Broneslav's Progress: CC3 and Mapping Karameikos

I was fiddling with Campaign Cartographer 3 and decided to do a standard 8 mile per hex map of Karameikos. Looking at my 1 mile per hex map, I had started to wonder if it would become too large, so I thought I might amend it. CC3 will let you produce maps with hyperlinks that allow you to click on an area and the next map in the series will come up. One example of this might be clicking on a town icon on a larger scale map to see the town map. The town map might have important buildings linked to floorplans of those buildings.

I would love to do that for all of Mystara but need to work through the tutorials to learn how it works and how to structure it so that I can have a fully clickable map. The idea would be to work from the 8 mile per hex map so that each hex is clickable and brings up a 1 mile per hex map of the hex itself. Then, any settlements, dungeons or places of interest could be linked from the 1 mile map. In this way I could build a fully interactive map of Karameikos and surrounding areas as Broneslav explores the place. By building the map slowly I can avoid burnout, I hope.

In the meantime, here is the 8 mile per hex map showing Broneslav's initial travels. I think some of the settings still need tweaking, but it's ok. The red arrow shows his journey in the campaign so far (of course). The areas north of the Karameikan border have only been filled in along the route that Broneslav should take to reach Gray Mountain Village and then Selenica.

The world according to Ruarightania

His Most Beneficent Majesty, King Roderick I of Ruarightania, by the Grace of God most enlightened Monarch of our great Nation and Foe of all Unrighteous, commissioned a map of the worlde. His Royal Cartographer, Erik Duncan, has now completed this map and presents it to the ladies and gentlemen of the court.

I cobbled this map together as an overview map for our Lacepunk campaign, which will stagger slowly along until we get distracted by something shinier. I plan to do an improved version of it at a later date with added detail, but I thought I would show what I can do in Campaign Cartographer now. For the campaign I shall need to add area detail maps too, especially for Gateway City in Pacifica and wherever we place our imagi-nations. On that last point, I am tempted to place them in the Caribbean so that I can include units of pirates as conscript militia in my Maurice army. I am also very tempted to use my Black Hat Martians as a native army somewhere on this map. Hmm ...

Click the image for a larger version.

More fun with CC3

As I mentioned in my last post, the more I use CC3, the more I like it. This post covers my use of Cosmographer 3, the space add-on.

Our science fiction campaign will hopefully involve space battles at some point. After all, I have a Brigade Models SAC fleet or two sitting in the ULP, awaiting the addition of paint. Our fleets should be fairly small, given the small budgets available to our Pocket Empires, so we plan to use Starmada: Admiralty Edition for our games. Starmada is geared towards hex-grid play and they recommend a playing area of something like 22 hexes by 24 or so. For our purposes, the hexes need to be about 40-50mm across. We could just set up a space mat and play counting each hex as 2" on the table and measuring turns in increments of up to 60 degrees. I have a CorSec Engineering mat for this that I bought as a pdf and printed out. It is nice, but I suddenly got to thinking about how I might do this for myself in CC3 using Cosmographer. Hey presto, a couple of hours later I had a battle mat that I can print out for our games. It has a 2" hex grid and measures approximately 44" by 44". It still needs some fettling, but here is the Mk1 version for your delectation and edification (Click the image for a larger version):

I can't wait to start playing games on this, but first I need to buy some more ink! :-) I have also noticed that the more I work with CC3, the more I want to play with it and produce more maps. Perhaps I should give up wargaming as a hobby and take up map-making instead!

Battlemats in CC3

I have been experimenting with making battlemats in Campaign Cartographer 3. The more I use this program, the more I like it. My first efforts were for a Labyrinth Lord game that I ran over the past couple of weeks. I'm a figure gamer at heart so I decided to try printing out the dungeon floorplans from CC3. To my surprise, it worked really well. All I had to do was print the dungeon plan onto 160gsm card, cut out the elements and tape them together as the adventure progressed. Marvellous. CC3's facility for scaling and tiling the dungeon plan worked beautifully. Had I been willing to do so and had more time, I could have cut out each room and glued it to foamboard to make a more permanent set. I chose not to for reasons of expense and utility. The rooms are quite specific to that particular dungeon so reusability is limited. Still, it is an option for another time, when I have more time to think through the best way to do this. Of course, to 'save' money, what I really want now is a table with a rear projection unit built in so that I can just project the floorplans onto the table and save ink!

