The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available. Create beautiful maps of maritime, canal-heavy cities like Venice or Amsterdam with the Serpentine City style. Named after the Swords of the Serpentine game by Pelgrane Press and modeled from the the map artwork by Jérôme Huguenin for the city of Eversink, the style uses vector graphics, many sheet effects and a custom color palette to match his beautiful work.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the October issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
Comments Off on Cartographer’s Annual 2020: October
In CC3+, each template is designed for a single style, which comes with it’s own symbols, fills and tools, while the resources belonging to other styles are not directly visible in the GUI.
This is intended behavior, because it puts the chosen style in focus. You know that all the elements you are being offered are designed to work with that style and fit with the visual design of the style. This behavior is both a blessing and a curse. Keeping the focus on the style is good. If you own everything, you’ll have about 40.000 different raster symbols (and a lot of vector symbols too, but I don’t have the count), you really don’t want to filter through all of these all the time when working on your map to find the ones matching your current map style, that’s just hugely impractical. But every now and then you want to be able to mix map styles, and you know of a couple of styles that work very well together. How can you easily access all the symbols from these styles?
Hot dog! Here is a map I love to make, Dungeons. This map was a quick and easy map I whipped up using the Dungeon Walls Annual in the SS2 style, one of my favorites. I’ve used this style before so I didn’t need the mapping guide, but if you’ve never used it, follow the guide along once and you’ll be all set on how to use Symbols Along and get your walls done.
(Download the FCW File)
As usual, I’ve made some Hue/Sat adjustments to some sheets. And the only other thing I’ve done different is added a wall shadow sheet. Depending on how a set up a map, I sometimes do an inner glow on the floor sheet, but with multiple rooms it gets a bit tedious doing a separate sheet for each floor so each room gets a glow. Or, you can put an outer glow on a wall sheet, rather than the wall shadow. For this map, however, I left the wall shadow set on the wall sheet and then created smaller shadows on the other walls on their own separate sheet.
The map is set up to be printed up in poster size 36×24 – map size of 180’x120’ – and in order to do that you really need to emphasize the grid, or it doesn’t print up well in poster size. For this, I just add a nice strong outer glow on it in the same color as the grid itself. That is just enough to be seen printed out and not have to change the line width of the grid. Or you can hide the grid, for VTT play, like I have been doing during quarantine when we were playing online by using the grid in your VTT platform of choice. Just set up your map size to match this one and it will line up perfectly.
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.
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Dungeon Walls (February 2018)
Well, here we are back in 2018. January, to be exact. We start the year off with an overland style map. I rather like a smaller map, so I started with a 200×200 map and decided to do a valley to keep it simple and letting me get a lot of cool adventure areas within.
(Download the FCW file)
As usual for me, I’ve adjusted many of the fills by playing around with the Adjust Hue/Saturation effect. Something else that I almost always do is to mix up the color of my varicolor mountains, hills and vegetation – I find this is more realistic, as no real forest has every tree the exact same hue as the next.
For the rivers on this map I decided to use the Color Key on the Land Sheet and bring the ocean background out as my water source. I prefer the look of a river with a Glow (outer) on that sheet than drawing on a river on a separate sheet with a Glow applied. It’s just a personal preference and using the drawing tools as is will produce excellent maps as this 😉
I always struggle a bit with labelling, specifically with color of text. Mostly that is because what I call my “Too Much Gene” kicks in and I want to use a myriad of colors and a variety of my hundreds of hundreds of fonts I’ve acquired over the years. When this happens, it’s best to stick with the standard font that comes with the annual.
I added a frame to this by creating four polygons, one on each side of the map and then added two sheets above, one for shading and one for the lines effect and copied those polygons to each sheet. I made the frame a solid color, the overlay I used the Horizontal and Vertical Brush Patterns bitmap fill with a transparency effect and the shading solid fill 10, 20, 30, & 40.. I was trying to get the look of wood grain without having to hand draw in the lines. The frame is currently hidden for those who aren’t into the aesthetics and just want and good old map. 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.
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Mike Schley Overland Hex (January 2018)
For the September Annual issue Sue Daniel a series of connecting cliff symbols to include in city maps.
We have updated the ProFantasy Forum with a new version of the Vanilla forum software, which adds a lot of useful functionality. Check it out if you want to join our community.
Resources
We’ve switched to YouTube for hosting our Live Mapping video tutorials, and of course they are all available for viewing.
Check out our selection of last month’s community maps here.
Remy Monsen’s article on symbol groups (see below) is also available in video format.
Articles
Christina Trani wraps up the rest of Annual 2019 with her maps for the October, November and December issues.
Remy Monsen looks at symbol groups and how to leverage them for your own use.
Comments Off on September: Cliffs, Symbol Groups and Annual Maps
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.
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.
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Worlds of Wonder 2
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. Continue reading »
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.
Comments Off on Cartographer’s Annual 2020: September
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).
The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available. Create beautiful maps of maritime, canal-heavy cities like Venice or Amsterdam with the Serpentine City style. Named after the Swords of the Serpentine game by Pelgrane Press and modeled from the the map artwork by Jérôme Huguenin for the city of Eversink, the style uses vector graphics, many sheet effects and a custom color palette to match his beautiful work.
