Another style coming up

Lately I’ve been working hard on a new style for Profantasy. As you can see in the test map of the style it is a black and white style that hopefully will work very well in print.

I have always been very fond of the old fantasy maps like the ones you found in the hobbit and the lord of the rings, black and white and very clean looking. Recently I’ve also made some old school dungeon maps so I thought that I’d like to have a black and white style that would work with these.

First I only had some mountains, forest and rivers and simple icons for cities/towns but when I was asked by Profantasy if I could turn it into a style for them I decided I had to expand the number of symbols and textures that could be used. I’m still convinced that you should keep things as simple as possible with this kind of maps, this is really a style where less can be more. Let the negative space in the map do its job. But now this one won’t be just for me, and there might be a million reasons why someone wants to include some symbols that I wouldn’t. So I decided to work through the list of symbols that are the most common in the styles released by Profantasy. Then everyone can decide for them self what to include.

The first map I made in the style had quite a lot of water in it, and while looking at the map I felt that the water area of the map was a bit empty compared to the land area with all its symbols of trees, mountains and hills. So I decided that I would add in some monsters like you have in old maps. The inspiration to the included monsters is from an old Swedish map called the Carta Marina. In this map the sea is full of strange and scary monsters and snakes. Of course there had to be a ship or two as well that fearlessly sails through these dangerous waters.

Making these monsters and ships has been a great challenge for me, I haven’t done anything like it before and I really had to push myself to the next step to make them. But it has been great fun and I must say that the monsters are probably the symbols I’ve enjoyed the most to make in this style. They’ve also inspired me to some more ideas for future maps, but more of that in a later blog post.

The style is not completely done yet, I still have some small things to finish up and I need to make a compass and a scale bar. But you should all be able to see the finished result this summer, if you subscribe to the Annuals.

Vadsbro

In the last post I published a mind map for an adventure, now it is time to start making maps. First of all I need a campaign map of the area where the actual adventure will take place, with that one in place it will be easier to plan the other maps I need to draw.
To make the map I decided to use the style I made for the December issue of the Annuals from Profantasy. The style was made for creating campaign maps for smaller areas, so it will fit very well for this map.

The adventure will take place in the country Armadien, close to a city called Vadsbro (Littlebridge in my Armadien map). Vadsbro is situated close to the Armadien border, next to the Traal infected Skymningsskogen (dusk forest) and the Traal mountains, so there will be a lot of forest in the map.

As soon as I started on the map I realized that I had to improvise a bit with the style. The main feature in the map, except for all the forest, is the river that split up in two rivers closer to the mountains. The rivers in the style aren’t really suited for depicting a main river in this scale, so I decide to use the ocean texture for the rivers. In this way the river will look more like the dominating natural feature in the area.

The river tool however comes in handy to show smaller rivers connecting into the main branches, but I had to change the colour of the rivers to blend in more with the main rivers. When I created the style, which is based on my Truscian map, I wanted the rivers in a darker colour and the ocean in a lighter one. That works very well if you do a more zoomed out map. But if you zoom in closer to an area for a map, and you suddenly want to use the ocean textures as rivers, the colour for the river tools don’t really blend in. So I decided to change them.

It is actually quite funny how a style you’ve created yourself, suddenly needs to be trimmed when you start working with it. But I think you can say that for all styles. At least I always trim the styles so they’ll fit into my way of working.

Now that the map is done it will be easier to decide what more maps I need to do. You can say that I’m making my adventure from the maps, the story I have so far will probably change a bit with every map I make. But that is the fun part of mapping, to weave a story around your maps instead of making maps from your story.

Artrage saves the day

So finally the style I’ve made for Profantasy has been released. I must say that I am very pleased with the end result and the work the people at Profantasy has done to turn it into a style. It actually feels kind of strange to make a map in CC3 and use graphics you’ve done yourself.

One thing I’ve learned from making the style is that my biggest strength when it comes to mapping is the big picture. With this I mean things like placing terrain in the right places selecting colours that blend good with each other etc. The small things are usually what cause me problems, things like symbols for villages, towns, fortresses and so on.

So in making this style I really had to push myself into areas I’ve avoided earlier and I’ve learned a lot from it. The process actually started some time before Profantasy contacted me about the style. When I decided to start to make more close up maps of the Etrakien world I really had to start to make symbols for cities and villages, but I didn’t feel ok with the things I produced. If you for example look at my Armadien map you can see that all the city icons actually are from different styles in CC3. None of them are my own artwork.