This is the ground floor of the castle that the players were evicting unwanted tenants from (Click the pics for larger images):

 Here are some photos from the session, showing the battlemat in use:

You'll always find the party in the kitchen

The party leaves a dead giant snake in the storeroom

An encounter with a cleric in the castle's chapel

Massacring defenceless goblins

Castle Caldwell - a couple of CC3 images

I've been playing some more with CC3 and came up with the following image of Castle Caldwell (Basic D&D module B9). It is based on a revised floorplan that I found online somewhere.

The adventure map:


The castle on a bright spring morning:


I forgot to switch off the text from the player's plan of the area, but that is not too much of a problem. Time to switch to a scale bar, I reckon. I've also just noticed that the trapdoors on the towers are casting shadows so I shall have to move them to a different sheet from the rest of the symbols I used, but overall I am rather pleased with the effect and usefulness for our Labyrinth Lord game. I reckon I am going to get some nicely atmospheric maps out of this package. Yay! Money well spent, and I don't even have to paint it!!

I have produced maps of the interior and the dungeon beneath the castle, but I shall not post those until my players have battled through them, just in case they actually read this blog.

A Map of Northern Karameikos - More Adventures with CC3

Ok, spent a bit of today fiddling with a map for our Labyrinth Lord game. The end result is this map of the area around the town of Threshold (Click for a larger version):

Looking at it displayed on the screen I notice some areas where I need to 'feather' the edges of the woods to give a less blocky feel. I could probably get away with fewer mountains in the mountainous areas too and the glow around the edge of the text needs fettling slightly to make the text more readable. Still, it gives the adventurers a visual aid, and I can fettle the map and add things they discover as I go along. The more I play with CC3, the more I wish I had this sort of technology in the late seventies when I first started playing Basic D&D.

Wargods and CC3 - Version 2

Ok, a couple of instruction videos down the line and I think I am beginning to understand a few more things. Here's the next version of the campaign map. Have I made any progress? I think so. CC3 seems simple enough to get the basics quickly but probably has a lot more subtlety to it that I may well manage to learn later. Hmm, Steve's a CAD wallah. Perhaps I should just point it in his direction and see what he makes of it.

Mapping Aegyptus with Campaign Cartographer 3

I have been considering putting together a Wargods of Aegyptus mini-campaign recently. It would be the first episode in a series that ideally would see the harbingers rise from lowly Ka1 wannabes all the way to Ka10 and possibly one of them becoming Pharaoh or restoring Osiris to the throne. The basic campaign idea is a simple one. The Harbingers must find the clues, which are located at significant named spots. Once all the clues have been found there is a climactic big battle. Each clue will add a bonus to the warband that finds it, so finding lots of clues will give an advantage to the warband that does this. So, I wanted it to be a map campaign and had drawn up a simple grid on paper. Then yesterday I weakened and bought Campaign Cartographer 3, primarily for mapping my Labyrinth Lord campaign but I produced an Aegyptus map first. This is the result, my first warts and all CC3 map using the basic package and no add-ons.

I was very surprised at how easy it was to produce this map. A quick whizz through the basic tutorial followed by a quick run through the CC3 Essentials pdf manual. A trip to the forum yielded a couple of clues about approaches and techniques too, as I read a few posts by first-timers getting their own work checked out, followed by looking up the topics in the main manual. So, that was Sunday afternoon filled up. I then spent an hour knocking this map together in the evening. I've tinkered with the settings a bit more today, in between running errands for my wife, but a small investment of time has yielded a perfectly usable map. It's not brilliant but I am quite pleased with it as a first effort. My next task is to try the same map using a different basic map type and see how that works. The range of icons available in the standard Vector style map is not as great as in the standard bitmap fill map, so let's see what I can do with the latter.

Overall I am very pleased with the basic CC3 package and how easy it is to use. I am not a great digital artist and have only sporadically used CAD packages in the past, so I am not an expert there. I use Photoshop Elements a bit, but this is not the same style of package and I am no great digital artist with PSE either, but I reckon that with a little bit more practice and thought I could be churning out competent maps for my games quite happily using CC3. I also suspect that I shall be spending a small fortune on the add-on packages too once I really get going!