ralf | June 4, 2014 | Annual, battle map, Par lindstrom
The June Annual has been designed by Pär Lindström – by now one of our most prolific contributors to the Annual. He came up with the idea of this extremely quick to use black and white style, which lets you whip up a battlemap for the next game in no time at all.
Pre-drawn rooms, buildings and mine parts take care of all of the complicated detail work for you. Be it a stretch of forest, an abandoned mine, a farm, or even a town or section of city, all of this can be created with this style in just a few minutes.
As a subscriber you can download the June Annual issue from your registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2014, you can do so here.
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ralf | May 1, 2014 | MonkeyBlood, overland
The May issue of the Annual 2014 contains an overland style by a new contributing artist: Glynn Seal of MonkeyBlood Design. We recently became aware of his beautiful Havenland set of symbols for overland maps, and luckily Glynn was more than willing to create a set for the Annual.
More than a hundred carefully crafted symbols and a complete set of bitmap textures make this style another great selection for your overland maps. As usual for the Annual, a mapping guide takes you through drawing a map in this style step by step.
The May Annual is now available from the registration page for current subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you’ll find more information on the Annual 2014 product page.
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ralf | April 14, 2014 | Newsletter
Dear Cartographers, welcome to the April newsletter!
News
Resources
Map-making articles
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ralf | April 14, 2014 | books, world building
Author Nat Russo posted the following great article on “A Writer’s Journey” and graciously allowed us to repost it here. Enjoy his excellent advice and check out his book “Necromancer Awakening“.
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Simon Rogers | April 14, 2014 | books, overland maps
From Tolkien’s seminal Lord of the Rings, to Lord Foul’s Bane and Game of Thrones, blockbusting fantasy novels need maps you can flick back to when following the journeys of the protagonists. The Fantasy Reader blog provides an index with wide selection of examples.
Campaign Cartographer has been used to illustrate novels such as Shades of Gray by Lisanne Norman, Le Temple Des Eaux-Mortes by Eric Ferris, and Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard, and writer David Brown discusses his experience with CC3 here.
So, which are the best CC3 styles to use to sketch a world for your frontispiece? Most likely it’s black and white line are, though greyscale might work. Here are some suitable suggestions for overland maps.
This prosaically named Overland B&W style is a perfect example of a simple style with which you can create a first fantasy map, It’s very straightforward to use.
Annual 2008 Overland B&W Style
Simon Rogers | April 14, 2014 | Dungeons, Floorplans
ProFantasy Software offers a large, possibly even bewidering range of dungeon styles from which you can choose. All our add-ons, symbol sets and annual require Campaign Cartographer 3 to draw. Dungeon Designer 3 makes it easier to create dungeons, but isn’t required, except to use its own built-in styles. Here, then, is a selection of the some of the styles we offer and the software you need to use them.
Dungeon Designer 3 built-in style.
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ralf | April 14, 2014 | Maps of the Month
Here’s the next collection of user maps from our forum. My, these guys have been busy again! Please note that I’m not including the competition entries in this this list, they are listed in a previous blog post.
Clercon posted one of his gorgeous city maps, a combination of work in City Designer 3 and Photoshop.
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ralf | April 10, 2014 | battle map, Deadlands, dungeons of schley, Floorplan
A few days ago my gaming group’s Deadlands Reloaded campaign ended, after 18 months and 23 sessions of play. We had great fun, despite – or perhaps because – the game system (Savage Worlds) is more combat-focused than the typical games we play. One thing it does, and it does that really well, is make use of battle maps and miniatures without slowing down combats much. To take advantage of this I decided at the start of the campaign that I would create as many battle maps for the game as possible – of course using the Profantasy software at my disposal to maximum effect.
For my maps I used Dungeon Designer 3 a lot, but also City Designer 3, Symbol Set 2 – Fantasy Floorplans, the Annuals, the free art collection CSUAC, and at the very end the brand-new Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley. All of these I printed on my inkjet printer at home in A4 tiles, then glued them together for play at the table. I ended up with more than a dozen A1 battle maps, plus a few smaller pieces. I’ve collected them here for your enjoyment and use. Just click one of the images to download the full-size pdf*.
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ralf | March 19, 2014 | competition, user maps
We’ve asked Christian, the winner of our map-making competition, to share a few words on his map and the competition and he was so kind to oblige. Here’s what he has to say.
* * * * *
A few weeks ago I was searching online for fantasy map-making contests. I wanted an assigned theme and a real deadline—something that would challenge my skills and help me generate another piece of work I could be proud of. That’s when I came across ProFantasy.com. I’d been interested in their software before, but hadn’t had a chance to use it. Now I had a chance to win it in a competition.
