We’ve just released the September issue of the Annual 2010.  While also including a complete new style based on the work of fantasy cartographer Robert Altbauer, the accompanying tutorial focuses on how to convert Photoshop brushes into CC3 symbols catalogs. The quick and easy process opens up a whole lot of material to use in CC3, as there are many free-to-use brushes available on the web.

The included style uses a serial of brushes for mountains and hills, made available on the Cartographers’ Guild forum. Here is the example map created with the new style:

And here's a sample of the Mountain symbol catalog created from a Photoshop Brush:

We’ve just released the August issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2010: An overland style for creating physiographic maps based on the amazing work of American cartographer Erwin Raisz.

His maps take the bird’s eye view of the land and are works of art through and through. Accordingly, creating a CC3 drawing style that pays homage to his work and produces beautiful maps of its own was a real challenge.

We think the result speaks for itself:

Landform style example: The Great River Estuary

Check our the Cartographer’s Annuals for many more mapping styles, tutorials, and tool packs. They provide an amazing wealth of new tools for Campaign Cartographer. 3

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: