Last month, I talked about how to bring your DD3 map into various Virtual Table Top (VTT) systems. Now, that is all well and good, but simply exporting a flat image from CC3+ to a VTT do have some limitation. For example, if you make a beautiful forest, the player token would be walking atop your trees, and the players wouldn’t see what is below the trees. In the real world, when you take a walk in the forest, you actually see the forest floor, not the treetops. Same happens when your characters encounters this mysterious house in the forest. Your gorgeous maps shows the scene, and as with any outdoor map, seen from above, the map shows the roof of the house. Then your players announce they are going inside. What now?
There are two ways of handling this. The first is just to have separate maps, one for inside the house, and another for outside. Then you can just load the inside map whenever the players enter the house. But what if someone stays outside and someone goes inside? Well, you could have an identical map still showing the outside, but now revealing the insides of the house instead of the roof. But this approach still means you need to move the player/monster tokens from one map to the next.
The other approach is to have items in your battlemaps that can be hidden to show additional features. This is something we are quite used to doing inside CC3+ by hiding and showing sheets, and the subject of an earlier article. This is a very nice approach, but it is also a bit trickier. The problem here is that when we export a map from CC3+, we end up with a flat image file, we lose things like sheets and layer. There are image formats supporting layers, but CC3+ can’t export to these, nor can the VTT software import them, so we need to do it differently.
We announced on the 23rd March that we would donate 10% of our bundle sales to The Cochrane Collection COVID-19 resources. We are pleased to say we’ve raised £1459 as of April 1st 2020. We’ll continue with this initiative until at least the end of April.
We’d like to offer a big thank you to our customers and to those who have donated directly.
Welcome cartographers, to another collection of beautiful community maps, this time from March 2020. Enjoy!
Daniel Pereda De Pablo created this beautiful city map, based on Castle Crimson of the Dragonlance setting, with the Mike Schley city style of Symbol Set 5. Continue reading »
Recently we have begun to experiment with live video streaming map-making sessions in the Campaign Cartographer 3+ Community on Facebook. In two sessions, Ralf demonstrated creating a dungeon and a small town with the Jon Roberts Dungeon and City styles respectively. You can still watch the archived videos here.
Creating a dungeon with the Jon Roberts Dungeon style
Mapping a town with the Jon Roberts City style
We will be scheduling future videos via ProFantasy’s Facebook page, so you don’t have to be a member of the community group. Please feel free to suggest videos you’d like to see in the comments.
Continuing our tradition of honoring and thanking the most prolific and helpful members of our community, we are awarding – probably to nobody’s surprise but her own – 2019’s title of Master Mapper to …
Master Mapper 2019: Sue Daniel
Sue has been a member of our map-making community for some years now and has been a constant companion to us in the community forum, the Facebook group, as well as in the work for the Cartographer’s Annual and other projects. We specifically want to thank her with this award for:
Creating many amazingly beautiful maps and sharing them with the community.
Always being there to answer questions from the community in the most diligent way.
Taking the tools and resources of Campaign Cartographer 3 to their limits and beyond, stretching their application for everyone else.
For contributing her knowledge and work both on the RGPMaps blog and in the Cartographer’s Annual.
So, thank you Sue and we hope we will see many more of your beautiful works and your helpful advice in the coming years!
The April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2020 is now available. It includes a new dungeon styles based on ink-and-paper cartography by the likes of Dyson Logos and MonkeyBloodDesign, which allows you to produce simple and effective but also beautiful black and white dungeon layouts. The included 6-page mapping guide takes you through the process of drawing a complete dungeon.
If you have already subscribed to the Annual 2020, you can download the April issue from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe here.
Welcome to the March newsletter, dear cartographers! We hope you stay healthy (and at home if possible) in these times of pandemic. You could use the time to create some beautiful maps, for example in preparation for your games when all the current restrictions are lifted again, or for online games if you already do these or want to try them out. See our article by Remy Monsen on the topic below.
News
The March Annual issue is available for download. Check out the Alexandria-class starship and it’s accompanying tutorial on bitmap fills.
We have released Update 25 for CC3+, adding more city and dungeon capabilities to the base CC3+.
In light of the recent world-wide developments, were many people are stuck at home, we’ve decided to extend the content in basic CC3+ to include more material for dungeons and cities, so you can use CC3+ alone to make everything from world maps via cities down to floorplans and dungeon maps. You can download this latest update from your registration page to get the additional tools and drawing styles, and the full CC3+ setup will also include them from now on.
What do you get specifically? We’ve included a selection of Annual issues, some of which were already available for free and other which weren’t so far:
CC3+ Version 3.94
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– added new drawing styles to CC3+ install: Jon Roberts Overland, Jon Roberts Cities, Jon Roberts Dungeon, Namoi VanDoren Floorplans
– added city and dungeon menus to base setup
– added basic city and dungeon tools to base setup
As a result of the outbreak, until further notice, our flagship map-making software CC3+ is half price.
There’s never been a better time to map out the worlds of your imagination. ProFantasy’s software has always been good value, but not affordable for everyone. We’ve decided to include new, free dungeon and city design capabilities with our core software CC3+, and offer it at half-price – just $22.45 for a permanent commercial license. This is everything you need to start making great maps.
And making maps at your PC doesn’t mean you miss out on a sense of connection. Our users have formed great online communities (check the Forum and the Facebook group) which offer support and feedback to each other – get inspired, help others and have fun.
In addition, we’ve also discounted our introductory bundles further, and we’ll donate 10% of all bundle sales to The Cochrane Collection COVID-19 resources.
Virtual tabletops (VTTs) are a great way of playing role-playing games together when you can’t meet physically. They make it easier to play with people from all over the world, and are a nice substitute when it becomes impossible to bring the old gang together in the same location any more.
One of the main attractions for these programs when compared to general-purpose meeting/teleconference software is their focus on displaying maps to the the players, enabling you to fight your miniature battles digitally. And maps are always an important aspect in most role playing games. I myself actually use VTT software to display the battle maps, even if my group always meet physically at my place and roll physical dice, because I can more easily do things like display the map on a projector, and only display what the players see (automatic fog-of-war/lighting/sight ranges).
So, today we will look at how to take those dungeon maps you’ve lovingly crafted in DD3 and make them available for use in the a VTT environment. Now, there are lots of different VTT software to choose from out there, and I can’t really cover them all, but I’ve tried to cover some of the more popular ones, such as MapTool, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20 and D20Pro. And many things, especially all the various concerns when exporting the map from DD3 will be the same for most software solutions, so this article should help you out no matter the system.
Last month, I talked about how to bring your DD3 map into various Virtual Table Top (VTT) systems. Now, that is all well and good, but simply exporting a flat image from CC3+ to a VTT do have some limitation. For example, if you make a beautiful forest, the player token would be walking atop your trees, and the players wouldn’t see what is below the trees. In the real world, when you take a walk in the forest, you actually see the forest floor, not the treetops. Same happens when your characters encounters this mysterious house in the forest. Your gorgeous maps shows the scene, and as with any outdoor map, seen from above, the map shows the roof of the house. Then your players announce they are going inside. What now?
In light of the recent world-wide developments, were many people are stuck at home, we’ve decided to extend the content in basic CC3+ to include more material for dungeons and cities, so you can use CC3+ alone to make everything from world maps via cities down to floorplans and dungeon maps. You can download this latest update 
