It’s time again for the world largest boardgame fair in Essen, Germany. This Thursday Spiel’12 opens its halls – and ProFantasy will be there.
See us in Hall 6, booth 6-711. Stop by to say hi, chat, get a CC3 demo, check out our new releases (Symbol Set 3 – Modern v3, Tome of Ultimate Mapping v3) and get a preview of the upcoming Perspectives 3 and Character Artist 3 artwork. See you there!
[Ed: Bill Roach is best known in the CC3 community for creating the free Terraformer enhancement to Fractal Terrains 3. Here he turns his attention to water courses; a features which is often added to maps without much thought.]
A PDF of this article is available
(Images in this article not created by the author are either courtesy of the EPA, FEMA, USGS, or NOAA, or are licensed as Public Domain, or under the GNU Open Document License by their respective authors.)
The rivers on your overland maps will be the life blood of your simulated world. Most of the plant and animal life on your maps will cluster next to them, near them, and around them. Settlements, towns, and cities will grow alongside them, and fishermen, hunters, trappers, farmers, and merchants will depend upon them for their livelihoods. They will act as major arteries of commerce, major zones of cooperation, and points of contentious, sometimes vicious geopolitical dispute. In peace they will be places of celebration – and in war, they will be places of intrigue. They will be signposts for travelers, and form the borders of nations. They may even be the focus of religious pilgrimage. They will be some of the most important and essential key elements of your maps.
When you design your overland maps, also remember that your riverways, lakes, and seas will influence weather.Agriculture depends upon rain – and farms are typically found in water rich places. Rivers and lakes mean farms, farms lead to hamlets, villages, and towns, towns give rise to cities, and cities give rise to nations.
I’ve been asked by Profantasy to turn the map style I used for the Truscian peninsula into a CC3 style (let’s just call it the Truscian style from now on). The thing is that when you sit and draw for your own needs you usually can cope with a lot of mistakes in your maps, maybe the city icons look a bit off or the hills just don’t look exactly as you want them to look. But that doesn’t really matter to someone else then yourself. When you suddenly are doing something that other people might be using those things start to matter and that can be a bit scary. Most of all you want it to be perfect, you don’t want it to just be ok.
Suddenly you also have to make decisions. How many types of terrain do you need? Do you have enough city icons? How many city icons are enough? The questions can very easily become quite many. The best thing to do here is to actually sit down take a piece of paper and start writing down what types of terrain you already have, what types are missing, what icons do you want, do you need some terrain features that you have to make. Do you have a compass rose and a scalebar? Get it all down and try to make a plan on when things shall be done.
When I started to put it all on paper I soon realized that I was missing a desert, some wasteland and volcanic terrain. I needed some new city icons, a volcano or two, maybe some graves, hills and so on. But now when everything is on paper and there is a plan, it is much easier to start working.
The map below is a test map of the style that I’ve made in Photoshop. It consists mostly of seamless tiles that I use as patterns. Every terrain type is on its own layer and I’m using layer masks to make the terrain visible where it shall be seen. The mountains and city icons are drawn objects that I’ve pasted in on top of the terrain layers. There is still no compass or scale bar, but I have a fairly good idea on how I will do them.
Well in December you will see the finished result, if you subscribe to the yearly annual. Hopefully some of you will find it useful.
Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com
Recently Profantasy has offered a batch of Unlimited Patron Licenses to our customers, as a way to get a comprehensive collection of our software, including unlimited future updates.
One of the included perks is a sample map of the customer’s campaign, done by yours truly. Now one of our patrons has decided to donate this map (or better the mapping time) to the community. To decide what this sample should be, I’m asking you for suggestions. What do you want to see mapped as a freely available resource? The map will be available for download in both CC3 and PDF formats, so that you can edit it if you own CC3 yourself, or just print it for your own game.
You can see some of my mapping work at mapsandmore.com. Let me know in the comments below or head over to the forum.
Happy mapping,
Ralf
The latest articles and news from ProFantasy from September.
The Tome of Ultimate Mapping and Symbol Set 3 are on sale at a lower price until 21st September. Get them at this price while you can!
The Tome of Ultimate Mapping has been updated by Remy Monsen (the author of the CC3 Full Manual) to cover Campaign Cartographer 3 and all version 3 products up to Fractal Terrains 3 (Dungeon Designer 3, City Designer 3, Symbols Sets 1 and 2, Cosmographer 3 and Fractal Terrains 3). The chapters on the other add-ons will be updated after their new versions are released. Symbol Set 3 is obviously the next on the list. You can see half a dozen example pages of the Tome here.
