New Zealand is one of the most avid sailing nations of the world and while traveling along it beautiful coasts I often came across marine charts detailing the waterways. I always loved these maps and decided at some point I’d have to create a CC3+ style that recreated their detail and beauty. This is the month where it happened!

The vector style “Marine Maps” let’s you recreate navigational marine charts within CC3+. With three dozen news symbols and drawing tools and a 5-page mapping guide it’s snap to produce a detailed picture of your real or fictional coastline.

The October issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

In the September Annual issue Remy Monsen, editor and author of the CC3+ user manual and the Tome of Ultimate mapping, takes you on a 22-page tutorial on doing extra-large exports from CC3+. Do you need that giant-sized poster for your gaming room? Or want a image for your website where visitors can zoom in to examine the specks of dirt on the houses’ doorsteps? Remy tells you how to do that, utilizing automated scripts to do section exports and image stitching. Take a look at his Snowport city map to see how far you can zoom in there.

The September issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

August has come and with it our biggest convention event of the year: GenCon 2017! Most of us will be in Indianapolis this week, so please bear with us if tech support might be a bit slower to respond than usual.

If you happen to be at GenCon yourself, we’ll be delighted to see you at booth 1317, which we are as usual sharing with Pelgrane Press. We’ll be happy to demo CC3+ and add-ons, answer any questions you might have. We’ll also have some great conventions offers at the show!

The August issue presents another overland style for CC3+. “Parchments Maps” is a re-work and expansion of 2015’s “Classic Fantasy” style, inspired by Gary Warburton’s map work with that style for his world of Aethir.

You can see Gary’s Kingdom of Icara map over on the ProFantasy forum. In addition to being a complete style on its own, the Parchment Maps style can also be used together with Classic Fantasy for a greatly expanded range of symbols.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

Annuals for CC3+

They have been out for a while now, but let us restate that all Cartographer’s Annuals are now available for CC3+. We’ve updated them to use all the new shiny tools and effects you’ve become accustomed too, all the way back ti the very first Mercator Historical style.

Thanks to the hard work of Jeff Salus, if you have previously purchased one of them, you can now freely the CC3+ setups from your registration page. Be sure you use the “Setup for CC3+” to install them properly with the current version of Campaign Cartographer.

If you don’t own them yet, purchasing them from the web store will give you both the CC3 and CC3+ versions. Highlights of the first four Annuals include the John Speed City style, the overland style recreating the look of Pete Fenlon’s Middle-earth maps, Pär Lindström’s very first style “Fantasy Worlds“, and Joachim de Ravenbel’s amazing “Castle Walls” toolset.

Bets of all, you can download a set of free Annual samples for CC3+ and try them out. 9 issues, one from each year until 2015 are available in the Annual Sampler.

Next up in our series of updates for CC3+ will be Dioramas. Look for it next month!

CC3+ Update 12

To support the current and upcoming updates for CC3+ we have also released a new update for CC3+: Update 12 (version 3.77). Here is the change log from the Readme file for Update 12:

CC3+ Version 3.77
=================
– improved bitmap export, allowing much higher image sizes
– updated Escarpment command (ESC)
– updates for Dioramas tools
– improved color display in Browse info files
– improved display with higher Windows dpi settings
– fixed Fractalize (FRX) command
– fixed # vs @ file path in various templates and sample maps.
– various internal fixes and changes

Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus has been getting a lot of love on YouTube lately, by an old and a new tutorial channel.

Joe Sweeney has started a whole new series of videos, redoing his classic mapping tutorials with CC3+ as the “Master Mapping Class“.

And another CC3+ user, Tony Crawford, has started his own set of introductory videos on CC3+ and its add-ons on the “Crawford Cartography” channel.

For a while now Remy has been quietly running a very interesting column over on the Profantasy forum: his “Command of the Week” series. Once a week he takes a look at a CC3+ command, explaining its use and highlighting its special utility. In his own words:

“CC3+ contains a huge amount of various commands and features. In this series, I plan to highlight some of these. There won’t be any special progression to this series, and the command will be selected from the entire range, from the simple basic commands, to more advanced features intended for the more advanced users. Feel free to use this topic to discuss the command presented. If you have a command you wish to have showcased, feel free to request it, and it may get presented.
This series is called the command of the week, but it could also explain a feature or effect. The explanations will tend to explain the technical parts of the command, and is intended to highlight the basics (and complexities) of the command, but won’t be a detailed tutorial on how to use it. It is up to you to use it creatively in your maps.”

Often I find myself nodding as Remy explains a command I use all the time, at other times I am surprised as he digs up a command I had almost forgotten about. Sometimes they are useful for beginners, at other times you’d need to be a little more advanced user to get the most use out of it. But Remy’s comments are always very interesting and useful, and by now he has accumulated 30 commands of the week.

So if you are interested in finding out more about CC3+’s many useful command and tools, head over to the latest command of the week “Sort Symbols in Map“, which also contains an index of all commands covered so far.

This month we go back to the very first drawing style every created for the Cartographer’s Annual: The Mercator Historical overland style, originally published in January 2007. Yikes! Has it really been that long?

Why are we doing that? Since the 2017 Annual has recently been updated, the Mercator style is already available for CC3+ after all? Well, it gives us the opportunity to do two major things: First, we can significantly expand the range of symbols available for the style. Second, we can update the documentation (i.e. the mapping guide) to take more of the CC3+ features into account. And we make this beautiful style available for everyone who doesn’t own the Annual Volume 1 yet.

For those who don’t know the style yet, it is based on the works of 16th and 17th century cartographers, and captures the flair of early exploration and the wonders of Terra Incognita – the Unknown Land.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

The June Annual is not the only new download available now from your registration page – you can also download the Random City command by Lee Saunders for CC3+ from the same place. Coincidence? Hardly!

For the Annual we’ve created a lengthy tutorial on how to use the Random City command and what to do to customize and enhance the maps the command creates for you. That way you can quickly create a base map and continue to map the city after that as far as you like.

The Random City command was originally created for use with City Designer 3 and is listed separately under CD3’s downloads. But it is also included in the June Annual download, and if you do not own CD3, you can use it with the basic city style in CC3+.

In addition to the Random City command itself, the June Annual contains a 9-page tutorial and 2 example maps created with the command, one done with City Designer 3, the other with CC3+ alone.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

While the May Annual issue was already available for download yesterday, our announcement is a day late, die to the May holiday. I hope you had a great day off and don’t mind.

We are thrilled to have a new contributor to the Annual: Jon C Munson II from our community forum. He created a set of intricate and beautiful mining equipment symbols, and after expanding them with some cave features and matching textures they made a great set to publish in the Annual. Thanks Jon (who by the way is available for commission work if you need more symbols in his style)!

The symbol pack “Munson’s Mines” contains more than 70 symbols and 20 textures for creating mine layouts. They are are usable on their own in the included Munson’s Mines drawing style, as well as in combination with the Dungeons of Schley style of Symbol Set 4.

The issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.