your districts both unified and unique across the city. This time, we’ll cover a whole bunch of assorted tips & tricks on map-making in City Designer 3.

Tips for Street & Building Placement

Back in Part 4 we covered how to use the Random Street tool in terms of settings for your streets. But beyond just settings, Random Street is going to be the backbone of crafting most large towns or cities, just because it automates a lot for you. But the tool can be a little quirky, so let’s talk about how to get the most out of it:

● If you don’t like the buildings that the tool generated for you, just move the mouse up and down or side to side to regenerate all but the first building (if you want to redo the first building, you need to cancel the tool and try again).

● A key point of the Random Street tool is to quickly make houses that conform to your roads. If you don’t like what you get after placing the buildings, that’s OK! You can move, scale or rotate those buildings (an easy way to do this is Quick Move via Ctrl+Q) or even just erase and hand-draw to fill the gaps. If you have to hand-draw with the House tool for only a few, you’ve still saved a lot of time.

● Don’t worry about overlapping buildings – reuse them instead! While placing buildings, you may find the tool suggesting doing something like the following:

You might be tempted to exit the tool and try again until you get a building shape that fits your constraints. Unfortunately, this wastes time when you are mapping dozens of such streets. A better way is to keep everything the tool generates for you. Then, you can move the trickier buildings around to a spot where they fit, shrink or rotate them, and move/scale/rotate other buildings to fit the newly vacated spot. Remember, vertical houses can become horizontal and vice versa. This way, you now don’t have to draw a house by hand.

● Similarly to the last point – let’s say you wind up with houses that just don’t fit:

That’s OK, don’t delete them! Instead, just Quick Move them aside to an empty area that you’re not working on right now. You’ll start to form a bank of pre-made buildings which you can then use to slot into tricky spots so you don’t have to use the House tool to make a custom fit.

● If you are faced with some empty land and aren’t quite sure where to draw a street, try using the Random Street tool to draw a “road-less street” – click the tool, then click a point that isn’t on a road:

This can help serve as a good visual test for what a road would look like there.

● Speaking of the Road-less drawing mode, it’s also a good way to quickly create a bunch of houses which you can then slot in to place by hand, which is quicker than manual house drawing.

● When placing houses – either via Random Street or the House drawing tool – try to select a neutral color in the Color Picker. There is currently a bug where sometimes the selected color bleeds through the edges of the house. It is possible to change this later with Edit Properties but then you need to be sure it’s the same color as the house’s Roof Ridge – otherwise changing the color will change the Roof Ridge color too.

Tips on Sheets and Shadows

Here are a few assorted tips related to sheets, sheet order and how that affects shadows:

● I find if very useful to have at least 3 different sheets for symbols with different shadow heights – a SYMBOLS LOW, SYMBOLS MEDIUM, and SYMBOLS TALL sheet – in addition to a SYMBOLS FLAT sheet (no shadow). For the ones with shadow, the exact scale of the shadow effect depends on your map, but play around and see what looks good to you.

● Take advantage of your sheet order. You can use the sheet order to hide things – for example, hide some terrain under a river, or a house can be partly hidden under a wall. This can help make things more realistic (there probably are some buildings being overshadowed by the city wall, for example).

● Speaking of hiding things with Sheets – this is one of my favorite tips. Some symbol sets, SS5 in particular, have some terrain included as part of the symbol (e.g. a stone floor). This can lead to disconcerting shadows at first:

We could switch this gate symbol to our SYMBOLS FLAT sheet and get rid of the shadow entirely:

But now that looks a little funny – this gate is supposed to be big and imposing; no shadow just looks funny. Instead, we can create a new sheet, one I called BUILDINGS GATE, and place that under the sheet with this symbol (which I called SYMBOLS GATE). I set up the shadow effect on the BUILDINGS GATE sheet to reflect the height of the shadow I wanted for the gate. On SYMBOLS GATE, I put no shadow at all (so, same as SYMBOLS FLAT).

