Did you ever want to venture into the vast darkness of the subterranean landscape beneath the oceans, mountains and forests of your surface world? With Pär Lindström’s Dungeon World style you can now map this journey in detail. Cross the dense mushroom forests and the plains of moss of lichen, scale mountain ranges of stalagmites and contend with the underground nations of brainflensers and dark elves with the June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2016.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

We are proud to present a new contributing artist for the May Annual issue: Naomi VanDoren, who awed us with her map work on Pelgrane’s second battle scenes book. We were very happy when she agreed to creating a floorplan-style based on her work.

Her drawing style is crisp, clear and evocative, and we think we managed to transport it to CC3+ very faithfully. Give it a try with this month’s “Naomi VanDoren’s Floorplans” style. You can follow along with the the included 4-page mapping guide.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

The April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2016 is now available. It contains a map and style pack based on a 1876 book on architecture with the wonderful title: “Hobbs’s architecture: containing designs and ground plans for villas, cottages and other edifices, both suburban and rural, adapted to the United States. With rules for criticism, and introduction”.

The issue contains four full sample maps drawn from Hobbs’ book and recreated in CC3+. The style “1800s Floorplans” allows you to create your own and edit existing ones to your liking. The maps make great handouts for any period horror (or other) rpg.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

The March Annual is now ready for download and your enjoyment. The Temple of Bones is an isometric dungeon style created by TJ Vandel and meshes seamlessly with earlier work by Herwin Wielink and the upcoming Perspectives 3 (in beta testing right now).

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

With 2016 upon us, we’ve been working hard on Perspectives 3 and it’s in late beta with no significant problems so far. The new Annual is in its second month and our users have once again amazed us with their cartographic talents.

News

• The Cartographer’s Annual 2016 is available for subscription, and you can download the January and February issues immediately, if you do so.
• The Cartographer’s Annual Vol 9 (2015) is now complete and available as a single package from our store. If you are already a subscriber and want the physical box, you can order the media at shipping cost only from your registration page.

Resources

• We’ve made one issue from the Cartographer’s Annual 2015 available as a free download as a sampler.
• The Vintyri Cartographic Collection is awesome resource for your city mapping. It adds hundreds of symbols to City Designer 3, all based on historic medieval towns and buildings architecture.

Articles

• Take a look at what’s on the Cartographer-On-Duty’s desk, including a report on the state of Perspectives 3.
• Check out the December and January collection of user maps from the community forum.

We have the Feburary Annual issue ready for you to download and enjoy: the overland style Empire of the Sun. It’s a wonderful design by TJ Vandel that lets you create overland maps in a quasi-historical style reminiscent of Japanese and Chinese cartography. With more than 350 symbols, the style allows you to easily put together varied landscapes and coastlines.

The February issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

Another year has passed, another Annual subscription is complete and we are seamlessly moving into the next year. A Happy New Year to you all. 2016 here we come!

Pär Lindström starts the new year with his large-scale overland style Here Be Monsters. All manner of weird and amazing sea creatures are now ready to populate the edges and corners of your maps, and show the terror the uncharted open ocean would hold for early mariners. Here Be Monsters, indeed!

The January issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2016 yet, you can do so here.

Like most years, we publish a free bonus issue for the current Annual around Christmas. This time you’re getting a collection of six high detail battle maps created with the techniques described in the December issue.

Raft the tumultuous Razoredge Gorge, defend the walls of Tenrock Hold, and sneak along a Forest Path to ambush your enemies in their Forest Camp. Edit and adjust the maps in CC3+ to your own needs. This bonus issue is a free download, you don’t need to own the Annual 2015 to use it. Just head over to the Annual 2015 page for the download links.

We’ll shortly offer current Annual subscribers the option to re-subscribe to the Annual 2016. If you want to take advantage of the reduced rate, you can still quickly subscribe to the Annual 2015 here.

The December Annual is now available for download. Check out an 8-page mapping guide on creating deluxe battle maps, with tips and tricks on merging different map styles into one, adding new sheets and effects for features like cliffs, water, height transitions and multiple floors, and using lighting to give your maps that bit of extra polish.

The December issue is available both for CC3 and CC3+ (sample FCW files CC3+ only). You can download both setups from your registration page on the Subscriptions tab. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2015 yet, you can do so here.

Over at Pelgrane Press and Fire Opal Media, they’ve been working hard on a new supplement for 13th Age code-named Battle Scenes. It is a collection of icon-themed encounters for all levels of play, packed with dangerous hand-picked foes on terrifying terrain, and I’ve been one of the people to help bring this “terrifying terrain” to life, not least because I’ve been using the playtest version of the book for my own games, as seen here.

For me these battle maps required a lot of special terrain effects, for which I had to import new bitmap fills, create lots of new sheets with specialized effects, and generally had to think outside the box of a specific drawing style. Naturally we’d like to make these ideas and tools available to more CC3+ users, so we created the December Annual issue to make that happen.

In addition to a tutorial with chapters on combining assets from different styles, custom artwork, working with water effects, showing elevation and cliff faces, creating multiple layers in one map, and lighting effects, the December Annual also contains 4 highly detailed example maps (2 of them straight out of Battle Scenes). Here is anther scaled-down example out of
High Magic & Low Cunning: Battles Scenes for Five Icons.