Welcome to 2018 and a new year of the Cartographer’s Annual with lots of mapping goodness! We hope you are as excited as us about delving into the twelfth year of our monthly subscription.

This January we start with a hex-mapping variant of Mike Schley’s wonderful overland mapping style from CC3+. We provide new templates, new versions of the style’s drawing tools, a bunch of hex symbols and take a tour through the creation process of hex-based maps. Check out the January style details on the Cartographer’s Annual 2018 website.

You can now subscribe to the Annual 2018 here. Once you have subscribed, the January issue will immediately become available for download on your registration page.

Earlier this year Mike Schley kickstarted the first episode of his Schleyscapes series. Aimed at producing an ongoing series of quality gaming maps, in combination with bitmap artwork that could be used in any graphics editor.

As you may know Mike is also the artist behind our own Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley, and the Schleyscapes art naturally matches the art in that symbol set perfectly. Of course we wanted to make that additional material available for our users of the Dungeons of Schley, and Mike was happy to oblige!

And here it is, the Forlorn Cottage extension to “Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley”. And the best part? It is completely free for the owners of SS4 – no additional purchase required. You can download it from your registration page as an extra install if you already have SS4 installed, or just use the full setup when you purchase SS4 fresh from the web store. All the new artwork is included.

The SS4 Forlorn Cottage Extension contains:

• 420 new symbols in the SS4 Dungeons of Schley color style
• 14 new bitmap textures for the same style
• 1 “Forlorn Cottage” example map
• 2 SS4 Forlorn Cottage template wizards (imperial & metric)
• Updated SS4 templates incorporating the new bitmap styles
• Updated SS4 symbol catalogs incorporating the new symbols

You can either start a SS4 Dungeons of Schley map and just use the additional symbols, or use the SS4 Forlorn Cottage template to limit yourself to the new symbols.

We are very happy to announce that Symbol Set 4 – Dungeons of Schley is now also available for CC3+. Mike’s gorgeous collection of dungeon, floorplan and outdoor symbols can be used with or without Dungeon Designer 3 and allows you to create wonderful maps, like the one shown here (created by community member Damon di Denti).

If you already own SS4, go to your registration page and click the download button for Symbol Set 4. Download and run the “Setup for CC3+” to install SS4 in CC3+. If you don’t own SS4 yet, you can buy it here.

While we are feverishly working to get CC3+ out to you, here’s another example of Mike Schley‘s overland style that is included in that next version of Campaign Cartographer. We created the map in the process of testing , and while we won’t give a fixed release date, let’s just say we’re getting very close now.

The map is a redo of Lee Moyer‘s gorgeous map for Pelgrane Press’ and Fire Opal Media’s 13th Age game. You can download the original here. The map shows the Dragon Empire, the game’s broadly defined, high-magic fantasy setting of a powerful human empire beset by troubles on all sides.

Click on the map to download a hi-res version suitable for printing.

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.

CC3+ incorporates a new complete symbol set from expert cartographer Mike Schley. We’ve worked with a number of professional cartographers to create Campaign Cartographer styles, and the process is now pretty slick. We are either adapting an existing style (as with our recent World War 2 annual issue) or creating one from scratch. This is the process:

1. We take a cartographer’s existing map, or the cartographer develops a new map style, always by creating a small map sample. Here is an early one Mike Schley produced for the new CC3+ overland style.

2. Once we’ve approved this, the cartographer adds more symbols and tools to the example map, and then does more as stand alone files. For a full ad–on or symbol set, this is a very big job. Usually the cartographer works in Photoshop, with layers on, so we can easily extract elements to create CC symbols and drawing tools.

3. Once the map-maker has finished, Ralf duplicates the style in CC, developing the set of drawing tools and adding effects to match the original.

4. Ralf creates the full set of symbol catalogs in all resolutions, with varicolour areas.

The very first example map we did with Campaign Cartographer was of my campaign setting, the Jaw Peninsula, and we intend to continue this tradition with CC3+. You can see the history of the map here and Ralf has rendered the eastern section of the map in his new style. Click the image for the full high-resolution map.

And here is a close up

And just to give you an idea of how detailed the symbols are – little works of art – here is a close up. Click for extreme close up.

[Ed: Mike Schley is a renowned game cartographer with clients such as Wizards of the Coast, Paizo and Scholastic and  aworking on a complete new overland style for CC3+]

As a professional artist, I’ve produced a large body of work over the past decade and a half for clients ranging from game developers to public universities. Most recently, the majority of my fantastical cartography has been for publishers such as Wizards of the Coast and Scholastic Books. The opportunity to work with Profantasy came as a wonderful surprise since not only does it allow me to develop what I believe will be an awesome new addition to Campaign Cartographer, but it will also let folks that already like my work use a new style of it to let their own imaginations run wild. What could be better than that?

Years ago, when studying art in college, I would have never thought my career would develop into drawing intricate worlds and mythical lands. Now, as a full-time fantasy illustrator, I have difficulty imagining doing anything else. When I sit down to work every day, it’s like I’m transported back in time to being a kid again and drawing campaign maps for D&D or custom boards for all-night sessions of Risk. World building and visual storytelling are two of the most fun things I can imaging spending my days on and the fact that my audience gets a kick out of what I do is icing on the cake.

Combining the use of digital and traditional media, I try to convey a naturalistic visual style while benefitting from the clean and quickly editable properties of the digital format. For my work, it should look hand drawn, even if it’s done exclusively in Photoshop. I love the greats of the golden era of illustration like Rackham, Mucha, Pyle, and Wyeth and although I’m working in front of a screen and not an easel, it’s their art that informs my tastes. As for my cartography, it might also help that apparently I have ancestors such as Jacob van der Schley who also were enthralled by map making as far back as 18th century. Hooray for maps!