Joe Sweeney has started a new series of mapping tutorials, this time on old school dungeon maps. As always, there’s tons of things about CC3 (and Dungeon Designer) you can learn from his videos!

So far two parts of the series have been released:

Mark Fulford and I formed ProFantasy Software back in 1993. At that time, Mark sold CAD systems (computers with pre-installed software) and I had just finished university. We are both keen gamers, and the idea of combining Mark’s knowledge of CAD with roleplaying to create campaign maps was attractive. The difficulty was finding a CAD program which was even vaguely close in price was the main problem. Enter Mike Riddle, creator of AutoCAD and later FastCAD and EasyCAD. He was willing to take a risk on us, allowing us to have a license to FastCAD at a price which enabled us to resell it to gamers, and only 200 or so licenses all told. We simply removed dimensioning, an essential feature for CAD designers, but not so important for gamers.

Over the years Mike has rewritten the software for his customers, but also taking into account our customers and ideas, improving the interface and functionality for both standard CAD users and cartographers. Next week, for the first time, Mark and I will be visiting Mike in person out in Phoenix, partly to come with new ideas for the next version, but mainly because we’ve never met despite long conversations and creative endeavours over nearly 20 years. One other person who worked with FastCAD is Peter Olsson, who then created most of the code for our add-ons and added buckets of functionality to the core program. Peter has worked in the ProFantasy offices and also with Mike in person, and he’ll be joining us.

It’s a long-delayed meeting, and I’m looking forward to it.

[STOP PRESS: Mike Schley, who has created a new overland style for CC3+ lives in Phoenix, and we'll be meeting him to discuss future cartography projects.]

Related Sites

• The history of CAD and Mike’s company Evolution Computing
• Peter Olsson’s company PK Data (Swedish)
• About ProFantasy

[Ed: This is a map created by Rigtje Schootstra, Leviathus on the forum]

Hello everyone!

It’s world map time! These maps are from my project Lion Head. The world is called Eterna.

Below the first map, made with Campaign Cartographer 3 (using the Mercator Style), which is based on my hand drawn map (see below this map). The position of the continents is a bit different than my original drawing, but I had to fit them in the two spheres without shrinking the map too much. Most of the place names and political borders are still placeholders.

The map I drew in Photoshop. Here you can see the names of the continents more clearly.

Enjoy guys.

~Cheers! (Original post here)

One of the things I like most with making maps is when you have to decide where your different countries and cities will be placed. But how can you do this in a convincing way? Where shall you put your cities? As always we have to look at our own history and learn.

If you look back in our history nearly all early cities started out close to water. Before we had good roads waterways were the highways for travel and transportation. To be able to start up a city you needed a surplus of goods and food, so not everyone needed to work. So that some people in the community could start doing the administrative tasks to keep it all together. Living close to water made those things easier to happen.

When that happens a smaller tribal village can evolve into something larger, a city, and in the end a great kingdom or empire. Of course this description is very simplified, but still you can say that this is the foundation behind the growth of a society. Maybe you have to add in things like learning to write, minting coins and technological advancements in building techniques. But without a surplus in production those other things will never kick off.

So how can you use this knowledge in your mapping?. Well when I make my maps I usually wait to plot out borders for countries and their cities until all the terrain is done. When the terrain is done I try to locate places in the map where larger cities might lie. If you look at the example map below I’ve marked out some locations with red circles. Those places are where I probably would put the larger cities in the map.

But not all cities are located close to water, so where should you put the rest of the cities?. To find out this the next thing to do is to draw roads between the large cities. When you’re done have a look at the map for crossroads, crossroads are typical places for a city or town. A place where people travelling to and from different locations meet, and goods can be sold. In the example map below I’ve added some roads and cities at the crossroads.

We now have a good base for our kingdom with some logically planned cities and towns. Next step is to continue adding in more towns, but this time towns that might not feel logically placed in the beginning. When a kingdom continue to evolve other more rare resources gets more and more important, like gold, silver, iron etc. Try to add towns in places close to where they can acquire resources for the kingdom. Also think of how the goods will be transported to the main towns. If you place a small town in the mountains where they mine silver and you have a river close by they would probably found another town next to the river so they easily can transport the silver, instead of transporting it all by the road. In the example map below I’ve added in some towns where they can collect resources.

You can continue this way and add in more and more towns. After adding the towns you add in more roads, more roads means more crossroads that leads to more towns. If you try to build up your map this way the placing of your towns will feel logical which will give you a better and more believing map. And while mapping you might even come up with an idea or two for an adventure.

Reposted from mapping worlds.

Last Friday’s Deadlands Reloaded campaign session saw a tough battle against a Chinook – a weather-controlling cross between a wolverine and a Kodiak bear in the Deadlands setting. It was fought on the shore of a mountain lake and I created this battle map for the occasion, making special use of the snow and ice bitmap fills includes in Symbol Set 2 – Fantasy Floorplans. The tree symbols are from CSUAC.

Click on the image to to download a full-size miniature-scale pdf and go to the ProFantasy forum to download the CC3 file.

A little late for January, perhaps, but here is the latest newsletter.

News

• The January issue of the Annual 2013 has been released. Subscribe here.
• A new bundle in the ProFantasy collection: The Top Three.

