Did you know that CC3+ (including all addons) contains over 1000 commands in total? And that new ones gets added with just about every update?

Today, we’ll have a quick look at two of the somewhat more recent commands; Select nearby symbols and Delete nearby symbols. Both these commands are intended to help you manipulate symbols that are near another entity. This can for example help you clean up symbols that are too near a river, or help you select all the houses along your main street, for example so you can change their varicolor.

Below is an example of a forest with a river running through it. On the left image, the trees are obstructing the river, while on the left one, Delete nearby symbols have been run to automatically delete the trees near the river.

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In CC3+, drawing tools are great timesavers. The basic functionality of a drawing tool is that it works as a preset that contains all the various settings required, such as line style, fill style, line width, color, sheet and layer so that when you draw using a drawing tool you don’t have to go around setting all of these manually like we did in the good old days. Drawing tools also have some built-in nice features like being able to draw two separate entities at once, being able to stay within the map border, and the option to easily edit an existing shape.

However, there is another very important feature that exists for drawing tools, and that is to attach macros to them. A drawing tool can contain an embedded macro which follow the tool and isn’t dependent on your main CC3+ macro file and can contain macros that work in tandem with what you draw using the tool, or even functionality that isn’t connected to drawing at all. Today, we’ll look at how to create these tools and have a brief look at how they can make things easier for us.

Drawing with Macros

If you have been making overland maps, you’ll probably familiar with the forest drawing tools. If you pay attention when you use them, you’ll note that they ask you to draw a smooth shape, and then fills this shape with trees after you are done drawing it. This is a macro drawing tool at work. What happens is that the tool itself is only set up to draw that forest background, but it also contain a macro that gets called when you are done drawing that calls the Fill With Symbols command to fill the area you just drew with trees. Let us make a similar macro that uses the Symbols in Area command instead. I won’t go into detail about Symbols in Area here, since this is about making a macro tool that uses the command, rather than explain the command itself, but if you need a refresher for the command, you can look at this article.

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Dear map-makers, welcome to the December newsletter! We have some exciting news with 2019’s Cartogapher’s Annual being available for (re-)subscription and the first of a new series of Products as pre-release: the Token Treasury – Monsters. We also continue with a couple map-making articles, show off more awesome user maps and provide the latest update for CC3+.

News

• The Annual 2019 is now available for subscription. If you have subscribed to the 2018 Annual you should have received an offer with the current subscriber discount. All others can get next year’s twelve monthly issues at the special early-subscriber rate.
• The Token Treasury – Monsters is available as a pre-release offer.
• The Annual 2018 concludes with the bonus issue “City Domes”.
• Update 20 is now available for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus

Resources

• We show off some more beautiful user creations in the Maps of the Month.
• The October 2018 Annual issue “Overland Video Tutorial” is now freely available to anyone.

Articles

• Jay Johnson continues his City Mapping tutorial, looking at how to construct detailed buildings using the City Designer 3 tools.
• Jens Fuhrberg goes on to build special and unique locations in his Taranis regional map.

The 12th year of the Cartographer’s Annual is coming to a close and as usual we have a bonus issue available for our subscribers, while another issue is made freely available to the public.

The bonus issue contains a set of almost 200 bitmap symbols by Sue Daniel, adding a wide range of high detail domed roof symbols which can be used in City Designer 3 or on their own. It meshes perfectly with the city styles already published in 2018’s Annuals, adding even more variety to your cityscapes.

We didn’t want to restrict October’s video tutorial to Annual subscribers only, so we’ve made that issue freely available to anyone. The download can be accessed from October’s web page, and the video is now public on our YouTube channel.

Cartographer’s Annual 2019

At the same time, subscription to the 2019 Cartographer’s Annual (Vol. 13) is now open. We think we have some great material in store for you, starting with a beautiful overland style in January, isometric city symbols in February and a detailed science fiction location in March. Check out the previews on the 2019 Annual site.

If you are a current subscriber or were subscribed in 2016 or 2017, you should have received an offer to resubscribe at special discount price via email. If you want to start fresh with 2019’s Annual, you can
subscribe at our pre-release price. The first issue will become available at the start of the new year.

Subscribe here for another twelve months of mapping goodness!

We’ve been working hard on the new Token Treasury product line and are happy to make the first set available as a pre-release offer.

We’ve expanded the range of monsters in the first set to 100, and created them both in a round and a square variant, so you can choose you’re preferred token look. Both come with a set of frames depicting the monster’s combat role (melee, ranged, magic-user or captain). These can be freely mixed and matched, creating hundreds of possible combinations.

The CC3+ version of the token set comes with everything neatly organized in sets of symbol catalogs and contains templates on which you can easily combine monsters and frames and then export them to you jpg or png format for use in the virtual tabletop software or your choice. Of course you can also simply plop them into your Dungeon Designer 3 map!

