ralf | October 31, 2019 | community, Maps of the Month, user maps
With the weather turning cold here in Europe and the trees shedding their leaves, it’s a great time to spent the darkening evening drawing a beautiful map or two. The ProFantasy community certainly has obviously done so and produced more awesome maps. Here are a few for your your delight!
Shera McDaniel (Ladiestorm) continues to transcend our organization and typing of map styles and produces wonderful city maps using the Mike Schley Overland style. Here is the city of Narvania.
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ralf | October 31, 2019 | Grimur Fjeldsted, Mapventures, overland maps
A Purple Box
The second-hand store around the corner of my 1995 midtown apartment always had interesting merchandise. Most evenings on my way home, I would jump off my bike at the store and look at the various new items they had in stock for the day. Since they were second-hand I often asked myself questions around previous owners and I found that the items with all their diversity often told small stories.
One night a small purple box still wrapped in plastic had appeared in the store window. Campaign Cartographer for PC, 3.5”. A few days later the floppy disk fired up my MS-DOS. A: DIR, CC.EXE and a land called Jaw Peninsular appeared in 16 beautiful colors on the screen of my Compaq 486.
I have always loved maps and the imagination they spark at the first glimpse. I longer to wander and explore these foreign lands, and a great fantasy map is for me a medium to get closer to that experience.
Now I was able to create the maps myself, learning that the experience of creating fantasy maps is one of asking questions as well. Who lives there? Why do they live there? What do they trade in? Who threatens them? Why?
Answering these questions makes the world come alive, and fantasy maps reveal their stories while you draw them.
World Building
Earlsdale started like that 25 years ago. A small feudal region in the center of the world. Three Duchies fighting for power and a cursed kingship that none of them dares to claim. While fighting each others, the surrounding empires to the east, west and south would expand. Soon their agents infiltrated Earlsdale only to be followed by their armies. War had come to Earlsdale.
Earlsdale was in 16 colors! It’s a shame, I lost the floppy disk and internet was not really a thing with lots of images back then. I would have liked to see it today. Nevermind.
The map changed not only because of updates and new symbols set for Campaign Cartographer, but because the players of my gaming group (same group of friends since 25 years) helped to shape the world in our regular sessions ever since. They answered many of the questions. Adventure sites were added. It happened that a city was burned down. Once the players invested their fortune to build a small keep (Liederburg, east of Schlandern). I added the keep in the CC2/Symbol Set 1 version of Earlsdale back in the days.
So Earlsdale is not the final map, it is only the current state. It is a still image of a 25 years world-building project, that keeps asking questions. We answer them as we explore. The Duchies of Earlsdale evolves and still keeps on revealing its story, since the players entered “The Royal Oak Inn” in Siegesbruck (south-eastern part of the map) in 1995.
There were even rumors at the last gaming session, that the “Tower in the Lake” near Ahnendorf, had sunken into the sea. It has been several years since the players were in Ahnendorf. I don’t know the answer yet, but time and adventure (or a new update/style for CC) will tell.
What you will be looking at below is the CC3+ version of the map. I have collected some of the basic steps and techniques I have used in the following tutorial.
Mini Tutorial
Background
I use the default settings of CC3+ with the Mike Schley overland symbols. For the background I prefer a slightly darker style with more variety in texture. An easy way to accomplish this is to add two new sheets with textures. The first texture is used to get a darker and richer green color, as well as to add more texture into the background. The second texture (Texture 2 below) is used for even more texture and by that variety of the overall background. The sheets effects are key for these overlays, and I use the transparency setting with low opacity (15-25%) to get the result I need.
Mountains & Hills
Next up are the mountains. In a regional map like this, I like to add some variety in size of the mountains. I use a scale from 0.5-2.5 on the mountain symbols. When the mountains are placed, I use the default mountain- and hills fills drawing tools, as well as the mountain- and hills background drawing tools to fill areas around and between the mountains. The “hills background” drawing tool works well also to create plains to add even more variety to the background. I then add some hill symbols manually around and on top of hills fills and backgrounds and place them on a new sheet. The key for this technique is moving all these sheets beneath the background texture sheets I created above. That way they blend in perfectly with the color and texture of the background. Add another sheet for hill symbols that will need to be in front of mountains or other symbols and place them above the symbols sheet.
Ocean, Rivers and Wetlands
Oceans and rivers are now placed with 3-5 different thickness levels (0.75 to 3.5), ranging from narrow at the mountains and broad at the sea. I add a dark green color to the “Outer Glow” sheet effect. Remember to add some broader areas in form of lakes and wider river areas. I add the ocean in the south with the same settings as the river, but with a darker texture for sea contours in deeper areas. I add another sheet for marshland and swamps, but this time keep the following sheets above the background layers I created earlier. The texture is another one from Herwin Wielink overland style (from the Annuals and one of my favorites), with transparency effect and inner edge fade to nicely blend in.
Vegetation
For the forest I use another texture than the default as forest background. I create the drawing tool and a new sheet using this texture and add transparency and inner edge fade like for all background elements. I place tree, jungle and swamp symbols on the entire map. Quite a click feast, but its worth it. Remember individual and small clusters of trees everywhere on the map where vegetation is present, like on the foothills of mountains, along rivers and later on in front of settlements.
Civilization
Now my favorite part starts – the structures. I like to vary the structures as well, mixing them a bit up by using combinations of them (castle, hamlet, village – makes a good town). This might not be realistic in scale, but it looks good and creates variety and adds individual character to a settlement. I play around with scale here within the range of 0.75-1.25 and use the mirror function for even more variety.
