Before the year runs out let’s take a relaxed look back at all the lovely mapping that the community shared in November. Without further ado, here are the Maps of the Month!

Matt Finch‘s lovely ruin of an abandoned tavern is own highlight of the month (just personal taste). Great work, Matt!
Abandoned Tavern Matt Finch Continue reading »

The Cartographer’s Annual subscription for 2024 is now available, and you can subscribe at a reduced cost. If you are a current subscriber, be sure to check your email, as you should have received your re-subscription offer that way. Otherwise, visit the Annual 2024 web page for the early subscription discount.

We have the first three issues lined up, starting with a reimagined version of the Fantasy Realms style by Allyn Bowker from 2009. We add lots of symbols and combine the tools with textures by Mike Schley, resulting in a very different look, that is still excellent for displaying local to regional maps of any Fantasy setting.

Next in line is a new parchment overland style combining symbols by Robert Altbauer and new textures. And then in March Sue Daniel provides a great new style for city sewers. If you want some input into that, check out her style development thread on the ProFantasy forum.

As always, subscribing to the Annual will give you access to all twelve monthly issues as they are released, plus a bonus issue at the end of the year. If you want to see an example of all the great content you will receive, check out the Annual 2023.

Subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 now.


(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.

Here are the last of the live mapping videos for 2023. See you again next year on YouTube!

CA203 Bairnemouth Under Siege
Every year we make one of the Cartographer’s Annual issues available for free to give everyone a taste of the great mapping inside.

This year we decided on the City Under Siege map pack from November, which details a large isometric city map, and includes both additional tools for Symbol Set 6 and a description of the city with lots of adventure ideas.

This Annual issue can now be downloaded individually from the Annual page and is included in the Free Annual Sampler.

CA204A Example 4To make up to all our loyal subscribers, we add a bonus issue to the year’s roster. This year we offer additional Wilderness map tiles and a template to make quick and easy use of the materials from this bonus issue and the December Annual.

The Bonus issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

You can subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 now at a 15% early subscriber discount.

2023-12 Burnings Towers
Perhaps it’s not a siege that is damaging your city, but a disaster like a great fire? And you want to show the conflagration as it is happening? Then these latest free fire and smoke symbols will come in handy!
20 new symbols depict flames and smoke as they rise towards and darken the skies above. Done for the Isometric Cities style, they can just as well be used on an overland map in the Mike Schley style.

The example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 6 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS6 installed, you won’t see these, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 6 – Isometric Cities is available for purchase here.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of year two up to and including July 2023 is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.


The December 2023 Annual issue presents a set of templates, tools, and instructions to create a basically unlimited set of tiling wilderness maps that you can print or export for use in virtual tabletop environments. The issue also comes with a set of pre-constructed tiles that you can use out of the box. The accompanying 6-page mapping guide details the process of creating many more tiles like these using the Forest Trail style by Sue Daniel.

The December issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

P.S.: The re-susbcription offer for next year’s Annual will be sent out mid-December.

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.

Continue reading »

Random Dungeon
News

  • We are currently running the Cartographer’s Vault campaign on Humble Bundle with lots of wonderful maps by community mappers and professional map-makers.
  • A new Random Dungeon command is available for Campaign Cartographer.
  • The November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is available, featuring a huge city under siege in the Isometric Cities style from Symbol Set 6.

Resources

Articles

  • Remy continues his tutorial on getting started with macros with part 3 of the series.
  • 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.
  • Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.

We’ve released a new collection with Humble Bundle, quite different to the others we’ve done, which were mainly collections of our products. This one is a treasure trove of maps, in high resolution format, with CC3+ fcw files where available.

The logo of the Cartographer's Vault
There are more than 450 maps, including dungeons, floorplans, cities, overland and lairs. Some of these were commissioned specially for the bundle, some are from Pelgrane Press, others are user maps which have been selected and enhanced for the bundle and a few were included on this blog or in annuals.  A more complete break down follows below.

The Bundle also includes a copy of CC3+ with the new Random Dungeon Generator. If you have CC3+ already, you can get the RDG from your registration page, and you are welcome to give your serial key away to a friend, as long as you let support@profantasy.com know.

A breakdown of what’s new and what’s not:

  • Campaign Cartographer 3+ (and the Random Dungeon Generator). The RDG is available as a free download to existing CC3+ customers.
  • The Encompass maps were previously published on DriveThruRPG (they are the ones with the brown covers on the Humble Bundle.) This was a series of detailed maps with supporting material published under a different imprint. Three of them had previously been published by ProFantasy as CC3+ files. They are included in the Bundle as is.
  • 37 maps by the excellent Christina Trani were published in the All the Annuals series on the ProFantasy blog as CC3+ files and low resolution pngs. The versions in the Humble Bundle are much higher resolution and available in labelled and unlabelled format.
  • 109 maps were from Pelgrane Press’s 13th Age Battle Scenes products, available as PDFs.Two of these were included in the December 2015 Annual. The Bundle includes them all as high resolution unlabelled pngs.
  • Five maps published in the 13th Age adventure Shadows of Eldolan published by Pelgrane Press. The Humble Bundle includes the CC3+ files.
  • Eight maps were from Pelgrane Press’s Ashen Stars RPG. One of these was also published as a Cartographer’s Annual. The HB versions include all the CC3+ maps as well as high resolution PDFs.
  • 83 of the maps were published on DriveThruRPG by the brilliant cartographer, Alyssa Faden.
  • 42 are newly commissioned maps, and the rest are maps which are enhanced versions of maps published online by CC3+ users.
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