CC3+ maps are more than just pretty illustrations of the area your players happen to adventure in. If you like to keep track of time passing in your game (or your novella) you need to know how long it will take your players to travel from Snowport to Knight’s landing. And to do that, you’ll naturally need to know the distance, and the terrain traveled through. The latter is easy enough to read visually from the map, and sure, you can provide an estimate for the former using the scale bar. However, this gets more and more inaccurate the more winding the road is though, maybe they are even traveling along an extremly winding river.

Instead of trying to estimate complex distances like that, CC3+ has built-in tools that lets you easily measure distances, both in straight lines, but also along a meandering path. Using these tools you can get the exact answer in seconds when the players ask about the distance/travel time, and get the same answer every time.

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What is the scale of this map?

It is difficult to tell. There are no scale markers, scale bar, or grid overlay. The only things we see to gauge the scale is the graphical representation of the trees and the river. The river could be 3 miles wide or it could be 100 feet wide. We do not know. The trees narrow this down a little as we could assume a tree is 100 feet tall and take it from there. Still a guess, but we are getting more of a sense of scale.

If we assumed the river was 1 mile across, the trees would also be roughly a mile high, and the map confuses us because the trees are shown at a more exaggerated scale.

When a map needs almost no scale indications other than the graphical representations, it works best. The interpretation of the maps relationship between features becomes easier, and after all, that is the job of a map.

There is nothing wrong with having features out of scale compared to each other and then having scale bars and reference dimensions, but it tends to make the map feel odd if the features aren’t at least, to some degree, realistically scaled. If you have fun creating maps, that is the main point.

Here is a photo I took whilst coming in to land at an airport in England. Look at the trees. They look like broccoli.

This image is a great reference for how trees, fields, buildings, and roadways might look on your map of a similar scale.
For those interested, this is the location on Google Maps: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.3593088,-1.8766505,2134a,35y,90h,38.86t/data=!3m1!1e3

I can also highly recommend looking at the following resources to see how features look from above the ground:
• Google Maps – https://www.google.co.uk/maps/ (switch on terrain view). It also has a ‘tilt’ 3D feature that allows you to see features in oblique aerial view.
• Bing Maps – https://www.bing.com/maps (switch on aerial view). Also note that Bing Maps has a great ‘bird’s eye view’ feature that can help with oblique aerial views.
• Google Earth – https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earth/. This really is a great tool in the mappers arsenal.

Measuring Tools

The above resources also allow you to measure distances and can be invaluable when you want to know how large half a mile, 5 miles or 40 miles looks from the air. Specifically, Google Earth has tools that allow you to place and measure the areas of circles, polygons. This is incredibly useful in garnering a sense of scale.

Scaling Trees

Let us take a quick look at trees. We all know what a clump of trees looks like, but they look different depending on how far away you are from them. If the map is a battlemap or a regional map, then representing trees (or other features) at the correct relative scale is important to aid a sense of scale for the map.

Let’s take a look at some differing sketches of trees that we could use to represent on a map.

Some links to ‘Top Down’ views of trees in order of proximity to the ground:
1. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.7441187,-2.0406674,164m/data=!3m1!1e3
2. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.7439175,-2.0401621,389m/data=!3m1!1e3
3. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.7435139,-2.0385929,1151m/data=!3m1!1e3

Some links to ‘Oblique Aerial’ views of trees in order of proximity to the ground:
1. https://binged.it/2GbdNRA
2. https://binged.it/2Gat5WQ
3. See photo from aircraft above.

A more advanced technique for top down forests, but much quicker and easier for large areas of trees is to use digital tools. In this example, I am using ArtRage 5, but the tools are available in programs such as Photoshop and Gimp. I am selecting a particle type brush in a green colour. The brush is set to have a little colour and luminance value variance.

I can then add some ‘drop shadow’ effect to the layer upon which this was brushed.

This gives it a sense of depth.

