Simon Rogers | June 10, 2011 | overland, Pete Fenlon
Our Annuals are designed to give value year after year – as an example, I give this flashback to May 2008 from my livejournal…
Many of us remember, and were inspired by Pete Fenlon’s wonderful maps for the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game. Today, Pete is Chairman and Studio Director at Mayfair Games. In January 2008, with Pete’s permission we released a style pack for making maps in his style as part of the Cartographer’s Annual 2008.
Steve Townshend produced this beautiful map in the Pete Fenlon style.
It uses only specially designed vector symbols combined with CC3’s effects to get the right look.
Style packs are preconfigured so that if you select a tool (for example, rivers, roads and terrain), it looks right for the map style. To create a forest, you just select the forest draw tool, click points for the border, and it does this, adding random tree tops and edge trees.
You building up mountain ranges by selecting a symbol, then placing. They are selected randomly from a collection of symbols. So this was one click per mountain, and the mess at the bottom is a mountain cursor. You can tab through random styles if you don’t like the current mountain at the cursor.
The distinctive ridges are also built up of symbols. On the left, with CC3 effects off, on the right, with them on.
Although the styles definitely make it easier to create maps such as these, Steve Townshend demonstrates that the human touch is still required to get an aesthetically pleasing map – style packs just make it easier to get the desired effect.
You can download the map in CC3 format here.
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ralf | June 1, 2011 | Annual, dungeon, Jon Roberts
We’ve just released the June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2011, and we’re very happy to present another style created by map-making artist Jon Roberts.
This time we went for a dungeon/floorplan style and the result is really gorgeous again. Take a look at these beautiful maps: Continue reading »
2 Comments
ralf | May 5, 2011 | Annual, city, Modern
The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2011 has been available since Sunday. It contains a new style to draw modern road atlas maps, both on a regional or local level:
Modern City Street Map
ralf | April 1, 2011 | Annual, Cthulhu, Floorplan, Horror, Modern, Pulp
We’ve released the April issue of the current Annual. The included floorplan style is inspired by the maps in vintage (1930s) Baedeker travel guides – just perfect for your pulp or horror games .
National Gallery Berlin done in CC3
ralf | March 6, 2011 | Caera, cartography, Dungeonslayers, game maps
Last week we played the first session of a German indie rpg: Dungeonslayers. As the name implies it’s a quick and easy, not quite old-school, Fantasy hack-and-slay (but not only) game. It’s a free download but can also be purchases in printed format at a very reasonable price. It’s worth it – we had a lot of fun.
The game comes with its own little setting called Caera. Its black-and-white maps are nothing to be sneered at, but of course they tickled my fancy and I set out to create my own CC3 version of the map. I loved creating this month’s Annual style (design by Jon Roberts) very much, so I decided to use it. Here it is: Continue reading »
15 Comments
ralf | February 1, 2011 | Annual, dungeon
More Dungeon Symbols
Well of Elemental Water
The
February issue of the Annual 2011 is now available. It provides a huge selection of dungeon and battlemap symbols for use in DD3. The number of individual symbols comes to a staggering 1500 – making the download larger than most of our full products. Community member Joachim de Ravenbel created the objects in Pov-ray and exported their top-down view as high-resolution bitmaps. We took those, created CC3 symbols from them and sorted them into catalogs for easy in use in CC3/DD3.
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Simon Rogers | January 27, 2011 |
This beautiful map was made using the Cartographer’s Annual Fantasy Map style found here by forum user Medio. You can follow its development on the forum.
Close up:
The political map:
4 Comments
ralf | December 17, 2010 | Annual, overland
The January issue: A new drawing style
The Cartographer’s Annual is now entering its fifth year with the 2011 subscription available for purchase.* Check it out
on its new website and purchase it directly
from this link.
Continue reading »
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ralf | October 4, 2010 | Annual, dungeon
The October issue of the Annual 2010 was released on Friday, and we are very happy to publish the awesome new commands created by community member Joachim de Ravenbel for CC3. They make it extremely quick and easy to draw complex wall layouts, as you would see in an actual medieval castle, including doorways, alcoves, windows and arrow slits.
It is also a great example what users can contribute directly to CC3. If you are interested in programming your own commands for CC3, check out Lee Saunders’ CC3 development blog and the CC developers’ mailing list.
2 Comments
ralf | September 1, 2010 | Annual, overland
We’ve just released the September issue of the Annual 2010. While also including a complete new style based on the work of fantasy cartographer Robert Altbauer, the accompanying tutorial focuses on how to convert Photoshop brushes into CC3 symbols catalogs. The quick and easy process opens up a whole lot of material to use in CC3, as there are many free-to-use brushes available on the web.
The included style uses a serial of brushes for mountains and hills, made available on the Cartographers’ Guild forum. Here is the example map created with the new style:
And here's a sample of the Mountain symbol catalog created from a Photoshop Brush:
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