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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Last month, I looked at how to add information to your city map by using demographic coloring. Today, let us see how we can add descriptions for map features, like a building, that can be shown with a click.

For example, this can be used to add a note to each house describing who lives here, or if it is a business, what they do, what they sell, opening hours, prices, and more.

The basic idea here is that we will use CC3+’s map notes to store the actual information, and then we will add a hotspot to the relevant buildings to make it clickable and display the text. There are several variants around this, like making the hotspot open up a webpage or hide/show text placed in the map itself, but let us stick with map notes for now.  Continue reading »

Everyone loves a pretty map, even me. But there is also more to maps than their visual appeal, it is the information they convey. An aerial photo of your hometown may tell you exactly how it looks visually and how it is laid out, but it provides very little information about what can be found where in the town. And this is what separates a map from a photo, the additional information it contains that explains what we see in the map.

Today I’ll look into a feature from City Designer – City Demographics. City Demographics in CD3 is a coloring system that lets you color buildings by function (for example residential, commerce, accommodation). This is also a toggle feature which means you can show a nice pretty map for illustrative purposes, and when you need demographics, you can simply turn it on temporarily. Continue reading »

If you have ever looked into the art directory folders (symbols/fills) inside the CC3+ data directory, you may have noticed one thing, there appears to be four copies of every file. Why is that? And why is four files better than one file?

Well, the answer here comes down to quality and performance.

The main issue that occurs when computers need to display an image on the screen is that the image must be scaled to fit the place it is being displayed. And this is not a free operation for a computer, it is actually a bit of a resource-intensive one. If you look at any random overland map, like the example map from the manual shown here, you’ll see that it is full of symbols. But all those symbols are pretty tiny. When zoomed out so you can see the whole map on screen, even in full screen, each of those trees are only something like 25 by 25 pixels on screen. Obviously, the symbol itself is much bigger, because it is not supposed to just look good when zoomed out like this, but also when you zoom in closer. And that means that for every one of those trees, CC3+ will have to take a much larger image, load it in to memory, and then resize it there before putting it on screen. A modern computer can do that pretty fast, but a map doesn’t just have one symbol, it can have thousands of them. And this process needs to be done anew each time you change the map view, like scrolling or zooming.

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One nice thing you can do with CC3+ maps is to have multiple views embedded in one map. For example, in the Forest Trail annual style, you can choose if you want to see the treetops, like you would normally see a location in a forest if viewed from above, or if you want to hide the canopies so you can see what actually goes on under the trees, quite important for a battle map.

There are also cases where you want to make a map with private information for the gamemaster, and a public version of the map for the players.

Or maybe you need an overland map with a lot of information, perhaps showing both political information, economical information and climate information, but showing it all at the same time looks pretty messy.

Of course, if you have used CC3+ even just a little bit, you know that I am talking about hiding and showing sheets here. For the overland map, you can have one sheet with a political overlay, one with economic information, and one with a climate overlay, and only show the desired sheet, simple enough. For your GM’s secrets, just put them on a sheet by themselves that you hide when you export the player map.

But, what if your view requires switching on and off multiple sheets? Due to different effects, that political overlay may actually consist of one sheet with political borders, one sheet with the text associated with the information, and maybe another sheet with symbols related to this overlay. Once you have multiple sheets involved, it can get a bit harder to turn on/off the right sheets for any given occasion, which is what we’ll have a short look at today.

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