When upon a background, it completes the illusion of a forest from a much higher vantage point and becomes more suitable for regional maps.

Scaling Mountains

We can apply the same kind of ideas to mountains. Here are some links to mountains at various distances from ground level:

Some links to ‘Top Down’ views of mountains in order of proximity to the ground:
1. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@47.1627293,12.1812876,12246m/data=!3m1!1e3
2. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@47.0934801,12.2144138,49403m/data=!3m1!1e3
3. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@46.8237988,11.0920616,234301m/data=!3m1!1e3

Some links to ‘Oblique Aerial’ views of mountains in order of proximity to the ground:
1. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@47.0566826,12.1812876,15142a,35y,37.4t/data=!3m1!1e3
2. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@46.4817889,12.1445335,85076a,35y,34.55t/data=!3m1!1e3
3. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@45.470392,11.5212508,246225a,35y,30.96t/data=!3m1!1e3

Think of mountains as a series of ridges and then valleys either side. Water flows down into the valleys and lakes and rivers are often found here, as well as glaciers into colder and higher areas.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@46.561726,10.7213714,12602a,35y,37.57t/data=!3m1!1e3

So, let’s take a quick sketch look at how we could represent mountains from varying distances from the ground. In the examples below, isolated mountains can be represented as shown on the left, and ranges of mountains shown as those on the right. The centre top is a more illustrative version of a mountain range.

A little bit of shading adds to the illusion.

We have another digital technique for top down mountains, which is again much quicker and easier for mountain ranges. In this example I am using ArtRage 5, but again, the tools are available in programs such as Photoshop and Gimp.

I am using a brush which some opacity, so I can build up layers and has some pressure sensitivity.

Then the magic bit. We use layer effects to add an ‘emboss, inside’ effect. Me make the contours sharp and as deep and as tall as possible using the ‘Radius’ and ‘Depth’ effects.

We can also adjust the ‘Radius’ down to turn the whole thing just as easily into a plateau.

A little bit of background and we are looking more realistic.

We can add the forested areas like we discussed earlier to this same mountain range and finish off with some texturing to the trees and mountains.

The sense of scale for the above is much more evident.

We can use similar techniques to create a lone mountain too, by stacking mountain layers on top of each other.

And with woodland added to help with the scaling.

It is even possible to take images created like the above and use as textures in 3d software. SketchUp is a fabulous bit of free software and can be used to lay images (textures) onto the faces of models (https://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-free). You would use the SandBox Tools: https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000130

When rendered, these can be very attractive gaming handouts.

Conclusion

So, in closing, given the above comments and the vast array of tools available, the key bit of advice is to look at nature using the available resources at your disposal. From that, you can graphically represent features that fit the scale of the map you are working on. This in turn should make it more intuitively interpreted.

Thanks for reading, Glynn

Glynn is the owner of MonkeyBlood Design & Publishing. Specialising in cartography, artwork, graphic design, and layout for the table-top gaming industry, Glynn is also a published author and has run two successful Kickstarter campaigns for game setting materials.

When working with maps, scale is one of the more important concepts to get right. For example, it is quite important if the distance between two cities on your map is 10 or 100 miles, and it can be quite important for what can be found in the dungeon depending on if the doors are 3 feet wide or 30 feet wide. No matter what you map, you’ll want to know what scale it is in. To accomplish this in the best possible manner, an understanding of how scale works in CC3+ is important, because as long as you do it right, you’ll have a much easier time using all the various tools and features of CC3+. For example, if you just draw that corridor an arbitrary width, and just state that “this is 5 foot wide”, that may work fine initially, but when you later try to add a 5’ foot grid you start to get in trouble because you need to figure out what size to tell CC3+ to draw your grid in. If you instead had been using scale properly all along, and the corridor was actually considered 5’ wide by CC3+, specifying the grid size would be as simple as just telling CC3+ to use 5’. This is just one of many examples why you should care about scale, and care about it from the very beginning of your map, not as an afterthought. CC3+ has lots of tools that helps you do your mapping, and there is no doubt that a lot of these works best when used at the correct scale.

