Welcome to the July newsletter, dear cartographers! While we are now preparing our yearly pilgrimage Gen Con – the Best Four Days in Gaming, we also have a lot of news for you. Dioramas 3 has now been released, and with the WW2 Interactive Altas we have updated the last of our product line to work with CC3+. Finally, the July Annual with its Dioramas 3 example and tutorial has been released. Our authors are no less busy: Remy Monsen explains how to dynamically show and hide features in a CC3+ drawing, while Pär Lindström discusses his experience of creating Annual issues and Sue Daniel digs into (or should we say “climbs unto”) roof architecture with her tutorial on creating realistically shaded onion domes.

News

• Dioramas 3 has been released. You can download several example sheets and try you hand at paper modeling if you want to give it a try!
• World War 2 Interactive Atlas is now compatible with CC3+.
• The July Annual issue is available.
• Find ProFantasy Software at GenCon at booth #1317.

Resources

• Remy explains how to show and hide map features in CC3+.
• We represent July’s Maps of the Month, a selection of interesting or beautiful (or both) maps from the user community.

Articles

• Sue Daniel teaches us how to construct a roof that looks like an onion dome from above in City Designer 3.
• Pär Lindström shares his thoughts on creating Annual issues for ProFantasy Software.

I’ve made quite some styles for the annuals over the years. I actually don’t remember exactly how many but I think it is around 15 styles so far. Whenever I make my maps I always wonder if the map I make can be made into a style for CD3. Most of my styles have been made this way. Two examples are the maps I made for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG campaigns Mythos Expedition (September ’14) and Cthulhu city (December ’17). Both those mapping styles where later turned into styles for the monthly annuals. Most of the time I have to flesh out the styles with more symbols then the ones I’ve used in my maps, so that the style will work on its own.

Other times I’ve made some styles when I’ve felt that I’m missing something in Campaign cartographer 3 or any of its add-ons. One example is my latest style, City ruins for City Designer 3. One of the things I really like is to just make different versions of villages and cities. It’s actually something I can sit and play with just for fun, dreaming up different places and try to make them as good looking as possible. But sometimes I feel that the styles in the program miss some bits and pieces, for example I had an idea of a map that I originally got from an old map of Firenze in Italy where people lived among the ruins from the Roman times. After the fall of the Western part of the Roman Empire the population in many towns shrank and a lot of the old buildings started to fall apart or where used as quarries. But in the middle of those fallen cities life continued and people built new houses among the ruins. This was the kind of city I wanted to draw. But I needed more ruins.

So I started making my own ruins to be able to make the map I wanted. After a while I thought that this might be something others miss too so I decided to ask Profantasy if they might be interested in making a style out of the symbols, which they were.

So how do I make the actual style? Well first of all I have to decide on what kind of symbols I need to draw. This is usually a process that continues during the whole time I’m making the style, since I seldom come up with all ideas at once. Another way of coming up with ideas for a style is actually to ask you, the users of the program, which is possible now since I found the Campaign Cartographer 3+ Facebook User Group on Facebook. This is the perfect place to find out if there is anything the community would like to see in the style.

When I have come up with enough ideas for symbols I start to sketch them out in Photoshop. Usually I have a square grid as a bottom layer which makes it easier to make straight lines and to get the right scale on all the different symbols. After having finished the sketches it is time to ink the symbols. This I will do on a separate layer. Usually all steps will be made on different layers, which will make it much easier to change things later if necessary. After inking the symbols I add a layer for colours, sometimes I also add a layer for shadows, if needed.

When I have all my different layers done, the symbols are finished and I cut them up in different files, one per symbol, and send them over to Ralf who will do the magic of turning them into a style for all of you to use.

I hope you will like all the ruins, I sure will, and now I just have to make that map of the ruined city.

Welcome to another detailed tutorial by Sue Daniel, looking at how you can create the shading for complex shapes – in this cased domed roofs. As the tutorial is fairly detailed we are providing it in pdf format for ease of access and printing.

About the author: Sue Daniel is active as a cartographer and artist both on the ProFantasy community forum and the Cartographer’s Guild. There, she has won 1 Lite Challenge and 3 Main Challenges, and just recently one of the annual Atlas Awards for most creative map in 2017. She has produced many beautiful art assets for CC3+ (such as the “Sue’s Parchments” Annual issue) and mapping in general that are free to use for anyone.

Here is this month’s collection of maps that have caught our eyes. They are taken from the CC3+ Facebook community and the ProFantasy forum, and as usual are just a quasi-random selection from the multitude of maps that have been posted. Enjoy!

Camp Cedarcrest by Jason Place is a wonderful example of mapping a real-world place in Campaign Cartographer and thereby giving it that little fantastical spin.

Another camp, but this time a fully fictitious one, the Forest Camp map by Jonathan Garrison serves as a beautiful location or battle map for that night attack on the heroes’ resting spot.

Linda Böckstiegel created this awesome map of an everburning ruin. I don’t even know what resources she used, but the Dungeon Walls Annual issue must have been one!