But I felt I had to jump the cliff on this and make some icons on my own. I think the biggest problem I had was to transfer my drawing techniques to the computer. And it was first when I discovered Artrage I felt that the pieces started to fall in place. With Artrage I got the tools that made me feel like I was drawing on paper again, but instead everything was done digitally.

So I started to look through tons of videos on youtube and reading articles about Artrage to learn the program. Of course I also had to do a lot of testing and drawing in the program. But in the end I actually made all the line work for the December style’s symbols in the Artrage, for different reasons I however did all the colouring and shadowing in Photoshop.

So for me working on the December style for Profantasy has really forced me to push my mapping skills to a new level and I now feel much more comfortable when it comes to making symbols for future maps. But you can really say that Artrage saved the day here, so buying that program was probably some of the best money I’ve spent.

The map in the beginning of the post is a map made by Ralf Shemmann and is a remake of a map from the lone wolf adventure books in my style. I feel that it very much accomplish what I hoped for while working on the style. So hopefully some of you who subscribe to the Annuals will find it useful.

The storm lands

This month’s annual for Campaign cartographer 3 from Profantasy offered a very good looking style based on the world map of the upcoming role-playing game the “13th Age” by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet.

I always like to try out new styles so I thought I should give this one a try too. Usually when I make maps I try to make a story around it. If you let the map visualize your story it is often easier to make it more unique and the details will kind of come more naturally. The drawback of working in that way is that it takes much more energy from you making a map, so this time I decided to just make a map without weaving a story around it.

The style itself was very easy and quick to work with. Most of the terrain is made up from seamless bitmap files so making mountains and other types of terrain goes really quick. The mountains however gave me some problems. Sometimes it was hard to get the high peaks in the places where you wanted them. But luckily enough the style also includes single mountains you can add to the mountain texture, which made the process easier.

If you look at the map included in this post I guess it took around three hours to do it, and then I probably spent as much time on labeling as I did on the actual map.

One thing I didn’t like though was that when you added the sheet effects to the map the seas didn’t get any effect added to them. When I made the map I had two larger seas, the sea of pain and little sea, that where close to the oceans. When those seas didn’t get any effect they looked strange compared to the nearby oceans. I tried to add some effects to the sea layer but because the ocean layer lies below the land layer and the seas are on top of the land layer it was hard to get an effect that looked exactly the same.

Apart from that I liked the style and if you want a map in a more stylish satellite style I can really recommend it.

A quick map for a game

One of the best strengths when it comes to Profantasy’s product line is that the products are easy to use and good at producing great maps in a fairly short time.

I’ve decided to introduce my two oldest kids in the world of roleplaying, and if you’re going to play with someone for their first time you need to make an impression on them. So you need maps!

We talked a lot about how you play and that you don’t have any gaming board that you use. I said that it was a bit like playing a fairytale. They both thought it sounded great.

The system we used is called Äventyr, a roleplaying game for children made by a Swedish guy and his eight year old daughter. It is very simple but works really good as an introduction.

In one of the first adventures I played with them they had to enter a mine and get rid of the dangerous Trolls that had moved in. To make it more exciting I made a quick map in Dungeon designer 3 of the mine. This map took me about an hour from start to finish. Nothing fancy or complicated, but it is great that you in such a short time can make something that actually looks good and pleasing to the eyes.

And do I need to say that they loved it

City of Lost Souls

There are places in the world where the souls of the dead and lost still roam. Those places are rare to find and if you find one the chances are that you never leave. This is the City of Lost Souls situated in a river delta between the countries Truscia and krug in the Etrakien world. The town is surrounded by ancient ruins from a since long forgotten past. Mostly there aren’t more left of the ruins then the foundation on which they once stood. But some larger buildings are rather well preserved and beneath the ground there are vast catacombs and even areas where whole blocks of the old city have been covered with earth. These parts are now excavated during the days to uncover artifacts hidden by the soil.

But among the ruins the souls of the dead still walk and guard their hidden treasures, or at least that is what people say. But strange things do happen, it is as if the world isn’t as solid everywhere in the old city as it should be. As if alternative realities shine through the fabric of this world, and if you don’t watch your step you might find it very hard to get back to from where you started.

To find your way through the labyrinth that the river delta form you have to follow one of the guiding boats. It is said that only the one that knows the true name of the city can find its way here. And the secret is well protected by the selected few who knows it.

