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.

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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.

This is my latest map made in City Designer 3 (CD3), plus some effects added in Photoshop. It depicts the village Farjvad in the province Vadsbro and is part of the campaign/adventure I’m working on at the moment, even though I’ve mostly made maps so far.

Farjvad is situated about a day’s trip north east of the main town in the area, Vadsbro. Farjvad won’t actually be of importance for the adventure I’m writing, but it will still be a part of the campaign information. As you might have noticed I like to make maps, and making the adventure/campaign gives me some good reasons to do that. I also figured out that if I only have maps of the villages where the adventure takes place the players will rather quickly figure out what places are of importance and which ones are not. Also this will make the adventure feel much more unscripted if the players can go wherever they pleasein the area and the GM will have a nice map of the place.

So how did I go from a blank page to a finished map? What shall you think about while making a village map? First of all you have to decide where the village is situated, is it in a forest or a desert? The environment gives as well takes away possibilities for the map. In my case I know from the overland map of the province Vadsbro that Fjardinge is a village that is founded on two sides of a river, only connected via a ferry in the middle of a large forest.

I also decided that the south part of the village was the old one and that the north side is the new part where recent expansion of the village has taken place. Because that the village is situated in the middle of the forest there had to be some place for the villagers to go for protection if some kind of crises turned up. In this case I put a keep (nr 5 on the map) where the governor of the village used to live with his soldiers, maybe ten of them at a max. I could have gone with a palisade but in this case it didn’t feel right.

I also added a temple (nr 4), all places must have somewhere to go for religious need. The ruined temple (7) just outside the village was deserted when the new temple was done. What resides there today is up to the GM to decide.

Nowadays most travelers are using the northern road that leads from Vadsbro to the village Klyvholm. For this reason a newer part of Fjardinge has been built on the northern side. To make the sides differ a bit I decided to make the fields more square here, like they’ve been planned a bit. The big house at the square (nr 1) will also house the governor of the village (he decided to move here from his keep on the south side).

What I’ve actually have done here is making a story around the village and letting the story lead the way while mapping. I think I’ve stated this before but having a story in your head while mapping usually makes your maps more interesting, which means a better end result. It is also a lot more fun to map when you have a picture in your head of what the place looks like, it is like seeing your ideas come to life.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com

To get more ideas for maps to do I’ve decided to make a fantasy adventure. First of all I need a campaign map of the area where the actual adventure will take place, with that one in place it will be easier to plan the other maps I need to draw.
To make the map I decided to use the style I made for the December issue of the Annuals from Profantasy. The style was made for creating campaign maps for smaller areas, so it will fit very well for this map.

The adventure will take place in the country Armadien, close to a city called Vadsbro (Littlebridge in my Armadien map). Vadsbro is situated close to the Armadien border, next to the Traal infected Skymningsskogen (dusk forest) and the Traal mountains, so there will be a lot of forest in the map.

As soon as I started on the map I realized that I had to improvise a bit with the style. The main feature in the map, except for all the forest, is the river that split up in two rivers closer to the mountains. The rivers in the style aren’t really suited for depicting a main river in this scale, so I decide to use the ocean texture for the rivers. In this way the river will look more like the dominating natural feature in the area.

The river tool however comes in handy to show smaller rivers connecting into the main branches, but I had to change the colour of the rivers to blend in more with the main rivers. When I created the style, which is based on my Truscian map, I wanted the rivers in a darker colour and the ocean in a lighter one. That works very well if you do a more zoomed out map. But if you zoom in closer to an area for a map, and you suddenly want to use the ocean textures as rivers, the colour for the river tools don’t really blend in. So I decided to change them.

It is actually quite funny how a style you’ve created yourself, suddenly needs to be trimmed when you start working with it. But I think you can say that for all styles. At least I always trim the styles so they’ll fit into my way of working.

Now that the map is done it will be easier to decide what more maps I need to do. You can say that I’m making my adventure from the maps, the story I have so far will probably change a bit with every map I make. But that is the fun part of mapping, to weave a story around your maps instead of making maps from your story.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com

[This map was created by forum user anomiecoalition.]

