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Many of us remember, and were inspired by Pete Fenlon's wonderful maps for the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game. Today, Pete is Chairman and Studio Director at Mayfair Games. In January, with Pete's permission we released a style pack for making maps in his style as part of the Cartographer's Annual 2008.
Steve Townshend produced this beautiful map in the Pete Fenlon style.
It uses only specially designed vector symbols combined with CC3's effects to get the right look.
Style packs are preconfigured so that if you select a tool (for example, rivers, roads and terrain), it looks right for the map style. To create a forest, you just select the forest draw tool, click points for the border, and it does this, adding random tree tops and edge trees.
You building up mountain ranges by selecting a symbol, then placing. They are selected randomly from a collection of symbols. So this was one click per mountain, and the mess at the bottom is a mountain cursor. You can tab through random styles if you don't like the current mountain at the cursor.
The distinctive ridges are also built up of symbols. On the left, with CC3 effects off, on the right, with them on.
 
Although the styles definitely make it easier to create maps such as these, Steve Townshend demonstrates that the human touch is still required to get an aesthetically pleasing map - style packs just make it easier to get the desired effect.
You can download the map in CC3 format here.
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Always keep some spare oil handy. A simple animation produced from screen captures in CC3 by Joe Slayton who has been working on lighting effects and Fog Of War. Expect to see these lighting effects released in the Cartographer's Annual 2008 in the New Year, with examples and instructions and eventually in CC3.
( Animated gif behind the cut )
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I'll be at Dragonmeet this year with Ralf ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) uthoroc for ProFantasy Software, and Jérome and Sasha pond823 for Pelgrane Press. Give me a shout out if you are going to be there.
For ProFantasy, we have some advanced copies the Cartographer's Annual. This consists of all of Ralf's work on the subscription site over the year as a single product. It's extremely good way of getting a variety of attractive maps done in a short time. 
fig 1: Ralf's brain in a DVD case
We have 40 advanced, specially printed copies of Trail of Cthulhu which arrived in the nick of time. I had to find the super-secret UPS overlord number to stop them being sent back to the State. gbsteve will be running GUMSHOE demos most of the day. 
fig 2: hah, hah, hah, I've got one and you haven't
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This month's Cartographer's Annual features a cathedral which makes extensive use of effects. As well as the map itself, Ralf has included detailed instructions on how to recreate the effects on your own maps. For more info see thesubscription site.
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Work in progress of next month's Cartographer's Annual entry courtesy of uthoroc behind the cut. It gives an idea of what to expect with Cosmographer 3 when it comes out.
( CC3 in Spaaaace... )
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As promised, here is an analysis of the advantages of our subscription product, the Annual.
For the consumer, the product can be changed to meet their needs. We can react to users' feedback and provide the tools they want. The subscription keeps on renewing itself; each month's issue can be absorbed fairly straightforwardly and provides very quick results. They get miniature products that we otherwise could not include in major add-ons, or would get lost in the mass of material we include.
For the producer. Usually, each product is a large, up front investment. For a subscription product, this is no longer the case. We produced a few months up-front, but not the whole year's worth. Each month is a discreet, self contained product which is easy to manage, and doesn't require huge resources to implement. A month's entry can be slotted in between other work. Each month, when the new material is announced and released, we get a little blip in sales, and after a year, it becomes a self-contained retail product. We don't waste time producing material which isn't popular. Finally, as time goes on, the product becomes more and more attractive.
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We've released the second month of the Cartographer's Annual. This month Ralf gives you the tools to create city maps in the style of John Speed. It's quick and painless. I'll discuss the advantages of the subscription model in another post.Here's a sample:
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On of our users, Grimur Fjelsted the webmaster of mapventures, has created a map with the Mercator style pack. He reports that it took him 30 minutes from first encountering the style pack. I played with the original for a while to fine-tune the effects, but not much needed doing apart from decreasing the default transparency on the symbol colouration, so that the towns, mountains and other symbols are not quite so see-through. This is the original map.
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Ralf Schemmann uthoroc who is creating the ProFantasy Cartography Annual 2007 shows another example of what will be included, a Gerard Mercator-style map.
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Master Mapper Ralf Schemmann will be creating a subscription product for ProFantasy. It will include a monthly release of updates of new styles, symbol sets, floorplans, templates and other goodies for ProFantasy users. We've been considering this idea since late 2004, but Ralph's creation of a style pack based on Sarah Wroot's Symbol Set 1 symbols and Cyrandon map spurred us into action.
For the full map, see this sample created in CC3.
The 2007 annual will include at least a couple of months of 2006.
Let us know what you'd like to see in it.
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