We are very happy to have another beautiful style by Pär Lindström in this year’s Cartographer’s Annual, with this month’s Parchment City style. Based on Pär’s work on a 19th century map of Stockholm, the style is very easy and quick to use thanks to to whole city blocks and symbols. You can hen dive in and add special landmarks and individual pieces at your leisure. Of course the accompanying mapping guide tells you how to do all that.
The April issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.
We are very happy that with Jimmy Medina (aka DM Geezer Jim) we have a new contributor to the Cartographer’s Annual for the second month in a row. We loved the multi-structure floorplans extending over several levels that he shared with the community, and asked him to create a floorplan of a whole city block.
The resulting map pack “City Block” makes up the May Annual issue and shows eight different buildings interconnecting via their cellars, ground levels, upper stories and roof tops using the Dungeons of Schley style. It also contains a 10-page mapping guide, including descriptions and adventure ideas for the buildings.
The May issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page.
If you haven’t subscribed to the Cartographer’s Annual 2023 yet, you can do so here.
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As we’ve announced a while ago, we are working on a new Symbol Set by Mike Schley, titled “Isometric Cities” and we are getting close to release now. The artwork by Mike is all done, Sue Daniel has created all the varicolor versions of the symbols, and yours truly is working on the bitmap fills and integrating everything into one coherent package.
The style consists of a large number of isometric building symbols. Each comes in four different views, which can be easily rotated to show the buildings from the four cardinal directions.
The symbols range from glorious gigantic structures like the cathedral above, to small details like graves, boats and market stalls. Naturally – because they are all created by Mike – they fit the Symbol Set 4 and 5 styles very well, and can potentially be used to illustrate cities that you’ve already create with Symbol Set 5 in an isometric view.
Look for the release Symbol Set 6 at the end of the month or in early November. Of course we’ll announce it here and in our newsletter, so keep an eye on those to not miss this new wonderful Symbol Set by Mike Schley.
Fitting for the time of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, the March issue of the Cartographer’s Annual brings you a wintry city style with snow-covered roofs and trees, frozen ground, deep snow drifts and frosty fields.
Sue Daniel’s Winter Village style contains more than hundred new symbols, new roof, house and street styles, as well as a host of drawing tools for those wintry settlements. The 4-page mapping guide talks you through creating such a village in a few easy steps.
The March issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.
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Love a world with monsters, mystery, and supernatural horror around every corner? Love the 1920s? Dying to run a campaign speaking in Old Tyme radio announcer voice? Oh, yes, then this annual should be the inspiration you need for your next Cthulhu themed tabletop game. You guessed it readers, I’ve been trying to get my gaming group to play Cthulhu for a few years now. Maybe this latest map will finally help them along to love and crave the Lovecraftian universe I have for so many years.
[Download the FCW file]
This annual allows a game master to create a Cthulhu inspired city easily with pre-made city street grid symbols. After laying out a few street grid symbols, and adding a street or two using the road drawing tool to connect the grids and also finish off the outer sections, laying out the building symbols on this map was so easy, since aligning them with the roads isn’t part of this particular map style aesthetic. I placed the symbols and named them all while creating a dark adventure in mind for my players.
This setting is a particular favorite of mine, so this annual is one of my favorites of the year. Speaking of… All the Annuals 2017 has come to a close. But wait! There’s more!! Stick around for the bonus annual… Sue Daniel’s Parchments.
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.
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Need a quick city? Dislike (like myself) laying out a city grid and dotting it with houses? Well the Random Cities Annual is for you. This annual is available for anyone who has City Designer 3. The Random City command allows you some creative license with the houses you place, though in this example, I did not make any adjustments and just used the basic CD3 Bitmap B set.
(Download the FCW-File)
After starting a map in either the Bitmap A or B styles (I chose B) you choose Random City from the City menu or just enter on the command line CITY – this brings up the City Wizard and make any adjustments to the settings you’d like, hitting next at each option. For this map, the only changes I made, were to mute the colors by adding a RGB Matrix to several sheets with different settings (I got those settings by just playing around with the adjustments one .1 at a time till it was the right shade). A quick city name at the bottom and done. A map such as this can easily be done last minute before a gaming session – this one took me 15 minutes.
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.
Every year we make one of the Cartographer’s Annual issue available for free to give everyone a taste of the tasty mapping inside. This year we decided on the Tagkrammer Isometric style from December, that lets you create 3D maps of buildings and dungeon layouts. This style is now included in the Free Sampler.
To make up to all our loyal subscribers, we add a bonus issue to the year’s roster. This year Sue Daniel expands on her City Cliffs symbol pack with two new sets of symbols, one in limestone and the other in sandstone. Almost 150 new symbols in 2 catalogs, 3 new bitmap fills, and two alternate versions of the Varon Rock example map give you lots of sheer rock faces to tinker with.
Recently we’ve done quite a few video tutorials and Annual issues on city mapping, and I wanted to to collect these into one conventient reference. Let’s take a look what we got:
Welcome to a brief article about the creation of Orde-on-the-Rock (or just Orde for short), in which I will be attempting to answer most of the questions I have been asked about this map since it was first released last year as a new example map for City Designer 3.
Orde was designed as a map to demonstrate what could be done with CD3 without using any additional add-ons or extra art assets.
Over the years I’ve been using CD3 I’ve done lots of cities using only the assets that come with CD3, so to make it more of a challenge for myself this time I decided not to use any of the regular Bitmap A house symbols. In their place I used buildings generated by the Building and Street tools, and added a few shaded polygon constructions for variety. Continue reading »
In light of the recent world-wide developments, were many people are stuck at home, we’ve decided to extend the content in basic CC3+ to include more material for dungeons and cities, so you can use CC3+ alone to make everything from world maps via cities down to floorplans and dungeon maps. You can download this latest update from your registration page to get the additional tools and drawing styles, and the full CC3+ setup will also include them from now on.
What do you get specifically? We’ve included a selection of Annual issues, some of which were already available for free and other which weren’t so far:
CC3+ Version 3.94
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– added new drawing styles to CC3+ install: Jon Roberts Overland, Jon Roberts Cities, Jon Roberts Dungeon, Namoi VanDoren Floorplans
– added city and dungeon menus to base setup
– added basic city and dungeon tools to base setup
In light of the recent world-wide developments, were many people are stuck at home, we’ve decided to extend the content in basic CC3+ to include more material for dungeons and cities, so you can use CC3+ alone to make everything from world maps via cities down to floorplans and dungeon maps. You can download this latest update 
