In CC3+, drawing tools are great timesavers. The basic functionality of a drawing tool is that it works as a preset that contains all the various settings required, such as line style, fill style, line width, color, sheet and layer so that when you draw using a drawing tool you don’t have to go around setting all of these manually like we did in the good old days. Drawing tools also have some built-in nice features like being able to draw two separate entities at once, being able to stay within the map border, and the option to easily edit an existing shape.

However, there is another very important feature that exists for drawing tools, and that is to attach macros to them. A drawing tool can contain an embedded macro which follow the tool and isn’t dependent on your main CC3+ macro file and can contain macros that work in tandem with what you draw using the tool, or even functionality that isn’t connected to drawing at all. Today, we’ll look at how to create these tools and have a brief look at how they can make things easier for us.

Drawing with Macros

If you have been making overland maps, you’ll probably familiar with the forest drawing tools. If you pay attention when you use them, you’ll note that they ask you to draw a smooth shape, and then fills this shape with trees after you are done drawing it. This is a macro drawing tool at work. What happens is that the tool itself is only set up to draw that forest background, but it also contain a macro that gets called when you are done drawing that calls the Fill With Symbols command to fill the area you just drew with trees. Let us make a similar macro that uses the Symbols in Area command instead. I won’t go into detail about Symbols in Area here, since this is about making a macro tool that uses the command, rather than explain the command itself, but if you need a refresher for the command, you can look at this article.

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Welcome to the February newsletter! Apart from an update to Fractal Terrains and a new column by Remy Monsen, we have two cartography articles from our Annual contributors – a feature we will continue in future months.

News

• A new version of Fractal Terrains 3 is available: 3.0.21 which improves the Finding Rivers function, ensuring they always appear. You can download an update from your registration page.
• The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 is available. The symbol pack Dungeon Walls allows you to create detailed and varied walls for your underground complexes.
• The January issue of the Annual 2018 offered a hex-version of Mike Schley’s overland style from CC3+.
• The Community Mapping Project is running a mapping competition. Anyone submitting a map to the project in February participates, so there is still time.

Resources

Articles

• Christina Trani describes her process for creating the battle-maps for March’s Annual issue The Curse of the Lich-king.
• Sue Daniel shows how to use GIMP to create parchment textures for use in CC3+.

Annuals for CC3+

We are happy to announce that three more Cartographer’s Annuals are now compatible with CC3+: Thanks to the hard work of Jeff Salus, if you have previously purchased one of them, you can now freely download Volume 7, Volume 6 and Volume 5 from your registration page. Be sure you use the “Setup for CC3+” to install them properly with the current version of Campaign Cartographer.

If you don’t own them yet, purchasing them from the web store will give you both the CC3 and CC3+ versions. Highlights of the three Annuals include the complete set of John Robert’s drawing styles: Overland, Dungeon and City.

You will also be pleased to hear that we are well underway for the next two Annuals (working backwards) to become available for CC3+. Look for Volume 4 and Volume 3 in the next few weeks.

CC3+ Update 10

To support the current and upcoming Annuals for CC3+ we have also released a new update for CC3+: Update 10 (version 3.76). Here is the change log from the Readme file for Update 10:

CC3+ Version 3.76
=================
– added Copy & Paste for sheet effects in Sheets & Effects dialog
– added preview in all fill style and line style selection boxes
– added status preview for layers and sheets in selection boxes
– added commands to control display of fill style types in style selection: FSCOMBOMASK (normal command) and FSCOMBOMASKM (macro version)
– added support for Annual Vol 6 and Vol 5
– added SHADEP command to draw shaded polygons will all possible options
– fixed CUTMENUON command
– fixed CD3 symbols to use @ bitmap link reference
– fixed CD3 house settings to include frills
– fixed importing symbols with @ links and _map references
– various fixes related to shaded polygons
– fixed editing macros from drawing tools
– fixed CC3B forest fill setting
– updated ImageMagick’s convert.exe to newest version
– updated CA Pro templates in CA3

As you can see it contains some other neat features. Especially the ability to copy and paste effects between different sheets can speed up work considerably when you are setting up your own effect settings. And the ability to see a sample of the fill styles when you are choosing one in any dialog box is also very handy.

Note: This is a cross post.  The original is posted @ The CC3 Developer Blog

Wow, its been a while since I’ve written a post here.  The holidays are always a busy family blur.  Well, here is the latest installment …

The path/poly element is the most used element in CC3.  You really cannot get much done with it.  Try building anything in CC3 without it (Sure you can just use more primitive elements and use multipoly & group for joining and filling, but really you are just re-creating the path/poly element).  So if you want to get something done in an XP, odds are you are going to be working with paths/polys.

