For this month we have a few very useful symbols for the Symbol Set 6: Isometric Cities (but which could also be used on overland maps). These Isometric Bridges can be extended to variable length to span any width of river, gorge or similar terrain feature.
Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of Symbol Set 6 to showcase the symbols in proper surroundings. If you don’t have SS6 installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. Symbol Set 6 – Isometric Cities 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. Mike’s new symbols are the last link in the list. All the content of year two up to and including February 2023 is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
EucalyptusNow over on the Profantasy community forum posted an excellent little tutorial on creating decorative symbols by tracing graphics from other sources, and we thought it would be great to share this on the blog. So break out your mapping tools and follow along.
This is a tutorial for creating vignettes / decoration symbols out of rounded polygons by tracing existing images.
I’ve more or less stumbled upon this method, after I wanted a spider to decorate a map and could not find one exactly like I wanted, so I drew/ traced it.
Step One: Determine what you want for your map.
Based on the opinion of a certain younger member of our household, I’m going to use a unicorn as an example. It should be suitable as a crest, stamp or as a general map decoration.
Step Two: Find a suitable source image:
This image could be any drawing, picture or even photo. The most important thing is that the general shape of what you want to trace matches what you want.
Please keep copyright in mind if you are planning to use the created symbol for a map you are going to publish. I try to use public domain images whenever possible.
After some searching around, I’ve found this public domain crest on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blason_ville_fr_SaintLo_(Manche).svg Continue reading »
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If you own a lot of ProFantasy products, or have installed one or more of the large community symbol packs, you will have a lot of symbols. By default, CC3+ will give you easy access to the symbols belonging to the current map style through the symbol catalog buttons immediately above the map window, but sometimes you may wish to search for other symbols not made for the current style, which may fit anyway. But how to best find these symbols? Let us check out a few ways which may be of assistance to you here.
Good news, dear map-makers! We are happy to announce that starting in June 2021 (i.e. Now!) we are releasing regular free content for Campaign Cartographer 3+.
This is available as a separate download from your registration page (among the CC3+ downloads) and will be rolled into the full CC3+ setup and upgdates regularly.
We start out with a batch of symbols for elven places by Mike Schley, expanding his overland style. Show your ancient elven civilizations with cities, towns, villages, holy groves and castles in their deserved splendor! Download it now from your registration page now, the new symbols will be integrated into the Strcuture catalog of the Mike Schley Overland style.
While most CC3+ styles have a good selection of symbols, including multiple variations of the same symbols, such as multiple different trees, mountains, tables or statues, you can get into an issue of repetition if you need lots of these symbols.
One of the ways to alleviate this is to apply different scaling, rotation and mirroring to these symbols. Just a subtle change of scale or orientation helps reduce the monotony of a lot of the same symbols. This can of course be done manually, but CC3+ symbol catalogs contain a cool feature for helping with this, namely random transformations. Random transformations are a configurable way to automate this process on a symbol by symbol basis, ensuring that it makes sense for each symbol it is applied to. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to have a random rotation of a mountain in an overland map, that would probably look weird given the isometric view of these symbols in most styles, while a table in a tavern may benefit from free rotation. The same mountain may find use in random scaling to vary it that way instead.
You’ll find that many of the official symbol catalog already use this technique by default, but it is easy to set up yourself, either to apply it to your own custom symbols, or to existing symbols when using them.
The second Annual issue of 2021 is a huge collection of symbols created by Sue Daniel: More than 300 ribbons, scrolls and seals to serves as titles, labels and other map ornamentation. Banners can be places at different widths, and parts can be combined to create multi-line scrolls and ribbons. The symbols can be used on an any map and the accompanying guide teaches you how to make the catalogs available in any style.
The February 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.
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When using CC3+, you may have encountered symbols with behavior, like houses that aligns to and offsets from the wall and doors that align to, resizes themselves to match and cut holes in dungeon walls. These are what CC3+ calls smart symbols. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these symbols and we’ll have a look at how to make our own smart symbols. I’ll be using DD3 here, but this functionality is not restricted to DD3, and can be used in any kind of map CC3+ can produce.
Try it out
Before making our own smart symbols, to see the existing ones in use, try out how dungeon door reacts to differently sized walls. Start with a new small DD3 dungeon, draw a wall using the wall drawing tool (I recommend you right-click Default Wall and pick a nice looking one) at any angle. Then, make sure Snap (bottom right corner) is turned off and then pick any door from the Wall features catalog and hover the cursor over the wall. The door symbol should rotate to match the angle of the wall, and once you click, you’ll notice that it actually cuts the wall where it places the door. These are two of the features of smart symbols, aligning to existing entities and cutting lines.
In CC3+, each template is designed for a single style, which comes with it’s own symbols, fills and tools, while the resources belonging to other styles are not directly visible in the GUI.
This is intended behavior, because it puts the chosen style in focus. You know that all the elements you are being offered are designed to work with that style and fit with the visual design of the style. This behavior is both a blessing and a curse. Keeping the focus on the style is good. If you own everything, you’ll have about 40.000 different raster symbols (and a lot of vector symbols too, but I don’t have the count), you really don’t want to filter through all of these all the time when working on your map to find the ones matching your current map style, that’s just hugely impractical. But every now and then you want to be able to mix map styles, and you know of a couple of styles that work very well together. How can you easily access all the symbols from these styles?
One of the features for CC3+ symbol catalogs is the ability to arrange these into groups, and then set this group to place random symbols from the group, or apply random transformations to them, like rotations or minor scaling to give variety to otherwise identical symbols.
But, what if you are making a particular map, and you need some other kind of grouping? For example, when placing trees you want to randomly place Decid, Pine and Jungle trees among each other? There are no predefined group like this in most symbol catalogs. Well, for that you can quite easily set up your own personal random collection just for the current map (or you can save it into a symbol catalog if you want it available later).
For this month we have a few very useful symbols for the Symbol Set 6: Isometric Cities (but which could also be used on overland maps). These Isometric Bridges can be extended to variable length to span any width of river, gorge or similar terrain feature. 
If you own a lot of ProFantasy products, or have installed one or more of the large community symbol packs, you will have a lot of symbols. By default, CC3+ will give you easy access to the symbols belonging to the current map style through the symbol catalog buttons immediately above the map window, but sometimes you may wish to search for other symbols not made for the current style, which may fit anyway. But how to best find these symbols? Let us check out a few ways which may be of assistance to you here.
When using CC3+, you may have encountered symbols with behavior, like houses that aligns to and offsets from the wall and doors that align to, resizes themselves to match and cut holes in dungeon walls. These are what CC3+ calls smart symbols. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these symbols and we’ll have a look at how to make our own smart symbols. I’ll be using DD3 here, but this functionality is not restricted to DD3, and can be used in any kind of map CC3+ can produce.