After a rather lengthy hiatus from the world of fantasy and roleplaying, I recently convinced a few friends to give it a try and set about constructing a world that would keep their interest. Along the way, I stumbled upon Campaign Cartographer 3 and was amazed at the maps that people were producing with it and the possibility that it provides to even the artistically challenged (like myself).  After a short couple of week tinkering with the program and learning a great deal from the tutorials available I constructed Brightstone Keep.

The map and its back story are loosely based on a free adventure provided by Wizards of the Coast.  The keep protects a mining operation that has been overrun by a variety of nefarious creatures.  The symbols utilized can be obtained from the CSUAC.

The first step in creating this map was to establish the basic layout.  I depicted a mountain wall running from the top left to bottom right corner  for which I used three separate sheets and shapes. Then I added cliff running left to right towards the bottom of the map on another sheet.

Adding the Mountain

I began by drawing a rough outline of the mountain wall and filled it with a dirt texture. I learned that it is a good idea to draw beyond the map border on these shapes to ensure that if I applied any edge-fade effects, they wouldn’t appear on the border side of the map. Using effects I then applied a slight blur and two black outer glow effects – one with strength of 0 above another with strength of 1. I then created two more shapes and sheets to go above this mountain wall and utilized different dirt textures.  To these sheets, I applied a slight blur and an edge-fade-inner effect.

Adding the Cliff

Depicting the cliff was a bit simpler – here I just reused the dirt texture from the background but constructed a separate shape on a separate sheet and applied a similar setting as that use on the first mountain wall sheet (but with an inner glow).  The final step was to add some hill overlay transparencies to add some character to the terrain.  I applied these symbols on a separate sheet and varied the size/orientation to achieve the desired effect.

Adding the Keep

In constructing the walls of the keep, I created four sets of sheets and shapes.  I began by drawing some solid gray lines (width of 6 – adjust to scale) to create the outer wall.  I then applied a texture sheet effect (stone texture of your choosing, Intensity 1, size 15); on top of that a black outer glow (strength 1, blur 2); a wall shadow (length 15, opacity 65, blur 5); and finally a bevel (length 1.5, strength 35, and fade 1).  I next wanted to create a walkway for that wall.  I copied the image to a new sheet and reduced the width to 3.  I then applied a texture sheet effect (with a different stone texture but same settings) and an inner black glow (strength 1, blur 2).  I followed the same procedure to construct the towers/ramp and placed those shapes and sheets on top of the wall. (The ramp actually required that I draw in a black shadow on the right side to give it some dimensionality.)

The Road and the Rest

The last step was to draw in some roads and tracks.  I laid down a road (added a texture, blur, and edge-fade-inner sheet effect) and then drew in the tracks according to the instructions provided in the Jon Roberts Special Issue of the Annual.  From there it was just a matter of placing some vegetation, rocks, buildings, and text to complete my map.

I had a great time making this map and was amazed at how easy it was once I familiarized myself with the program (the video tutorials and assorted blog entries are invaluable.)  I just hope my friends enjoy playing with this map as much as I enjoyed making it.

*I plan on posting more of my maps on my new blog

The January issue of the Annual 2013, entitled “Investigation Props”, is now available. Be it your classic Cthulhu campaign set in 1920s and 30s, games set in even more recent times like Night’s Black Agents and Delta Green, or sci-fi settings like Ashen Stars – the January issue contains the tools to create handouts, charts and other props for any of these.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2013 here.

The latest articles and news from ProFantasy for the festive season.

News

• The Cartographer’s Annual vol 6 is out now. See this year’s highlights.
• The forthcoming Annual 2013, which will include includes a new style developed by Jonathan Roberts, is available for subscription at 10% off until December 20th
• Renowned cartographer Mike Schley is developing a complete overland style for CC3

Resources

• This month’s selection of user-created maps.
• Learning CD3 by Par Lindstrom
• Kartotum – creating an amazing city map
• Deadlands Battlemap by Ralf Schemmann

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When I grew up I used to play a lot of Role playing games and especially I played a Swedish game called Drakar & Demoner (Dragons &Demons). Most of the adventures they released took place in a campaign world called Ereb Altor. At that time I thought the world was one of the coolest places for an adventure that existed, and I must say that the maps I saw then and the adventures I read really has influenced me a lot.

