How did I get into this mess?!

It was an easy enough problem, with an apparently easy enough solution; I wanted to draw maps for my Role Playing Gaming, and I wanted consistency; common symbols, common method of making the maps, and so on.

That's the thing about proper Role-Playing Games: You use a truly hellacous amount of time preparing the adventures you're gonna send your payers through, if you're doing a good job. Preparation time tends, in my book, to mean five times, often more, than actual playing time - did I just say "often"? Strike that. Make it ALWAYS. And five times? Scratch adventures, maybe. Truly complex or tournament level adventures (I used to write a fair few for Millennium's End at UK Gen Con events a while back) take MONTHS for a few hours game play. yep: I'm that picky, lol.

Anyhow, I needed something that was vector based for ease of file size (raster = big, vector = small); I needed it to be cheap (I'm a flintskate!), and I needed it to be both popular and easy to use.

Popular, yes. Easy enough to use? Hmm... Oh well... one out of two ain't that bad, I guess!

Enter ProFantasy Software...

Remembering back to a Games Fair event at Reading University waaaaay back many years, I remembered a small company called ProFantasy Software, and a DOS (yep, I'm 42 years old at the time of writing this - sue me!) program they did called Campaign Cartographer. It was vector based, and, if they were still going, several years later, maybe they'd updated the program to Windows level. So, a quick search on Google resulted in their website, and the then current version called Campaign Cartographer Pro 2. So, I nipped up to Leisure Games in Finchley, and bought a copy, went home agin (of course - where else was I going to go?!), and installed the software (good: Dead easy!).

Then proptly fell over in confusion.

It wasn't really that intuitive. But then, I'm not a CAD/CAM designer, I'm not of the Digital Generation (see my age above), and since it's back-end programming is heavily based on a popular full-blown CAD package, I suppose I shouldn't've been surprised.

But it got me thinking. If the problems I encounter, that aren't listed in the help topics, or in the sometimes overly complex in the help files, or in the truly massive 8 meg PDF manual downloadable file, are ones I could easily stumble across and wind up pulling clumps of my rapidly thinning hair out at, what about other folks in the same boat?

Kinda makes you go "Hmmm..." doesn't it?

So here we are...

This, then, is the sum of how I've got to grips with the latest version of Campaign Cartographer, currently CC3; as time passes, more will obviously be added to this website; I hope it helps you out in solving your CC3 problems; I've certainly had an education in finding out and/or discovering how to get the most out of this remarkably cheap and useful software!

This entire web site (including the quirky humour) is © 2007 Roger Stenning, All Rights Reserved.
Campaign Cartographer is © ProFantasy Software, All Rights Reserved.