Last week we played the first session of a German indie rpg: Dungeonslayers. As the name implies it’s a quick and easy, not quite old-school, Fantasy hack-and-slay (but not only) game. It’s a free download but can also be purchases in printed format at a very reasonable price. It’s worth it – we had a lot of fun.

The game comes with its own little setting called Caera. Its black-and-white maps are nothing to be sneered at, but of course they tickled my fancy and I set out to create my own CC3 version of the map. I loved creating this month’s Annual style (design by Jon Roberts) very much, so I decided to use it. Here it is: Continue reading »

This beautiful map was made using the Cartographer’s Annual Fantasy Map style found here by forum user Medio. You can follow its development on the forum.

Close up:

The political map:

Sven Lugar has created some excellent historical maps with CC3 at both miniature and non-minature scale. You can see a wide selection here on his website.

Here is Waterloo:

Naseby (English Civil War)

And Salerno

I’ve been dealing with general customer queries for a couple of weeks while Ralf is on a well deserved holiday. Aside from the odd bit of tech support and registration enquiries I’ve had a few emails about licensing – that is, whether you can publish and/or sell the maps you create with Campaign Cartographer 3. The answer is simple: Yes, you can. You hold all the rights to the artwork you create with ProFantasy’s Software.

What you may not do, is re-distributing the artwork that we provide, i.e. the symbols and catalogs that come with the software. This includes maps that are created solely for the purpose of distributing symbols. We also include floorplan-resolution exports (eg PDFs) consisting predominantly of our artwork in this proviso.

Think of the symbols as a True Type font you have bought. You may create and sell documents created with that font, but you may not redistribute the font itself, or create a book of fonts.

I recently had the pleasure to create a map for Silver Branch Games‘ upcoming Albion game.

Tim Gray had created a map for his setting in CC2 Pro a while ago and approached me at Dragonmeet for a re-working in one of CC3’s newer styles.

As it will be printed in black and white, we decided on the standard CC3 b&w vector style and this this the result. I’m pretty happy how it turned out:
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Recently I had a German customer contact me with questions concerning sheet effects and export functions in CC3. During our discussions I got to see some of his maps and I was thrilled to see that he was redoing maps from an old German DSA (Das Schwarze Auge) adventure, that I played back in the day … must have been 1985 or 1986. The module (Die Göttin der Amazonen) still sits on my shelf.
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Coming Saturday Profantasy will be at Dragonmeet 2010 in Kensington Town Hall, London.

As usual, I’ll be manning the booth and I’m looking forward to seeing the British gaming crowd again! We’ll be right at the hall entrance next to the Pelgrane booth where Simon, Robin Laws and Ken Hite will be lounging around when not occupied by panels or games.

I’m back from the Internationale Spieletage in Essen and again it’s been great fun doing the show. We had great helpers (thanks to Gordon, Carsten, Michael and Torsten!), met some old-timers I always love to see, and added quite a few new faces to the CC3 user crowd. Happy mapping everyone!

Here are a couple pictures from the show.
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Back in the early 80s, I began my long-running AD&D campaign set in the Jaw Peninsula. I drew a map which slowly disintegrated, and which Mark Fulford (my now business partner) copied it out by hand, adding new details. When we started ProFantasy, this was our target map for the original Campaign Cartographer for DOS. The difficult thing initially was to get trees and mountains looking decent, and the discpline of printing only to a monochrome dot matrix helped here. This was created with line art, using the 16 colours then available:

With CC Pro for DOS we added raster fill styles which enabled us to stretch the 16 colours available into a range of shades:

Then we moved onto the Windows 95 version, which gave us the chance to redo the symbol set with a wider range of solid colours.

Up to this point, it was me, a non-artist who was doing the cartography. I asked Ralf to redo the map using the Fantasy Worlds style from the Annual 2009.

Here is a close up. This map saw service recently in a mammoth weekend session of AD&D, and I have a feeling that CC3 may need some more example maps…

I’m pleased to say that Cosmographer 3, the science fiction add-on for CC3  is out now.

It’s suffered from feature creep – or to be more precise, we’ve suffered from it, and you’ve benefited! It’s a much bigger and better product that we originally planned, more symbols, more styles and a wide variety of new map-making capabilities.

Existing customers and registered users have been emailed about their upgrade.

You can find out more  about Cosmographer 3 here.