The May issue of the Annual 2014 contains an overland style by a new contributing artist: Glynn Seal of MonkeyBlood Design. We recently became aware of his beautiful Havenland set of symbols for overland maps, and luckily Glynn was more than willing to create a set for the Annual.

More than a hundred carefully crafted symbols and a complete set of bitmap textures make this style another great selection for your overland maps. As usual for the Annual, a mapping guide takes you through drawing a map in this style step by step.

The May Annual is now available from the registration page for current subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’ll find more information on the Annual 2014 product page.

From Tolkien’s seminal Lord of the Rings, to Lord Foul’s Bane and Game of Thrones, blockbusting fantasy novels need maps you can flick back to when following the journeys of the protagonists. The Fantasy Reader blog provides an index with wide selection of examples.

Campaign Cartographer has been used to illustrate novels such as Shades of Gray by Lisanne Norman, Le Temple Des Eaux-Mortes by Eric Ferris, and Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard, and writer David Brown discusses his experience with CC3 here.

So, which are the best CC3 styles to use to sketch a world for your frontispiece? Most likely it’s black and white line are, though greyscale might work. Here are some suitable suggestions for overland maps.

This prosaically named Overland B&W style is a perfect example of a simple style with which you can create a first fantasy map, It’s very straightforward to use.

Annual 2008 Overland B&W Style

Following our map-making competition, we asked the winner Christian, whether he would allow us to transform his beautiful island map into a new style for the Annual. He happily obliged us, and the April issue is the result of that. Titled “Volcanic Islands” in honour of the competition, the style of course allows to draw all kinds of islands or regions and especially suited for small to mid-sized areas. Check out the example map on the right (click for an enlarged version).

The April Annual is now available from the registration page for current subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’ll find more information on the Annual 2014 product page.

Interested in the history of cartography and the quest of mapping the earth’s globe on a flat piece of paper? Want your imaginary world to have a touch of realism or believability? Than the March Annual issue is for you. Check out more than a dozen new templates, showing different map projections, and instructions on how to convert these into your favorite mapping style.

If you are an Annual subscriber, log into your registration page to download it. If not, you can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 here.

It’s time for the monthly parade of user maps posted to the ProFantasy forum – again we have some lovely work to show off, thanks to the community!

As described elsewhere, TolrendorDM finished off his 2013 Annual Challenge with this map of the “Barrens of Gorak” in the 1930’s travel guide style.

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The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 has been available since Saturday (log in to your registration page if you are a subscriber). It contains pre-assembled paper figures to use in your games. Created with the new Charcater Artist 3 add-on, a selection of generic heroes is opposed by a wealth of stock monsters. Character Artist 3 is not necessary to enjoy this issue, but it also contains the CA3 source files so you can quickly create more variations if you do.

You can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 here.

It’s been a while since we did a collection of users maps here. First the convention season didn’t leave us enough time and then the Character Artist 3 release took a lot of resources. But now we’ve been able to take a breath over the holidays, we’ve looking at the forum again and there are so many nice maps. Here’s the collection:

suntzu created this amazing set of isometric dungeon and outdoor maps with Herwin Wielink’s Isometric Dungeon style.

This beautiful little gem of a Knight’s Crypt was posted by Modric.

This interesting cave map is the result of work in DD3 and Photoshop by Avotas. It’s being created for a commercial D&D/Pathfinder adventure, therefore the grey watermark overlay.

Drednort posted a stalwart adventuring party, freshly created with Character Artist 3. You’ll find more character portraits in the forum thread when you click on the image.

While deceptively simply this black and white map of the world Maioria by Miafeya is one of my favorites. Designed for a 2-page spread in a book, it suits that purpose very well.

TolrendorDM shared several maps for his Annual 2013 challenge, you’ll find them in the thread linked through this example of the CC3 Overland Hex style.

I’m always happy to see star ships created with Cosmographer 3 and craigo730‘s Mercury-class Battlestar is no exception.

KenG shared another great dungeon map, King Ranier’s Vault with the community. And it comes with a complete adventure!

He also created this collection of boats and rafts, very useful if you need a quick way to get across that river on your battlemap!

I don’t really need to say much about Clercon’s (Pär Lindström) New Year Village map, after all he’s done several Annual styles already. But his city and village maps are always particularly impressive.

Educational use of CC3 always delights me, so I was thrilled to see languard and his students create these SciFi tiles for a boardgame of their own making.

What would a user map collection be with one of Sadizm‘s gorgeous Deadlands battle maps. A lot less exciting that’s for sure!

TolrendorDM, one of our community members over on the forum, set himself the challenge of creating a map for each and every issue of the Annual 2013.

He now completed the challenge and you can see all the of the great results over on his blog.

See the final (December) map here on the community forum:

It might have slipped by silently due to the holidays, but the first issue of the Annual 2014 stalwartly appeared on January first. It’s a beautiful area map style by Michal Cross, as seen in the Achtung! Cthulhu adventures by Modiphius Entertainment.

You can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2014 here.

The accompanying mapping guide also takes you through the steps to take a real-world map from an online map service and convert it to a WW2-era style map in CC3. Here is an example:

Next year’s Annual is now available for purchase. Order it now to receive the first issue – World War 2 Area Maps – on January 1st.

If you are a previous subscriber and haven’t received an email last week with your re-subscription discount offer, sent us an email – the offer still stands.