Around settlements I place farmlands on a new sheet, again adding transparency and inner edge fade effects to blend into background layer, and to avoid sharp edges of the smoothed polygons. Roads are placed between settlements, with a brown outer glow effect. I now place the last structures such as bridges, castles and other sites of interest.
Labels and Finishing Touches
Labels and finishing touches are an important part. I create the labels as symbols in various sizes, with a paper background texture. Square corners for cities, towns and villages, round corners for castles and sites and areas. I do various sizes to reflect the size of cities and to match length of the site names. Important cities have shields. I then add sheet effects, such as shadows and outer/inner glow. In the finishing touches I play around with texture and sheet effects to get a result that matches with the overall mood and colors of the map. I add the title (font: “Ode”, Adobe Fonts). Compass and scale bar is added. I export the map in a large format (7300×5903 pixels in this case). I then add the image to a zoom application, customize it and then upload the files to my webspace.
Final Map
You can see the full map in the zoom application here: Duchies of Earlsdale.
I should probably dedicate the map to the person that sold the purple box at the second hand store back in 1995. Oh, boy! You missed out so many stories.
If you are interested in some of my other maps, check out mapventures.com.
Happy Mapping,
Grimur Fjeldsted
About Grimur
Grimur is half-icelandic, half-german and lives with his wife and three kids in Germany’s northern most city Flensburg. In his daily job he heads up communications and marketing in a global technology company. He began to create maps in 1995 when he was studying, and he has been part of the Campaign Cartographer community ever since. He enjoys experimenting with styles and creates all his maps for the same home-brew setting. Besides being with his family or making an occasional fantasy map, he enjoys good coffee, history, design, boardgames and all things digital.
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Remy Monsen | October 30, 2019 | C++, CC3 Plus, development, XP Development
This is the third article in my series about XP development. To understand this article properly, you should be familiar with the contents of the previous articles.
When writing commands for CC3+, we frequently need to communicate with the user. This is often in the form of requesting some data from the user, such as where to place a node or which color to use, or we want to provide information to the user, such as instructions on the command line or the information the user requested. In this article, I’ll talk about the Text Formatting & Output Service (FormSt) used to prepare data to display to the user, and the data request format (ReqData). We have been touching both of these briefly in the two prior articles, but it is time to discuss these a bit more in depth.
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ralf | October 1, 2019 | Annual, Gary Warburton, overland
The October Annual of 2019 is available now and we are glad to present a new contributor to our series of mapping styles. Gary Warburton – Dungeon Master Gaz on the ProFantasy forum – caught our eye with his wonderful “Legend” series of maps, depicting mythological Greece, and we were thrilled when he agreed to publish a similar one as an Annual issue.
He produced a neat new set of symbols for a Mesoamerican setting, a wonderful example map and here is the drawing style we created from that.
If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to the Annual 2019 here. If you are already subscribed, the October issue is available for download on your registration page now.
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ralf | September 29, 2019 | ft3, Quenten Walker
This continues Quenten’s previous article about converting an FT3 world in CC3+.
CLIMATE
Turn on the climate layer, by pressing the C button on the key at the side of your map. You will see the following picture (I have hidden everything else, except coastline). This map has only 5 biomes, but yours will most certainly have more.
We must now add a sheet for each biome – again, so we can use various effects, bitmap fills and alteration. Here I have added a sheet for each biome: (see above), including one named CLIMATE ABOVE, which is the lowest of the Climate sheets.
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Remy Monsen | September 20, 2019 | cc3plus, update
Update 22 for CC3+ was just released, and in addition to fixing a couple of issues, it also includes some improved commands, as well as a few brand new ones. Let us have a look at these and how you can use them.
Trace
A new command for tracing the outline of images (and other CC3+ entities) and turning them into CC3+ entities have been added. This new command, simply called Trace is an easier to use variant of the Contours command from Update 16, and it also support colors.
There are two new commands here, TRACED and TRACE. The former allows you to select entities for tracing, and then it will pop up a dialog where you can set various parameters, while the latter is the silent version which just executes the trace using the current parameters (either set by using the dialog version, otherwise it uses default ones). The options in the dialog are as follows: Continue reading »
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ralf | September 20, 2019 | Campaign Cartographer, cc3plus, update
A new version of CC3+ is available now, adding full GUI access for more button sizes, as well as better custom palette handling, bitmap tracing, fractalizing and house symbol mirroring. Also a few smaller bugs where fixed.
Version Notes
CC3+ Version 3.91
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– Added PALLOAD and PALSAVE commands to load and save different custom palettes.
– Added GUI option (Screentools button) to allow user to pick any of the 4 available icon resolutions instead of just large/small.
– Added a TRACE and TRACED command to trace around a bitmap in a more general way than the CONTOURSM family of commands.
– Modified Fractalize (FRX) command to affect outlines even if they are separate entities.
– Modified roof shading code to flip angles by 180 degrees when specifying mirrored on bitmaps
– Fixed blur radius computation in effects when using Map Units.
– Fixed lighting direction on mirrored symbols (initial implementation in June was incorrect).
– When the system issues a “no matching drawing tool” message, will now show the tool name that it was looking for.
– Cosmographer 3 deckplan bitmap templates can now add new grids?
– Fixed bug in FastCAD core that was preventing higher-resolution icon sets from loading.
– Fixed crash on exit when writing XML file that was intermittently appearing as project changed.
Download this latest update from your registration page.
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Unfortunately a little problem crept into the previous update to CC3+ and affected the display of sheet effects for some users. Thanks to prompt reports, we were able to fix this problem quickly and just released a new update (23) and full setup for CC3+ version 3.92. As usual you can download them 