The pre-release version will install only if you own Campaign Cartographer 3+, but the full version (to be released early next year) will offer you the option to install it separately, for direct use in any virtual tabletop software or the graphics package of your choice. There will be no need to re-purchase the full version; you will receive a new setup file. There may be a few other changes and additions in the full version.

The Token Treasury – Monsters is now available at a special pre-release discount of 15%. Just follow this link to order it.

Welcome to the December round up of user maps that caught our eye. As usual this is based as much on random chance as anything else. If you want to see more, join the Facebook community group or sign up in our forum!

Christina Trani (Lorelei) produced a set of wonderful building floorplans based on a single symbol in a city map: The Blue House.

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Part II: Symbols for special places

“Over the day-smitten towers and walls of Shudm (uglier by day, all its black filth and spiritual garbage too openly displayed), the air began to sing and to ripple, and then grow oppressively silent and motionless. And then the air hardened, like cooling lava. And like lava, the air darkened, until it let in the fierce glare of the sun, but nothing else. Nothing – no lesser light, no noise, no breath of wind or vapor, neither dust nor rain – no wisp of anything. Even the vagrant corpse-eater birds could no longer get in, or out. Like a tomb. Above and also beneath. Inside – not simply a dome but an egg of leaden crystal, there was Shudm now, and the afternoon went by, and sunset, which was true dawn to the ghouls, and night, and midnight. And in the first overcast minutes of the new morning, there was not one sensible thing in the city that did not know it had been trapped.”
Tanith Lee, Delirium’s Mistress

And so, the last days of the ghouls of Shudm began – trapped by this spell of Sovaz, the daughter of Ashrarn, Lord of the Night. In Tanith Lee’s novel these ghouls were an amalgam of ghouls and classical vampires, dependent on eating flesh and drinking blood but not harmed by sunlight. As they became trapped, they had only each other left as food and after the last had eaten himself, their fate was sealed. Sovaz had chosen her very special way of revenge for what they did to her before… Maybe it was inspired by this story of Tanith Lee, that in one of the sourcebooks of RdW the players started their adventure, waking up trapped under an invisible force dome in the house of a mighty vampire.

This chapter of my map-making article will be about making symbols for special places of the campaign. For those who read the WIP thread in the forum, this chapter may contain redundancies, but nevertheless for my understanding of fantasy maps it is maybe the most important chapter.
I like it a lot when a map for an RPG campaign contains parts of the narrative of the world. That means that I like to build dedicated symbols, or scenarios on the map which tell stories, giving more information than just the landscape.

In this chapter I show several symbols I’ve made for the map, along with the explanation of how I made the symbol with the background as written in the original RdW sourcebooks.

Let’s start with the symbol for the magic force dome I mentioned above, protecting a powerful vampire who is looking for fresh blood and trapped a group of players in his home:

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We continue Jay Johnson’t city mapping article with part 2. Go here for part 1.

Building Construction Techniques

I think we are at the point where I should talk about some of my building construction methods. Here are some techniques for making complex structures utilizing the HBT.

Splicing

The first building we will construct is what I will call the Building with Enclosed Courtyard. The technique I used for this can be used to construct all kinds of variations and is also what I used to construct the city walls around Melekhir. We will refer to this technique as splicing.

First choose the building style you want in the HBT. Ensure the House shape is set to option nine which is the trapezoid shape and the Roof type to option one which is gable.

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A new version of CC3+ is available now, fixing a few bugs and preparing CC3+ for the next releases.

Version Notes

CC3+ Version 3.89
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– Fixed grids not aligning correctly to snap points
– Fixed drawing tools not displaying preview
– Fixed Common sheet not being selectable in sheet dialog
– Fixed TEXPORT, TFIND, and TREPLACE not showing dialogs

CC3+ Version 3.88
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– Fixed bug with wall-cutting symbols not working properly

For the end of the year we blast off into space and the future with the Deckplan Geomorphs tool pack. Inspired by the work of Robert Pearce on Yet Another Traveller Blog, we’ve created the tools that allow you to create geomorphic deckplan tiles.

Of course we’ve also included a set of examples that you can modify or use straight out of the box to create large starship or space station layouts by simply assembling the tiles into various configurations. It’s as easy as importing a file, rotating it and placing it on the template adjacent to previous tiles. With Cosmographer 3, you can even just continue working on such a constructed deckplan with the normal starship tools.

Keep your eyes open for the upcoming 2018 bonus issue (by Sue Daniel) and the opportunity to resubscribe for the 2019 Cartographer’s Annual in mid-December.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the November issue is now available for download on your registration page.