The Cartographer’s Annual December issue is now available. We’ve expanded last month’s hand-drawn dungeon style significantly with lots of new symbols, textures and drawing tools, specifically aimed at enabling outdoor battle-maps at the same amount of detail as the dungeon floorplans already possible. Enjoy the large example map of a logging camp and the mapping guide detailing the outdoor parts of the style.

The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.

The Cartographer’s Annual November issue is now available. Seeing the popularity of the Hand-drawn Fantasy style from May and June, we decided to expand this kind of symbols to the Floorplans and Dungeons map types, and the result is this new set. Use more than 140 new, hand-crafted symbols to map building and underground lairs.

The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.

The Cartographer’s Annual October issue is now available. Explore the 10 levels of Delomoro Keep mapped in glorious detaul by Kevin Goebel (Royal Scribe). Make it your adventuring base, assault it to defeat the evil baran living there, or sneak into its cellars to steal its treasures.

The October issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.

Last month, I talked about how to draw railroad tracks for your maps. In that article, we looked at how to draw the basic tracks and sleepers, and adding appropriate effects to make them look nice. But we can’t stop with just straight track segments, can we? Of course not, we’ll be needing to make ourselves some nice curves. Fortunately, CC3+ has the tools needed to be able to take our railroads to the next step.

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Trains and Rails are useful for all kinds of mapping. From the humble carts on a track used in mines, to daring train heists in the Wild West, through subways and all the way to modern high-speed bullet trains. They can be used for battle maps to play out interesting encounters, as scenery in your mine maps and part of the infrastructure of your city.

In this first part I’ll be having a look at creating the basic tracks.

(I’ll also be looking at this in tomorrow’s live stream, so join the stream or watch the archived video later if you wish a video version of this)

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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.

Saddle up, pardners! The horses are rested and ready for the next expeditions, thanks to a neat set of stable furnishing in this month’s free symbol catalog by Mike Schley. 20 new symbols showing horses, saddles and tack, hay piles and other stable staples (sorry!) make up this set.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 4 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS4 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is available for purchase here.

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 year two up to and including April 2023 is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.

Remy Monsen ran a mapping competition during the month of August, and some amazing building floorplans were created by the community.

The challenge was to create floorplans for a set of buildings chosen from one town map (see on the right) of the community atlas project, with the finished maps (hopefully) becoming part of the atlas and complementing its wonderful collection of free content.

It’s time now to vote for the winners, so head over to the community forum to chose your favourite in two categories.

According to our End User License Agreement, you need our permission to publish floorplan-scale maps consisting predominantly of our artwork commercially (when the maps are a product of their own and not part of an adventure or such). This is mostly to protect our artwork rights and to keep the floorplan-market from getting flooded by cheap, extremely simple maps. Recently Matthew Verdini approached us to get such a permission, and seeing the quality of his maps, we were more than happy to grant that permission. See for yourself!

We also asked him to say a few words about himself and his work, so here he goes:

First off, I will admit to being a fan of the Profantasy line of products since they first debuted in the 90s. I remember seeing their ads in Dragon magazine and thinking how cool the software looked. I eventually mustered up some funds and got myself to the nearest gaming shop I could find so that I could buy a copy of Campaign Cartographer to use in my home brew world building.

Since my interest in cartography began with Profantasy, I thought it would only make sense that the work I share be part of that.

You can find Matthew’s maps in his Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MasonandMansfield.

Are you still looking for that treasure in the half-sunken temple on the shoreline? Getting bored by always the same seaweed slushing around your legs? Don’t worry, Sue Daniel has more maritime excitement for you with the second part of the Marine Dungeons style.

New ways to enhance your floors with metallic inlays, connecting walls, new flora and fauna for your shore and sea floor … more than 140 symbols, a dozen new textures and many drawing tools are included in the Marine Dungeon 2 style expansion pack.

The December issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2021 yet, you can do so here.

Note: The re-subcription offer for the Annual 2022 will become available in mid-December, when we also make one of this year’s Annual issues available for free and release a bonus issue (Darklands City part 2).