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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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.

Previously in this series, we have developed a set of tiles which we can use to build a space station of any size. Sure, more variation would have been nice, but the four tiles we made are actually enough for any size space station, as long as we accept that it has to be shaped like a rectangle. The previous articles should have given you the information needed to make more tiles though, such as making an inner corner to complete the set and allow for a more complex shape.

Last time, we did look at how to export and print the tiles. Printed tiles could be assembled on the fly at the gaming table, while the exported images are great for combining in just about any program, like an image editor, a Virtual TableTop, or even CC3+ itself. And this is what we will be focusing on in this article, how to use the tiles in CC3+. There are two options here, either we can import the images we exported as symbols and use those, or, instead of exporting our tiles in the first place, we could create symbols directly from the tiles themselves. This latter option gives us some interesting options we will look at in the next installment, but today, we’ll look at creating bitmap symbols.

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The summer is usually a bit quieter in terms of map-making, but our users have nevertheless created a bunch of beautiful maps last month. Let’s take a look at some of them that were shared on the ProFantasy forum or the Facebook group!

Ricko Hasche has utlitzed the latest free monthly symbols by Mike Schley to go a-viking with this amazing village map.
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The August issue of the Annual 2024 brings you a revamped and refreshed overland mapping style by Sarah Wroot, one of the earliest fantasy cartographers who contributed to Campaign Cartographer.

Sarah’s style “Sarah Wroot Revisited” takes beautiful hand-crafted line symbols and combines them with watercolor style backgrounds to create a wonderful artistic result. It combines easily with the hand-drawn style from Symbol Set 1 – Fantasy Overland (also created by Sarah Wroot) for a much wider variety of symbols.

The August issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.

I recently finished my 11-year long AD&D campaign with an epic final boss battle. And a good boss battle obviously need a good battle map.

My group is playing in-person, but we use a Virtual Table Top program displayed on a projection screen for our battles. This allow us to zoom out/in on various area, and have a more flexible approach to the area, but for those that prefer using physical miniatures, printing is of course an option as well.

For this project, I did most of the work in CC3+, but it involves using the VTT software as well (MapTool in my case). I’ll keep this article more an overview of the process rather than diving down into the technical details or making a detailed tutorial, but I invite anyone who has any questions regarding the process to drop by the ProFantasy Community Forums and post their questions there, and I will be happy to help.

Continue reading »

In the July Annual issue community veteran Quenten Walker revisits the Watabou Cities tool pack and style. The style referenced the Watabou online random village, town and city generator and leveraged it to create city maps in CC3+. Since its inception, the Watabou map generator has been changed and developed further. Quenten has taken it on himself to revise the style to take the changes into account and expand it to offer more tools and options.

The new style does not only contain a new bitmap fill selection, more drawing tools and more detailed instructions, it also leverages improved options of the Watabou Cities Generator to make creating cities, town, and villages randomly even easier in CC3+.

The July issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.