Welcome to the February newsletter! We have a first article in a new series on city building for you, a look at the cartographer’s desk, the latest update for CC3+, a way to create a spinning globe image and not one, but two Annual issues!
News
Update 24, bringing CC3+ up to version 3.93, has been released.
We needed a little update in CC3+ for the February Annual issue and took the opportunity to include some recent fixes when we released Update 24 for CC3+. This allows more commands to be used in macros (and in consequence in drawing tools.
Here are the release notes for version 3.93:
CC3+ Version 3.93
=================
– Fixed the SETFS* family of commands to work with multiple element selections, which allows easier use in macros and draw tools.
– Changed ESCM and FRXM commands to work with multiple element selections, which allows easier use in macros and draw tools.
– Added timeout options for some status bar messages (status message displays for a fixed length of time, then disappears).
– Fixed align to first edge for shaded polygons. Combined with the SETFS fixes, allows for draw tools that have a bitmap fill aligned with the first edge of a polygon.?
– Fixed display bug with LISTDWG (would leave a vertical bar on all formatted strings after use)
– Fixed Cosmographer Bitmap Deckplan (metric) template
We’re well into 2020 now and and the community has been busy decorating the new year with lots of beautiful maps. Here are some that caught our eye!
The January Annual issue (Watabou Cities) has been especially popular, as it allows the fast creation of beautiful city maps. Enderrin over at the community forum shared several of his creations and the Dragonsrock map below is just one of them, where he added his own kind of cliffs to the style. Continue reading »
What it’s in the works here are Profantasy HQ at the moment do you ask? Well, apart from behind the scenes work on Campaign Cartographer itself, the ongoing Annual development and the daily routine, we are getting close to finishing the next installment of the Token Treasury series.
The artist, Rich Longmore, has delivered as wonderful new collection of nasties (and not so nasties) for your games and maps, and I am now converting them to CC3+ format, creating varicolor versions and building catalogs. Look for the release later this month! You can check out the first installment of the Token Treasury here.
Recently, I completed a large-scale city map over the course of about three months. It is only my second map with City Designer 3, so I am by no means an expert, but between the two maps I’ve recently spent a lot of hours with the tools, learning some of the ins and outs of the how as well as the why.
Both of the cities (well, one city and one town) I’ve built have been quite large for their size. I’d specifically like to consider these kinds of settlements, as opposed to a quaint fishing village or a small farming hamlet. Because these are smaller settlements, by definition less time will go into them. Also, when I was doing my research on how to start mapping a large city or town, I found very few resources on how to tackle such an ambitious project. Continue reading »
One of my favorite player visualizations is a spinning globe. Nothing makes a world come so alive when the players are able to properly visualize the entire planet.
This is also why I prefer to always start my new worlds in Fractal Terrains, as it lets me get a proper grip on the planet before I move on. Starting directly with a flat map in CC3+ gives so many possibilities for missteps when mapping a sphere, and I also just love to click through the auto-generated FT3 worlds until I find the perfect one. When I picked the world for my current campaign world of Virana, I probably clicked through hundreds of generated worlds and tweaked the settings a dozen times before I found the right one.
Now, this article isn’t about creating your FT3 world however, but rather on how to best make one of those nice spinning globes you can use to show it off.
The February issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available and brings you an amazing local area style by Sue Daniel, who painstakingly recreated the style of early modern cartographer Joseph de Ferraris.
Ferraris was one of the first map-makers to map whole regions in exquisite detail and high accuracy and his maps of today’s Belgium are works of art. With Sue’s Ferraris style you can recreate this wonderful type of map in CC3+ for real-world or imaginary locations. The detailed 12-page mapping guide that is included with the Annual issue takes you through all the steps of assembling the dozens of fill styles and hundreds of symbols into your own little piece of cartographic art.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the February issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
As is our tradition for the Cartographer’s Annual we produce an extra issue each year and make one of them available for anyone. For 2019, the bonus issue IS the free one.
The Bonus issue “Symbol Drawing Tools” takes advantage of some recent updates to add drawing tools for mountain ranges, scattered woodlands and other terrain types to the overland styles of CC3+. The updates allow the creation of drawing tools that place randomized symbols along paths and fill polygons with a random scattering of symbols. The included mapping guide teaches you how to set up these kind of tools yourself. The example map as shown on the right was drawn with drawing tools only. No individual symbols were placed.
The bonus issue is available as a free issue and can be used by anyone with Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Download it from the Cartographer’s Annual Vol 13 web site.
A Happy New year and welcome to 2020! We hope you had great holidays and are as eager as we to start into a new year of mapping goodness. But let’s take a quick look back at December and what happened at the end of last year. We start out with the new Cartographer’s Annual, set a challenge to bring the Community Atlas to 400 maps, learn about the color palette and multi-sheet symbols and present beautiful user maps from the forum and Facebook communities.
So your New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was to finally start (or re-start) using Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus, but you don’t know where to begin? Let us help you out with a selection of great tutorials and starting points.
Video Tutorials
If you are a visual learner and want to follow video tutorials, here are some we would recommend to start out with.
Josh Plunkett does a great job at introducing you to the basics of CC3+ as a newcomer in his first video.
Follow that up with his tutorial on overland mapping and you’ve got the basics down for any overland map straight out of CC3+:
For a longer look at creating a whole overland map, check our own video with Ralf describing the process of creating a map.
PDF Guides
If you prefer reading your tutorials and follow a pdf guide, there are some great choices too.
Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus comes with a pdf Manual, that is probably still one of the best ways to learn the software. Check it out here, and follow the instructions starting on page 24 to draw your first map.
A slightly less detailed, but still very useful step by step guide to creating a map, comes with the mapping guide for the Herwin Wielink style, that comes with CC3+, available in the Documentation folder or from this link.
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Welcome to the February newsletter! We have a first article in a new series on city building for you, a look at the cartographer’s desk, the latest update for CC3+, a way to create a spinning globe image and not one, but two Annual issues!
We needed a little update in CC3+ for the February Annual issue and took the opportunity to include some recent fixes when we released Update 24 for CC3+. This allows more commands to be used in macros (and in consequence in drawing tools. 
What it’s in the works here are Profantasy HQ at the moment do you ask? Well, apart from behind the scenes work on Campaign Cartographer itself, the ongoing Annual development and the daily routine, we are getting close to finishing the next installment of the Token Treasury series. 
