Fitting for the time of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual brings you a wintry city style with snow-covered roofs and trees, frozen ground, deep snow drifts and frosty fields.
Sue Daniel’s Winter Village style contains more than hundred new symbols, new roof, house and street styles, as well as a host of drawing tools for those wintry settlements. The 4-page mapping guide talks you through creating such a village in a few easy steps.
The March 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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Have you marveled at the beautiful city maps that Mike Schley has created for the D&D role-playing game and other brands? If not, head over to his web page to see a great selection. Myself, I am a particular fan of his isometric city views like the Candlekeep map you see as the first listed on that page. They give a great overall impression of the location, while also haviong enough precise information to make them really useful as a gaming tool.
Of course I’ve been advocating for a symbol set using this art style for a while here at Profantasy, and I’m now more than happy that I have the first symbols on my desk for by an upcoming set by Mike himself. He’s been busy creating the inked outlines ofr the buildings and kindly provided a few colored ones as well, that I can show off here. Take a look!
So far my job concerning this product has mostly been looking over the incoming symbols, nodding and saying “Yes, they are great, thank you” by way approval. I’m looking forward to diving into creating all the symbols for CC3+ when more of the colored versions come in, and trying my hand at creating isometric city maps with them myself.
Browse through the community’s Maps of the Month for February to see how your fellow map-makers have started the mapping year.
Articles
Matthew Verdini is producing and selling some very nice battle maps created with CC3+ for virtual and real tabletops. Check out some samples of his work.
Remy Monsen continues his development of dynamic dungeon tools. Follow this excellent exercise and tutorial on programming your own extensions for CC3+.
Reminders
CC3+ has been updated to version 3.97 (Update 27) which is available from your registration page.
Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
In Febuary Mike Schley sets out to expand the vegetation options for his overland style in CC3+. 24 new symbols of majestic giant trees, huge pines, weird alien forests, gigantic carnivorous plans and mammoth funghi allow you to build fantastic maps of strange locations.
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 up to and including February 2022 is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
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Hello Cartographers and welcome to the first set of user maps of 2022. We’ve picked out a dozen beautiful maps from the user community for you to enjoy. Make sure to join the forum and/or the Facebook group to see many more each month, including the progress of many of these!
AleD used the Spectrum Overland style for this fantastic version of the lanscape of the same name in Northern Italy. Continue reading »
According to our End User License Agreement, you need our permission to publish floorplan-scale maps consisting predominantly of our artwork commercially (when the maps are a product of their own and not part of an adventure or such). This is mostly to protect our artwork rights and to keep the floorplan-market from getting flooded by cheap, extremely simple maps. Recently Matthew Verdini approached us to get such a permission, and seeing the quality of his maps, we were more than happy to grant that permission. See for yourself!
We also asked him to say a few words about himself and his work, so here he goes:
First off, I will admit to being a fan of the Profantasy line of products since they first debuted in the 90s. I remember seeing their ads in Dragon magazine and thinking how cool the software looked. I eventually mustered up some funds and got myself to the nearest gaming shop I could find so that I could buy a copy of Campaign Cartographer to use in my home brew world building.
The product was a far cry from the work that can be done today, but there was nothing like it at the time. As a student, I would slowly pick up additional products as I could while trying to build my worlds.
Graduating college and getting a graphic design job eventually afforded me the ability to buy all their products as I continued building worlds, cities and dungeons for my adventures. All my games were in person for a long while, therefore there was a great amount of time spent printing out pages and taping them together. However, now I play entirely online, allowing me to easily utilize the maps as needed.
The amount of time I put into my maps grew as I relied on them more and more in the digital landscape. Admittedly my work is not done strictly within the confines of the software or only using the assets they provide. The artist and designer in me adds some of my own tweaks to the assets as well as post production adjustments like lighting, textures and so on. In the end though, the heavy lifting has been done with Profantasy’s products.
When the pandemic hit, I began to explore some side businesses and ultimately opened up an Etsy shop for geek clothing and accessories, with a strong bend towards roleplaying. As I continued to grow the shop, I thought it might be interesting to explore a line of assets for Gamemasters. With that, I recently took my first step into attempting to sell premade maps.
Since my interest in cartography began with Profantasy, I thought it would only make sense that the work I share be part of that.
Our Dynamic Dungeon project is moving along, and for this installment of the series, I am going to address several interesting concepts and techniques.
Creating custom entities so we can store our settings with the map.
Creating dialogs to change settings. Here I also show how we can use owner-drawn lists to draw comboboxes with previews of the fill from the map. We’ll also create macro versions of the settings commands.
Accessing the drawing InfoBlock to find fills.
Making sure our tool stop at the map border, the same way that CC3+’s drawing tools does.
I am including the interesting bits of code right here in the article, but I have made minor changes all over the code from the previous articles to accommodate some of the new features from this article, so don’t forget to download the complete project from the link at the end of this article.
We are heading into February with the Cartographer’s Annual and a new style by Pär Lindström, inspired by one of his latest commission works in the Swedish rpg industry. He created a style that looks and feels like a page in a vintage modern atlas.
In addition to the fine example of a contour-based modern map style, we were intrigued by the book-and-pages frame of the map. So he set out to separate all the Photoshop assets he created to be made into a CC3+ style. And here we are with the style ready for you to use, and you could even go ahead, take the book frame only and apply it to other map styles.
The February 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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Are you experiencing issue with missing bitmap textures in older or custom map styles, instead showing a Red X? Remy Monsen explains the possible causes and how to fix them.
Jason Payne explains his way of creating “heatmaps” in CC3+, i.e. maps highlighting locations, patterns and density of specific features.
Reminders
CC3+ has been updated to version 3.97 (Update 27) which is available from your registration page.
Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
