Here is the round up of last month’s live mapping sessions on YouTube.
The December 2019 Annual, last official one of the year, brought us back to Worlds of Wonder – expanding the first of the year’s Worlds of Wonder style. On this map I really didn’t do much other than alter a few of the Effects settings and adding an Edge Fade here and Color Key there. I used both options for land masses to depict the colder, sparser element in the southern region. Then, I added a few sheets for use on the southernmost landmass for LAND SNOW and a LAND FOREST SNOW sheet to top off some of the forests with snow closer to the Realm of the Frost Giants, where it is obviously, blustery cold.
Download the FCW source file of the map
I really enjoyed, despite some trepidation on the annuals featuring tools I’ve never used before such as the Perspectives styles or most recently using FT3 and Wilbur, taking me far from my comforts of my very own personal style of hacking DD3 to do almost anything I usually map, doing this project immensely. I think, that’s what is perfect about these annuals, trying out styles you’ve never considered before and discovering you will use them again and again in the future. Now go try one of those styles you’ve never used before….who knows, maybe the SciFi Base will inspire a space themed campaign for your gaming groups next adventure, or a Watercolour map to use as the background for your upcoming novel cover….the possibilities are endless with a 12 annuals to inspire you every year 😊
Well, I’ve completed a year’s worth of annual maps and I can tell you all, I feel pretty accomplished. I’ve always wanted to make a map with all the annuals, but never seemed to find the time or a reason when there was always a map I could be making for my long running homebrew campaign or contribute to the Community Atlas in a style I have mastered using. This year’s annual gave me the opportunity to really challenge myself and overcome many long standing, mapping anxieties I’ve had. I’ve found styles I really, really loved using and never though I would ever use, let alone love the end result so much I’d use it again on personal maps.
I challenge all of you to do the same! Map along with me, if you please 😊 I’ll be continuing along and mapping my way back to the year 2018 and would love to see what you all make along with my weekly maps.
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.
Hi folks, welcome to our monthly look at the maps of our user community. Check out these few samples of the great stuff the CC3+ users have posted on the (now freshly re-furbished) forum and the Facebook group. Thanks to all of them and everyone else who is sharing their work!
Shessar posted the final version of her map of the Western Lands.
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The September Annual is now available. Sue Daniel created a wonderful set of connecting symbols that let you draw precipitous cliffs in your city and town maps with just a few easy clicks, along with special features like gaps, stack, ascending roads and waterfalls.
The symbols come integrated with the Jon Roberts Cities style, which is included in CC3+, but can also be added to any other city style (for example from City Designer 3) easily. The accompanying mapping guide not only explains how to do that, but also gives a step-by-step overview of the workings of the connecting symbols.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the September issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
One of the features for CC3+ symbol catalogs is the ability to arrange these into groups, and then set this group to place random symbols from the group, or apply random transformations to them, like rotations or minor scaling to give variety to otherwise identical symbols.
But, what if you are making a particular map, and you need some other kind of grouping? For example, when placing trees you want to randomly place Decid, Pine and Jungle trees among each other? There are no predefined group like this in most symbol catalogs. Well, for that you can quite easily set up your own personal random collection just for the current map (or you can save it into a symbol catalog if you want it available later).
It is time to update the software running the ProFantasy Community Forum. This includes both the forum software itself, as well as the underlying software on the server. There are a lot of things that need to be manually handled here, so this is a major operation.
I plan to start at Friday, August 28th 2020 at 18:00 hours CET, and estimate a maintenance window for about 6 hours, but it could potentially take longer. During this time, the forum will be unavailable.
The new version of the forum software will bring along some new features to the forum, such as a better post editor and better support for mobile browsers. Check back after the upgrade is complete to learn about all the other changes.
Update:
The new version is now up and running. Check this post in the forum for a breakdown on some of the changes.
Well, I managed to pull this one off. The One Day Worldbuilder Annual for use of Fractal Terrains 3, Wilbur and of course Campaign Cartographer 3 is designed, for the most part, with people like me in mind. Believable geography of a map, fantasy or not, has often given me headaches. Those of us that remember the great “River Debates” in other mapping forums remember how, as a mapper with little to no knowledge of what a believable map should look like, the fear was real. This isn’t really much of an issue for me, since I usually stick to dungeon and village mapping, though I do have overland map of my own homebrew fantasy – it has some of the MOST unbelievable geographical locations!
(Download the whole set of files and exports for this map.)
So, starting out with this I was a bit unsure of my skills in Fractal Terrains 3, Master Mapper or not, and decided to grab one of the ready-made worlds provided with the annual. I made some minor changes here and there, but for the most part, kept it near to the original. I was early on following along in the guide, of which I HIGHLY recommend you do, that I ran into some trouble saving as an mdr file. I ended up doing a repair on my FT3 and reinstalling Wilbur and all was well again. Also, I made sure to always open a file as administrator as recommended by Sue Daniel. Speaking of……I managed to follow along and get myself a pretty neat little world I was pretty happy with. I was even surprised with how easy I was able to use Wilbur for my intended purposes through Sue’s simple step by step instructions.
I decided to do a CC3+ map using both a vector map exported from FT3 and also an imported bitmap image background map. I did run into a bit of trouble that Sue helped sort out for me, but otherwise, I managed to complete this project on my own with the Mapping Guide. I thought it would be nice to show beginner users that by following along, step by step, anyone can create a fantastic world so I’ve included all the style maps within my one CC3+ fcw file. Just hide the style sheets and text style (I’ve done two) you don’t want. My favorites in the bunch are the Old Style and the Volcanic Style. Oh, and the dark parchment. Which are yours?
So, for this map I followed along with the Mapping Guide, for the most part; though, I did find that I had to change some settings in Effects to suit my aesthetic. That is the great thing about this program, by simply changing one or two settings can change the whole look of a map.
Download the FCW file of the map.
As usual, my go to for names of the unusual kind is the internet and the many name generators out there. I simply searched for Mayan and Aztec names and went from there. Though, if you notice… I used mostly the Aztec symbols on the map (I just liked them better). I thought, hey, why not mix it up and create some hybrid Mayan/Aztec civilization map?
This month in the newsletter we’ve got the completion of the City design article series for you, wonderful new community maps, more example Annual maps by Christina and a long list of new YouTube videos.
News
- The August Annual issue bring you a style for retro-design starships, usable with out without Cosmographer 3.
Resources
- The archived live mapping videos of the last month are available on YouTube.
- Enjoy a selection of beautiful Maps of the Month created by our users in July.
Christian Trani continues her “All the Annuals“ series , where she creates a map for each of the Annual issues, starting with the Annual 2019. Check out the maps for July, August, and September of that year.
Articles
- Ari Gilder finsihes his series on city building with a discussion of final touches for the map.
- Remy Monsen looks at creating day and night versions of the same map. You can also check out his video version of the article.
Here is the round up of last month’s live mapping sessions by Remy or Ralf.