On the BUILDINGS GATE sheet I drew this little House:

Now I have a nice looking shadow, I can layer the gate (which is flat/has no shadow) to get this final result:

The stone floor still obscures a little bit of the shadow, but now this feels like it has a lot more depth to it regardless.

Technical & Performance Tips

Here are a few assorted technical CC3+ tips and performance speedups:

● When you complete work on a district, create a Layer for it and move all the buildings, symbols and roads in that district to that Layer. Then, you can just hide that Layer entirely when you move on to the next district. This will help with rendering speed a lot, since CC3+ doesn’t have to redraw all those extra symbols. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.

● You can disable Aligned Fill Styles for a slight boost in speed; this can be helpful when working with a large map. You can also change the bitmap quality to Medium (I don’t recommend Low for a city) for a little bit more of a boost. These are available in the Display Speed Settings dialog:

● Don’t be afraid to create your own drawing tools, especially for things like roads which you may need many of, but may also need to vary the size, shape and smoothness. This especially applies for Roads as well as Terrain. Here are some of my drawing tools:

● For some symbols, you may want them to always go to one particular sheet. For example, I want all my docks symbols to go directly to my SYMBOLS DOCKS sheet. To do this, I need to open up the Symbols Manager (Symbols Menu > Symbols Manager or the SYMMGR command) and find the symbol(s) I want:

Then, I click Options and I can check off the Force Sheet option and specify which sheet:

● Remember the keyboard shortcuts! I find the most useful one is Ctrl+Q for Quick Move. By default, Quick Move will only move one entity you click on, put you can press S when you need to select multiple entities.

If you are feeling brave, you can edit your .mnu files to create keyboard shortcuts for other common commands like Erase and Random Street. Make sure to edit the correct .mnu file – for example, SS5 and CD3 have different .mnu files.

Applying Finishing Touches

When you complete a district, or even your entire city map, make sure you take the time to put the text labels you need! You can choose to do this on the map, or on a side legend.

Some things to consider applying text labels for: District names, major landmarks, major streets, parks, squares and other noteworthy features (see Part 5). You can also label more minor locations which may be significant to your characters or players.

When you finish each district, and once again when you finish the whole map, I suggest you do a “consistency check” for your sheets and layers. Hide all except one sheet and check all the entities/symbols on that sheet. Make sure the ones you see are the ones that are supposed to be there (it’s easy for some things to snap to a SYMBOLS DEFAULT sheet, so be meticulous! It will pay off in fewer mistakes when you print or export your map).

Repeat this process for every single sheet and every single layer. This is a last-ditch backstop intended to prevent missing or awkward shadows.

Thank You for Reading!

Well, my fellow mappers, with those final tips, I’ve finally concluded everything I wanted to share with you about City Building. When I started, I wished there was some tutorial that detailed the process of city building, not just a guide on how to use the tools. As anyone who’s mapped a large town or city can tell you, it is indeed a process. Building the map for New Cassia took me about 3 months, with several hours each day (though I didn’t work on it every day, it was just a few hours on the days that I did).

As you build your city, you’ll become very familiar with all its nooks and crannies (it was you that put them there, after all) – turn that familiarity into your city’s history! Takes notes, jot down adventure ideas as you map. I set out to build this city so I could conduct an immersive urban-setting D&D campaign (versus a traditional wilderness or dungeon setting). These can be harder to work with, but if you follow these tips throughout this article series, you are sure you have a great handle on the complexity and intrigue that a large urban setting can offer.

So that’s it, mappers. If you’ve read this far, I’d love to continue the conversation. You can find me over at the CC3+ Facebook Group where I sometimes lurk and try to offer advice when I can. Thank you for reading; I hope I’ve helped you learn a thing or two about how to Bring Your City to Life.

