We continue with our free monthly content for Campaign Cartographer 3+. This month Mike Schley added the the thrid party of the classical fanasy trio his overland style: The Dwarves and their mostly underground cities, strongholds, mines and outposts.
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 (see image on the right). All the content so far is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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The September issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 is now available. Dive into city building with a great new style by Sue Daniel. The style is designed to match her Darklands overland style in tone and colors, and is named Darklands City accordingly.
The grim and gritty style contains many ruins and dilapitated buildings, and with its more than 200 new symbols and many bitmaps fills in Sue’s detailed signature style offers a gorgeous set for city mapping.
The Septmeber 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.
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When mapping, there are times when precision matters a lot, and times when it doesn’t matter at all and simply eyeballing sizes and positions gives the best result. But in this article, I am going to talk a bit about the former, when we want perfect precision in our work, when we need that road to be exactly 10 feet wide, or entities needs to line up perfectly with each other. In CC3+ we have multiple tools available for that purpose, such as snap grid, modifiers and coordinates. I’ve talked about these things in other places before, but I’ll put all these into the context of precision work here.
Following the Live Mapping: Repeating Textures session, recently presented by Ralf Schemmann, I will be writing a short series of blogs, or a series of short blogs, illustrating how I go about generating my own seamless tiles. My methods are similar to those described by Ralf in the Live Mapping session, but I thought you might like to know a bit more about the workflow I use.
In this first blog I will be covering how I make seamless textures in CC3 using the available symbols from a chosen style. This is one of the quickest ways to make a new seamless tile since it involves no drawing or any kind of work in any app other than CC3.
To make things even easier I have made a new template, which you can download from the link below and place in your C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus\Templates\Other folder:
This is a very simple template, consisting of a black square on the BACKGROUND sheet, and the frozen MAP BORDER layer. This black square is where you will be making your new seamless tile and will automatically define the extent of the export when it is time to export your new tile.
There is a series of red lines on a sheet and layer that are both called CROP MARKS. These are also frozen so that you don’t end up picking them at any point and moving them around. They are helpful guides intended to show you the extent of the tile you are making once the black square is all but covered in symbols.
The template is loosely based on the Mike Schley Overland style, and is designed to generate tiles that are 1000 px x 1000 px, but it can be used to generate symbol tiles in any style if you locate the relevant symbol catalogue by browsing the directory and adjust the export size.
For this example I will use the MS overland trees to create a seamless tile that I can use in conjunction with the published tree fills that come with the style. This will help to break up any unwanted tile patterns caused by mapping extensive areas of unbroken forest using only the published tree fills.
The first step is to pick the set of symbols you want to use, and start pasting them all over the black square at the default symbol size (usually 1) until there is no more black to be seen between the symbols. Don’t worry about pasting them so that they are in the correct order. Just cover the black square.
Use Symbols-Sort Symbols In Map , right click in the view window and pick All, then press D for do it.
Now to move this block of trees and copy it so that we move the edges to the centre, just as Ralf did with his sand texture in the Live Mapping session referenced at the top of this blog.
Turn the SNAP and GRID buttons on and make sure you have the 50 mile, 2 snap grid selected when you right click the GRID button.
Pick the Move tool and select all the trees with a box selection and press D for do it. Then pick the trees at the central snap point and move that point to one of the four corners. It doesn’t matter which one, as long as you snap the central point to one of the corners, like this.
Using the Copy tool, copy and paste this block of trees 3 times from this corner to all the other corners.
Once you have done this sort the symbols again as above, and hopefully you will have something that looks a bit like this
Now for the magical part.
File-Save as… Pick the PNG Bitmap file option in the Save as type: box, and open the Options dialog. The template you are using has been set up to generate 1000 x 1000 pixel sized tiles, so set the height and width of the export to 1000 x 1000. Make sure the checkboxes are ticked as shown, and CC3 will automatically export just the area covered by the black square, and no more or less than that.
I exported my example fill to a subfolder within the Bitmaps\Tiles folder. I called my personal folder User, but you can call yours whatever you like. It’s yours.
Ralf covered how to import your new fills in the Live Mapping session linked to at the top of this article, so I won’t make this article any longer than it needs to be by repeating it again right here.
This is the result of importing my new fill and drawing my first polygon with it. Remember that I said the template is designed to give you a tile that is 1000 x 1000 map units? Combine this information with the fact that symbols and fills are ideally imported to overland maps at a resolution of 20 pixels per map unit, and you get a scale of 50 map units to set for your new fill. this should perfectly match the scale of the original symbols you used to create the fill in the first place.
When you have had a practice using just one random collection, try mixing collections, or even using a background texture and spacing out your trees. You can also do this with other symbols, so you could try hills or mountains
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Hello dear cartographers, welcome to the August newsletter. Mike Schley has created another set of symbols for you, we have a tutorial pack in the Annual about repeating textures, you can check out many beautiful community maps, videos and articles by Christina and Remy.
We continue with our free monthly content for Campaign Cartographer 3+. This month Mike Schley added the results of all the wars between the Orcs and the Elves to his overland style: Once lively, now abandoned cities, towns and villages, destroyed keeps, cursed crossroads and haunted graveyards can now adorn your maps.
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 (see image on the right). All the content so far is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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Here is the list of live mapping sessions we have done since the last month. A few less due to holidays, absences and an actual thunderstorm, but still lots of great material for you to review.
We are a bit later this month, as I was on holiday for a week, but we still got a bunch of great maps from the community to show off.
The section of the city of Padova by AleD uses Sue Daniel’s Ferraris city style to great effect.
Parsley‘s Land of Vareltia map is a wonderful example of the type of result you can get for your very first maps with the Mike Schley Overland style. Continue reading »
Love a world with monsters, mystery, and supernatural horror around every corner? Love the 1920s? Dying to run a campaign speaking in Old Tyme radio announcer voice? Oh, yes, then this annual should be the inspiration you need for your next Cthulhu themed tabletop game. You guessed it readers, I’ve been trying to get my gaming group to play Cthulhu for a few years now. Maybe this latest map will finally help them along to love and crave the Lovecraftian universe I have for so many years.
[Download the FCW file]
This annual allows a game master to create a Cthulhu inspired city easily with pre-made city street grid symbols. After laying out a few street grid symbols, and adding a street or two using the road drawing tool to connect the grids and also finish off the outer sections, laying out the building symbols on this map was so easy, since aligning them with the roads isn’t part of this particular map style aesthetic. I placed the symbols and named them all while creating a dark adventure in mind for my players.
This setting is a particular favorite of mine, so this annual is one of my favorites of the year. Speaking of… All the Annuals 2017 has come to a close. But wait! There’s more!! Stick around for the bonus annual… Sue Daniel’s Parchments.
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.
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The August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 is now available for download. Follow a detailed tutorial on using repeating textures in CC3+.
The 10-page tutorial focuses specifically on the repeating patterns that can become very apparent and distracting in large bitmap fills, and how to mitigate and remove them as far as possible.
The August 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.
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We continue with our free monthly content for Campaign Cartographer 3+. This month Mike Schley added the the thrid party of the classical fanasy trio his overland style: The Dwarves and their mostly underground cities, strongholds, mines and outposts. 