The city itself prospers from the diversity of old artifacts that are found in the ruins that surrounds it. It also harbors some of the world’s most famous pirates that pay well for the protection that the city gives. More than once enemy fleets have tried to find its way up through the delta, still none have succeeded.

The map is done in City designer 3 (CD3) from Profantasy combining the included styles A and B with the latest annual city style by Jon Roberts.The end result from CD3 has then been quite heavily edited in Photoshop, where the labeling also has been done.

In the next post I will go through the process of creating the city. Until then you can have a guess on which two real world cities that inspired me while making the City of Lost Souls.

Crossroads

This months annual from Profantasy is a new city style designed by the Fantasy cartographer Jon Roberts. This is the third time that one of Jon Roberts themes are presented as an annual. The two earlier versions have been an overland style and a dungeon style.

I must admit that I’ve really looked forward to the release of this annual. First of all I love city maps and CD3, secondly Jon Roberts is a very skilled cartographer and illustrator so I expected some really nice graphics in this one.

As expected all the graphics are top notch and I especially like the walls and towers. To test the style i decided to make a rather quick village, called crossroads, situated in the middle of a forest. The style was easy to work with and if you have done maps in CD3 before there isn’t really any new things to learn here. One little feature I liked however was the ability to make nice shadows on the hills. You can clearly see this on the hill where the temple of life & death (3) is.

After finishing the map there are some things I felt I need to work a bit more on next time I’m using the style. First of all the fields didn’t turn out great in the map,probably I have to try to put some more time on them in the future. When I started doing maps in the included styles in CD3 it took me a long time with trial and error before I got the fields right. So I have some more testing and practice to do here.

Another thing to think of is that in this map I had quite some open space between the forests and in the background texture you can see a pattern. I think the solution here is to add in some more different textures to hide the pattern. If you look at the included map in the annual you don’t see this pattern there.

At last if you look at the trees in the forest you can see that the northern forest has the trees more closely to each other. I actually think they got too close so in the southern forest I put some space between the trees. This made the forest look much better, in my opinion.

Overall I think the style is really nice. I like the darker colours of this one compared to the included styles in CD3 (which means less editing in Photoshop for me) . Still it takes some time to get to know the feeling of a new style, to get all the things in place in a good way. This one surely needs som more practicing for me before I’m there.

As usual I added the labeling in Photoshop, and I also selected another font. If you want to use the font I used it’s called Blackadder regular and can be downloaded from dafont.com for free.

Dwarven gate

I’ve always been very fond of Dwarves and their mines as a great location for an adventure. I guess you can blame this on Tolkien and his description of Moria. I still remember how excited I was when I saw the Lord of the rings on TV for the first time (now we’re talking about the old film, not the new ones) and they entered the old mines full of orcs.

This map however is only of the entrance to a Dwarven kingdom. It is made in the Dungeon Designer 3 add on for Campaign Cartographer 3. The style used is from the 2011 annual, Jon Roberts Dungeon. This particular style is actually free for anyone to download.

When I map some kind of fortification I always try to picture how an attack on the area would be done. How could I defend the area in the best way? Whoever that want to get past the fort has to pass through the entrance hall (1) on the map. So I wanted the entrance hall to be well guarded, I accomplished this through the watchroom (5) next to it. From there the guards can watch who enters and also shoot at them. The inner iron door will hopefully prohibit any hostile intruders from getting any further in.

The two towers facing the outside (4a-b) are also good spotting areas from where you can see who’s approaching as well who’s standing in front of the gates. I try to continue thinking in this way while mapping, other important aspects are where will the guards sleep, eat or relax? Remember this is a place where the guards probably spend a week at a time before they are relived.

In the end I also added the secrete passage (11). This passage shouldn’t really be there because it is a huge security risk. The reason I put it there was that if some adventurers need to sneak in past the guards they need a way to do it. So the passage was added to make the map more fun to use in an adventure.

This was the first map I made in Dungeon Designer 3. The program however I feel is the most complicated one from Profantasy, mainly because there are so many different things you can add and have to take into account. It took me a long time to realize that I in this map actually by mistake used the wrong beds and tables (they are from another style then the one I intended to use). So it was very good to have the pdf from the annual style to use as a guide while exploring the program. This however doesn’t mean that this is a bad program in any way, probably the contrary. But it crave from you as a user that you take the time to learn it.

