We are very happy that with Jimmy Medina (aka DM Geezer Jim) we have a new contributor to the Cartographer’s Annual for the second month in a row. We loved the multi-structure floorplans extending over several levels that he shared with the community, and asked him to create a floorplan of a whole city block.
The resulting map pack “City Block” makes up the May Annual issue and shows eight different buildings interconnecting via their cellars, ground levels, upper stories and roof tops using the Dungeons of Schley style. It also contains a 10-page mapping guide, including descriptions and adventure ideas for the buildings.
The May 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.
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In CC3+, we use polygons a lot. They are used when you draw a landmass, they are used when you draw the floor of your building, they are used for your terrain fills and so on. Basically, when you work with a CC3+ map, there are 3 main types of entities you deal with, your symbols (places, objects, markers and more), your polygons (for filled areas like landmass and floors) and your lines (for walls, roads and similar).
Now, for this article I am going to have a little look at how we can do things like split our polygon up into two pieces, for example if we only need part of it for another map. And, I am also going to look at how to properly join up two polygons into one, as due to various factors, just drawing two partially overlapping polys and leaving them at that doesn’t always work.
In truth, lines and polys are mostly the same thing, the main difference is that polygons are closed (i.e. the programs draws a closing segment between the end node and back to the start node) while lines do not have this closing segment. When we are splitting and joining out polygons, we’ll actually be temporarily turning them into lines, so it is worth noting already now that having the fill apparently disappear while doing this is completely normal, and it will return when we are done. This also means that the procedures described here are the same for both lines and polygons, except you don’t close up lines at the end.
Now, I use landmasses for my example here, but this works exactly the same way with floors in dungeon maps and all polys in all other map types as well.
Saddle up, pardners! The horses are rested and ready for the next expeditions, thanks to a neat set of stable furnishing in this month’s free symbol catalog by Mike Schley. 20 new symbols showing horses, saddles and tack, hay piles and other stable staples (sorry!) make up this set.
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley 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 April 2023 is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
We are happy and proud to present a new artist for the April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual. E. Prybylski has been contributing beautiful CC3+ maps to the community for a while, but they are also a great artist with ink and watercolour brushes, and we wanted to leverage that for the Annual. So symbols and Textures were drawn by hand and then converted into digital assets.
The result is the E Prybylski Watercolour style you see here. More than two hundred hand-drawn symbols combine with a dozen textures to produce unique and beautiful overland maps with a decidedly hand-drawn flavour.
The April 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.
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I’ve always loved some interactivity in my maps, especially the dungeon ones. It is fun adding secret doors that can be opened, rotating sections, and other surprises. If you watched my latest live stream, you saw me build a hedge maze with a rotating central section, where the inner region was only reachable if you rotated the it first using a clickable hotspot in the map. (You’ll find both a link to the recording as well as my map in this forum conversation.)
I thought I could show you a couple of more examples of nice easy macros you can assign to your hotspots to accomplish interesting results, and hopefully come away with an expanded understanding of macros at the same time.
We are very happy that with Jimmy Medina (aka DM Geezer Jim) we have a new contributor to the Cartographer’s Annual for the second month in a row. We loved the multi-structure floorplans extending over several levels that he shared with the community, and asked him to create a floorplan of a whole city block. 
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