The November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual builds on the foundation Sue Daniel set with the “Japanese Temples” style in September. It adds more than 30 new buildings, and a full set of house, street and city tools for a comprehensive “Asian Towns” style for City Designer 3. The 6-page mapping guide takes you through all the steps to utilize these resources.

Check out the details of the style here on the 2018 Annual’s page and click the image on right to see the included example map of the “Fishing Town of Sukoyara”.

You can subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. If you are already subscribed, the November issue is now available for download on your registration page.

Hm, what to pick from the huge amount of beautiful maps posted over the last month!? This is really the toughest job, let’s see…

Gurnic: A Kingdom in Erdan’s World
by Medio is a gorgeous use of the DeRust overland style from the Annual Vol 7 with some custom symbols added.

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We close off the 2017 Annual (except perhaps for a little bonus issue) with another style by Pär Lindström. He created this wonderful new city style for the weird and ominous metropolis of Cthulhu City, a setting for Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu role-playing game.

Of course we took the opportunity to create a city style for CC3+ from it. Since the style doesn’t use the City Designer way of drawing individual houses and random streets, you can even use it fully without having CD3 available.

The December issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

Are you looking for some house-to-house fighting with orcs or undead? Yearning to kick in that door or burn down a barn that hides an evil cult? Look no further, the November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2017 has you covered. It contains three highly detailed battle maps that combine building floorplans with outdoor locations.

The maps were produced for Pelgrane Press’ upcoming third installment in the Battle Scenes series and highlight the options you get when combining different map types and styles into a larger whole.

The November issue is now available for CC3+ from the registration page for all subscribers. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2017 yet, you can do so here.

The Vintyri Project has released another great and free add-on to CC3+: Bogie’s Mapping Objects. Here are their own words:

Bogie’s Mapping Objects includes more than 100 fills (textures) and more than 1,000 symbols (objects). In addition to general collections for dungeon and city mapping, the collection also includes Bogie’s Redthorn Tavern, generally considered to the the definitive graphical collection for mapping floor plans of taverns and inns.

We (the Vintyri Project) have been thinking for some time that it would be great if Bogie’s collections were converted for Fractal Mapper 8 and for CC3+, to fully integrate them into both products, and, in the case of CC3+, to make them available in the multiple resolutions with which CC3+ works best.

The download package for Bogie’s Mapping Objects is available from the Vintyri Project page. We (ProFantasy) have cooperated with the Vintyri project to make the add-on install into CC3+ and its add-ons (DD3 and CD3) as seamlessly as possible, but please do read the installation instructions closely to avoid any problems or confusion!

All example maps here were created and are the copyright of S D McDaniel. They are used with permission. If you want to check the EULA that covers the use of Bogie’s Mapping Objects, you can find that here.

The Vintyri Project released their enormous content collection for City Designer. Here is the announcement from Mark Oliva.

We now have completed release of the entire Vintyri (TM) Cartographic Collection for ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3+ and 3. This is a collection 974 CC3+ and CC3 raster symbols in the VH, HI, LO and VL resolutions and 122 fill styles along with templates and drawing tools, also in the VH, HI, LO and VL resolutions. Additional templates and drawing tools can be downloaded and installed by users of City Designer 3 and Dungeon Designer 3 with CC3+ or CC3.

Mark Oliva
Webmaster, the Vintyri Project (TM)
Internet: http://www.vintyri.org
E-Mail: info@vintyri.org
The Vintyri Project is a non-commercial service

It’s summer (well, at least here in the northern hemisphere), it’s July and here’s the seventh issue of this year’s Cartographer’s Annual. Draw panoramic views of your cities in the style of 16th-century publishers Braun & Hogenberg, with TJ Vandel’s new style “City Panoramas“. Almost 400 new symbols allow you to construct landscapes and and settlements in a bird’s eye view with speed and ease.

The July issue is available both for CC3 and CC3+. You can download both setups from your registration page on the Subscriptions tab.
If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2015 yet, you can do so here.

City Designer 3 is now compatible with CC3+, and to celebrate, here is a round-of maps, tutorials and resources for cities.

• An 8-part city creation tutorial- Mapping Cities part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8.
• Learning CD3
• Kartotum – a city creation example
• Making City Maps – the styles and tools ProFantasy provides for city design
• Making a City part 1
• Making a City part 2

There is a new update available for Campaign Cartographer 3. Update 11 brings CC3 up to version 3.43 and includes the following additions and changes:

• added CC3 Overland Hex mapping style including
  – 2 templates (imperial and metric)
  – 53 hex symbols in 8 catalogs
  – 55 drawing tools
  – 1 example map
  – 1 5-page mapping guide
• added Character Artist 3 master filter functionality
• added metric versions of all CC3 template wizards
• added CC3 Basic City style including
  – 2 templates (imperial and metric)
  – 35 drawing tools
  – 100 symbols
  – 1 example map
• improved Symbol Style Toggle handling
• removed SS1 style entries from CC3 master filters
• removed duplicate map notes in CC3 standard overland template
• replaced ImageMagick file Convert.exe with newer version

Check your CC3 version under Help > About in the menu. If it is less than 3.43, head over to your registration page and download CC3 Update 11 from among the CC3 downloads on the Products & Downloads tab.

When I grew up I used to play a lot of Role playing games and especially I played a Swedish game called Drakar & Demoner (Dragons &Demons). Most of the adventures they released took place in a campaign world called Ereb Altor. At that time I thought the world was one of the coolest places for an adventure that existed, and I must say that the maps I saw then and the adventures I read really has influenced me a lot.

As I might have mentioned earlier making maps is my hobby, during the days I work as an IT-engineer, so mapping is something I do in my spare time. For that reason I’m very restrictive when it comes to taking up commissions, making maps for someone else means that I can’t make them for myself. But when I realized that the world Ereb Altor still was alive and that people still actually were working on new material I just couldn’t turn it down.

So after a short introduction to the people running the site I was asked to do a map of Kartotum, the capital city of Palinor. Making this city however turned out to a bit of a challenge. So far all of my city maps have been done in City Designer 3 (CD3) from Profantasy, a great program when it comes to make cities. However the program has its weak sides, and one of those is that it works best when it comes to making cities without too much elevation. Of course you can draw some elevation in the program, but not in a way that I wanted to do it.

You see Kartotum is situated on the slopes of a mountain so it is surrounded by great cliffs, and to draw that in CD3 was something way out of my league, if it’s even possible. So I decided to make the city and all the houses in CD3 and then draw the cliffs by using a combination of both Artrage pro and Photoshop. But to do this I first had to mark out the area in CD3 where the cliffs would be. To do this I added a green colour, different from the actual grassland, where I later would add the cliffs, as you can see in the map below. In this way I could place the symbols correctly in CD3.

When the city was done in CD3 I exported the map and opened it up in Photoshop. In Photoshop I added the black lines for the cliffs and saved the image as a .PSD file. The actual shadows around the lines I decided to add in Artrage Pro. The water colour brushes in that program are absolutely fantastic and in this way I could get the shadows exactly as I wanted them. I also added the colour of the cliffs in Artrage before opening the file in Photoshop again to add some finishing shadows and light effects.

Working on this commission has teached me a lot when it comes to adapting to some one else’s ideas and opinion and I must say that in some ways it’s even more relaxing doing maps for someone else than yourself. Suddenly you don’t need to come up with all the story and explanation to all the stuff you make. That is someone else’s headache.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com