I’ve been asked by Profantasy to turn the map style I used for the Truscian peninsula into a CC3 style (let’s just call it the Truscian style from now on). The thing is that when you sit and draw for your own needs you usually can cope with a lot of mistakes in your maps, maybe the city icons look a bit off or the hills just don’t look exactly as you want them to look. But that doesn’t really matter to someone else then yourself. When you suddenly are doing something that other people might be using those things start to matter and that can be a bit scary. Most of all you want it to be perfect, you don’t want it to just be ok.
Suddenly you also have to make decisions. How many types of terrain do you need? Do you have enough city icons? How many city icons are enough? The questions can very easily become quite many. The best thing to do here is to actually sit down take a piece of paper and start writing down what types of terrain you already have, what types are missing, what icons do you want, do you need some terrain features that you have to make. Do you have a compass rose and a scalebar? Get it all down and try to make a plan on when things shall be done.
When I started to put it all on paper I soon realized that I was missing a desert, some wasteland and volcanic terrain. I needed some new city icons, a volcano or two, maybe some graves, hills and so on. But now when everything is on paper and there is a plan, it is much easier to start working.
The map below is a test map of the style that I’ve made in Photoshop. It consists mostly of seamless tiles that I use as patterns. Every terrain type is on its own layer and I’m using layer masks to make the terrain visible where it shall be seen. The mountains and city icons are drawn objects that I’ve pasted in on top of the terrain layers. There is still no compass or scale bar, but I have a fairly good idea on how I will do them.
Well in December you will see the finished result, if you subscribe to the yearly annual. Hopefully some of you will find it useful.
In November we have an extensions to the fan-favorite overland style by Herwin Wielink from April. Orcs, Elves and Dwarves get symbols for their cities, castles, etc, together with lots more symbols and textures to choose from. It basically doubles the resources included in the original style.
We close the Annual 2012 subscription in December with a new style by Pär Lindström. This one is specifically designed for creating regional campaign maps, ie smaller areas than your typical continental or world campaign map.
We’ve just released the October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2012. It contains a huge amount of gorgeous bitmap artwork which focuses on alien starships and landscapes. It was created by Storyweaver (Joseph Sweeney’s rpg company) in conjunction with their High Space setting.
This is the second part of the immense collection of bitmap art, the first part having been released in July. The October issue also integrates all the bitmap artwork and drawing tools into new template wizards based on Cosmographer 3’s Deckplan Bitmap A style.
This month’s annual (September ’12) for Campaign cartographer 3 from Profantasy offered a very good looking style based on the world map of the upcoming role-playing game the “13th Age” by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet.
I always like to try out new styles so I thought I should give this one a try too. Usually when I make maps I try to make a story around it. If you let the map visualize your story it is often easier to make it more unique and the details will kind of come more naturally. The drawback of working in that way is that it takes much more energy from you making a map, so this time I decided to just make a map without weaving a story around it.
The style itself was very easy and quick to work with. Most of the terrain is made up from seamless bitmap files so making mountains and other types of terrain goes really quick. The mountains however gave me some problems. Sometimes it was hard to get the high peaks in the places where you wanted them. But luckily enough the style also includes single mountains you can add to the mountain texture, which made the process easier.
If you look at the map included in this post I guess it took around three hours to do it, and then I probably spent as much time on labeling as I did on the actual map.
One thing I didn’t like though was that when you added the sheet effects to the map the seas didn’t get any effect added to them. When I made the map I had two larger seas, the sea of pain and little sea, that where close to the oceans. When those seas didn’t get any effect they looked strange compared to the nearby oceans. I tried to add some effects to the sea layer but because the ocean layer lies below the land layer and the seas are on top of the land layer it was hard to get an effect that looked exactly the same.
Apart from that I liked the style and if you want a map in a more stylish satellite style I can really recommend it.
Community member soldyne created this map of the “World River” as his very first map in CC3.
Henrie61 drew this “quick and dirty” town map to try our the Jon Roberts Cities style and was impressed how quickly you can create a beautiful map this way.
The Jon Roberts Cities style seems very popular as shown by the “Yellowmire” map created by Dargurd. The unusual, swampy location of the city comes acress very well.
In a change of pace Modric created this black and white map of “Avern” and added a great parchment style filter for a great player handout. The style used is from the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 2.
And last but not least, forum member anomiecoalition drew this neat little Al Quadim-flavoured dungeon, using resources from DD3, the CSUAC art collection and Dundjinni forums.
Kudos to all the great maps our users have been creating!
The September issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2012 was released last Saturday. It lets you create maps in the beautiful style of the 13th Age world map by Lee Moyer. 13th Age is the upcoming new role-playing game by Pelgrane Press.
The August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2012 has been released. It contains a 10-page introduction and tutorial to the Cut menu and its commands, a way to cut out and export a section of a larger map in CC3.
We’ve also added previews to the September and October issues to the Annual website. Check out the September issue and the Gallery page for some previews of the beautiful map included in Pelgrane Press’ upcoming rpg 13th Age (by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet).
If you are a subscriber, you will notice that we’ve changed the way the download for the Annual works. For details, please check here for details.
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The upcoming July Annual contains a host of new bitmap artwork, hundreds of new textures and symbols for your starship floorplans. They will be released on Sunday for the Annual subscribers.
But perhaps best of all, they are accompanied by a series of new video tutorials by the master of CC3 videos, Joseph Sweeney. These videos are freely available to anyone, and you can already view them on Joe’s YouTube channel or download them from the July Annual page.
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We are happy that we’ve been able to put out two new products last month. Together with the monthly Annual, I’ve got a triplet to announce.
Symbol Set 3
The long-awaited and much delayed new version of Symbol Set 3 – Modern is now available. It comes with two completely new bitmap drawing styles for floorplans, with about 500 symbols each. One was created by Jon Roberts, the other by Michael Tumey. There is also a snazzy new blueprint-style for realistic looking player handouts, a Modern political overland style, and the old vector style has been updated to work with CC3’s sheet effects and drawing tools.
Tome of Ultimate Mapping
The second product is the Tome of Ultimate Mapping which has been updated by Remy Monsen (the author of the CC3 Full Manual) to cover Campaign Cartographer 3 and all version 3 products up to Fractal Terrains 3 (Dungeon Designer 3, City Designer 3, Symbols Sets 1 and 2, Cosmographer 3 and Fractal Terrains 3). The chapters on the other add-ons will be updated after their new versions are released. Symbol Set 3 is obviously the next on the list. You can see half a dozen example pages of the Tome here.
June Annual Isometric Dungeon Style
Last but not least is this month Annual Issue, an isometric dungeon style created by Herwin Wielink. I’m especially delighted with the lovely artwork in this issue and spent a whole evening just tinkering with the symbols, putting together a large example example map.
Recently a particularly large number of very nice overland maps has appeared on the Profantasy forum – and they were all done in the April’s Annual style by Herwin Wielink. Apparently the style is especially well-suited for creating quick and beautiful maps. Here is a little gallery:
Local Region Map by community member Modric
The tidally-locked world Thraalion by community member Clercon
Map of the Whalebones Islands (Forgotten Realms) by community member Eranthius
Map of the Neverwinter Region (Forgotten Realms) by community member Dargurd
Batazan Map by community member FarsightX3
Sagorike map my community member Clercon
If you – like some members of the Profantasy crew – prefer your seas more blue and balmy, here is a neat little trick to adjust your ocean color: Add an RGB Matrix effect to the BACKGROUND sheet, using the values shown below.
