ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

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

Originally posted on Mapsandmore.com.

Ashen Stars is a wonderful space opera rpg by Pelgrane Press, based on the GUMSHOE system. I had the pleasure to create the game’s published setting map (a part of the Galaxy called “The Bleed”) based on a sketch by Robin D. Laws.

Lately I got to revisit the setting when, after play-testing the upcoming Terra Nova adventure, Simon asked me to create a simple black and white diagram of the adventure’s featured luxury liner. You can see the result below (the color background was added for web display). While the exact layout of the ship isn’t important for the story, the relative position of the important locations is, and the map shows those.

Speaking of science fiction rpgs and maps done in Cosmographer 3 in our previous post…

I recently had the pleasure to create a trio of maps for the new FATE edition of Brennan Taylors Bulldogs! game. I drew the following encounter, galaxy and deckplan maps with Cosmographer 3: Continue reading »

The paladin lies vanquished by that indomitable foe – time.

Another Perspectives 3 preview. The excellent Kai-Uwe Allner is creating the 3D symbols. In Perspectives Pro, we offer four symbol angles, in Per 3, it will be eight. You can me tabbing through the different angles in the clip.

In answer to comments in the previous thread:

Yes, we’ll have wall textures. We haven’t decided how to do wall shading.

Our plan is to have flat doors but with “indent” symbols to give them depth. The advantage of flat symbols is that they can align to walls at any angle. We might do 3D ones limited to fixed directions though. We still have to decide.

Sven Lugar has created some excellent historical maps with CC3 at both miniature and non-minature scale. You can see a wide selection here on his website.

Here is Waterloo:

Naseby (English Civil War)

And Salerno

I recently had the pleasure to create a map for Silver Branch Games‘ upcoming Albion game.

Tim Gray had created a map for his setting in CC2 Pro a while ago and approached me at Dragonmeet for a re-working in one of CC3’s newer styles.

As it will be printed in black and white, we decided on the standard CC3 b&w vector style and this this the result. I’m pretty happy how it turned out:
Continue reading »