First Look: Character Artist 3

Character Artist 3 by ProFantasy Software is their latest Campaign Cartographer addon. It allows you to create impressive character portraits with ease even if you can’t draw if your life depends on it.

ProFantasy’s Ralf Schemmann was actually nice enough to provide me with a free review copy of CA3 a while ago, and today I was finally able to give it a closer look. The Character Artist 3 completely integrates with CC3, so if you’re already familiar with Campaign Cartographer, you’ll know your way around in no time.

CA3 comes with various templates that allow you to either create character portraits (like the one to the right) or you can create whole sheets of printable paper miniatures, or single counters. Putting together a character is a pretty easy and straightforward process. Creating the character on the right actually took only a couple of minutes and it looks pretty impressive, if you ask me.

In order to create your character protraits you basically just pick and choose parts. At first you pick a head, a left and a right arm, a torso, and legs. There is artwork for both male and female human, elf, halfling, dwarf, half-orc and monster characters. After putting the various body parts together, you can add clothes and miscellaneous equipment. CA3 makes clever use of CC3’s sheet feature, so that clothes appear on top of the body, and things like belts etc. appear on top of the clothes. But you can also move sheets around in cases like when a character’s braid should be partly concealed by one of the arms.

CA3 contains over 9000 symbols and you have full control over every aspect of your character. If you are only slightly proficient with CC3 you can easily create character portraits or paper miniatures for your games in no time. In addition to the humanoid characters CA3 also includes full monster figures (see below).

What I like about CA3 a lot is that it is probably the CC3 addon that is the easiest to use. If you use the existing elements as they are, you can create impressive looking character art in mere minutes. Of course CA3 gives you all the freedoms you know from CC3. And since everything is fully compatible, you can use character art in your maps and vice versa.

The only aspect I don’t like is that CA3 is for fantasy only. Some artwork for SF or contemporary characters would have been cool, but I guess ProFantasy will add additional artwork in the future. Overall I like CA3 a lot and I will definitely put it to good use in the future.

You can buy Character Artist 3 directly from ProFantasy Software and it sets you back £27.95 (about $46 or €33).