Dungeon Designer 3

Let’s go Spelunking.

Last year, ProFantasy updated their flagship Campaign Cartographer to version 3 and now they follow up with an upgrade to Dungeon Designer. This add-on to Campaign Cartographer comes packed with hundreds of new symbols to use and adds tools to make dungeon designing much faster and easier than before. Although Dungeon Designer 3 is an add-on to Campaign Cartographer, it does have limited use if you own Dundjinni or Fractal Mapper 7 as the new symbols are all in a bitmap format and can easily be read by the above programs or any image editing product, like Photoshop or GIMP. While you cannot use any of the dungeon building tools in this way, the art is plentiful and gorgeous with a good mix of things you would expect to find in the dungeon. Besides the normal assortment of walls and doors, there are religious pieces, traps, stairs, ladders, natural formations, random debris, elemental items, furniture, weapons, and humanoids.

In the 10 by 10 room you see…

After installing the product, it takes a click of a button on the toolbar to bring up the new tools. Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of documentation for Dungeon Designer 3 and this is one of the few flaws with the software. You can read the manual for Dungeon Designer 2 (which is available as a free download) since the behavior of everything is essentially the same, but some step-by-step tutorials showing what the new stuff can do would go far in introducing the new user to the power of the software. Once you start figuring out how the software works, it becomes obvious that it can do a lot. There are two basic ways to create a dungeon. First you can click on the Add Room button, select the type of room you want and draw it on the map. Continue doing so until all of the rooms are on the map and then click on the Add Corridor button and click until all of the rooms are connected. In addition to drawing the rooms and hallways, these buttons also fill in the flooring with the fill of your choice. Once all the rooms are done, just click on the various symbols to fill them up with different props and your map is done. The second manner is with the Dungeon Geomorphs. In essence, these are pre-built sections of rooms and hallways that you stamp down on the map. Keep stamping until you build your dungeon and then add any additional decorations you desire. As you can see both ways allow you to quickly build a good looking dungeon with a minimum of effort. The additional tools in Dungeon Designer 3 do nothing to slow down Campaign Cartographer’s speed.

Is that a stalactite or stalagmite, I can never remember?

In addition to man-made dungeons, Dungeon Designer 3 has tools for natural caves and other formations. Much like Campaign Cartographers terrain tool, the Default Cave uses a fractal algorithm to create natural looking uneven walls for caves and passageways. There are also tools for water and other terrain types, although they lack the fractalization feature. Building underground caverns is fast and the end result is quite attractive.

So what else is down here?

There are a lot of other little features to Dungeon Designer, such as the ability to link maps to Campaign Cartographer maps and instantly jump between the two, that are nice but may not be used by a majority of people. Also, every map designed in Dungeon Designer 3 is scalable, allowing printing from index card to battlemat size with no appreciable loss in quality or scale. Campaign Cartographer 3 is fully capable of building dungeon maps, but Dungeon Designer 3 makes it a lot easier with its built-in tools. Also the addition of the new symbols, all dramatically upgraded from their Dungeon Designer 2 brethren, make this a compelling purchase to anyone with underground mapping needs.