The German role-playing, games and fantasy online magazine Teilzeithelden (“Part-time heroes”) has reviewed Campaign Cartographer 3+.
Welcome back to this article series on mapping as worldbuilding for large cities and towns. In the last article in this series, we covered developing the geographical setting for your city, identifying the main purpose or economy of the city, dividing it into districts, deciding between functional and residential districts, and we even talked a little bit about transportation. Recall that by way of example, I’ve been mostly using the city of New Cassia which I recently mapped as a means of illustration of the ideas here.
In this article, I’d like to cover some more about ways to go about laying out the canvas for your city by exploring textures, terrains and landmarks. We’ll apply this to district building next, and in a later article we’ll go into some more of the technical pieces on how to actually construct each district in CC3+ but for now we’ll stick with planning as it relates to storytelling and worldbuilding.
The most important piece to start with: in general, work on your city one district at a time. Doing so provides cohesiveness in what you’re working on, and also gives you a concrete deliverable that you can complete and then take a break. I like to do a nice quality export of each district I finish as a milestone marker to record my progress over time, as well as share with the CC3 community for any feedback.
We last left New Cassia with some districts and main roads.
Road Types, Sizes and Materials
In the previous article, we ended with defining the major thoroughfares of our city. Let’s cover that in a bit more detail. Not all roads in a city are the same size in most cities you could probably think of, so thoroughfares are the largest of these roads. Depending on the scale of your city, these may be 10′ or 20′ wide (using Imperial measurements, but applicable with the equivalent metric sizes as well). New Cassia is a large city, so its main thoroughfares will be 20′ wide; this will visually stand out as well as define the routes the city’s inhabitants will take for most navigation.
Stepping stones in a Pompeii street
Exotic lava roads in WotC’s City of Brass
Keeping a Microdecision Log for Inspiration
Think about the implications of each microdecision. If your main roads are sludge, that suggests a sewer-dwelling city, or perhaps the Underdark. Do people use boats or rafts to traverse them, or do they walk on foot? Each of these questions can lead to interesting story developments, like defining the daily experience of a resident (or visitor, which may differ) or leading to questions about why it is that way, or how commonplace non-walking modes of transportation are.
Each time you make one of these microdecisions, you can write down a question or two about it. For each mapping session, you’ll build up a short or medium list of questions. You can then ponder these in between mapping sessions. You don’t need to answer all or even most of them, but each answer will flesh out your world. You can come back to sticky questions that keep coming up, or discard them and move on.
So hopefully now we’ve at least decided on our main roads, and maybe even begun to ruminate on other road styles throughout the city. Great job! Now we can turn our attention to individual sections of the city.
Constructing our First Landmark
As a warm up exercise to district building, let’s do our first exercise in landmark construction. I recommend thinking about what the most defining building is going to be in your whole city. You figure out what “defining” means to you – it could be culturally, religiously, politically or economically. In some cases this might be a seat of government – a keep, a castle, a mayoral palace, a parliamentary house or any other such building. Sometimes a city may be oriented around this place; other times it might be at the city edge, and still others may have accidentally evolved the location of this building. These are all okay, but are microdecisions worth writing down and maybe asking yourself questions about.
Sapphire Citadel, home of the Mages’ Academy, is one of the most notable landmarks in New Cassia.
Now you’ve built or placed one building. Think about what supporting buildings may surround it, and place those. A keep may have additional administrative offices around it. A military training facility may have barracks nearby. A mages’ academy may have a library nearby. Or, maybe you’ll decide this building is solitary: a grand wizard’s tower at the peak of a tall hill, with nothing else daring to surround it!
The Sapphire Citadel, with some supporting academic buildings and the Great Library of Ytron. Notice how the mix of grassy terrain gives more depth to the district. Also note the dirt path mixed with stone roads.
Think about what terrain you expect to surround the main building. A castle may be built atop paved stone; a monument to a town’s founder may be in the heart of a central park, surrounded by grass and dirt roads; a demon’s spire may be surrounded by a lava most. Now place that.
As you’re placing the terrain and supporting buildings, ask yourself a question or two (not too many, we don’t want to rathole on this) about why they are there or what their nature is. If something (or even better, someone) interesting pops up, write that down somewhere.
Now, one finishing touch: label it! Just plop some text down on or near it with either a name (if you’ve got one; if not, you can punt on that till later) or a short description to remind you of what it is and why it’s there. Note: you do not have to do this on your main TEXT sheet; you can create another one such as TEXT ANNOTATIONS that you can use just for your own notes and labels about notable buildings. This sheet can be hidden during your final export if you don’t want to show them (we’ll talk about labeling towards the end of the series). But recalling the purpose and name of each place can help us build up stories in our city.
Congratulations! You’ve just constructed your first (and most important) landmark! We’ll be going through this process a bunch, but hopefully you’ve learned a few things from doing this:
- It’s okay to experiment, sometimes extensively. We’ll develop ways to keep this from ballooning too much all over the city.
- The process of building a landmark does not have to be scary, and can be as simple as a few local decisions.
- A landmark can help define the area around itself, such as the terrain and the nearby roads. We’ll need this as we build up our districts.
- Noting down random thoughts about why a building is where it is can lead to interesting story hooks.
- Textures, terrains and materials can define a lot of character, history and culture about an area.
Next time, I hope to cover planning each district, and discuss how to make each district unique stylistically and feature-wise (including landmarks!).
Ari Gilder is a software engineer, and has been interested in maps for a long time. He spent seven years working on Google Maps, working on features like local business search, Google Maps and Navigation on mobile, and studying the way users understand maps. He even proposed to his wife using maps. He often spends hours staring at maps in fantasy novels, and in 2013 starting putting together some of his own dungeon and battle maps for a D&D campaign. After a hiatus of several years, he recently dived back into cartography with CC3+, tackling more overland and city maps in preparation for a new D&D campaign. He is a father of two, and has recently introduced his older daughter to cartography, both hand-drawn and with CC3+ where she insists that black and purple varicolor trees must surround everything.
The March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available. The map pack “Alexandria-class Starship” contains a fully realized space ship, including an exterior view, multiple decks and a description. In addition the Annual issue comes with 186 science fiction/modern bitmap fills and a tutorial on how to import and use these in any map or style of your choice.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the March issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
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.
- The February Annual issue – Ferraris Style by Sue Daniel – is available.
- The bonus issue for the Annual 2019 is available and can be downloaded for free by anyone.
Resources
- Create a spinning globe of your world with these instructions by Remy Monsen.
- Check out the community Maps of the Month of January.
Articles
- Ari Gilder starts a new series on designing and building cities with City Designer 3.
- Ralf takes a look at what’s currently on his Cartographer’s Desk.
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.
Bringing Your City to Life – Part 1
By Ari Gilder
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.
