The April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 is available, providing a new city style by Pär Lindström for drawing 18th to 19th century city maps.
Bundle of Holding is running a Profantasy MEGA offer with tons of our software at an amazing price.
Resources
Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
We are already late in April and its high-time to look back at the maps produced by the community in March. Here are some of the highlights I’ve picked out, enjoy!
Hello Cartography Friends! We are down to our last two sets….both Overland. Not my favorite, as you would know if you’ve been following along and have read my blurbs. However, I usually do my best work under pressure….I guess that’s why I trained as an Emergency RN as my nursing career choice, lol. Organized chaos is my Roman Empire 😊
Anyway, this style is one of three ins a set overland styles offered this year, along with Scorching Sun and Realms of Legend. All three of these sets, created by the talented TJ Vandel, were made to work alone, or in combination with one another. In this example, I’ve just followed along with the mapping guide, so as to decrease my stress of where I wanted things to go. It just flowed nicely. I really like the clean look of this map and decided to keep it simple and free of clutter.
About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.
Comments Off on All the Annuals: Realms of Legend (November 2016)
For those of you who haven’t seen them, we do a live mapping session on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+. Here are the most recent Live Mapping videos, as archived on YouTube:
The Treasure Maps style is an older, but very easy and quick to use style from the Cartographer’s Annual:
I present the latest issue of the Cartographer’s Anual 2024 (April issue: Parchment City) in this live mapping session.
When you start a new map in CC3+, you’ll find that there is normally 20 or so sheets in a map. One of the main reasons of these is to ensure the correct drawing order, that symbols goes atop the floor and not below it and the floor goes atop the background terrain, and so on. Most tools will select the appropriate sheet automatically to ensure things goes where they are supposed without the user having to micro manage everything.
Obviously, these sheets are named so their purpose is understandable by people so you can know what their purpose is, but there is also some interesting tricks when it comes to sheet naming that can be used with the tools. This is something to keep in mind when you create your own sheets, as following the appropriate way of naming can help greatly.
For those of you who haven’t seen them, we do a live mapping session on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+. Here are the most recent Live Mapping videos, as archived on YouTube:
The Overland Hex style from the Annual 2010 introduced the first style using the hex symbol functionality embedded in CC3+.
City Designer 3 can be used for many different styles of settlement. Here we showcase a Old West style town.
Remy Monsen demos the latest Cartographer’s Annual style (by Sue Daniel) in this video.
Time for another look at the maps the community has produced last month i.e. in February. Everybody has been extremely busy, so we’ve got a long list!
Julian Dracos created a map of the Dragonlance world in the Worthington Historical style, and I love it. Now what was the name of that world again? Trying to remember and too lazy to Google it right now… Continue reading »
A little warning this month: If you’re suffering from arachnophobia, take it slowly with this month’s free symbols. Mike has drawn some lovely web-cloaked woodlands, massive giant spiders to haunt your dreams and web and lairs to give them a wonderfully scary home.
To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of the current year (January to March 2024 so far) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
Comments Off on Free monthly symbols – Spider-haunted woods
There are many things that sets CC3+ apart from other graphics and mapping programs. One of these differences is the size of the mapping area. In most programs, when you start a new file, you specify a size, and you get a canvas exactly that size. If you try putting something halfway outside the edge, like a symbol or equivalent, the spillover is simply lost. In CC3+ however, this is completely different.
CC3+ doesn’t operate with a fixed sized canvas, for most practical considerations it is infinite. There’s nothing preventing you from placing a symbol entirely outside the map area if you so wish, simply because your map only occupies a small spot on that almost infinite canvas. But if the drawing area is of infinite space, how do we determine the actual size of the map? And why do our drawing tools seem to only draw within the map area?
To understand this, we need to look at the map border. When we talk about map borders in CC3+, there are actually two different things we may be talking about. We might be talking about that nice decorative frame around your map. This is known as the decorative map border, and it is just that, decorative. Some map styles have a very elaborate decorative map border, while others have a much more spartan one, sometimes even just a simple line. It doesn’t have any functionality, it is just there to give your map a visual frame. Then we have the technical map border. This is what actually defines your map’s size on the canvas, and all tools that have a restrict to map border option, like drawing tools and bitmap exports work with this one. Usually, it will overlap in location with the decorative map border, but it is the technical map border that provides the functionality.
