ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

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.

There are many things that sets CC3+ apart from other graphics and mapping programs. One of these differences is the size of the mapping area. In most programs, when you start a new file, you specify a size, and you get a canvas exactly that size. If you try putting something halfway outside the edge, like a symbol or equivalent, the spillover is simply lost. In CC3+ however, this is completely different.

CC3+ doesn’t operate with a fixed sized canvas, for most practical considerations it is infinite. There’s nothing preventing you from placing a symbol entirely outside the map area if you so wish, simply because your map only occupies a small spot on that almost infinite canvas. But if the drawing area is of infinite space, how do we determine the actual size of the map? And why do our drawing tools seem to only draw within the map area?

To understand this, we need to look at the map border. When we talk about map borders in CC3+, there are actually two different things we may be talking about. We might be talking about that nice decorative frame around your map. This is known as the decorative map border, and it is just that, decorative. Some map styles have a very elaborate decorative map border, while others have a much more spartan one, sometimes even just a simple line. It doesn’t have any functionality, it is just there to give your map a visual frame. Then we have the technical map border. This is what actually defines your map’s size on the canvas, and all tools that have a restrict to map border option, like drawing tools and bitmap exports work with this one. Usually, it will overlap in location with the decorative map border, but it is the technical map border that provides the functionality.

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The monthly symbols by Mike Schley have been very popular and of course we continue this tradition into the new year. From the isometric city symbols we return to artwork for overland maps for a while, with a fiery first collection of volcanic symbols.

20 new symbols depict active and dormant volcanoes both for land-bound mountain ranges and volcanic peaks rising directly out of the sea, as well as lava pools and fiery chasms leading down into the bosom of the earth.

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 (only January 2024 so far) is included in the one download.

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

Behind the scenes we’ve been working on a new feature for Campaign Cartographer: a random generator that allows you to generate complete maps by just a few clicks. This version is a taster of what we’ll introduce in CC4. We are very happy that we were able to recruit the help of the designer of the Watabou series of random map generators. The first of these, a Random Dungeon generator, is now at a stage where we are happy to release it into the public as a beta, for you to try out and make use of.

Note This is an enhanced output from a version still under development. Current beta output will look a bit different.

You can download the Random Dungeon generator from your account at profantasy.com. It is a small, simple executable that will add the functionality to your current CC3+ install.

When you run CC3+ after installing it, a sample map will come up with a link to an introductory guide to the Random Dungeon command. Click the link to open the pdf or download it from this link: Mapping Guide – Random Dungeons.

We’ve also done a live mapping session on using the first version of the Random Dungeon generator. You can view it on YouTube now:

We will further develop this random generator and add other ones in the future. Join the community forum and/or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the development. Send us feedback by posting on the forum or by email. We are looking for anything from bug reports to feature requests.

In the meantime enjoy creating some random dungeons!

Trains and Rails are useful for all kinds of mapping. From the humble carts on a track used in mines, to daring train heists in the Wild West, through subways and all the way to modern high-speed bullet trains. They can be used for battle maps to play out interesting encounters, as scenery in your mine maps and part of the infrastructure of your city.

In this first part I’ll be having a look at creating the basic tracks.

(I’ll also be looking at this in tomorrow’s live stream, so join the stream or watch the archived video later if you wish a video version of this)

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When you make your own symbol catalogs, either from new symbols, or just to create a re-mix of existing symbols, one of the main issues is how to make them easily accessible. Sure, you can always click the open symbol catalog button and browse for it, but that means you need to remember where it is, and it is more complicated than just clicking one of the symbol catalog buttons in the top toolbar.

But, if all the official catalogs can be loaded from those buttons, why not our own? It’s actually quite simple, so let us have a look.

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When working with Campaign Cartographer 3+ you can make good looking maps quite easily. Templates come with the appropriate effects predefined, symbols and tools draw on the appropriate sheet automatically and most styles have a nice selection of symbols and fills to use in your map. With just a little bit of experience with CC3+ and it’s tools, you can quickly and easily throw together that battle map for tonight’s encounter. Sometimes however, it can be worth spending a little more time with the map, looking at the details and taking it from a good map to a great map.

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One of the nice upgrades CC3+ brought with it back when it was released was the ability to include drawing tools in your symbol catalogs. Now, this is hopefully not news to you, as this is used quite a bit in the official symbol catalogs used in most styles. But this fact does make the symbol catalog window a bit smarter, since drawing tools can do quite a bit of things, like I discussed in my article about Advanced Drawing Tools earlier this year.

This means that the tools we add to our symbol catalog doesn’t have to be limited to drawing shapes that fit the theme of the symbols in the catalog, but also tools that can do powerful things like running macros to almost everything we want.

The feature of putting drawing tools into the symbol catalog is simple enough, it is the possibilities that this opens that make it exiting.

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There are several ways to organize your maps, both inside and outside of CC3+. We’ve previously talked about linking your maps together to make a navigable atlas, and how to index your maps to make them easy to search to find the map you want. Today, I’ll talk about the bookmark feature in CC3+. Using bookmarks, you can create lists of maps, for examples maps belonging together, or maps with a common theme. For example, in the community atlas, I have bookmarks for the different types of maps, for example one bookmark set that contains all the overland maps, one the contains all the dungeon maps, and so on.

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Dear fellow map-makers! May is here and we are looking forward to the summer.

News

• The free monthly symbols for this month are a special highlight, as Mike Schley has created some amazing structure symbols for a Dark Empire in his overland style.
• The May issue of the Annual 2022 is available, featuring an overlay style for computer networks and other electronic systems.

Resources

• Watch or re-watch last month’s live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
• Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for April to see the beautiful maps shared by our fellow map-makers.

Articles

• We have a new Master Mapper in our roster of awesome cartographers. Read about the work of Hans Anders Bergström, our Master Mapper of 2021.
• As travel restriction are being lifted and events are happening at a larger scale again, you’ll find ProFantasy at GenCon again this year, meaning we have to travel to Indianapolis.

Reminders

• CC3+ has been updated to version 3.97 (Update 27) which is available from your registration page.
• Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
• Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.