Southpoint

This is a map of the city Southpoint, situated in the southern parts of the kingdom Armadien. The map is done using the same technique as the one I described in my tutorial I ran earlier here on the blog, but on a much larger scale.

The map is done in City Designer 3 (CD3) from Profantasy, but edited with various effects in Photoshop after completion in CD3. CD3 is probably my favorite program from Profantasy and I’ve done quite a lot of maps using the program. Mostly small villages and medium sized towns. The programs strength is that it let you create a very convincing town or village in a very short time, compared to if you did everything by hand in a program like Photoshop. It is easy to place houses and trees and there is a great variety of different textures of more “important” buildings you can as easily use.

Even if the program in most cases work great there are some smaller drawbacks with it. First and mainly it has a tendency to crash,and usually this happens when you haven’t saved for a long time. Which makes you loose a lot of work. So saving as OFTEN as you can is a must. Also when you use a predefined style the end result tend to be a bit ordinary, that’s why I like to process the maps in Photoshop. To give them a more unique look and feeling.

When you create a larger town like Southpoint you need to do a bit more planning of the city then if you’re mapping a small village. When I made Southpoint I started by looking at some older towns in Google earth, which is a great and fun way to spend you time . In this way I tried to see how I could capture the look and feeling of a town, that would make Southpoint look more convincing and real.

When I started on the map I began by creating the landmass and sea. I then decided where to put the inner town wall an designing the streets in the inner more compact part of the city. At this stage I put in the roads that led into town and decided where to put the gates for the outer town wall and how the wall itself would stretch. I now had a inner dens city surrounded by a city wall and an outer city wall with roads leading up to the inner city from the maps lower end.

Next step was to try to figure out where people would settle down in this area. usually people start to build houses around the city gates, you need to have a place to stay if the walls are closed and after arriving in the town you might want some refreshment or selling some of your goods. At this stage I also tried to decide what roads will be used more often, because these will be cobbled, where might the squares be situated, any other landmarks I want to put in.

A good thing to do here is trying to pretend that you are a visitor to the town. When you enter the city through one of the gates what can you expect to see? Where would you go to look for an inn? Are there any temples near by? In this way it is both fun and inspiring to start building your city, and often I come up with a lot of ideas in this way.

So after completing the map and working in the way described here I came up with the following story regarding Southpoint.

Southpoint used to be a free city with close connections to the City state Ankh-Bathor further south. But the King of Armadien couldn’t accept it’s freedom (well he obviously wanted part of the money). After some short battles and long negotiations Southpoint agreed to be a part of the Armadien kingdom and pays a yearly tax from it’s vast trading income. A lot of very influential people in the city (mainly traders) don’t like this and want there freedom back. With support from Ankh-Bathor they are plotting against the king. Unfortunately some are also looking for help in the shadows and nightmares where seldom good deals are done.

The lands of Dunver

One of the best things that Profantasy has released is in my opinion the Annuals. If you buy Campaign cartographer 3 from the company you get a really great program, but if you want it to shine you really need the Annuals. It’s here that all the gems are hidden, all those great styles that will let you create fantastic maps.

So every year I buy the annuals, of course not all months include a style that I want or need, but you always learn a bit or two from the including pdf, that you will get every month. So if you want to become a better mapper with Profantasy’s products I can really recommend the Annuals.

This year I’ve decided to try to make a map of all styles that are included in this year’s Annual. So every month I will try to make a map of the included style, as long as it is possible. Some months you don’t get a style from which you can create a map, then it is hard to do a map from it.

So this month you got the Overland Satellite style in the annual. I really liked this style, it is very different from the other styles you have in the program, which is refreshing. It also turned out to be a very easy style to work with. The more stuff you put into the map the better it will look.

When you start the map I can recommend that you put in some time while creating the coastline of your continent. As you can see in my example the coastline is a bit too straight. I realized this half way through the map, so I didn’t bother to go back and change it. But if I’d start a new map in this particular style I’d try to make it a bit more uneven.

I also had some problems with the rivers. For some reason, that I don’t know they always turned out much fainter after having exported them via Cute pdf. In the end I increased the glow on them a bit, which made them OK. But if I decide to make a map in the style in the future I probably will make the rivers in Photoshop.

I also decreased the glow you have around the continent, I thought that the original setting was a bit strong, but that is just my taste. I also made the labeling in Photoshop, but the reason for that is mainly that I work so much faster in Photoshop then in Campaign Cartographer 3, so I decided to take the quick path here.

Anyway here is the final result, The lands of Dunver.