So, for my last map of the 2018 Annual, I decided to just create a small map highlighting the use of Sue Daniel’s bonus Domes addition to the 2018 Annual. I, personally, have used these domes in so many of my own maps, including our cooperative project Sanctuary, and I cannot say enough how much I love using them.

(Download the FCW file)

Sue’s done a lovely job on these, giving the mapper a variety of domes to choose from, including transparent domes. For this map, I’ve created a small, walled school of magic by using the varicolored Gothic style houses in CD3 and adding a variety of the domes on the multi-leveled sheets. I started this map, however, in the Asian Town style that comes along with this year’s annual rather than CD3, as I love Sue’s textures and vegetation.

I’ve done nothing special for this map other than, I’ve added a new tool, the Wall Round, for my walls by using the 10’ Wall tool as a template, and then changing the Draw Method to Ellipse/Circle. In Options, in Draw Method, I changed the Eccentricity to 1.00. In Outline Properties I made the outline an Extra Entity, changed it’s Properties to a 2.5 Fixed Width and put the outline on the proper Layer and Sheets I wanted. I then just placed the Wall Round on the corners of my walls and there you have it.

And so, dear reader, another year’s mapping of All the Annuals series has come to a close. I hope you’ve enjoyed the variety of maps I’ve been privileged to create for you using the 2018 Annual. It has been, as usual, a welcome challenge stepping out of my dungeon mapping comfort zone, and I hope I’ve inspired some of you to do the same and try out this annual. Happy mapping, Cartographers!

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.

We are happy to announce the release of Token Treasury: Monsters 2, our second release in a line offering tokens for CC3+ and supporting virtual tabletop software with ready-to-use artwork.

The Token Treasury line gives you a huge selection of creatures and characters to populate your maps, with frames and varicolor backgrounds to customize your virtual tabletop tokens. The art is available as CC3+ symbols and as PNG files for any graphics package such as Photoshop and GIMP. The Token Treasury is designed for use with any virtual table top software such as roll20, Battlegrounds, d20pro and Fantasy grounds.

Token Treasury: Monsters 2 contains 100 creatures drawn by fantasy artist Rich Longmore, in rectangular and circular forms, as well as a set of token frames for depicting the creatures role and position in combat for your fantasy maps.

Token Treasury: Monsters 2 can now be ordered from the ProFantasy store.

The full feature list includes:

• More than 500 symbols for use in CC3+ including the 100 creatures and 32 frames/arrows frames in 4 symbol catalogs, and templates and drawing styles for creating more token combinations.
• More than 700 tokens, consisting of 100 creatures and 32 frames/arrows in various configurations, for immediate use in any graphics software such as Photoshop or GIMP.
• Ready for use in virtual table top (VTT) application such as roll20, d20pro, Battlegrounds and Fantasy Grounds.
• Frames for melee, ranged, magic and bosses to denote the creature’s role in combat, and arrows to indicate their facing.
• A guide introducing you to the Token Treasury both within CC3+ and in other applications.
• If you own CC3+, TT:M also installs symbol catalogs, templates and drawing tools. Create custom tokens with varicolour backgrounds and add your own frames. Mirror the symbols to add variations.

This is the full list of creatures. Normal creatures are 300 x 300 pixels, large creatures are 600 x 600 pixels, and huge creatures are 600 x 900 pixels.

Welcome dear mappers to another selection of wonderful maps created by our mapping community. See some of the beauty they produced in January!

The Temple of Isxiltahar (I pray I never have to pronounce this) is just one of the serials of jungle maps by Arcwynd on the community forum, which you definitely need to check out.

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The second Annual issue of 2021 is a huge collection of symbols created by Sue Daniel: More than 300 ribbons, scrolls and seals to serves as titles, labels and other map ornamentation. Banners can be places at different widths, and parts can be combined to create multi-line scrolls and ribbons. The symbols can be used on an any map and the accompanying guide teaches you how to make the catalogs available in any style.

The February issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.

In my latest live stream, I did use the RGB Matrix Process effect quite a lot for changing the colors of fills ans symbols. I this article, I’ll dive a bit more into this effect and describe it in a bit more detail.