In this article, we’ll have an in-depth look at the many instances where you encounter scale in CC3+ and explain how to work properly with these values, and hopefully demystify scale a bit. I expect a certain degree of familiarity with CC3+ for readers of this article, so I won’t be explaining where to find every button or menu element.

Map Scale

One of the first things that meet you when you create a new map is a prompt that requests the dimensions of the map (If you chose to base your map on a pre-defined template instead, you would see these values in the file names of most template you can choose from). Before providing the appropriate values, it is very important to understand what these values are. And this brings us to one of the most important aspects about scale in CC3+. In CC3+, your map is expressed in real-world units. CC3+ isn’t concerned about the size of your exported image or the size of your printout, CC3+ is interested in the actual real-world size of the area the map represents. So, if you plan to map an island that is approximately 700 by 300 miles in size, well, then you make a map that is 700 by 300 in size (or a bit more to make room for some ocean around it). Same if you make a battle map for miniatures, if the area covered by the battle map is 300 by 200 foot, then you enter 300 x 200, NOT the 8 by 11 inches the paper printout measures.

At this point you DO NOT care about print or pixel sizes, that is something you care about later when you are ready to print or export your map, not when you make it. Those of you familiar with working in image editing software may thing at this point, but wait, doesn’t the size I select now impact what quality I can make the map in?’. This is true for an image editor, because if you make an image 1000 by 800 pixels, it won’t be high enough quality to fill a sheet of paper when printed. But this is NOT true in CC3+. The size you pick here isn’t a pixel size and isn’t a limiting factor for final export/print quality, it is simply the size of the map. So, to re-state what I wrote above, in CC3+ your map is expressed in real-word units, so make to fill in the values according to the real-world size of the area you plan to map. Also note that the size of the map you specify here is not related to memory/CPU use when working with the map. There is no performance difference with working with a 10 by 10 map compared to a 10000 by 10000 map, the only things that effects performance is the amount of details you put into your map (and you can easily put as much detail into that 10 by 10 map as the 10000 by 10000 map if you so choose).

Ok, so we established the map dimension are in real world units? But what units are they in? miles? Km? yards? Feet? Inches? The short answer here is that it depends on the map type. For overland maps it is miles (or km for metric maps), while for city and dungeon maps, it is feet (or meters for metric maps). There are maps that uses different units of course, such as star maps which uses units such as parsecs, light years, and astronomical units. I won’t concern myself more about this for this article, because these also follows the same rule as above, the map size should be expressed in the real world size of the area to map, and the exact unit type follows from the type of map you are going to make. Just remember that fact, and use the values the template expects, such as miles (or km) for an overland map, and not feet. And don’t use print or image sizes, like inches or pixels. If you are unsure about what the correct unit is for the kind of map you picked, you can always check it by going back to the previous page in the wizard, the unit type is listed right below the preview image.

Now, the above is the simple explanation, and the one you should keep in your head for everyday use, but it will help you to understand a bit of how CC3+ treats units. CC3+ doesn’t really care about miles or meters or inches or whatever. In reality, all maps are specified in something called map units, which is the working unit of CC3+. That 400 by 300 foot dungeon, for CC3+, it is a 400 by 300 map unit map. That 400 by 300 mile overland map? Still a 400 by 300 map unit map. This system in CC3+ is what allows us to create any type of map we want, because we can simply define a map unit to mean whatever we need it to (The definition must be consistent within any one individual map of course). You’ll se term map unit being used many places, such as in effects dialogs, and the important thing to remember here is that one map unit means whatever unit your map is in. So when you set a shadow to be 10 map units long in a dungeon map, that means that the shadow will be 10 feet long, while doing the same in an overland map would result in a 10-mile shadow. Continue reading »