Last Friday's playtest took me to run my first full town assault with two squads and two sniper teams. It was fun, lots of fun, but it showed the limitations of the map selection. I had a hodge podge of building interiors and a small college community with some real photos of the city taken from Google Maps.
The next mission leaves the frozen Georgian mountains to drop the teams in the heat and sand of the middle east. For this adventure I want to create a custom town just for the mission so I'm firing up Campaign Cartographer (CC) and learning a few tricks to create a convincing city and "dungeon" map in one. Thus giving the players a real city with building they can storm into at any time!
CC has three modules Campaign Cartographer itself for large kingdom maps, City Designer (CD) for city maps and Dungeon Designer (DD) for dungeon maps. To create the city I began a map with CD and put some buildings, roads and areas with grass and dirt as shown below. I selected CD's middle east buildings for an extra touch of detail.
When I'm done laying out the buildings, landmarks and ground detail I open up the floorplan creator dialogue. This will automatically create floorplan maps for the buildings. I select the type, specify the number of above ground and below ground levels and give it a name.
This creates a nice set of floorplan maps with the building outlines already laid out for me. From there on it's my job to fill in the inner detail like I've shown below. To do this I switch to DD's toolset and use its set of dungeon icons and room/floor design tools to fill the inside of buildings. I can easily switch between floors with the convenient menu on the lower right and fill all the building's floors with tons of detail.
Once I'm done I can export the maps to my preferred image format and upload it to Roll20 and be ready to play the next mission!
Disclaimer, I'm by no means affiliated to ProFantasy Software.
CC3's page http://www.profantasy.com/products/cc3.asp
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