Symbol Set 3 – Modern comes with two completely new bitmap drawing styles for floorplans, with about 500 symbols each. One was created by Jon Roberts, the other by Michael Tumey. There is also a snazzy new blueprint-style for realistic looking player handouts, a Modern political overland style, and the old vector style has been updated to work with CC3’s sheet effects and drawing tools.
Once a month or so someone emails us having bought a second-hand copy of CC3, or more usually, older versions of Campaign Cartographer. Usually, these purchases do not include a serial number. Such purchases are worthless. Occasionally this is deliberate, but more often it’s a mail order copy – these don’t include the serials, just the media and documentation. Ebay is a very typical source of unlicensed copies.
Now, in common with most software, when you spend money on Campaign Cartographer, you are buying a license to use the software – so the important thing is the unique serial number. You can transfer our license to another person, as long as you let us know and the transfer includes all versions of CC3 that the original licensee has purchased. This prevents mutiple individuals buying an upgrade for a product. We’d be happy to email any potential seller confirmation that they have a legitimate copy, and arrange for a license transfer.
So, if you are in any doubt, or even if you’ve been stung, we’d be happy to help. Just email the support desk.
Down in the code pit, the nuts and bolts of the CC3 engine are being disassembled and reassembled for future proofing – glue routines are being replaced and code recompiled with the latest compiler. We are as prepared for Windows 8 as we can be.
Our development work affects the order in which we release products, so we’ve moved Character Artist 3 to the top of the production line. The changes to Character Artist are primarily art – the interface is already straightforward and doesn’t need much work.
The art work is nearly finished – the squid faced gentleman is an example, but we’d like your input in deciding where to concentrate our final art efforts. Please vote here.
L. Lee Saunders has been working with our beta testers to get the RCG ready for public consumption, and now here it is – ready for your feedback.!
Perspectives has been rescheduled because we want to include a surprise additional style in it. Existing Annual fans might be able to guess who it’s by!
For the Source Maps series, we want to update the maps in new styles and create new maps, which will require additional cartographers. These will then be available as modestly priced updates to the existing Source Maps series.
The main work here, once more, is art; newer, better art. CC3’s art capabilities combined with the work of professional artists and cartographers have transformed the quality maps which users create, and we intend to repeat this with Dioramas, too. The main additional feature will be angled fill styles, enabling us to create nets with, say, a raster brick pattern in all directions.
This month’s annual (September ’12) for Campaign cartographer 3 from Profantasy offered a very good looking style based on the world map of the upcoming role-playing game the “13th Age” by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet.
I always like to try out new styles so I thought I should give this one a try too. Usually when I make maps I try to make a story around it. If you let the map visualize your story it is often easier to make it more unique and the details will kind of come more naturally. The drawback of working in that way is that it takes much more energy from you making a map, so this time I decided to just make a map without weaving a story around it.
The style itself was very easy and quick to work with. Most of the terrain is made up from seamless bitmap files so making mountains and other types of terrain goes really quick. The mountains however gave me some problems. Sometimes it was hard to get the high peaks in the places where you wanted them. But luckily enough the style also includes single mountains you can add to the mountain texture, which made the process easier.
If you look at the map included in this post I guess it took around three hours to do it, and then I probably spent as much time on labeling as I did on the actual map.
One thing I didn’t like though was that when you added the sheet effects to the map the seas didn’t get any effect added to them. When I made the map I had two larger seas, the sea of pain and little sea, that where close to the oceans. When those seas didn’t get any effect they looked strange compared to the nearby oceans. I tried to add some effects to the sea layer but because the ocean layer lies below the land layer and the seas are on top of the land layer it was hard to get an effect that looked exactly the same.
Apart from that I liked the style and if you want a map in a more stylish satellite style I can really recommend it.
Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com
The original Character Artist Pro artwork is looking a little long in the tooth so, for Character Artist 3, we’ve comissioned artwork by Rich Longmore. We have an art budget and we’d like to use it as wisely as possible, so we have to make some tricky choices. This image shows some of the variety of clothes, accessories and humanoid monsters we already have.
Character Artist 3 lets you create humanoid monsters such as the Dread Pirate Squid above, but in CA Pro we also included some front-on symbols for a variety of monsters for use on counters or standees. I asked Rich to produce a sample image, and this is what he came up with. Cute fella, isn’t he?
This leaves us with a question – how much do you want news monster and treasure tokens in CA3 compared with some extra clothing, accessories, expressions and humanoid monster parts? Please let us know in this poll.
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