Resources

• A new CC3 user writes about his first experience.
• Forum user anomiecoalition talks about his desert-themed designs of Brightstone Keep and the Buried Temple of Ifar.
• The December and January roundups of user-created maps.
• How to gift ProFantasy’s software.
• A battle map of an underground lab and hide-out.

Map-Making Articles

• A new video tutorial by Joseph Sweeney about aligning side-view and floor plan maps.
• Forum member Flavion comes up with a unique new overland style for his Myrr dominion map.
• Pär Lindström uses the last year’s December Annual style (of his own design) to create the Vadsbro overland map and combines City Designer 3 and Photoshop work for a great city map of Farjvad.

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[Ed's Note: Let us know if you like this style, and with Flavio's permission, we'll create an Annual from it]

My fiancée recently asked me if it would be OK to make a Viking character for my Al-Qadim campaign.  I thought about the role playing possibilities for a moment: Viking gets lost at sea en route to pillage and plunder; Viking gets shipwrecked in hostile desert environment; Viking PC makes for a very interest game indeed.  I then thought about where such a Viking would come from in my world and set about creating a map of his home.

Myrr is a semi-arctic region largely inspired by Scandinavia, Iceland, and Alaska.  I spent a great deal of time looking over maps of their fjords and river systems in the hope that I could create something similar and believable in my own map.   After an hour or two tinkering around with the fractal line tool (adding a river here, indenting land mass there, etc), I finally had a landmass and set of islands I could be happy with.

The next step was to create the mountain range.  I first drew the main ridge of the mountain and all the little ridges that branch off of it with the smooth poly tool. This is what the looked like without effects on.

I gave it a rather long and dark wall shadow, a deep edge fade inner (with 75% inner opacity), and a large lighted bevel effect (so that the two sides of the bevel met in the center of the polygon).  I then added a Mountain Hills sheet that encircled the range with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect.  Next, I added a Mountain Base sheet that encircled the Mountain Hills (also with a smaller edge fade inner and lighted bevel effect.)  Because I wasn’t thoroughly happy with the colors that were coming out, I finalized it with a Mountain Cover sheet.  This shows the details of the effects:

And this is the final mountain range:

As you can see, I also used the Mountain Base sheet to layout my hills.  I further added a Hills Base sheet that encircle these hills and had a deep edge fade inner to give the illusion of height.  From there I added some forests (very subtle), rivers, text, (about a dozen assorted sheets to get the ocean, landmass and desert looking right) and called it a day.  All of the textures came from Herwin Wielink annual and CGtextures.com.

This map was a great deal of fun to make and I learned a new technique for mountains in the process.   Of course, the best part is now crafting a history about this region to help fill in the gaps of my fiancée’s character’s back-story.  Although I’m far from done, you can check what I have so far (along with a full resolution version of the map) at my blog.

We’ve gone into 2013 and our community shows no sign of letting up with the barrage of wonderful user maps. Here’s the roundup for January!

KenG was inspired by KROM’s wonderful close-up maps/paintings done in the Herwin Wielink overland style. The result is this beautiful local map.

Continue reading »

This is my latest map made in City Designer 3 (CD3), plus some effects added in Photoshop. It depicts the village Farjvad in the province Vadsbro and is part of the campaign/adventure I’m working on at the moment, even though I’ve mostly made maps so far.

Farjvad is situated about a day’s trip north east of the main town in the area, Vadsbro. Farjvad won’t actually be of importance for the adventure I’m writing, but it will still be a part of the campaign information. As you might have noticed I like to make maps, and making the adventure/campaign gives me some good reasons to do that. I also figured out that if I only have maps of the villages where the adventure takes place the players will rather quickly figure out what places are of importance and which ones are not. Also this will make the adventure feel much more unscripted if the players can go wherever they pleasein the area and the GM will have a nice map of the place.

So how did I go from a blank page to a finished map? What shall you think about while making a village map? First of all you have to decide where the village is situated, is it in a forest or a desert? The environment gives as well takes away possibilities for the map. In my case I know from the overland map of the province Vadsbro that Fjardinge is a village that is founded on two sides of a river, only connected via a ferry in the middle of a large forest.

I also decided that the south part of the village was the old one and that the north side is the new part where recent expansion of the village has taken place. Because that the village is situated in the middle of the forest there had to be some place for the villagers to go for protection if some kind of crises turned up. In this case I put a keep (nr 5 on the map) where the governor of the village used to live with his soldiers, maybe ten of them at a max. I could have gone with a palisade but in this case it didn’t feel right.

I also added a temple (nr 4), all places must have somewhere to go for religious need. The ruined temple (7) just outside the village was deserted when the new temple was done. What resides there today is up to the GM to decide.

Nowadays most travelers are using the northern road that leads from Vadsbro to the village Klyvholm. For this reason a newer part of Fjardinge has been built on the northern side. To make the sides differ a bit I decided to make the fields more square here, like they’ve been planned a bit. The big house at the square (nr 1) will also house the governor of the village (he decided to move here from his keep on the south side).

What I’ve actually have done here is making a story around the village and letting the story lead the way while mapping. I think I’ve stated this before but having a story in your head while mapping usually makes your maps more interesting, which means a better end result. It is also a lot more fun to map when you have a picture in your head of what the place looks like, it is like seeing your ideas come to life.

Originally posted on mappingworlds.wordpress.com

Joe Sweeney has posted a new video tutorial on his YouTube channel. While aimed at aligning side views and floor plans of starships, the technique can be used just as well for dungeons and buildings.