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:

Ravi Felicity starts making maps with two who?s

Take a look at Google Maps. Their satellite images give us stunning detail but are next to useless as road maps. To make a road map of the same area, Google removes extraneous information not concerned with roads and direction finding. They exaggerate the size of roads, colour-code road types for easy identification and label places of interest.

Google is an example of a good map-maker taking the information available to them and choosing what to include and, equally importantly, omit to make their map most useful for the reader.

So, when creating fantasy maps, the First Who? to ask yourself is Who drew this map?
It tells you how much the cartographer knows, what they would consider noteworthy, their map style and accuracy. Dragons may not consider lesser dragons to be noteworthy, but you probably would.

The Second Who? is Who for?
A miller wants to know about wheat fields, granaries, mills and markets; their map shows a skull to avoid but the dragon living under Scaremonger Hill is sadly omitted. A military map for a general shows terrain, fortifications, resources and enemies. Adventurers simply want rich pickings but are oh so easy to fool.

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 a series of articles by various authors we look at creating engaging settings for your games.

A Rough Guide to Castle Design

Part 1 – Who? and Why?

by Jon Roberts

In this article I’ll lead you through the design process I use to bring sense to my castle designs. It’s a process that puts reason into design, so that players’ questions have sensible answers. When a world makes sense to players they can imagine it, engage with it and use their heads to navigate its challenges.

There is of course a balance to be struck. If I spend too much time on the little details (how many pounds of meat a garrison of 20 need to store for the winter) then I’m not adding any value – that time is better spent on the evil villain’s master plan or creating truly fiendish traps to deter invaders.

To create a castle that makes sense, first we need to answer Why? and Who?

Continue reading »

A Rough Guide to Castle Design

Part 2 – The Room List

by Jon Roberts

The basic Why? and Who? can now be developed first into a list of who lives in the castle and then the living and work space they will require.

My castle is home to the lord, 10 elite cavalry and 25 soldiers. It will also house 10 non-combatants, including a castellan, chief herald, captain of the guard, and 3 or 4 senior servants. I also want a mage and a priest.

Now that I have the population I can quickly get an idea of the rooms we’re going to need. I think in terms of shelter, food and defence.

For shelter, it’s a question of thinking about how the population lives and allocating suitable space. My lord lives at the top of the castle, in a suite of rooms. On a lower floor I’ll have the second tier of nobles and important servants – the castellan I mentioned. I also want the cavalry to have a room on this level. The men at arms will sleep in the great hall – similar to vikings sleeping in the mead hall. It adds an obvious historic divide to the building from our own experiences. The non-combatant staff will be in a series of rooms one floor up. The mage and the priest will have their own rooms as they’re important but the mage should probably be in a separate area as his activities are dangerous and likely to give off foul odours. I also want a couple of spare chambers for visiting nobility and a small cell for a couple of prisoners. I don’t need a large prison because local justice is brutal and brief.

Continue reading »

A Rough Guide to Castle Design

Part 3 – The Floorplan

by Jon Roberts

To collect and transform the room list into a sensible layout I make a flowchart, finding this to be a simple way to list the areas and work out how they are connected or, indeed, isolated. You’re unlikely to get it right first time (the chart below is my third attempt) but that just goes to show that it’s time well spent. It’s much easier to fix a flowchart than a floorplan and lines added to a floorplan become an increasing deterrent to fixing mistakes.

Notice that there are already clear hubs. The great hall, the kitchen and a group connecting the Lord’s quarters, cavalry quarters and the chapel are all clear groups.

At this point we have the rough layout of our castle. Before we go any further, sit back and have a look at it. Think about anything else you’d like to add. In my case I want this to have a bit a twist. What if the castle is in a region that is beset by wyverns? To combat this, the castle needs covered walkways on the roof and battlements, and some means of combating the flying menace. I’ll add ballistas with alchemists fire from our wizard. I’m going to give our lord a gryphon too. This adds in an eyrie and solves the issue of how our lord might escape.

With these final twists laid in, I’ll do one final flowchart of the layout (below), now adding floors. This allows us to locate the stairs. If you’re feeling really keen you can always decide to place the fireplaces and chimneys here too. However, unless your players like turning into gaseous form and coming down the chimneys (mine do) you probably don’t need to worry too much about that level of detail.

Note that many of these groupings can be re-used in any castle. You can take the kitchen and stores and place them in a grand citadel, a hill giant’s lair or a mind flayer hive. I can re-use this castle structure for many situations with little chance of anyone noticing. Save yourself the hard work and re-use this work when you need to. If it makes sense in this castle, it’ll make sense in others too. Continue reading »

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:

Traveller was the very first Sci-Fi rpg I played, and among my first experience with English-language games to boot. Back then our Traveller GM had me buy a boatload of books when I was over in Princeton for a school exchange in 1986 (hey folks, that was before internet-enabled international orders). Therefore it’s escpecially thrilling to include Traveller-maps in the new Cosmographer.

Marc W. Miller is doing some neat  stuff in T5 too, like providing customizable ship-plans so that GMs can make their own version of the Type S scout courier for example. Of course this just begs for a CC3 version, where adding your own details becomes even easier than on a paper map.

So here is the customizable scout/courier deckplan that’ll come with Cosmographer:

Writer, game designer and award-winning potato salad maker Robin D Laws has written three posts about how he uses Campaign Cartographer 3. This is the first:

Campaign Cartographer, the Writer / Designer’s Friend

Part 1 – Better than the hideous scanned-in scrawl

Here’s a paradox for you. I consider Campaign Cartographer an indispensable tool of my work as a game designer and writer and use it on a regular basis.  I am at the same time a lousy mapper. When I see the gorgeous maps produced by Profantasy’s cadre of dedicated mapmakers and by its fan community, I am reduced to fits of envy.

After all these years of using the program, I lack mapping chops because I only infrequently use it for its intended purpose. Instead, I’ve press-ganged it into service as an outlining tool. I use it to create product mock-ups, build diagrams for game books, and, most of all, visually organize my thoughts when plotting fiction projects.

Continue reading »

Campaign Cartographer, the Writer / Designer’s Friend

Part 2 – Moving stuff around

by Robin D Laws

CC3 offers the primary benefit of a CAD-based illustration tool in a gamer-friendly form. Whether creating a map or using it for any of the purposes I’ll discuss below, that benefit is ease of editing. It lets you think visually, by allowing you to easily and continually manipulate its various elements. Changing either an element or its position relative to others proves blissfully easy.

When sketching out an encounter map for publication, you’re always going to realize midway through that you need to make an adjustment—you’ve left a tactical bottleneck at the entrance, placed a trap where it won’t get tripped, or given a confusing position marker to a creature. You can move stuff around in Photoshop or one of its equivalents, but it’s a pain. On paper, forget about it. Moving stuff around is what CC is all about—for me at least. Continue reading »