Jensen’s campaign map “Die Kronlande” is a blast from the past for me, since it is based on a very old German rpg.

ScottA has produced another beautiful map with his Huntsman’s Green village map. Great use of City Designer 3!

GenCon 2018 – the Best 4 Days in Gaming – is coming up next week, and of course ProFantasy will be at the show.

Stop by at booth #1317 (we are sharing the booth with Pelgrane Press) to check out the new Dioramas 3, get a glimpse of what we are working on, or just chat with Simon, Ralf or Doug. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

When you make a map, you may desire to have different kinds of views for it. For example, if you make a floorplan, you may wish to be able to see the roof of the house too, or if you make a dungeon map, you don’t want to show your players the version that also includes all the traps.

For this article, we’ll see how we can easily make features in our maps togglable. As an example, I will take a small building from CD3 and make a floorplan from it, and then add a togglable roof and trap.

I start by picking the building symbol I want to use as a base. After that, I start a new dungeon map, and simply use the dungeon room/wall/floor tools to draw the floorplan on top of the building I just inserted to make it match the building shape (I could also have used the automatic floorplan generator from CD3 to make this based on the outline).

Once I am happy with the floorplan, I simply make a new sheet to hold the building symbol, naming it ROOF. Then I move the building symbol to this new sheet, and finally hide the sheet since I don’t want to see the roof as I am working on the floorplan.

Next, I draw the floorplan. For my trap, I place a pit trap just behind the door, and then cover it up with a carpet.

Continue reading »

The World War 2 Interactive Atlas has always been the odd one out in our range. It mostly appeals to WW2 aficionados and history buffs, since it is a huge collection of historical maps on the largest conflict of the 20th century. Its maps are all linked together and referenced to a timeline of events. In that capacity as a reference work, it installs as a stand-alone product.

But the Atlas also contains tools, templates and symbols to use in Campaign Cartographer, to create similar maps or edit the existing WW2IA maps. This functionality has previously not been usable in CC3+, but a compatibility update makes it available now. If you own WW2IA, you can download it from your registration page.

With WW2IA the last of the add-ons has now been updated to work with CC3+.

Here it is: the full release of Dioramas 3. Pimp your game and create your own paper models with hundreds of new bitmaps and symbols to choose from.

Design your model in real-world scale and then print at whatever modeling scale you want to build. Pick a pre-defined model from our large range of samples and adjust it to your requirements, or build something new completely from scratch.

Dioramas 3 includes instructions for printing and assembling your paper model so you don’t need any prior experience in paper modelling and the included examples give you plenty of material to practice on.

Dioramas 3 is available as an upgrade from Dioramas Pro and features the following new material:

• Two new bitmap drawings styles in addition to the updated vector style.
• 275 new bitmap textures (compared to 22 in Dioramas Pro)
• 700 bitmap symbols of doors, windows and other wall features
• Loading/saving of diorama panel settings (no more setting them up for each new panel)
• Sheet support for Dioramas tools

Get Dioramas 3 now from the ProFantasy online store. Or log into your registration page to grab the upgrade from Dioramas Pro.

If you want to try your hand at paper modeling with craft knife and glue before you jump fully into Dioramas 3, we have two examples buildings for you to download in pdf format.

Sage’s Tower
The reclusive sage dwells in this lonely tower somehwere on the outskirts of cilized lands. What will the adventurers find inside when they arrive to get his advice?

Village House, Church and Tower
A tiny village nestles into hills, sporting a few houses, a church and a lonely tower, guarding the townsfolk from marauding orcs and goblins.

The release of Dioramas 3 is imminent and we’re celebrating the occasion with a map and tutorial pack of a Bridge Diorama. The 9-page tutorial takes you through the design, construction and assembly of a multi-part bridge model. By printing and assembling as many parts as desired you can create a bridge of any required length.

The July issue of the Annual 2018 previews a few of the new bitmap textures included in Dioramas 3, and once that is released, you can replace or expand the included textures in the drawing with the full set. The model is included both as a FCW file and a set of three A4/US Letter pdf pages that you can print as often as you like and need.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. Once you have subscribed, the July issue will immediately become available for download on your registration page.

Welcome to the June newsletter, dear cartographers! We take a look at the progress of Dioramas 3, and Remy helps us Understanding Styles in CC3+. Mike Schley writes about Mapping Narratives and Pär Lindström finishes his series with the third article on overland mapping. Finally, check out new Maps of the Month from the user community.

News

• Dioramas 3 is coming along nicely and should be in beta testing soon. Take a look at what’s on the Cartographer’s Desk to complete it.
• The June issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 is available.

Resources

• Remy explains the concept and details of drawing styles in CC3+. Check out this especially useful article!
• Check out some highlights of community-made maps in our Maps of the Month selection.

Articles

• Pär Lindström finishes his tutorial about drawing overland maps in CC3+.
• Mike Schley talks about Mapping Narratives, giving as an exclusive look into his thought processes when designing his beautiful maps.