(Download the FCW file)
Hello mappers! Welcome to this month’s All the Annuals, Scorching Sun. This overland set is fantastic. I love the color palette with this set. What’s also great about TJ’s fantastic style is that this annual works really well with another annual that came out at the end of 2016 – don’t worry, we’ll get there – giving you so many more symbol options and fills to play with.
For this map, I actually used a font I downloaded from one of the free sites online, as you can see by the middle eastern flair font in the png. Your map, should you download this one, will come with the standard font from the annual, but I wanted to show you in this particular font so you can see it’s super easy to add more font choices to your maps, if you choose.

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.

Last month, I talked about the basics of macros, how a macro is basically just a series of commands executed in sequence. And for the majority of macros used in CC3+, it actually stops there. For example, one of the more common uses of macros are as part of drawing tools, where you draw a polygon with the tool, and then a macro built into the tool takes over and does it’s magic to the polygon, such as filling with with symbols (like trees for a forest), or automatically align the fill or other similar operations.

But of course, that the majority of macros used are rather simple doesn’t mean we doesn’t have more advanced functionality that is highly useful. For this month’s part, we’ll be talking about variables.

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If you are a novice CC3+ user, you may think that macros sounds way to complicated to even touch. But, the fact is that from the moment you start making a map, you have already been exposed to several macros. You might not have noticed, but CC3+ uses macros for quite a lot of things. Every time you start a new map or load an existing one, a macro is run to set up the environment appropriately for that type of map. A lot of the buttons on the toolbars and elements in the menus call macros, and many of the drawing tools have embedded macros that are being run when you draw something with them.

So, why don’t we take a brief look at the basics of macros?

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CA200 Ruins on a CliffIn the August issue of the Annual 2023 we return back to some (visually) simpler maps in black and white. Draw ruins, floorplans and dungeons with faux-inked lines and easy to use black and white symbols.

Related to and compatible with 2020’s Inked Dungeons, the Inked Ruins style allows you to build surface ruins and outdoor areas that can be easily printed and comfortably read even at relatively small output sizes.

The August issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.

Naled-Zhar by Eric McNeal
News

  • The July issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is available, with an overland style by a new Annual contributor – Monkey Frog Studios.

Resources

  • The latest free monthly symbols by Mike Schley give you symbols for military encampments like tents and fortified trenches.
  • Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
  • Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for June, possibly providing some inspiration for your own mapping projects.

Articles

  • Remy dives into part 2 of his tutorial on how to draw tracks and rail lines, letting us swerve around in curves on our tracks.
  • Christina Trani continues with her “All the Annuals” series going through all the Annual issues over the years. This time it is the “Temple of Bones” isometric dungeon style she is looking at.

Reminders

  • CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
  • Fractal Terrains 3+ has been released and is available from among your FT3 downloads on your registration page.
  • Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.

Last month, Railroad TracksI talked about how to draw railroad tracks for your maps. In that article, we looked at how to draw the basic tracks and sleepers, and adding appropriate effects to make them look nice. But we can’t stop with just straight track segments, can we? Of course not, we’ll be needing to make ourselves some nice curves. Fortunately, CC3+ has the tools needed to be able to take our railroads to the next step.

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Kinjiro by Calibre
News

  • The June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is available, with asymbol pack compatible with Dungeons of Schley, including trains, tracks, vehicles and lots of strange machinery.
  • GenCon 2023 is drawing near and Profantasy will be there, at booth #515 of the exhibition all.

Resources

Articles

  • Remy teaches us how to draw tracks and rail lines in his latest article. How convenient seeing the June Annual’s focus on trains!
  • Christina Trani continues with her “All the Annuals” series going through all the Annual issues over the years. In this iteration she creates a map using the Empire of the Sun style.

Reminders

Railroad TracksTrains and Rails are useful for all kinds of mapping. From the humble carts on a track used in mines, to daring train heists in the Wild West, through subways and all the way to modern high-speed bullet trains. They can be used for battle maps to play out interesting encounters, as scenery in your mine maps and part of the infrastructure of your city.

In this first part I’ll be having a look at creating the basic tracks.

(I’ll also be looking at this in tomorrow’s live stream, so join the stream or watch the archived video later if you wish a video version of this)

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In CC3+, we use polygons a lot. They are used when you draw a landmass, they are used when you draw the floor of your building, they are used for your terrain fills and so on. Basically, when you work with a CC3+ map, there are 3 main types of entities you deal with, your symbols (places, objects, markers and more), your polygons (for filled areas like landmass and floors) and your lines (for walls, roads and similar).

Now, for this article I am going to have a little look at how we can do things like split our polygon up into two pieces, for example if we only need part of it for another map. And, I am also going to look at how to properly join up two polygons into one, as due to various factors, just drawing two partially overlapping polys and leaving them at that doesn’t always work.

In truth, lines and polys are mostly the same thing, the main difference is that polygons are closed (i.e. the programs draws a closing segment between the end node and back to the start node) while lines do not have this closing segment. When we are splitting and joining out polygons, we’ll actually be temporarily turning them into lines, so it is worth noting already now that having the fill apparently disappear while doing this is completely normal, and it will return when we are done. This also means that the procedures described here are the same for both lines and polygons, except you don’t close up lines at the end.

If you’re after extracting part of your map to make a detailed local map from a regional map, you may also wish to check out my Large to Small – Going from Regional Maps to Local Maps article.

Now, I use landmasses for my example here, but this works exactly the same way with floors in dungeon maps and all polys in all other map types as well.

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I’ve always loved some interactivity in my maps, especially the dungeon ones. It is fun adding secret doors that can be opened, rotating sections, and other surprises. If you watched my latest live stream, you saw me build a hedge maze with a rotating central section, where the inner region was only reachable if you rotated the it first using a clickable hotspot in the map. (You’ll find both a link to the recording as well as my map in this forum conversation.)

I thought I could show you a couple of more examples of nice easy macros you can assign to your hotspots to accomplish interesting results, and hopefully come away with an expanded understanding of macros at the same time.

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