[Download the FCW file]
Well met, Mappers! I come in peace. This month’s issue of the 2015 Annual is SciFi Downport. This issue, by Steph Mclea has drawing tools and symbols that allow you to put together a starport map for you sci-fi rpg campaign needs in no time at all. Truly, this map took me less time than maybe any I’ve ever worked on, and sci-fi is not my typical rpg genre to play or DM in.

It’s spring here in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York, yet I am currently hunkered down at home during Spring Break (I work in a school now) watching the SECOND snow storm since the beginning of spring blow outside my office window. It’s snowed more this spring that all of winter combined (our last storm on the 2nd day of spring brought me 20” of snow). With that in mind, I’ve been doing a lot of “winter” themed mapping and decided to do this starport on a polar planet, engulfed in snow and ice.

Using the river to divide residences and the “industrial” sector of the port, I simply placed some road where I wanted buildings to be and began dropping the easy symbols in this set. I noticed there is a drawing tool for “monorail” so I decided to create an elevated monorail by adding a sheet and adding a drop shadow to it. I also created a sheet for elevated buildings, such as the terminals and landing pad, and put a drop shadow on those as well.

This issue is super user friendly, and I recommend it for beginners and experts alike for your Sci-Fi tabletop needs.

About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy.

The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual is now available. It allows you to create an architecture layout of a computer network (or similar), either as a stand-alone map or an overlay on an existing drawing. Add a computer network to a research installation to create a new attack vector for your cyberpunk hacker, or to the enemy starship for your sensor and electronic expert to contend with.

The Annual issue provides both a full template wizard to create these maps from scratch as well as a drawing part to import into any existing map as an overlay. The mapping guide takes you through the slightly more elaborate process of adding the overlay.

The May issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2022 yet, you can do so here.

The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2021 contains the “Colonial Outpost” map pack, a large collection of pre-drawn buildings for science fiction gaming scenery. It depicts a colonial outpost or settlement with prefabricated houses, a variety of add-ons like a satellite dish, walls, and other little scenery pieces.

The sets are included as pdfs for immediate printing, but you can also modify and adjust the existing CC3+ drawings, as well as create your own designs with the accompanying drawing style. Dioramas 3 is not required to make use of the sets, but will be very useful, if you want to draw your own buildings. Cosmographer 3 can be useful for further flash out the scenery with additional symbols and textures.

The October 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.

This was a fun map that I put together in a couple of hours, and honestly most of my time was spent on names thanks to the Mapping Guide [HighSpace Galaxy].

(Download the FCW file)

I basically followed along Ralf’s guide and made a few personal touches here and there with some color changes. But otherwise I’ve done nothing special and this map came out pretty good, I think. This month’s edition couldn’t be any more user friendly for anyone looking to put together a map for sci-fi based game.

About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy. 

In yesterday’s Live Mapping session I combined tools from Dioramas 3 with assets from Cosmographer 3 to design the paper model of a simple communications tower. You can watch the video here:

As I was quite happy with the results and am currently building some science fiction terrain anyway, I sat down to actually build the model, straight from the print out of the session’s work. Here you see me messing around with paper cutter and glue to build the model:

And finally, here is a picture of the finished model, next to some of my other terrain. Click the image to download the FCW file.

Download the CC3+ file here. Note that you need the Annual 2019 installed to view it properly.

Download the CC3+ file here. Note that you need the Annual 2019 installed to view it properly.

Mapping with the Sci-Fi Base Annual

Mapping the floorplan of a Sci-Fi Base. Now, THIS was my jam. I finished the exterior map in less than 1.5 hours and then the interior in about 45 minutes or so. I flew through it. Why? Because THIS is what I LOVE about mapping….my mind was flying in 7000 different story arc directions as I was creating this pair of maps 😊

Now….I’d like to first start by saying I just started playing in a Starfinder campaign – although I REALLY wanted to play a Star Trek campaign, I got voted out – but space themed for sure since I can’t get anyone to jump on my Cthulhu bandwagon in my gaming group, but that’s a story for another time (Oooh I sure hope ProFantasy asks me to map the Annual with the Cthulhu city in it..now THAT’S a super fun city map pack). Anyway, I was pretty excited to map this base out.

I started with once again, following the Mapping Guide, since although I’ve had Cosmographer for years, I’ve hardly had a reason to use it, so I felt I needed some guidance with starting out here. Setting up this base was super easy following Ralf’s guide…along the way, as usual, tweaking a few things like adding an RGB Matrix effect to the Whole Drawing just to give everything a little greenish grey look….it IS an alien planet. I also added a sheet SYMBOLS IN DOME – for those symbols I wanted to show under each dome and a LIGHT sheet for the light effect I created for the spotlights.

