The Cartographer’s Annual December issue is now available. We’ve expanded last month’s hand-drawn dungeon style significantly with lots of new symbols, textures and drawing tools, specifically aimed at enabling outdoor battle-maps at the same amount of detail as the dungeon floorplans already possible. Enjoy the large example map of a logging camp and the mapping guide detailing the outdoor parts of the style.

The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.

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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News

• Humble Bundle is re-running the Map-Making Mega Bundle. Even if you already own CC3+, this is an amazing way to round out your collection.
• The November issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available, bringing you a a new, hand-drawn dungeon and floorplan style.
• The November free monthly symbols add more sea, ocean and coastal symbols to the Hand-drawn Fantasy style.

Resources

• Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping video from our playlist on YouTube.
• Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for October.

Articles

• Remy changes his mapping tactics and starts mapping on the fly in his latest article.
• A recent scientific project publishes an amazing zoomable map of the Roman road network. Use this as inspiraton for your maps.

Reminders

• CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
• Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.

What lurks beneath the ocean waves and threatens to destroy those fragile wooden boats sialing on the surface? Map the dangers of the sea and promise those sailors a watery death, if they don’t chart the right course. From the fearsome leviathan via water spouts and icebergs to the treacherous sandbars hidden just below the waves, the latest free mnothly symbols let’s you populate a sea of adventures.

Note that the example maps included with this free content make use of the full Hand-drawn Fantasy style from the Cartographer’s Annual 2025. If you don’t have that Annual installed, you won’t see these correctly, but you can still use the symbols on other maps. The Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available for purchase here.

To download the free content go to your registration page and on the Downloads tab, click the download button for Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus. The new symbols are listed there. All the content of year (up to September 2025) is included in the one download.

You can always check the available monthly content on our dedicated page.

Welcome dear fellow cartographer’s to another round up of awesome maps! Have a look what wonderful places the CC3+ community mapped in shared in October. Thank you everybody for your awesome work!

Ute Gundacker mapped a whole underwater science station using the Modern Blueprint style from Symbol Set 3. I definitely want to see more of this!


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If you’ve missed any of the live mapping sessions we do on YouTube most weeks, showcasing a certain style or set of tools in CC3+, you’ll find them archived and organized into playlists on YouTube. Here are the most recent ones:

A story about modern maps and ancient geography appeared in my newsfeed recently, and I found it very inspiring for my own map-making. A scientific project has assembled the latest archaelogical and historical finds about the road system of the Roman Empire into the most comprehensive digital atlas yet (there have been others previously).

This is Itiner-e, a zoomable road map that can be displayed as an overlay over contemporary maps. It paints an amazing picture of the transportation network of the Roman Empire and for our purposes can serve as wonderful inspiration for fictitious places of similar technological level.

It also great fun to look around places where you live and have traveled too. While I live in a part of Germany that the Romans never colonized, and therefore none of their roads a close by, I did find an old Roman road in Wales that I have hiked on a few years back.

Brughmans, T., de Soto, P., Pažout, A. and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup, P. (2024) Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads. https://itiner-e.org/

The Cartographer’s Annual November issue is now available. Seeing the popularity of the Hand-drawn Fantasy style from May and June, we decided to expand this kind of symbols to the Floorplans and Dungeons map types, and the result is this new set. Use more than 140 new, hand-crafted symbols to map building and underground lairs.

The November issue is now available for all subscribers from their registration page. If you haven’t subscribed to the Annual 2025 yet, you can do so here.

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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• The October issue of the Cartographer’s Annual 2025 is available, bringing you a detailed map pack of Delomoro Keep by Kevin Goebel.
• October free monthly symbols expand the Hand-drawn Fantasy style with dwarven and orcish settlements.

Resources

• Watch or re-watch the recent live mapping video from our playlist on YouTube.
• Check out the community’s Maps of the Month for August.

Articles

• The cartographer travels to into the past of his role-playing career with a weekend retreat and the Borbarad campaign.
• In his latest article of the “Informative Maps” series Remy explains the map index function of City Designer 3.

Reminders

• CC3+’s current version is 3.98. Check in Help > About and if your version is older, run Update 28 for CC3+ available from your registration page.
• Join our community of map-makers on the Profantasy forum and/or the Facebook group.