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One nice thing you can do with CC3+ maps is to have multiple views embedded in one map. For example, in the Forest Trail annual style, you can choose if you want to see the treetops, like you would normally see a location in a forest if viewed from above, or if you want to hide the canopies so you can see what actually goes on under the trees, quite important for a battle map.

There are also cases where you want to make a map with private information for the gamemaster, and a public version of the map for the players.

Or maybe you need an overland map with a lot of information, perhaps showing both political information, economical information and climate information, but showing it all at the same time looks pretty messy.

Of course, if you have used CC3+ even just a little bit, you know that I am talking about hiding and showing sheets here. For the overland map, you can have one sheet with a political overlay, one with economic information, and one with a climate overlay, and only show the desired sheet, simple enough. For your GM’s secrets, just put them on a sheet by themselves that you hide when you export the player map.

But, what if your view requires switching on and off multiple sheets? Due to different effects, that political overlay may actually consist of one sheet with political borders, one sheet with the text associated with the information, and maybe another sheet with symbols related to this overlay. Once you have multiple sheets involved, it can get a bit harder to turn on/off the right sheets for any given occasion, which is what we’ll have a short look at today.

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The Cartographer’s Annual subscription for 2025 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 2025 web page for the early subscription discount.

We have the first three issues lined up, starting with a revisited Ancients Realms style by TJ Vandel from 2009 with new symbols, new fills, new effects and new and updated drawing tools.

Next in line is an issue that combines FT3+ exports with new templates in CC3+ for new parchment overland maps. And then in March Sue Daniel provides a great overland style tentatively named “Bird’s Eye Overland”. If you want to provide some input and feedback for 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 2024.

Subscribe to the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 now.

While the year is quickly churning towards its end, let’s pause for a month, look over the shoulder and enjoy the maps the community shared in November.

Stephen St John created this wonderful city map with Pär Lindström’s Renaissance City style.
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Symbols in CC3+ comes with a lot of advanced functionality beyond simply placing down an icon in your map. One of of the entries on that list is symbol attributes.

Symbol attributes are text entities that are embedded into the symbol, but allow the user to set their value when placing the symbol. This allows a single symbol to have a kind of dynamic content. this can be used for many purposes; one of the more common one is for scale bars. By default, most scale bars in CC3+ are designed to be 100 miles or feet long. But instead of hard-coding the number 100 in the symbol, the scale bars use attributes, so if you need a shorter scale bar, you can just place it at 0.5 scale and type 50 as the attribute value. This means you only need to define a single symbol, and it can be used for multiple scales, instead of having a small fixed set with common values. The text you enter becomes part of the symbol, so it will follow along if you move the symbol around.

Other uses for attributes are placeable signs with user-defined text, modern military unit counters with identification text, and much more.

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During the last few months, we ran the celebratory competition for the 1000th map in the Community Atlas Project. The competition is now over, and Royal Scribe won the honor of getting the official 1000th map in the atlas, while Ricko Hasche took home the prize for best map by community vote. You can see all the winners, and check an image gallery containing all the maps.

The Winning Entry: Metzvel by Ricko Hasche

I thought I could continue on with the topic of the atlas today, and give a little overview of the macros I use in the project, both in the maps themselves, and the ones I use when processing the maps. To avoid making this a 10-part series, this will just be a basic overview of them, to give people ideas how they can utilize macros in their own mapping.

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[Download the FCW file]
Hello Mappers! This month’s annual in the 2015 set is Black & White Towns by one of our favorite resident artists, Pär Lindström.

Following the Mapping Guide, I started first by creating the water, and then adding some elevation symbols around the banks and in the outer corners. I quickly decided that I would tie in this map to the OSR Dungeon map I had done earlier in the 2015 Annual series and sticking with the black and white theme, I added a section of ruins. Once I got in my main road of the hamlet, I used the Random Street tool to line the road with some houses. I then removed a few and inserted some of the symbol houses that come with the set to mix up the housing look of the hamlet. Some bushes, some trees and some accessories and 15 minutes later and this map was done.

Despite my love of color and texture blending, I oddly love this style more than I’d like to admit. I am going to quickly work up copies of many of my villages in my homebrew world, making printing up maps for my players so much easier and cost effective.

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.