The effect itself is just a basic color-replacement effect, but all those text fields with numbers can look quite a bit daunting when you open it up for the first time, but you can use it to make some nice results. You can see some examples in this older blog article where I also touch briefly on this effect, but today I’m going to explain it in a bit more detail.

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This is a lovely style, which compliments the Japanese Temple Annual. The tools and symbols you get between the two give you all you need to create a really nice Asian inspired city, town or village.

(Download the FCW file)

I honestly haven’t much to say about this map. I did get the coastline from a satellite pic in Google that I slightly modified, but other than that, I just mapped along as I felt inspired, starting with my cliffs along the beach. After that, everything just fell into place.

I really love a nice easy style like this. Thanks to Sue Daniel for another fantastic Annual.

Ever wanted to have something appear as a being inscribed into the wall or floor instead of appearing on top of it? With a little bit of manipulation and a few effects, we can turn any vector symbol or basic shape into such an inscription.

We can then use this technique to decorate floors in a dungeon, or used with both walls and floors in a perspective drawing, netting us some nice way of adding decorations without overusing symbols.
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Well, I love this annual. It makes just such pretty maps. I didn’t work on this awfully long. Actually, the longest stint was just waiting just a few hours for Ralf to get me a new file to unzip, as I had a little glitch with the vari-colored trees that got fixed up right quick. ProFantasy support is awesome.

(Download the FCW file)
So, for this map, just mapped as I went. I had no clear plan what I was going to do, so I just started putting down buildings, then the walls around them. I modified a few symbols by changing their scale to use in an unconventional way or two, but that’s what I do (such as the docks and the trellis over the walls).

After getting my structures settled, I set about the landscape, water, and rock ridges. For vegetation, I always start with the low-lying vegetation bushes both green and flowering, then I like to make two sheets for trees, just to assure certain trees I want are higher than others.

I wanted a boat and a few things around the map and normally I would delve into my arsenal of symbols to really dress this map up. Since this is a series featuring the Annuals, the maps should be symbols from the annual only….so what else to do than make my own? I set out to make a rudimentary boat, as I am no Sue, Hans or Pär by any means. I made a sheet for the basic boat shape, then another for the boat bottom and it’s shading to give the illusion of depth (not the well, I’m afraid, lol) and another for the rim of the boat. By adding some Glow effects and Bevel effects, I think it’s decent a job with the tools and talent I’ve got. I also made some stone benches for reflection throughout the temple by creating a sheet and putting the Glow, Bevel and Shadow effects on them. There’s also been a reflection well created on one of the islands.

The font I’ve got showing on the image in not ProFantasy issued. I wanted something with a bit more of an Asian flair so I went online and found this free for commercial use font called Night in Tokyo, which can easily be found by doing an internet search. You, reader, will get the standard font for this annual, Uchiyama, when starting a new map with this style.

And there you have it. Japanese Temple Annual.

When using CC3+, you may have encountered symbols with behavior, like houses that aligns to and offsets from the wall and doors that align to, resizes themselves to match and cut holes in dungeon walls. These are what CC3+ calls smart symbols. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these symbols and we’ll have a look at how to make our own smart symbols. I’ll be using DD3 here, but this functionality is not restricted to DD3, and can be used in any kind of map CC3+ can produce.

Try it out

Before making our own smart symbols, to see the existing ones in use, try out how dungeon door reacts to differently sized walls. Start with a new small DD3 dungeon, draw a wall using the wall drawing tool (I recommend you right-click Default Wall and pick a nice looking one) at any angle. Then, make sure Snap (bottom right corner) is turned off and then pick any door from the Wall features catalog and hover the cursor over the wall. The door symbol should rotate to match the angle of the wall, and once you click, you’ll notice that it actually cuts the wall where it places the door. These are two of the features of smart symbols, aligning to existing entities and cutting lines.

This article is also available in a video version.

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Welcome back to the Maps of the Month series, where we present a selection of beautiful and special maps created by our user community. Take a look at the great maps that have been posted to the ProFantasy forum or the CC3+ Facebook group.

This is one of the very first maps done in CC3+ by forum user simianorganism, using the Dungeons of Schley style for a virtual tabletop battle map.
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