The first thing I thought of when I saw this map by CC3 user Gerard Serre was Ultima IV, one of the greatest computer games ever made. The layout of the town could be lifted straight out of that game and I see my little pixel avatar wandering around the buildings (C)hatting up each and every passerby.
Gerard’s map is in 4 parts and done as a 25mm scale miniature battle map with Dungeon Designer 3. Overlaid with a grid and printed to scale it creates an excellent floorplan for a town skirmish.
We’ve started into 2012 with our new Annual subscription and a combined map pack for creating dungeons on the table. “Combined” because it contains the tools for doing it either as a “flat” 2d version or – if you are into building your own paper models – as a 3D model.
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The November Annual issue was released on Tuesday, providing a detailed floorplan and street map of Moe’s Dive, a generic seedy bar to use in your adventures. It also contains a combined City Designer 3/Dungeon Designer 3 template for those close-up street battle maps.
Inspired by the Geomorphic dungeons of Dave’s Mapper and the idea of vertical dungeon maps by Stonewerk on his blog, I created a set of geomorphic dungeon tiles for the August Annual complete with the style and tools to draw your own.
EDIT: The style was inspired by the images posted on the ProFantasy Community Forum, which I mistakenly thought came from Stonewerk’s Blog. The proper source is Dyson Logos’s blog “A Character for Every Game“. Sorry for the mistake and thanks for the great inspiration!
Here is my complete example map for Issue 56 of the Cartographer’s Annual (click image for a larger view):
Mark Needham created these beautiful castle floorplans for the Time Ref – Medieval History website:
He used the Jon Robert’s Dungeon style released as the June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2001. This style is freely available for download and showcases the beauty of Jon Roberts’ artwork, as well as the value of the content of our Annual subscription.
by Avotas
Eight months ago I took the digital plunge into a brave new world called “YouTube” and released my very first video tutorial explaining the how to integrate maps created in CC3 and DD3 into RPTools MapTools. Since that time, and after careful reflection, I have come to the determination that the video really does look like something someone does for a first project. Still the advice is sound, and I wish to expand on concept.
In the video I used a PNG, which is a lossless compressed format, but not the best tool for streaming images across the internet. For that you should use JPEG.
Now we are talking about JPEG, if your file sizes are still too large (and I mean over 150K) export your image without a background. You will see an instant reduction in the file size as the computer discards all of that white space in the compression.
Use tiles! Wait not, not the stuff in the bathroom, well, kinda .. ok it’s close. If you want to sacrifice a little artistic direction, you can make tiles by photographing common materials (such as floorboards, walls, doors, furniture, etc) and build your own dungeon like you would assemble a puzzle. This will require a photo editing program such as Photoshop, or Paint .Net, but when you’re done you end up with a dozen tiny files that are repeated to make up a larger picture. The theory is sense these images are duplicated, the user only has to download a three 64×64 squares instead of a 4000×4000 image to cover the same ballroom floor. MapTools allow snapping, for ease of building, along with rotation tools to spin the images and scale tools to change the size.
Forum member Nicholas Hopkins created an atmospheric floorplan for a Call of Cthulhu game. Download the PDF.
He says:
I saw a couple of floorplans in some older mission sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu and wanted to emulate it as much as possible. I am doing a 1920’s campaign so I wanted it to look a little old fashioned, hence the black and white. It is based on the lighted dungeon template so that the shadows fall the right direction and it gives the rooms a little more texture as there are small, subtle shadows towards the corners of the rooms.
I used the Sepia setting under the RGB Matrix effect and it worked very nicely. Because I didn’t want a background of solid black (never seems to print well) I put in a couple of light sources outside the walls to light things slightly and cast some shadows off the corners of the building. There was some odd effects with the light sources associated with doors and windows so I just made a new sheet called Window Block, made sure that things on it blocked the light sources and was below the Wall sheet so it would disappear, and drew a simple line across the openings. Took care of things nicely. The symbols are a mixture of DD3 symbols and SS3 Modern symbols. They all came out nice looking with the effects turned on.
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 »
More Dungeon Symbols
Well of Elemental Water
Recently I had a German customer contact me with questions concerning sheet effects and export functions in CC3. During our discussions I got to see some of his maps and I was thrilled to see that he was redoing maps from an old German DSA (Das Schwarze Auge) adventure, that I played back in the day … must have been 1985 or 1986. The module (Die Göttin der Amazonen) still sits on my shelf.
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