ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

The April issue of the Annual 2026 has been released, giving you a second installment of content for January’s Hand-drawn City style with new symbols and drawing tools.

You can now put your cities, including castles and extensive fortifications on looming cliffs, bury the dead in proper graveyards and cemeteries, and plant lush greenery in city parks and the rural surroundings.

The April issue is now available to download for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about using the random dungeon feature for a map depicting the innards of a magical artifact.

I decided that just randomly exploring it could end up being a bit boring, so I decided to give the players a bit of guidance, to give them targets to search for without giving them too much information about the dungeon. And what better medium for this than a player handout that is a hastily drawn partial map of the dungeon found on the corpse of some poor adventurer who never made it?

So, I dug into the list of styles available to see what could be useful for something like this. I was looking for something that looked hand-drawn, but also something that looked like it was done somewhat quickly, maybe with a bit of care, but not some map drawn by a cartographer sitting at his desk for hours. In the end, I decided on the Sticky Note Dungeons from the 2024 annual. It might sound like a weird choice initially as sticky notes don’t really scream medieval dungeon, especially since this was an in-game map supposedly drawn by an NPC. But that makes this style really work for this purpose is the fact that it has drawing tools and effects that allow you to draw lines that look hand-drawn, and the included symbols also looks like something someone could draw quickly. So I decided to used that as a base and customize it for my needs to get what I needed.

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Welcome to a new year and a new Cartographer’s Annual, dear mappers! We start of January with a new city style, completing the trilogy od hand-drawn style that we started last year. The Hand-drawn City style combines hand-drawn symbols with bitmap textures, symbol fills and the powerful city-drawing tools of City Designer 3.

The January issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2026 yet, you can do so here.

The early-subscriber discount is still available for a few days, so you can get it at 15% discount. If you subscribed to the 2025 Cartographer’s Annual and missed the re-subscription offer, let us and we’ll resend the link to you.

Do you have areas in your world where the forces of Good or Evil hold special power? Or where Chaos and Order clash in endless battle? Do you need to mark treasure locations or places of great magic? The December monthly symbols add options for these kind of landmarks to the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 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. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to September 2025) is included in the one download.

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

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.

What lurks beneath the ocean waves and threatens to destroy those fragile wooden boats sailing on the surface? Map the dangers of the sea and promise those sailors a watery death, if they don’t chart the right course. From the fearsome leviathan via water spouts and icebergs to the treacherous sandbars hidden just below the waves, the latest free mnothly symbols let’s you populate a sea of adventures.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 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. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to September 2025) is included in the one download.

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

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 May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is now available. This month brings you a new overland style, by yours truly. I’ve been inspired to sit down with pencil and inks, create some hand-drawn symbols and then create a fresh new style from them. In addition to giving you a nice and easy-to-use overland style, it will allow me to show the whole process of creating and using your own artwork in CC3+. I will also be able to easily expand the style with additional symbols in the future.

The May 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 October issue of the Annual 2024 delivers a wonderfully whimsical and simple dungeon style by community mapper CC Charon, where colorful sticky notes represent dungeon rooms. Corridors drawn on the background paper connect them, and they are populated by handdrawn traps and monsters. 120 hand-drawn bitmap symbols, 18 drawing tools, 7 bitmaps styles and a 3-page mapping guide combine in the Sticky Notes Dungeon style to allow you paste together charming dungeon designs within minutes.

The October 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.

Anders Bergström – known as Lillhans on the ProFantasy forum – has astounded us at ProFantasy and the whole CC3+ community with his aquarelle-style drawings for a while now, with many of us having trouble believing that they were done in CC3+. Look at this map:

It’s so different from the usual battlemap styles (varied as they are), that everybody was wondering “how did he do it?”.

After creating an Annual style based on his work in September 2019, he’s now spilling even more secrets in the following article “Doodles & Drawings”. Let’s hand over to him:

Doodles & Drawings

A while back, it was suggested that I write an article about the train of thought and process of using Campaign Cartographer in what has to be among the least time-efficient ways possible. That is, using it to the best of my abilities. Not too long after, there was also a request for a tutorial being made and while a completely different script was already in the making for the first article, I figured I might as well splice thoughts and ideas. Then, a third request for popping the hood of my faux hand-drawn endeavours prompted yet another consideration of focus and approach and – would you believe it – a third iteration seemed more appropriate after all.

Anyway, here is the rather lengthy introduction. Don’t worry: there will also be some kind-of-technical stuff further down the line. And that stuff is going to be rather lengthy as well, I guess.

Continue reading the pdf article…

About the author: Occasional map-finisher, sometimes character sheet filler, and at least once every two decades talking with the others about putting the band back together. It’s probably for the best not to mention I one time was in the jury (when they still had those) for the Eurovision song contest national selections.