The cold season is here again, at least in the northern hemisphere, and white stuff is falling down outside my window.

There are a couple of nice styles for making winter maps, such as Winter Trail and Winter Village, but what if you just want to make your overland map look a bit more seasonal?

One of my favorite effects is the RGB Matrix Process. This effects may look a bit complicated if you just look at the dialog, but this is just all about simple mathematical manipulation of the color values. Using this dialog you can strengthen or weaken an individual color component, such as adding more red or less green. You can even completely swap color components around, for example swapping the red and blue components. CC3+ has other ways of manipulating colors too, but none of the other effects can accomplish the same as the RGB Matrix process can.

I’ve already explained the effect in another article a few years back, The RGB Matrix Process Effect, so today I’ll just use it to show you how to give a quick makeover to an existing map, you can read more about the calculations in the linked article.

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Last month, I wrote an article about Mapping as You Go showing off one technique I use for maps in my game.

This time, I’ll present another map I made last week for their next adventure. I had a situation where the characters encountered a misbehaving magical artifact. It was a small cube that could be used to summon a wizard’s laboratory that one could enter. Unfortunately, the thing started spawning random monsters instead, and now the characters have to enter it to shut it down.

To me, that meant that the Random Dungeon generator was a perfect fit. It gives a perfect starting point for a dungeon inside a magical artifact. I could focus more on the content of the dungeon, and not spending too much time deliberating the layout.

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I recently started a new role-playing campaign with my group. It is set in my existing campaign world of Virana, so I already have some higher overview maps and maps of various locations, but as often is the case with new campaigns, they take place in a small local area somewhere.

So, instead of making the map up front, I decided to go for a slightly different approach this time, starting with a blank map and adding stuff to it as players explore. This gives me a lot more freedom to accommodate the various whims of players, and it gives them a greater sense of being explorers as they simply don’t have a complete map of the area.

I thought I should share some of my thoughts and experiences around this with you, maybe you can use this idea in your own campaigns?

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In Informative Maps 01 – City Demographics I tackled how you can use demographics coloring to visually show the demographics of your city. Another very useful way to add information to city maps is the use of a map index. While an index can technically benefit any map type, it is especially useful in city maps because the density of information typically found in city maps, such as street and location names.

CC3+ has the ability to automatically generate such indexes from your map files, and show with a grid reference to make it easy to find the feature in the map itself. The command itself is extremely easy to use, but we can also improve things by being smart about our layers.

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There are lots of things you can do in CC3+, and often lots of ways you can do every thing. Today I am going to take a look at 10 quick things that are helpful to know for any mapper.

Note that the list is not presented in any particular order.

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Campaign Cartographer contains a host of nice features to help you make your maps. But it also contain some features whose functionality might need a bit more of an explanation before one understand how to use them properly, and why they on the surface might seem complicated when compared to a similar feature in an image editor.

One of these features is text. If you are new to CC3+ you might have experiencing that text sometimes appear to have a mind of it own, and you may have experienced behavior where text looks perfect as you place it, but when you zoom in or out, it may appear to no longer fit into the space for it, or that text you struggled placing neatly in the corner of the map suddenly expands into/over the map border.

So, let us have a look. Why can text be so troublesome at times? And how can we master it to make it work like we want?

Before continuing on, note that I did intentionally go looking for bad cases here. In many cases, you won’t notice this problem at all, but the idea behind this article is that when/if you encounter this, you should understand why, and how to handle it.

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A common way to label maps is to place a number next to an important feature (building, room, prominent location, trap, etc). The advantage to just using a simple number is that it takes less space in the map, making it look less cluttered, something that is very helpful if you need lots of labels in a small space. Number labels also doesn’t betray any information by themselves, so it can be used on dungeon rooms without players knowing their meaning just from seeing the map.

These markers can of course be placed using the regular text commands, but one very easy way that are often overlooked is to use the Number Label command found in CC3+. This command is designed to make it extremely simple to quickly place multiple labels with automatically incrementing numbers.

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Last month, I had a look at how to embed notes into your map, and make clickable links to show these. Such notes are great, since they are embedded into the map and thus part of the map file itself. But they also have their downsides, one of them being that they only support plain text. What if you want rich formatted text, maybe with some images?

Well, we can’t embed that into the map, but we can make the same kind of clickable hotspots that can link to either websites or external files. The notes are no longer part of the map, but they can easily be accessed from it.

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Last month, I looked at how to add information to your city map by using demographic coloring. Today, let us see how we can add descriptions for map features, like a building, that can be shown with a click.

For example, this can be used to add a note to each house describing who lives here, or if it is a business, what they do, what they sell, opening hours, prices, and more.

The basic idea here is that we will use CC3+’s map notes to store the actual information, and then we will add a hotspot to the relevant buildings to make it clickable and display the text. There are several variants around this, like making the hotspot open up a webpage or hide/show text placed in the map itself, but let us stick with map notes for now.  Continue reading »

Everyone loves a pretty map, even me. But there is also more to maps than their visual appeal, it is the information they convey. An aerial photo of your hometown may tell you exactly how it looks visually and how it is laid out, but it provides very little information about what can be found where in the town. And this is what separates a map from a photo, the additional information it contains that explains what we see in the map.

Today I’ll look into a feature from City Designer – City Demographics. City Demographics in CD3 is a coloring system that lets you color buildings by function (for example residential, commerce, accommodation). This is also a toggle feature which means you can show a nice pretty map for illustrative purposes, and when you need demographics, you can simply turn it on temporarily. Continue reading »