How to Google Earth your campaign world.

Okay, so finally here goes. I have been busy writing a homebrew type 3/type4/Dark Heresy hybrid so I took a while to finish this post. More on the homebrew later.

I first got the idea from the Cartographer's Guild Forums whilst looking for something that I could use to map, and then zoom in and out, to draw things that players had discovered and that I had randomly improvised or generated, or to annotate areas.  Google Earth is pretty close to that goal, unfortunately though you can't directly draw a map into it, but you can annotate and draw polygons and all in all, do some pretty awesome stuff.

Before starting. Turn off everything in the bottom sidebar so that Michigan and Massachusetts don't turn up in your world.  (You could however enable real world weather, which would roam over your map and is kinda cool, but not that useful).


You should be able to open all the images to make them bigger and see what I have circled etc.

Step 1

Have your maps ready. Draw them on paper or in Photoshop or something if you’re sophisticated. I suggest having a large world sized map, and then smaller maps to layer on top of this.

Make sure you know what the scale is approximately, and what latitudes each region of your world fit into. 

You can either have separate maps or layer them over each other in Google Earth (I have done this) or you can layer them over each other in Photoshop or the like (more precise and something I will be doing next).  Google Earth doesn’t like really big files though, it tends to increase loading time and sometimes may just break and not load, so watch out for that.  [Note: Google Earth ‘wraps’ the image around the globe, and this means it will get pinched at the poles, warping your image slightly, and reducing the distance between points.  There seems to be no way to stop this from occurring, so if you care about this, like I do, you will need to use Photoshop and edit your image using filters.  I have been playing around with the Distort – Rectangular to Polar filter and the some Spherical Texture corrector from the interwebs, I think there are some links towards the end of the Cartographer's Guild Forums . Though I haven’t got something I am happy with yet.  With subsequent layers this will also still distort. Ultimately I am looking at creating one huge Image file and overlaying it all in Photoshop and not in Google Earth.  Be warned that the larger image sizes generated by Photoshop simple cannot be loaded by Google Earth].

Here is an example of a map I overlayed, this covers about 1/4-1/3 of the entire surface area of the globe in Google Earth;

Step 2

Click the insert Image Overlay button and select your image.  Rename it something funky like “Imperial Eladria” or “The Known Firma” so you can identify it in the Tab to the left of Google Earth. These Tabs control anything you add over the top of Google Earth.  I arrange them into areas of the world I am using, and then sort them by Layers (our Maps), Places (things we drop down to write descriptions) and Polygons (shapes we draw in Google Earth, which i use for political boundaries and could be used for environmental ones). 

Here is the button on the top bar;

Drag the corners to resize the image, holding down shift to keep its aspect ratio the same.  You can rotate the image with the diamond, but the rotate is a little funny, and if you rotate it you will apparently not be able to transfer the image over to the browser based Google Maps, as everything needs to be aligned straight up and down for it transfer to a Google Maps .kml file. This is another reason I am going to try and overlay all the layers in Photoshop first, so I can have the layers appear in Google Maps as well as Google Earth. 

Decrease the transparency slider so you can resize the maps and shift them around to match up with any of your other maps you have already put onto Google Earth, or particular terrain features of the real world.

Make sure you check the box that says ‘Clamp to Ground’ to insure your maps don’t ‘Float’ over the ground.  You can use the numbers to insure that the maps you want ‘above’ the others draw after the ‘lower’ maps.

Step 3

Add more maps. 

You can now drop Places like you can do normally for Google Maps and Earth.  You can include pithy descriptions about hexes and cities and the like.  More importantly when you randomly come up with something on the fly, or generate something using a table, you can drop a place onto your world and record the location of it and what it is. I use polygons to designate countries, you can change the thickness and colours of the lines. You can also make them invisible, which could be useful for climates and environmental encounters as when you right click on an area inside a polygon it comes up with the polygons description.

Here are the controls and some examples;

 You can then use the measuring functions during play (especially useful, to figure out the exact distance the PCs travel or how far away things are from each other.

