A few months ago, I started the Rails & Trains mini-series of articles. In the two prior installments (part 1 – part 2), we looked at how to make the tracks themselves, now it is time to round it out by looking at rail cars.
We’ll have a look at how to draw the insides of a rail car based on a real blueprint, giving us a nice scene for a handout or battle. I am going to base my drawing on a blueprint from the early 19-hundreds. I mainly picked these because it is difficult to find older blueprints online with proper dimensions, and because the trains of that time still had the same basic layouts as earlier trains, making it easy to adapt them to earlier times. Of course, my procedure here works fine with any blueprint, so if you’re mapping for a modern train, just grab the appropriate blueprint and possibly a different drawing style better suited for modern maps, such as SS3.
Both the December issue and bonus issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 are available, bringing you a large selection of modular Wilderness tiles as well as the tools to create more yourself.
With this year’s Annual complete, the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 is now available and you can subscribe at an early adopter discount.
Resources
The latest free monthly symbols by Mike Schley add fire and smoke symbols to the Symbol Set 6 style (or other styles of your choise), turning those ruined battlements into a raging inferno.
Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for November, possibly providing more ideas and inspiration for your own mapping projects.
We made the November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual available for free and integrated it into the Free Annual Sampler.
Articles
Remy delves into the practical use of maps within CC3+, such measuring the distance between locations.
Christina showcases the August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2016 with the “Scorching Sun” style in her latest iteration of the All the Annuals series.
Reminders
CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
(Download the FCW file)
Hello mappers! Welcome to this month’s All the Annuals, Scorching Sun. This overland set is fantastic. I love the color palette with this set. What’s also great about TJ’s fantastic style is that this annual works really well with another annual that came out at the end of 2016 – don’t worry, we’ll get there – giving you so many more symbol options and fills to play with.
For this map, I actually used a font I downloaded from one of the free sites online, as you can see by the middle eastern flair font in the png. Your map, should you download this one, will come with the standard font from the annual, but I wanted to show you in this particular font so you can see it’s super easy to add more font choices to your maps, if you choose.
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Scorching Sun (August 2016)
CC3+ maps are more than just pretty illustrations of the area your players happen to adventure in. If you like to keep track of time passing in your game (or your novella) you need to know how long it will take your players to travel from Snowport to Knight’s landing. And to do that, you’ll naturally need to know the distance, and the terrain traveled through. The latter is easy enough to read visually from the map, and sure, you can provide an estimate for the former using the scale bar. However, this gets more and more inaccurate the more winding the road is though, maybe they are even traveling along an extremly winding river.
Instead of trying to estimate complex distances like that, CC3+ has built-in tools that lets you easily measure distances, both in straight lines, but also along a meandering path. Using these tools you can get the exact answer in seconds when the players ask about the distance/travel time, and get the same answer every time.
We are currently running the Cartographer’s Vault campaign on Humble Bundle with lots of wonderful maps by community mappers and professional map-makers.
Christina showcases the July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2016 with the “Woodcut Maps” style in her latest iteration of the All the Annuals series.
Reminders
CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
Welcome to our latest tour de force through some of the wonderful maps created by the ProFantasy user community. Let’s take a look at the bountiful crop of cartography from the the ProFantasy forum and the CC3+ Facebook group in October.
Talaraska created this splendid map of a Harvest festival including an amazon hedge maze. I want to get lost there! Continue reading »
(Download the FCW file)
Happy new month, mappers! This month’s All the Annuals has me giddy. I LOVE this map I’ve created. Yes, I said it. I just love it. It might be a bit busy, but it’s super close to my heart, so it’s perfect.
Last year, I left my home of Long Island and moved upstate to the Adirondack region of New York. I’ve spent many summers up there camping, hiking, and just enjoying the outdoors and rich history this area has, most especially American Revolutionary history. Walking around my town a few months ago, I saw these real woodcut maps of our beloved Lake George. They were just amazing. I wanted to purchase one, but they were dearly priced and out of my meager nurses salary. Well, enter the Woodcut Maps Annual.
I traced out an image of the lake and used mostly current town/city names, but some go back to the Revolutionary War times, so it’s not exactly accurate. I also played around with the stripping setting a bit to get it where I wanted them. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with my little local map of our gem of a lake here in the beautiful Adirondacks. Come for a visit! The fall foliage up here is the best in the nation!!!
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Woodcut Maps (July 2016)
In my previous two installments of this series, I’ve looked at the basics of macros and how to use variables. Today, I’ll be rounding off this introductory series by having a look at program flow. The macros we have looked at so far have just been a row of instructions, which are executed one by one, but it is also possible to make branching logic and loops. For example, you can do different things based on what the user chooses, or you can run the same block of code multiple times. For example, if you’ve had a look at my Large Exports annual, it contains the code required for exporting a small section of the map, and then it just loops over the same code enough times to export the entire map as smaller chunks.
A few months ago, I started the Rails & Trains mini-series of articles. In the two prior installments (part 1 – part 2), we looked at how to make the tracks themselves, now it is time to round it out by looking at rail cars.
In my previous two installments of this series, I’ve looked at the 