Ari Gilder is a software engineer, and has been interested in maps for a long time. He spent seven years working on Google Maps, working on features like local business search, Google Maps and Navigation on mobile, and studying the way users understand maps. He even proposed to his wife using maps. He often spends hours staring at maps in fantasy novels, and in 2013 starting putting together some of his own dungeon and battle maps for a D&D campaign. After a hiatus of several years, he recently dived back into cartography with CC3+, tackling more overland and city maps in preparation for a new D&D campaign. He is a father of two, and has recently introduced his older daughter to cartography, both hand-drawn and with CC3+ where she insists that black and purple varicolor trees must surround everything.

So, here you are, having just prepared the main location for tonight’s adventure. But then it dawns on you, you have no idea when players will actually visit this location. They may even drop by multiple times.

Well, today we’ll be having a look into how to set up effects to it is easy to switch between day and night views of the same map. In the day scene, we will be using regular wall shadow effects to have the buildings and symbols cast shadows, while the night seen will use the point light system in CC3+ to have light sources in the scene that causes the symbols to cast shadows. We will be using this to show how symbols around a fire casts shadows away from the fire, and how we can have lights coming from the windows.

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For this map, I took my Ancient Tombs map of the Tomb of Nefertari and followed the mapping guide provided with this annual. I’m not very proficient with Perspectives, and like the Beaumaris Castle Annual map, I decided to follow the Mapping Guide for this map, and boy am I glad I did!

[Download the FCW file]

Getting my top down floorplan/dungeon map of the tomb into an isometric map style was very easy with the Mapping Guide reminding me of the 3D Projection button and it’s ability to take a 2D layout and projecting the result in perspective. I used the wall symbols for this map, as I really liked the design options – and knowing what the interior of the real tomb looks like (there is that amazing site Osirisnet.net) I was able to make this map as close to the real tomb as I could – with some of my own embellishments, of course.

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.

[Download the FCW file of “Ancient Rome” example map.]

Cities. Not being a fan of mapping cities, I will admit I wasn’t looking forward to another one. Laying out a city is mostly my issue, so for this map I decided to use a cheat – I decided to loosely trace over an existing map – one where I wouldn’t be infringing upon copyrights. Enter a lovely map of ancient Rome I came across is my many hours of just searching through the internet for old maps. Come on, you know you other cartographers out there do it, too! I had come across this map I had found and it really reminded me of the style of Pär Lindström’s Renaissance City Annual, so I decided I would trace it.

After importing the .png into my map using Draw>Insert File and placing it on a new sheet, then applying a transparency to it, I began tracing out my roads first. Once I had my roads placed, I set about placing buildings, rather haphazardly, as I wanted it to look unfinished in some areas, unkempt or sparse than a regularly crowded Renaissance city.

On this map, once again, I applied some of my favorite effects such as Texturize, RGB Matrix and Hue/Sat Adjustment to give it a more antiqued look and my own personal choice of palettes tend to be more muted hues. Once I was satisfied with my placement of buildings, vegetation, etc. I set about adding any little “extras”, etc. On more than one occasion I had to use the SYMSORT command, which sorts out the symbols you choose on a sheet, setting them in proper back to front order if they are layered over each other within the same sheet, as my ADD gets the best of me when mapping anything isometric in nature.

All in all, this was a relatively easy set to work with. I like the clean lines and style of this Annual and I could actually see myself using it again for my own campaign.

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.

(Download the FCW file.)

This was a fun project. Knowing I have an Isometric version of this tomb in an upcoming annual to map out, led me to do a little research on just exactly how or what I was going to map. I wanted to find something simple, as I am not very familiar with the isometric/perspectives maps ProFantasy offers, although I do own them, I just haven’t found myself using them, which makes this project even better! Anyway, I found my way to a fantastic site, https://www.osirisnet.net/3d-tours/e_3d-tours.htm which led me to tomb QV66, otherwise known as the tomb of Queen Nefertari, one of the most beautiful tombs found to date. Continue reading »