Make an island, they said, about three miles across. Something like a medieval treasure map. The contest had been open for months, but was closing in just a few days. I took a look at the submissions that had been sent in thus far, decided I had a shot at winning, and threw myself into it.
I worked feverishly, right up to the deadline, and actually ran out of time to put absolutely everything I wanted into the map. That’s why there’s no border around it, and no compass rose… But what I did manage to produce followed my vision. As a novelist and dungeon master, I knew I could create some storytelling elements that would hook into the drawing. Some secrets and clues that would only be available to those who looked closely, and a narrative that would marry the image to the text. I had an aesthetic that I’d been developing for maps for my novels, inspired by some of the top fantasy cartographers online. I’m passionate about making beautiful illustrations, and I’m excited to be learning new techniques every day.
* * * * *
As for the hands-on process itself, virtually all of this map was hand-drawn in ProCreate on an iPad 3 using an Adonit Touch stylus. There are a few “pattern brushes” in that app which help with things like the the jungle trees and the ocean waves, but everything else was the result of pushing pixels manually. The shape of the island and mountains isn’t based on anything other than doodling with the idea of a vaguely volcanic tropical island in mind.
The cloister overhead plan was laid out in Adobe Illustrator. It’s far larger, sharper, and more detailed in the original file, with many upper floors and basement dungeon levels. The “3D” isometric extrusion of the cloister is actually just faux-3D, a technique I use in Illustrator where I take the overhead plan and rotate, squash, duplicate and move by a certain amount, and then blend. I took a screen shot of that and traced over it in ProCreate.
The last step was to bring it all into Adobe Photoshop. I had created a “parchment background” from some rendered clouds and a bunch of filters, so I laid out the various pieces on that background and added the text elements. Then I did save-for-web and picked settings that looked good but kept the resulting file under 2 MB.
The cloister itself is about 300 feet on one axis, making the hypotenuse around 500 feet. Since you can line up 30 of the little cloister images end to end and have them stretch from one side of the island to the other, the island winds up being about 3 miles across.
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ralf | March 10, 2014 | competition
As we wanted to be as impartial as possible, we’ve asked fantasy cartographer Mike Schley to be the judge for our January competition. He took his job very seriously and came back to us with the following results:
First, I would like to thank Profantasy for inviting me to serve as judge for this mapping challenge. When approached by Simon to decide the results of this competition I jumped at the chance. Then, upon seeing the work, I realized how difficult the task would be. Assessing each entry in a logical manner and narrowing the field to two pieces would require making tough choices on the narrowest of margins.
My methodology for examining the submissions came directly from my own cartographic practice and relied on the three criteria by which I judge my own work. These measures include aesthetic appeal/creativity, visual readability, and usefulness of the information provided. Given the straightforward parameters set down for the competition, “create a map of an island, less than three miles wide” scoring the entries by these criteria made for a process that, though difficult, was fairly straightforward and analytical.
So without further delay, the winner is… entry #17 Cloister Island, followed closely by the runner up, entry #15 Smugglers’ Island.
Of all the submissions, I felt that the Cloister Island map functioned best as both a visual information system and an inspiring illustration of its setting. Even though the cartographer left off a compass rose and scale bar, the overall work felt the most coherent and provided numerous levels of information. Like an onion, the island and story revealed themselves in layers, giving the reader an opportunity to explore deeper and deeper into an immersive world. On top of this, I’m a sucker for hand drawn isometric maps.
Choosing a runner up was probably the hardest part of the job since there were a number of maps that I felt had quite a lot going for them. I selected Smugglers’ Island mainly because it’s design and presentation of information felt more unified than the other entries. The visual details work well together and the cartographer’s choice of font, embellishments, and patterning add up to a striking, if somewhat cluttered, image.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone that contributed work to the competition and encourage them to keep at it. Designing worlds is something dear to my heart and it was a joy to see so many thoughtful approaches to the assignment.
Sincerely,
Mike Schley
So the winner of the competition and the new holder a full ProFantasy Patron License is xianpryde. Congratulations!
The runner-up, dfahr, receives a ProFantasy store voucher worth $100. Also congratulations.
And thanks to everybody for their submissions. Your work was all wonderful!
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The June Annual has been designed by Pär Lindström – by now one of our most prolific contributors to the Annual. He came up with the idea of this extremely quick to use black and white style, which lets you whip up a battlemap for the next game in no time at all. 