Other than those simple modifications, and using some symbols in an unorthodox way, I pretty much stuck to the Mapping Guide. I decided to include the Hyperlinks in this map, since the Guide included it, although I usually do not use this for my own maps, though it IS a pretty useful too and quite easy to do.

I’ve said this once and I’ll probably say it like 9 more times before this year of Annuals is up, but read through the provided guides….it can take a bit more time than you planned on putting into a map, but reading through how the creator of the style or program put together their maps is hitting the jackpot of mapping knowledge in my book.

Have some fun experimenting with this Annual. I really had to refrain from using any of the other Cosmographer symbols I have (and for those that KNOW me, know that was VERY difficult, lol) because I really wanted to show this Annual as a standalone, as you do not need Cosmographer to get all these great assets. Now go… create your own Sci-Fi Base and share them on the ProFantasy forums!

About the author: Lorelei was my very first D&D character I created more years back than i’d like to remember. When I decided to venture into creating maps for my and others rpgs, I thought I owed it to her to name myself Lorelei Cartography, since it was her that led me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming in the first place. Since then I have been honored to have worked with companies such as WizKids, Pelgrane Press, and ProFantasy. 

Traveller by Marc W. Miller was the among the first science-fiction role-playing games ever published and remains a popular game to this day. It’s sector maps and starship deckplans are iconic images of the rpg hobby and of course we had to include compatible material when we produced our science fiction add-on Cosmographer 3. Let’s have a look at what we included.

The Big Picture

One of the signature styles of Cosmographer 3 is the big “Galaxy Map” style, and you might be tempted to recreate Travller’s huge “Charted Space” map in its beautiful blue, white and black colors. But you’ll find that is not necessary – as were tempted just as much and included this map as an example among the drawings that come with Cosmographer 3. Edit it to your liking and print it as a huge poster map if you like. Of course the matching template is there for you, if you have your own galaxy to map!

All the Sector Maps You Need

Apart from containing normal templates for Traveller’s sector maps, Cosmographer 3 also contains a very powerful data import feature. It draws the numerical data of a selected sector from the web (www.travellermap.com) and generates a full sector map from it, including x-boat routes and allegiance codes. Watching the import and auto-generation process alone is just pure, unadulterated fun.

You can create such map in the bitmap style as shown on the left, or in the classical black and white print style of the published Traveller books.

Of course the smaller subsector maps are also available as templates, again both in traditional black and white (as on the left) or Cosmographer’s bitmap style. Wile they can’t be automatically generated like the sector maps, you can easily copy the necessary content of the sector map over into this smaller section.

Let’s Swing around the Sun Once More

One of the less iconic but no less useful type of maps used in Traveller are the system charts, showing the planetary orbits of a star system. These show the distances of the various planets and other celestial objects from their central star.

As usual the templates are available both in a black and white vector style and a full color bitmap version (depicted here). As they are much less setting-specific than the sector and subsector maps, these are useful for almost any science fiction setting beyond Traveller.

Zoom in Closer

What would Traveller be without its world maps? Well, at least a lot less iconic. Of course Cosmographer 3 includes templates of the classic icosahedral projection, subdivided into hexes. These come in a variety of sizes, scaled to the standard UWP (Universal World Profile) designations of the Imperial Scout Service.

One of the two versions of the style depicts the world as if shown in a satellite image (while keeping the hex map aspect) and the other as a clear and simple vector abstraction, ideal for planning and hex crawling. The symbols depicting the terrain features in this style were taken directly from the Traveller 5 draft document (Cosmographer 3 was released before T5).

And How Do We Get There?

Last but not least, Cosmographer 3 has the templates for the most important aspect of the Traveller setting: the starships. The classic black and white style is straightforward to use and shows everything clearly, but of course the Traveller ships can also be mapped in Cosmographer’s own more elaborate bitmap style. We’ve included templates for two of the most used ships in Cosmographer 3, the 100t Scout and the 200t Free Trader. The maps are outlines only, so any custom interior design can be added to the deckplan in minutes.

After Cosmographer 3’s release we ran a poll to see what other ships our users wanted to see and added the three most popular selections as extra downloads for free.

All of these maps and styles and much more non-Traveller specific resources are available as part of the Cosmographer 3 add-on for Campaign Cartographer 3+.

Dive into the depths of space with the June Annual and the Mandible-class starship. Inspired by the Ashen Stars RPG by Pelgrane press, this set of four deckplans shows a complete starship in high detail. An extensive sheets & effects guide discusses the different sheets and effects used in the drawing, so you can apply the principles to your own designs.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2015 yet, you can do so here.

It’s time for some futuristic maps with the March Annual issue that has just been released. Steph McAlea created a set of symbols and textures that makes drawing planetary star ports a snap. Grab the style pack “SciFi Downports” from your registration page.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2015 yet, you can do so here.

Joe has been so kind to create a video tutorial to go with this month’s Annual issue (High Space System Maps). Way to go, Joe!