The May issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 is available, presenting a tool pack for drawing extendable and variable stairs on dungeons and floorplans.
Dear map-makers, it’s time to look back at another month of mapping goodness in the ProFantasy community. Here are some of the wonderful maps our community members shared in April. Enjoy!
For those of you who haven’t seen them, we do a live mapping session on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+. This is the most recent one, showcasing the Annual 2024 Annual issue:
Merry meet, Mappers! We’re down to the style for 2016, bringing us to the Dark Realms Annual. This set is meant to stand alone, yet it also can be used in combination with two other styles in this year’s annual, Scorching sun and Realms of Legend by TJ Vandel, both of which I’ve given you basic sample maps. This wraps up the overland styles for 2016 available in this amazing annual.
I just love this one, along with the Scorching Sun. The textures are some of my favorites for overland mapping. The little bunches of woods and forests are just…..chef’s kiss adorable for me. As usual with overland mapping, I struggled….these maps tend to take me much longer than my worth in mapping sometimes, but I stick to it, to improve and get over my geographic anxiety of where and why everything goes where it goes. For my own personal use…..my players no nothing about nor do they care about where mountains are, or if the rivers flow rightly….plus I can use magic and supernatural explanations for the aberrations in geography. For a map I am putting out there on the internet for the world to see? For the River Police that once plagued, and may still, a popular cartography web page? Well, that just stresses me out. After getting over my anxiety, I just relaxed and mapped what felt right. I think it looks good, and I sure hope you do, too.
The only thing I did here was make a few adjustments in PS to the png with the contrast. I love how my maps look on my screen in CC3, but once saving them, they often change appearance, especially since I save at such high resolutions, so that my maps are still clear enough for VTT play when I size them down to the usual 20MB limit most VTTs have, sometimes I make some minor adjustments outside of this incredible program.
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.
Do you need more variety in your cultures and settlemens? How about adding some Asian-themed farms, villages, towns and cities to your maps with the latest free monthly symbols by Mike Schley?
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 the current year (January to April 2024 so far) is included in the one download.
You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.
The May issue of the Annual 2024 is now available and presents a tool pack for drawing extendable and variable stairs on dungeons and floorplans. No longer limited by symbols of fixed length and direction, the included drawing tools greatly expand your options.
More than a hundred new drawing tools add functionality to popular dungeons styles (DD3 Dungeon, Jon Roberts Dungeon and Dungeons of Schley), but can also be added and used in any other dungeon style. The accompanying mapping guides teaches you how to use and edit the tools, as well a how to set up your own.
The May issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2024 yet, you can do so here.
Campaign Cartographer is not designed to be a tile-based mapper, rather it is designed to be fully free-form where you can shape things as you want. But sometimes, having a set of pre-made tiles available can allow us to throw together a map quickly, or to serve as inspiration.
Most CC3+ styles doesn’t come with such tiles, but creating our own tiles for use in later maps isn’t difficult, although it is a bit time-consuming if we want lots of nice tiles available for our use, but it can also be a nice relaxing activity, and each individual tile can be finished relatively quickly once you have your basic framework ready.
Tiles can be used for multiple purposes, like battle maps, dungeons, space stations and cities. And of course, a tile in CC3+ isn’t fixed and locked once made, you can make a dungeon using tiles, and then still add or remove individual items after placing the tiles.
Tiles can also be printed and used for assembling a quick location on the table for miniature play.
In this article series, I’ll take you through the creation and use of such tiles, and we’ll look at some of the more advanced options available in CC3+ to make the best tiles. Continue reading »
The April issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2024 is available, providing a new city style by Pär Lindström for drawing 18th to 19th century city maps.
Bundle of Holding is running a Profantasy MEGA offer with tons of our software at an amazing price.
Resources
Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping videos from our playlist on YouTube.
We are already late in April and its high-time to look back at the maps produced by the community in March. Here are some of the highlights I’ve picked out, enjoy!
Hello Cartography Friends! We are down to our last two sets….both Overland. Not my favorite, as you would know if you’ve been following along and have read my blurbs. However, I usually do my best work under pressure….I guess that’s why I trained as an Emergency RN as my nursing career choice, lol. Organized chaos is my Roman Empire 😊
Anyway, this style is one of three ins a set overland styles offered this year, along with Scorching Sun and Realms of Legend. All three of these sets, created by the talented TJ Vandel, were made to work alone, or in combination with one another. In this example, I’ve just followed along with the mapping guide, so as to decrease my stress of where I wanted things to go. It just flowed nicely. I really like the clean look of this map and decided to keep it simple and free of clutter.
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.
Campaign Cartographer is not designed to be a tile-based mapper, rather it is designed to be fully free-form where you can shape things as you want. But sometimes, having a set of pre-made tiles available can allow us to throw together a map quickly, or to serve as inspiration.
