ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

Sometimes when you draw a box, you may wish to pretty up the corners a bit, for example by making them rounded or just cutting them off. This might be for many reasons, perhaps you are making a box to be a nice frame around your map legend, or you are making some kind of map marker. And of course, this technique doesn’t just work with boxes, but with every case where you have two lines joining in some kind of corner.

If you have been seeing some of the recent live mapping videos, you may have noticed Ralf using this command to produce simple village symbols.

We have two sets of commands that are very helpful here, the Chamfer and Fillet commands. If you right click the Trim button you’ll find two versions of each of these commands. The Fillet command is for making a rounded corner, while the Chamber command makes an angled corner. The difference between the regular and Trim version of the commands is that the regular version will add the line/curve but will not trim away the extra part of the line, while the Trim version also trims the lines to the new corner shape. You normally want to use the Trim versions of these commands, but feel free to experiment.

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You want to marvel at those lofty peaks clad in eternal ice and snow, rising up from their surroundings like frost giants among goblins? See their snowy caps glitter white under sun or moon and can been seen from far away? Then you’ll enjoy this collection of free monthly art for the Hand-drawn Overland style, as it includes a range of Snowy Mountains to use in your maps.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available for purchase here.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of from August 2025 to April 2026 is included in the one download. All previous content has been folded into the latest update for CC3+ (Update 28).

There is no getting around the fact that CC3+ contains a huge number of symbols, especially if you own all the add-ons, symbol sets and annuals, and even more if you have installed some of the available free community made sets, or maybe even imported images you have found yourself as symbols.

We have different ways in how we like to go looking for symbols, but one way some people like is having a kind of symbol book they can flip through. I still have memories of software in the last millennium that often came with such printed books in their box, for example a clipart book showing all the clipart available in the software. These days, such books are not quite as useful, because as computers evolved and became more powerful, they started offering on-screen preview and search features. Still, sometimes flipping through a book, either in physical form, or a pdf on your screen can be nice. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can even keep that book on one screen and work with CC3+ on another.

Now, CC3+ doesn’t come with any such books, neither printed nor digital, but it contains the tools that allow you to make one for yourself.

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Last month, I wrote an article about Mapping as You Go showing off one technique I use for maps in my game.

This time, I’ll present another map I made last week for their next adventure. I had a situation where the characters encountered a misbehaving magical artifact. It was a small cube that could be used to summon a wizard’s laboratory that one could enter. Unfortunately, the thing started spawning random monsters instead, and now the characters have to enter it to shut it down.

To me, that meant that the Random Dungeon generator was a perfect fit. It gives a perfect starting point for a dungeon inside a magical artifact. I could focus more on the content of the dungeon, and not spending too much time deliberating the layout.

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While the dwarves dig deep into the mountains and build their subterranean palaces into the roots of the world, the orcs settle the wastes and steppes of the world, always to fight and plunder the settlements of their enemies. Now you can add their realms to the maps in the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available for purchase here.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to September 2025) is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.

Campaign Cartographer contains a host of nice features to help you make your maps. But it also contain some features whose functionality might need a bit more of an explanation before one understand how to use them properly, and why they on the surface might seem complicated when compared to a similar feature in an image editor.

One of these features is text. If you are new to CC3+ you might have experiencing that text sometimes appear to have a mind of it own, and you may have experienced behavior where text looks perfect as you place it, but when you zoom in or out, it may appear to no longer fit into the space for it, or that text you struggled placing neatly in the corner of the map suddenly expands into/over the map border.

So, let us have a look. Why can text be so troublesome at times? And how can we master it to make it work like we want?

Before continuing on, note that I did intentionally go looking for bad cases here. In many cases, you won’t notice this problem at all, but the idea behind this article is that when/if you encounter this, you should understand why, and how to handle it.

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Humble Bundle is currently doing another re-run of the first Campaign Cartographer 3+ bundle, the Maps Extravaganza, containing not only CC3+, but also depending on the level chosen:

• City Designer 3
• Dungeon Designer 3
• Tome of Ultimate Mapping Plus
• Perspectives 3
• Sources Maps: Castles
• Source Maps: Temples, Tombs and Catacombs
• Symbol Set 2 – Fantasy Floorplans
• Token Treasury – Monsters 1
• Battle Maps and Floorplans Collection (contains a selection of Annual issues)

If you were waiting to jump into CC3+, this is a great opportunity to get it at an awesome price. Even if you already own CC3+, this can be well worth it to get a great selection of add-ons. Part of the cost goes toward charity, Save the Children.

The bundle runs until December 4th.

We have reached the final article in the series about making mapping tiles. In previous articles (Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4) we discussed how to design such tiles, how to print or export them for use in other software, and how to make raster symbols in CC3+ from them so we could use the tiles for assembling maps quickly.

But, as we pointed out in the earlier articles, exporting static bitmap images have some limitations. For example, if you rotate them, you change the direction of shadows and patterns in the fill. One could just call it an acceptable tradeoff and move on, but there is a better way, and that is to turn these tiles into advanced symbols in CC3+. By making symbols that contain the actual entities in the tiles instead of static images, directions of fills and effects are calculated when the tiles are used, not when you originally make them, and it also allow you to actually change the content after placing them. In short, if you are going to make maps using the tiles inside CC3+, this is the best approach, so let us dig into how to achieve this.

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Did you love last month’s Far Eastern symbols by Mike Schley, but feared there was not enough variety available? Don’t worry, we have you covered with more of the same style. Sprawling castles, palaces, temples and shrines, as well as ruined town and smaller places, they are all included in the May selection of free symbols.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of the current year (January to May 2024 so far) is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.

A little warning this month: If you’re suffering from arachnophobia, take it slowly with this month’s free symbols. Mike has drawn some lovely web-cloaked woodlands, massive giant spiders to haunt your dreams and web and lairs to give them a wonderfully scary home.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of the current year (January to March 2024 so far) is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.