The bags are packed, stock and supplied enroute, hectic activity is slowly giving way to contemplative travel mood… meaning GenCon is around the corner.

If you are one of the lucky visitors, come find us at booth (#101) directly across the big Paizo booth. We are sharing with our sister company Pelgrane Press. Stop by pick up the latest Annuals, any other products you might be missing, a demo of Character Artist 3 or just a quick chat about mapping.

Please bear with us if we respond a little more slowly in the coming days than usual. GenCon takes a lot of attention and energy.

We have just released the August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013. Check out the easy-to-use sci fi style for creating stunning star system charts. The bitmap artwork has been created by Joseph Sweeney of Storyweaver and you can use the style to create charts matching his High Space game maps.

Subscribers can download the issue from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2013, you can do so here.

The July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013 is now available. Check out Pär Lindström’s beautiful black & white overland style.

Subscribers can download the issue from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2013, you can do so here.

Dear Cartographers, welcome to the June newsletter!

News

• The June issue of the Annual 2013 has been released. Subscribe here.
• Check out a preview of the July Annual (by Pär Lindström).
• Character Artist 3 is coming together nicely. Here are some previews.
• Simon Rogers shows up new icon graphics for Campaign Cartographer 3.

Resources

• The June and May collections of community user maps include tons of gorgeous map artwork.
• Mysterious East meets Weird West in the Deadlands setting in this floorplan of a Chinatown block.

Map-Making Articles

• Master Mapper Joachim de Ravenbel has created a detailed tutorial on doing floorplans.

Dear Cartographers, welcome to the April newsletter!

News

• The April issue of the Annual 2013 has been released. Subscribe here.
• Kobold Press is offering a discount on its Kobold Guide to World-Building and other products for Profantasy customers. Check the details and read an excerpt of the guide here.
• ProFantasy will be at RPC Germany in Cologne (June 2nd to 3rd) and Origins Games Fair in Columbus (June 13th to 16th).

Resources

• Gweddyz’s Chatelet – Seven levels of gorgeous floorplans of a castle by community member Joachim de Ravenbel.
• Longhouse on a Clearing – more battle maps for Deadlands Reloaded.
• A parade of great user maps in the April round up from the forum.

Map-Making Articles

• Presenting new, clearer and bigger icons for Campaign Cartographer 3+.
• Three new video tutorials by Joseph Sweeney on old-school dungeon mapping.

We have released the April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013: The Midgard World overland style. Created in cooperation with Kobold Press and Jonathan Roberts, this style recreates the maps published in the Midgard fantasy campaign setting and the accompanying iPad atlas. You can now add your own regional maps for this setting, or recreate another world in the same mapping style.

Even better, the Midgard World style is compatible with the Jon Roberts overland style from the Annual Vol 5. They can be combined for a greatly enlarged variety of symbols and fill styles.

We’ve just released the March Annual issue: Flavio’s Myrr Overland style is now available as a download for the Annual subscribers.

His beautiful and unique overland style is based on intricate bitmap texture and shaded contours, as you can see from this sample:

You can subscribe to the current Annual here.

Forum member Gonzalo (pool7) has some spare ProFantasy products that he is generously giving away to the community. Post in this thread on the forum to get a chance to win a Symbol Set 1, an Annual Vol 4 or Vol 5 or a Tome of Ultimate Mapping.

A little late for January, perhaps, but here is the latest newsletter.

News

• The January issue of the Annual 2013 has been released. Subscribe here.
• A new bundle in the ProFantasy collection: The Top Three.

Resources

• A new CC3 user writes about his first experience.
• Forum user anomiecoalition talks about his desert-themed designs of Brightstone Keep and the Buried Temple of Ifar.
• The December and January roundups of user-created maps.
• How to gift ProFantasy’s software.
• A battle map of an underground lab and hide-out.

Map-Making Articles

• A new video tutorial by Joseph Sweeney about aligning side-view and floor plan maps.
• Forum member Flavion comes up with a unique new overland style for his Myrr dominion map.
• Pär Lindström uses the last year’s December Annual style (of his own design) to create the Vadsbro overland map and combines City Designer 3 and Photoshop work for a great city map of Farjvad.

[poll id=”5″]
Look at the Myrr Dominion map here.

[Ed’s Note: Let us know if you like this style, and with Flavio’s permission, we’ll create an Annual from it]

My fiancée recently asked me if it would be OK to make a Viking character for my Al-Qadim campaign.  I thought about the role playing possibilities for a moment: Viking gets lost at sea en route to pillage and plunder; Viking gets shipwrecked in hostile desert environment; Viking PC makes for a very interest game indeed.  I then thought about where such a Viking would come from in my world and set about creating a map of his home.

Myrr is a semi-arctic region largely inspired by Scandinavia, Iceland, and Alaska.  I spent a great deal of time looking over maps of their fjords and river systems in the hope that I could create something similar and believable in my own map.   After an hour or two tinkering around with the fractal line tool (adding a river here, indenting land mass there, etc), I finally had a landmass and set of islands I could be happy with.

The next step was to create the mountain range.  I first drew the main ridge of the mountain and all the little ridges that branch off of it with the smooth poly tool. This is what the looked like without effects on.

I gave it a rather long and dark wall shadow, a deep edge fade inner (with 75% inner opacity), and a large lighted bevel effect (so that the two sides of the bevel met in the center of the polygon).  I then added a Mountain Hills sheet that encircled the range with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect.  Next, I added a Mountain Base sheet that encircled the Mountain Hills (also with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect.)  Because I wasn’t thoroughly happy with the colors that were coming out, I finalized it with a Mountain Cover sheet.  This shows the details of the effects:

And this is the final mountain range:

As you can see, I also used the Mountain Base sheet to layout my hills.  I further added a Hills Base sheet that encircle these hills and had a deep edge fade inner to give the illusion of height.  From there I added some forests (very subtle), rivers, text, (about a dozen assorted sheets to get the ocean, landmass and desert looking right) and called it a day.  All of the textures came from Herwin Wielink annual and CGtextures.com.

This map was a great deal of fun to make and I learned a new technique for mountains in the process.   Of course, the best part is now crafting a history about this region to help fill in the gaps of my fiancée’s character’s back-story.  Although I’m far from done, you can check what I have so far (along with a full resolution version of the map) at my blog.