The September issue of the Annual 2023 extends April’s “E Prybylski Watercolor” style with another 50 symbols for non-human settlements, more mountains and other artwork.

Add giant elven tree cities, dwarven mountain strongholds, orc camps and cozy halfling cottages to your map, populate your oceans with monsters and hazards, and have a cat (yes, a cat) shove ships off the edge of the world. The accompanying mapping guide takes a look at the new symbols, and details additional methods to decorate your maps.

The September issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

In the August issue of the Annual 2023 we return back to some (visually) simpler maps in black and white. Draw ruins, floorplans and dungeons with faux-inked lines and easy to use black and white symbols.

Related to and compatible with 2020’s Inked Dungeons, the Inked Ruins style allows you to build surface ruins and outdoor areas that can be easily printed and comfortably read even at relatively small output sizes.

The August issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

It seems to be the year of new contributors in the Cartographer’s Annual 2023. Please welcome Monkey Frog Studio with their new overland mapping style in the July issue.

Cleverly named “Monkey Frog Overland”, the drawing style comes with over 200 new symbols and we are planning to expand it even further, with lots of structure symbols later this year. As always the accompanying mapping guide takes you through creating a Monkey Frog Overland map step by step.

The July issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

Christina continues her series on the 2016 Annuals…

Next up, Empire of the Sun. I love, love, love this Annual. It looks like wall art, doesn’t it? For this Annual I changed nothing except the range of the text’s outer glow a teeny tiny bit. No reason to change a thing. I love the brushed watercolor look of this map.
For this map, I must admit I used my own homebrew fantasy world for this landscape. I’ve changed the names from my world, just in case any of my players make their way here, or come across this map for any reason other than within their gameplay.

[Download the FCW file]

About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.

Welcome, dear cartographers, to the June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual and to an alternate universe where steam technology goes way beyond what was possible in ours, mad scientists devise strange and powerful artefacts, and most likely zeppelins zip across the sky – in other words, a steampunk world.

Jon C Munson II, who created his first Cartographer’s Annual (Munson’s Mines) in 2017, has returned with another symbol pack compatible with Mike Schley’s Dungeons of Schley of Symbol Set 4. It includes trains, tracks, vehicles and lots of strange machinery.

The June issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

We are very happy that with Jimmy Medina (aka DM Geezer Jim) we have a new contributor to the Cartographer’s Annual for the second month in a row. We loved the multi-structure floorplans extending over several levels that he shared with the community, and asked him to create a floorplan of a whole city block.

The resulting map pack “City Block” makes up the May Annual issue and shows eight different buildings interconnecting via their cellars, ground levels, upper stories and roof tops using the Dungeons of Schley style. It also contains a 10-page mapping guide, including descriptions and adventure ideas for the buildings.

The May issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

We are happy and proud to present a new artist for the April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual. E. Prybylski has been contributing beautiful CC3+ maps to the community for a while, but they are also a great artist with ink and watercolour brushes, and we wanted to leverage that for the Annual. So symbols and Textures were drawn by hand and then converted into digital assets.

The result is the E Prybylski Watercolour style you see here. More than two hundred hand-drawn symbols combine with a dozen textures to produce unique and beautiful overland maps with a decidedly hand-drawn flavour.

The April issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

For the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 Sue Daniel is back with a glorious new battle map style for those wintry excursions. See how her forest paths of 2022 turns into new winter trails, frozen rivers and lakes, and snow-covered woods.

Compatible with Sue’s Forest Trail style form last year’s Annual, Winter Trails contains everything you need to draw snow-covered outdoor maps for those encounters in the woods.

The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 is now available for download. We have a new, beautiful town style by Pär Lindström for you, venturing out into the heat of the desert this time. The “Desert Oasis” style contains hand-drawn buildings, ruins, palm trees and gigantic monuments, alongside bitmap textures to build an oasis settlement, an ancient ruin, or similar locations in a desert setting.

The February issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

Last year’s Cartographer’s Annual – Volume 16 – is now available as a complete setup, all monthly issues collected into one single package. Subscribers who downloaded all the monthly issues don’t need to do anything, but if you skipped some issues or are a fresh owner of Volume 16, you can install everything in one go now. The setup is available from the registration page as usual. If you didn’t subscribe, waiting for it to become available as one single package, you can now purchase it from the Annual’s page or the store as usual.

Last year saw a bit of focus on battle maps and floorplans, but also ranged to electronic system maps and overland styles. The stars of the show (for me at least) were the battle map styles Creepy Crypts and Forest Trail by Sue Daniel – both so resource and work intensive we had to split them into two parts. But her Winter Village set was also extremely beautiful. It was also great to see Pär Lindström back with the wonderfully illustrative Book of Maps style.

Personally, I was happy to let some of my travel inspirations flow into the Island Chains issue and revisit Jon Roberts‘ awesome overland style. But the Tactical Maps style I developed from a commission for Pelgrane Press was also great fun to create.

For the coming year we are looking to include more new talent again and are actively looking for artists who are interested in creating an Annual issue style for us. See Simon’s call here.

The current Annual 2023 subscription has now started and the January issue is available. So if this retrospective on 2022 did wet your appetite, check it out here.