November has come and gone and produced another fine crop of user maps on both the Profantasy forum and in the CC3+ FB Group. Here is a very small selection of them presented as the November installment of our popular Maps of the Month blog.
Near the beginning of the month Loopysue completed a map that Jerry Thiel started some time ago. Jerry is sadly no longer able to map but still finds pleasure in writing game scenarios. The Lakes of Michigami is a fantasy version of a real world location intended as the main campaign map. Continue reading »
Well, it’s been a busy time for me. I’ve returned to full-time in person work and have had little time for mapping. But….games do go on, so a DM needs to be able to through together something quick on the fly. That’s what this is….a map I literally threw together in no time.
(Download the FCW file)
I decided to go with a seasonal theme with this one. So, here’s an orc kingdom during the autumn season in some fantasy world. This style made it pretty simple to through together something quick, easy and pleasing to the eye. Just follow along the mapping guide if you’ve no clue where to start.
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The year is almost over, and we will soon be starting the resubscription offer for 2021. But until then the Cartographer’s Annual has another great mapping style for you: Tagkrammer Isometric for Perspectives-style floorplans.
We became aware of the beautiful isometric floorplan for a merchant’s “Kontor” on the Cartographer’s Guild and approached the author about turning it into a CC3+ style. Kawe Weissi-Zadeh of Westphalia Miniatures was happy to oblige and the result is the Tagkrammer Isometric style. It is an easy to use floorplan style, that can make good use of Perspectives 3 tools, but can also be used without that add-on.
On Thursday, December 3rd, the style features in our Live Mapping session on You Tube.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the December issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
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When using CC3+, you may have encountered symbols with behavior, like houses that aligns to and offsets from the wall and doors that align to, resizes themselves to match and cut holes in dungeon walls. These are what CC3+ calls smart symbols. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these symbols and we’ll have a look at how to make our own smart symbols. I’ll be using DD3 here, but this functionality is not restricted to DD3, and can be used in any kind of map CC3+ can produce.
Try it out
Before making our own smart symbols, to see the existing ones in use, try out how dungeon door reacts to differently sized walls. Start with a new small DD3 dungeon, draw a wall using the wall drawing tool (I recommend you right-click Default Wall and pick a nice looking one) at any angle. Then, make sure Snap (bottom right corner) is turned off and then pick any door from the Wall features catalog and hover the cursor over the wall. The door symbol should rotate to match the angle of the wall, and once you click, you’ll notice that it actually cuts the wall where it places the door. These are two of the features of smart symbols, aligning to existing entities and cutting lines.
In yesterday’s Live Mapping session I combined tools from Dioramas 3 with assets from Cosmographer 3 to design the paper model of a simple communications tower. You can watch the video here:
As I was quite happy with the results and am currently building some science fiction terrain anyway, I sat down to actually build the model, straight from the print out of the session’s work. Here you see me messing around with paper cutter and glue to build the model:
And finally, here is a picture of the finished model, next to some of my other terrain. Click the image to download the FCW file.
This was a fun little map. With this month’s annual I decided I would do a section of the ruined city Shan Drag’Oth in my homebrew campaign. It is a cursed city of ruins in a valley of evil and desecration, so a dark, gloomy theme was a must. This annual fits in with the CD3 Bitmap B symbol set, so I stuck with those fills for this map.
(Download the FCW file)
I am not personally particularly fond of the fills for this set, and they are not as gloomy as I needed for the look I wanted, so I found myself using the RGB Matrix on multiple sheets, including the sheet with my trees on it…..surprisingly the RGB Matrix worked beautifully on the tree symbols (not the bushes for some reason, so I just shrunk down the trees and used them for bushes on a separate sheet). I used a setting Sue had provided for her Isometric Town annual and tweaked it a little for the exact look I wanted. Once I had the coloring down, I then added the Texturize effect, which I am a fan of, to multiple sheets to give the map a gritty look.
Along with changing the color of the trees for this map, as usual, I used the varicolored symbols so I can change their color at any time, which can dramatically change the look of a map very simply. The ruins symbols that our friend, the talented Pär Lindström created for this annual are a wonderful addition to the city set.
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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After finishing the 2019 Annual, Christina Trani steps back in time to go through all of the 2018 issues with example maps and comments. Available so far are January, February, March, April, and May.
Remy Monsen takes a look at using multiple symbol styles in the same map and how to make that as easy as possible.
Recently we’ve done quite a few video tutorials and Annual issues on city mapping, and I wanted to to collect these into one conventient reference. Let’s take a look what we got:
Every week we do a live mapping session on YouTube, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+. Here are the most recent Live Mapping videos with Remy and Ralf, as archived on YouTube:
Welcome back to the Maps of the Month series, where we present a selection of beautiful and special maps created by our user community. Take a look at the great maps that have been posted to the ProFantasy forum or the CC3+ Facebook group.
This is one of the very first maps done in CC3+ by forum user simianorganism, using the Dungeons of Schley style for a virtual tabletop battle map. Continue reading »
When using CC3+, you may have encountered symbols with behavior, like houses that aligns to and offsets from the wall and doors that align to, resizes themselves to match and cut holes in dungeon walls. These are what CC3+ calls smart symbols. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these symbols and we’ll have a look at how to make our own smart symbols. I’ll be using DD3 here, but this functionality is not restricted to DD3, and can be used in any kind of map CC3+ can produce.
