It’s 2015 and we start out with the 9th iteration of the Annual. TJ Vandel created this beautiful style that captures inked old-school dungeon maps with cross-hatching for filling in the walls.
If you have subscribed already, the download of the January issue is available from your registration page. If not, you can subscribe to the new Annual subscription from here.
To celebrate the release of The Dungeons of Schley, we’ve devised a competition. Create a small underground lair – a bandit hide out, a cave taken over by a dragon, a mine used as a cultist HQ. The whole area the map covers including map embelishments should be no more than about 100 m / 300 ft square. The best will win an unlimited patron license to all our cartography software forever; two runners up will receive vouchers.
Need hidden depths? Have some of ours.
From the fiendish imagination of award-winning cartographer Mike Schley comes a whole new style of dungeon for Campaign Cartographer 3, featuring devious traps, lurking horrors, breath-taking hoards ancient architecture – Symbol Set 4: The Dungeons of Schley.
All users who have not opted-out have been sent a special offer. If you have not received your offer email, please contact support.
SS4 works seamlessly with Dungeon Designer 3, but can also be used on its own in CC3. It includes two complete drawing styles based on Mike Schley’s artwork, with over a thousand symbols, more than 100 texture, 350+ drawing tools, three example maps and a mapping guide on how to go about a Dungeon of Schley.
Check out the SS4 product pages for more information.
Beneath the Old Castle Example Map
Warrow’s Hideout – Black and White Example Map
SS4 Symbol Detail
In February last year, Mark Fulford and I flew to Phoenix to meet CAD guru Mike Riddle and expert programmer and ProFantasy mainstay Peter Olsson. Serendipitously, cartography Mike Schley lives in Phoenix, so we agreed to meet.
By this stage Mike Schley was developing an overland map style for use in the forthcoming CC3+, but as a result of our conversation we also agreed that he would create an entirely new symbol set, too. It’s an unashemedly fantasy-oriented dungeon-bashing style, with the complete set of symbols you get with DD3 and Fantasy Floorplans.
We’ve kept this one under our hat, but we are now ready to announce, The Dungeons of Schley!
We’ve still got to do some work perfecting the effects to make it look just right, but here are some sneak peaks:
Click on the main dungeon map and symbol selection for a higher res version.
We’ve just released the October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2013. Check out another beautiful black and white style by Pär Lindström, this time for floorplans and dungeons. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to this year’s Annual here. If you have, download the issue from your registration page.
Joe Sweeney continues his series of video tutorials on old-school mapping.
Part 6: Creating Drawing Tools
Part 7: Create a Tool That Creates Floors AND Walls
Part 8: Automating Grids
[This map was created and this article written by forum user anomiecoalition.]
Mapping has become one of my favorite escapes from the drudgery that is graduate school. Whether it’s developing a mystical environment from scratch or recreating a classic adventure, I look forward to spending a few hours playing around with CC3. Lately it’s been the latter, and I’ve found quite a few gems mining my mini-library of TSR adventures.
This particular map is a reproduction of a “Buried Temple” encounter in the “Master of the Desert Nomads” module (X4). Our adventures leave the comforts of a desert oasis to investigate a recently unearthed buried temple – Once inside they’ll discover all manner of nefarious creatures, but should they survive, the rewards will be well worth the effort.
The most challenging aspect was trying to find a way to depict areas that are both above and below ground on the same map. I spent a great deal of time (and got lots of great suggestions from others on the Profantasy Forums) messing with my underground section. After creating my underground walls, I multipolied the area outside the walls and placed that shape on my Background sheet (which sat below my wall sheet on the list). From there I applied a subtle edge fade inner effect so that the sand was slightly covering the wall. I then multipolied the area inside my underground wall, applied my sand fill to that shape, and then added a transparency effect to that sheet. My hope was that these two techniques would give the view the impression that this area was underground.
After that, it was just a matter of dressing my dungeon utilizing various symbols from the CSUAC and textures from CGTextures.com. I also created a bunch of sand dune sheets (edge fade inner and glow effects) to muddy up the background. I’d be lying if I said that I was completely satisfied with the final product, but I think its human nature to demand more of yourself. I made a lot of mistakes with this map, but I learned even more. ..And I can’t wait for my next opportunity to start the cycle all over again.
If you’re not tired of my Desert Maps, you can see more in full resolution on my blog: http://drunkennerdery.wordpress.com/
I’ve really looked forward to the release of this year’s June Annual that gives you a new drawing style by Herwin Wielink: Isometric Dungeons. The style itself includes some really fantastic graphics and possibilities and it lets you create a new good looking map in no time at all (compared to if you’d do all the graphics by hand).
The style itself was a bit tricky to work with for me. Or if you put it another way, the style really showed me how much I still have to learn to completely master Campaign Cartographer 3. Maybe I have to take a closer look at the Tome of Ultimate mapping to catch up on a thing or two.
Getting all the different objects in the correct order in the map really gave me a slight headache. When you create a map in this style you really have to plan in what order to do things, if you don’t want to move things back and forth on the actual sheet. It took me some restarts of the map to get a hang on it. But once you understand the logic everything runs a lot smoother. The secret of success is to work from one of the top corners to the opposite lower corner. In this way you will naturally get the graphics in the right order and you don’t need to rearrange the order of the rooms and corridors all the time.
When you reach that point everything also gets a lot more fun. I really enjoyed working with the style and the result gets so good that you just want to keep going, it’s just as addictive as playing a good computer game.
However there was one thing I felt was very frustrating with the style, and that was that I want more! The style feels like a small taste of something that could be amazingly fantastic. I want circular rooms, walls with windows, more furniture, different floors, traps, outdoor environments, sewers and I could continue that list for another two posts. This is what Perspectives 3 (if it comes out) should look like.
At the moment when the selection of different graphics isn’t too vast a lot of maps will turn out looking quite similar. So it is quite hard to do something unique with the style, but I’m hoping for a bright future and more isometric add-ons in future Annuals maybe.
Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com
Here’s a little sneak preview of the June Annual: Isometric Dungeon by Herwin Wielink:
We’ve started into 2012 with our new Annual subscription and a combined map pack for creating dungeons on the table. “Combined” because it contains the tools for doing it either as a “flat” 2d version or – if you are into building your own paper models – as a 3D model.
Continue reading »
