It seems an age since I really got my teeth stuck into a proper map e.g. one which wasn’t just a quick CC3 hack to print out a scale battle-map.

For my ‘Amber Pendant‘ solo campaign with my son, I needed to start detailing the northern borderlands of the Kingdom of Norbaer, as his character would be travelling through this region on his quest. In Tolrendor, this area is just to the south of the Nentir Vale (where my ‘Amber Tower‘ campaign is taking place) from the 4E source-books.

I decided to use the ‘Mike Schley Overland‘ style, which comes with CC3+ Beta, the new version of Profantasy‘s premier map-making program. Although I’ve had this installed for some time, I’ve hardly touched it, so that was a good incentive as well.

CC3+ was great to use: much faster than its predecessor, and very able to cope with leaving sheet effects turned on the whole time, as promised! In CC3, doing this was usually a recipe for white screens and frequent crashes. I also really liked the tool prompts displayed with the cursor, so you weren’t continually looking to the bottom of the screen for options.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the results, and here I am also very pleased with this style; in fact it may just have got to the top of the list of my preferred styles for area maps. Nice soft colours with excellent blending and effects, great bitmap symbols, and especially, gorgeous forests combining the simplicity of drawing tools with symbol fills.

Here it is: