Dear map-makers! What did the community share with us in September? Lots of cool maps of course. Let’s take a look at some of them.
EukalyptusNow takes the lead with the wonderful, atmospherically-lit Swamp Rat Inn. Check the forum thread for non-lighting versions of the map itself.
Wyvern created this wonderful map of Lovecraft’s Providence in the Cthulhu City style.
The Lizard Lair by Tommy Kehlet uses Sue’s Marine Dungeon style.
I just love the color pop on James Stewart‘s weird and spooky reality rift map.
Matt Finch‘s map of a wooded settlement is unnamed, so we’ll just go with the name of the D&D campaign it is for, “The White Shadow”.
I really have a soft spot for the Worlds of Wonder overland style Jeff B used in his Turia/Uldiar Region map.
Quenten Walker‘s small floorplan of Vlad’s Dive nicely captures the cramped, rundown feeling of a slum dive.
And finally, Ricko Hasche created another wonderful Ravenloft-style map, this time of Castle Smirnoff.
I often use boxes to put information like a map key or the map title in as I like to separate these things from the map itself. Creating such a box is easy enough, I usually just use the Box command to draw an appropriate box with a nice fill on a dedicated sheet, slap a quick effect on it like edge fade and/or transparency and I am done. If you did the first map tutorial in the CC3+ user manual, this was one of the final steps when we completed the map in the text chapter.
But, what if I want to make it a little neater, like for example adding rounded corners to it? CC3+ doesn’t have a ready to go rounded corner tool out of the box, but we can easily assemble one ourselves with a few simple steps. And of course, once you have made the shape, you can throw whatever fills and effects on it that you want.
The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available. itrevisits an old favorite style: Jon Roberts’ overland entry from the Annual 2011, adding new bitmap fills, drawing tools and settings to take advantage of the newer features of CC3+.
The Jon Roberts Revisited style gives you all the tools and symbols for overland regional, continental or world maps. The 5-page mapping guide takes you through the whole process of creating the map.
The October issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.
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Ever wanted to add your own buttons to the CC3+ toolbars? Perhaps you have a command you use frequently, or just want quick access to a symbol catalog?
CC3+ doesn’t have a built-in editor to do this, but all it takes is a few simple changes in a text file to make it happen.
In this blog post, I am going to go through the basics for adding a new button to your toolbar. To keep it simple, I’ll just focus on buttons, although there are other things you can do in the menu as well, such as adding pop-up menus when you right click a button, but I’ll just cover the basics for now.
If you like, you can also watch the basics of this article as a video, and then come back to check out additional details in the article later.
Dear map-makers, we hope you enjoy the waning days of 2022’s summer with some chilled map-making. Let’s see what the last month had in store mapping-wise.
We’ve got an update for Fractal Terrains 3+ that takes care of some concerns with the river generation commands.
As the update concerns some core functions of the software, it will profit from some wider beta testing and we therefore decided to make it generally available for all FT3 users to try out.
So if you have had problems with river generation in FT3+ in the past, or just want to give this new version a try, download FT3+ 3.5.2 from your registration page.
Dear map-makers! It’s time to take another look last month’s community maps. If the selection is a bit smaller than usual, it’s only because many maps were created for the August mapping competition, which I did not want to double up here, especially before the winners were announced. If you want to check them out, and perhaps help with the voting, head over to the forum thread. But do enjoy these beautiful maps first!
JeffB created Richardson’s Roadhouse in the Dungeons of Schley style and did a superb job with adding atmospheric lighting.
While Ricko Hasche‘s city and village scenes are familiar by now, he doesn’t fail to delight with this wonderfully atmospheric cursed village
Mike Degn‘s Cloth-Salt Colonies are a wonderful example of how beautiful a modern overland map can be.
For the Chronicles of Möwendorf Morrgans has combined a whole slew of different map styles, including Pär Lindström’s book border and Vandel’s location vignettes. Great stuff!
Wyvern‘s whimsical map of Queen Mica’s Scintillating Palace (i.e. an anthive) just warms my heart. Such a lovely design!
Eric McNeal is back with another historical map of (actually a whole set of maps) in the Ferraris style, this time of the area of Miami. Gorgeous!
Last but not least, Mark Fradley shared his first city map with this underground dwarven city. I love the color-coding, great work, Mark!
We continue the free monthly content with the dressings for the lair of a proper villain like a necromancer. Corpses fresh and old, moldy skeletons, black robes, tools and machinery, as well as the proper occult tomes, will serve to make your resurrectionist or vivisectionist feel right at home.
Note that the example maps included with the 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 September 2022 is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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Remy Monsen ran a mapping competition during the month of August, and some amazing building floorplans were created by the community.
The challenge was to create floorplans for a set of buildings chosen from one town map (see on the right) of the community atlas project, with the finished maps (hopefully) becoming part of the atlas and complementing its wonderful collection of free content.
