In March we held a forum vote on a number of user suggestions for future Annual issues. The most popular turned out to be a fantasy overland hex mapping style, reminiscent old pen & paper rpg products, specifically the original maps published for the Greyhawk setting.

Hex mapping has been a feature of CC Pro and CC3 since Cosmographer Pro was published, but it’s been underused for fantasy-style maps. So this was the perfect opportunity to combine the work on Cosmographer 3 with an Annual issue. I had to create new hex-styles for its Traveller-approved content anyway, letting me use the Annual style an exercise to remind me how these things work – I haven’t created many hex maps in the past myself.

Here is the overland hex style as it will published in the July issue of the Annual next week:

In addition to the old Cosmographer Pro hex style, the new Cosmo contains two hex style maps using standard T5 world (and region) templates. The first is a relatively plain vector style, for GM reference, and for players mapping the worlds they explore:

There will also probably be a black and white version of this style. But the other, very different, one is meant to invoke the feeling of satellite imagery with data overlays. Effectively it’s a cross between Cosmo’s bitmap overland style and the above hex-styte. Here is the same world as above:

Traveller was the very first Sci-Fi rpg I played, and among my first experience with English-language games to boot. Back then our Traveller GM had me buy a boatload of books when I was over in Princeton for a school exchange in 1986 (hey folks, that was before internet-enabled international orders). Therefore it’s escpecially thrilling to include Traveller-maps in the new Cosmographer.

Marc W. Miller is doing some neat  stuff in T5 too, like providing customizable ship-plans so that GMs can make their own version of the Type S scout courier for example. Of course this just begs for a CC3 version, where adding your own details becomes even easier than on a paper map.

So here is the customizable scout/courier deckplan that’ll come with Cosmographer:

By Ralf Schemmann

We’ve been working on the new version of the Cosmographer add-on for a while, mostly because we didn’t want it to be “just” an art upgrade.  We’ve now added some very cool new features and are getting close to announcing a release date. Here are some collected previews of the different styles and features available in Cosmographer 3. Some of the images have already appeared on our blogs, others are new.

Deckplans

We’ve had some talented German artists (the BananaMonks) create a stunning set of  bitmap symbols for starship deckplans. Continue reading »