As I might have mentioned earlier making maps is my hobby, during the days I work as an IT-engineer, so mapping is something I do in my spare time. For that reason I’m very restrictive when it comes to taking up commissions, making maps for someone else means that I can’t make them for myself. But when I realized that the world Ereb Altor still was alive and that people still actually were working on new material I just couldn’t turn it down.

So after a short introduction to the people running the site I was asked to do a map of Kartotum, the capital city of Palinor. Making this city however turned out to a bit of a challenge. So far all of my city maps have been done in City Designer 3 (CD3) from Profantasy, a great program when it comes to make cities. However the program has its weak sides, and one of those is that it works best when it comes to making cities without too much elevation. Of course you can draw some elevation in the program, but not in a way that I wanted to do it.

You see Kartotum is situated on the slopes of a mountain so it is surrounded by great cliffs, and to draw that in CD3 was something way out of my league, if it’s even possible. So I decided to make the city and all the houses in CD3 and then draw the cliffs by using a combination of both Artrage pro and Photoshop. But to do this I first had to mark out the area in CD3 where the cliffs would be. To do this I added a green colour, different from the actual grassland, where I later would add the cliffs, as you can see in the map below. In this way I could place the symbols correctly in CD3.

When the city was done in CD3 I exported the map and opened it up in Photoshop. In Photoshop I added the black lines for the cliffs and saved the image as a .PSD file. The actual shadows around the lines I decided to add in Artrage Pro. The water colour brushes in that program are absolutely fantastic and in this way I could get the shadows exactly as I wanted them. I also added the colour of the cliffs in Artrage before opening the file in Photoshop again to add some finishing shadows and light effects.

Working on this commission has teached me a lot when it comes to adapting to some one else’s ideas and opinion and I must say that in some ways it’s even more relaxing doing maps for someone else than yourself. Suddenly you don’t need to come up with all the story and explanation to all the stuff you make. That is someone else’s headache.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com

As you might have noticed I really like to make city maps. I don’t know why but I just love to see how a blank paper slowly turns into crawling streets and vast parks. It makes my imagination really spin.

Most of my city maps I make in the program City designer 3 (CD3) from profantasy. It is a great program with a huge toolbox you can use to make the creation of your cities a much smoother experience. To make the maps more unique I also like to edit them a bit in Photoshop afterwards.

When I bought CD3 my first impression of the program however was quite different. You can easily describe it in one word, overwhelmed. Just the sheer number of tools and objects made me fear for my mental health. The first time I started the program I think I just closed it immediately.

So how did I go from there to where I am now? Well the answer can actually be divided in three parts. First of all practice. I started out quite small with a little village and first after a couple of small practice maps I went for the bigger cities or towns. Secondly I looked up some tutorials, especially Gandwarfs tutorials over at the cartographer’s guild where extremely helpful. Thirdly there was a black and white city style released in the 2010 annual from Profantasy.

So what was so great with the black and white city style? First of all you get a very nice tutorial in every edition of the Annual, this makes it very easy to learn a new style, you can just follow the steps described. For me this meant a lot when it came to learning CD3, because I could in this way quickly pick up the different tools to use.

Secondly the amount of objects decreased quite a lot in the black and white city style compared to the coloured styles that were included in the actual program. This might sound a bit odd but the good thing here was that suddenly the program didn’t feel as overwhelming as before. When the choices in objects decreased, it kind of made it easier to grasp the program and find what you were looking for.

The map included in this post is a map that I made while trying to learn CD3. It was one of my first experiments to make a really large city map. I especially experimented a lot with the random street tool in this one. The random street tool is really a great help when you quickly need to fill and area with many houses.

When I was done in CD3 I opened the file in Photoshop and added some cliffs on the northwest side of the city. I also draw my own arena object to add to the city, I really missed that object in the style. As a finishing touch I made the map sepia coloured and placed the map on a paper background.

Well after that I just continued doing city maps and slowly the interface started to make sense and nowadays I rather feel that the there are too few objects in the program then too many 

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com