ProFantasy's Map-Making Archive

There is no getting around the fact that CC3+ contains a huge number of symbols, especially if you own all the add-ons, symbol sets and annuals, and even more if you have installed some of the available free community made sets, or maybe even imported images you have found yourself as symbols.

We have different ways in how we like to go looking for symbols, but one way some people like is having a kind of symbol book they can flip through. I still have memories of software in the last millennium that often came with such printed books in their box, for example a clipart book showing all the clipart available in the software. These days, such books are not quite as useful, because as computers evolved and became more powerful, they started offering on-screen preview and search features. Still, sometimes flipping through a book, either in physical form, or a pdf on your screen can be nice. If you have a multi-screen setup, you can even keep that book on one screen and work with CC3+ on another.

Now, CC3+ doesn’t come with any such books, neither printed nor digital, but it contains the tools that allow you to make one for yourself.

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There is no denying that there is a lot of symbols available in CC3+, especially if you have several of the various add-ons and annuals. And at times, it can be hard to find what you want.

In CC3+, all symbols are arranged in symbol catalogs, and symbol catalogs are all associated with a map style. For example, the Mike Schley overland style have it’s own set of symbol catalogs, while the CC3 Standard overland style have a different set of symbol catalogs. CC3+ is set up this way to make it easy to find and use the symbols that belong to the current style, you should be able to access them simply by hitting the various symbol catalog buttons immediately above the mapping window. Symbols are deliberately divided into different styles because these symbols are drawn by multiple artists using multiple drawing styles, and very often don’t look all that good if you try to mix them on the same map. Just look at the mountains above. They all look good when used in the map style they belong to, but mixing them makes little sense. This is why when you click the mountains catalog button in CC3+ you will be presented with a symbol catalog containing symbols that fit your current map style instead of just the same set of mountains always.

Sometimes however, you do want to use symbols not part of your current style. Some styles are more compatible with each other than others, so there are certainly cases where a symbol from another style may look good. Generally in CC3+, you can always browse for any symbol catalog you want by hitting the Open Symbol Catalog button right above the symbol catalog and look for the right symbol catalog (They’re all found in subfolders under the Symbols folder in the CC3+ data directory). If you want to use many symbols from other styles however, this can lead to a lot of clicking and browsing, making creating your own symbol catalog a good idea. A custom symbol catalog gives you easy access to the symbols you have included in it, without impacting the official catalogs.

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A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about using the random dungeon feature for a map depicting the innards of a magical artifact.

I decided that just randomly exploring it could end up being a bit boring, so I decided to give the players a bit of guidance, to give them targets to search for without giving them too much information about the dungeon. And what better medium for this than a player handout that is a hastily drawn partial map of the dungeon found on the corpse of some poor adventurer who never made it?

So, I dug into the list of styles available to see what could be useful for something like this. I was looking for something that looked hand-drawn, but also something that looked like it was done somewhat quickly, maybe with a bit of care, but not some map drawn by a cartographer sitting at his desk for hours. In the end, I decided on the Sticky Note Dungeons from the 2024 annual. It might sound like a weird choice initially as sticky notes don’t really scream medieval dungeon, especially since this was an in-game map supposedly drawn by an NPC. But that makes this style really work for this purpose is the fact that it has drawing tools and effects that allow you to draw lines that look hand-drawn, and the included symbols also looks like something someone could draw quickly. So I decided to used that as a base and customize it for my needs to get what I needed.

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The cold season is here again, at least in the northern hemisphere, and white stuff is falling down outside my window.

There are a couple of nice styles for making winter maps, such as Winter Trail and Winter Village, but what if you just want to make your overland map look a bit more seasonal?

One of my favorite effects is the RGB Matrix Process. This effects may look a bit complicated if you just look at the dialog, but this is just all about simple mathematical manipulation of the color values. Using this dialog you can strengthen or weaken an individual color component, such as adding more red or less green. You can even completely swap color components around, for example swapping the red and blue components. CC3+ has other ways of manipulating colors too, but none of the other effects can accomplish the same as the RGB Matrix process can.

I’ve already explained the effect in another article a few years back, The RGB Matrix Process Effect, so today I’ll just use it to show you how to give a quick makeover to an existing map, you can read more about the calculations in the linked article.

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Last month, I wrote an article about Mapping as You Go showing off one technique I use for maps in my game.

This time, I’ll present another map I made last week for their next adventure. I had a situation where the characters encountered a misbehaving magical artifact. It was a small cube that could be used to summon a wizard’s laboratory that one could enter. Unfortunately, the thing started spawning random monsters instead, and now the characters have to enter it to shut it down.

To me, that meant that the Random Dungeon generator was a perfect fit. It gives a perfect starting point for a dungeon inside a magical artifact. I could focus more on the content of the dungeon, and not spending too much time deliberating the layout.

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I recently started a new role-playing campaign with my group. It is set in my existing campaign world of Virana, so I already have some higher overview maps and maps of various locations, but as often is the case with new campaigns, they take place in a small local area somewhere.

So, instead of making the map up front, I decided to go for a slightly different approach this time, starting with a blank map and adding stuff to it as players explore. This gives me a lot more freedom to accommodate the various whims of players, and it gives them a greater sense of being explorers as they simply don’t have a complete map of the area.

I thought I should share some of my thoughts and experiences around this with you, maybe you can use this idea in your own campaigns?

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In Informative Maps 01 – City Demographics I tackled how you can use demographics coloring to visually show the demographics of your city. Another very useful way to add information to city maps is the use of a map index. While an index can technically benefit any map type, it is especially useful in city maps because the density of information typically found in city maps, such as street and location names.

CC3+ has the ability to automatically generate such indexes from your map files, and show with a grid reference to make it easy to find the feature in the map itself. The command itself is extremely easy to use, but we can also improve things by being smart about our layers.

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There are lots of things you can do in CC3+, and often lots of ways you can do every thing. Today I am going to take a look at 10 quick things that are helpful to know for any mapper.

Note that the list is not presented in any particular order.

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Campaign Cartographer contains a host of nice features to help you make your maps. But it also contain some features whose functionality might need a bit more of an explanation before one understand how to use them properly, and why they on the surface might seem complicated when compared to a similar feature in an image editor.

One of these features is text. If you are new to CC3+ you might have experiencing that text sometimes appear to have a mind of it own, and you may have experienced behavior where text looks perfect as you place it, but when you zoom in or out, it may appear to no longer fit into the space for it, or that text you struggled placing neatly in the corner of the map suddenly expands into/over the map border.

So, let us have a look. Why can text be so troublesome at times? And how can we master it to make it work like we want?

Before continuing on, note that I did intentionally go looking for bad cases here. In many cases, you won’t notice this problem at all, but the idea behind this article is that when/if you encounter this, you should understand why, and how to handle it.

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A common way to label maps is to place a number next to an important feature (building, room, prominent location, trap, etc). The advantage to just using a simple number is that it takes less space in the map, making it look less cluttered, something that is very helpful if you need lots of labels in a small space. Number labels also doesn’t betray any information by themselves, so it can be used on dungeon rooms without players knowing their meaning just from seeing the map.

These markers can of course be placed using the regular text commands, but one very easy way that are often overlooked is to use the Number Label command found in CC3+. This command is designed to make it extremely simple to quickly place multiple labels with automatically incrementing numbers.

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