You could even try and draw your entire world in terrain colour or hexmap it all out, and then drop places for cities and not include any labels on your drawings, but only in Google Earth (one of my goals). 

Finally you want to "Save my Places As" - this will save your places and image overlays as a .kmz file with a name, rather than just you My Places for your Google Earth. You can then load this file onto other people's Google Earth and distribute your campaign map more simply than with paper copies (however your players could measure distance exactly and see your annotations, though if you turn these off when you save you should be able to generate a file without your placemarks etc).

So that's pretty much it. The potential that Google Earth has is really up to you.  You could even add 3D graphics of buildings if you want.

Ramblings about 4th Ed Vertical Inflation

Forgive me if somewhere there is a better written and articulated article explaining this, but this is my re purposed ramble to my gaming group about the ridiculous vertical inflation inherit in Type 4 D&D.

Everything with a stat block in 4ed gets half its level added as a bonus (on top of special abilities, magic items and ability score bonuses) to its defenses, and to its rolls to hit and initiative and to skill checks.

Thus to break this down.

Lets say a level 1 peasant has say AC 12, Fort 12, Reflex 11, Will 11
This is from +1 of AC for padded clothes, +1 for Dex.
They have no bonus from level. They roll at +3 to hit (+1 for strength +2 for a poor quality spear).
They have 22 HP (Con +8).
+1 initiative

A tiger (level 6).
73 hp
AC 20 (+4 dex, +3 level, +3 natural) Fort 19 (+4 strength, +3 level bonus, +2 natural), Reflex 19 (+4 dex, +3 level, +3 natural), Will 17 (+2 wisdom, +3 level, +2 natural)
+11 for its bite attack. (+4 strength, +3 level, +4 for proficiency value of its teeth and natural).
+7 initiative (from memory) (+4 dex +3 level)

Now this may seem fine for your tiger and other beasties (which i don't necessarily disagree with) to have these stats but consider your standard level 21 Eladrin NPC "Ghaele of Winter" so a mage-like fellow.

HP 134
AC 33 (+9 dex, +10 level, + 4 natural/armour) Fortitude 30 (+6 con, +10 level, +4 natural) Reflex 33 (+9 dex, +10 level, +4 natural) Will 33  (+9 cha, +10 level, +4 natural)
Attacks +25 (+9 dex, +10 level, +6 natural [+2 implement, +4 enhancement/natural)
Initiative +19 (+9 dex, +10 level bonus).

This Eladrin also has +24 to diplomacy, +16 perception, +21 insight, and its untrained stealth is +19 - meaning particularly for perception and stealth that it is more perceptive than your average scout trained and employed by the military (by about twice as much) and is twice as stealthy as a trained footpad.

Which would be okay, if the Eladrin wasn't a frostmage.

My point is this can be remedied easily by scrapping every things + half level to bonuses.

This changes the game from being a vertically scaling arms race of points, to one in which player character growth is horizontal (by gaining new abilities and cool stuff) and focused into the areas where the character is good.  The difficulty class suggestions for tasks can then remain the same across the entire campaign, and not have to ramp up vertically to account for these ridiculous abstract bonuses. The barbarian who does not know much about arcana then does not get abstract bonuses to arcana because they got experience from killing things, that puts them ahead of apprentice mages who are are studying arcana. Similarly the bumbling professer-mage doesn't get abstract bonuses to stealth enough to sneak better than most of the footpads in the slums.  Characters will get better at their focused areas, but not necessarily at everything.

Even if characters won't get as many points across the board characters recieve plenty of vertical bonuses (magic gear providing +2 to something, skill training, ability score increases every 2 levels, feats and HP),

Thus at level 15 the peasants struggle to hit characters, not because they have an abstract +7 bonus to defenses because "oooh they're level 15", but rather because they have more abilities, better equipment. Even if it is more likely that peasant mob can hit and damage level 15 PCs, this should just force players to be more careful.  It has the added bonus of meaning that level 4-5 town guards are still a potential threat at high levels, if they bring they full force of the law down.

So philosophically there seems no reason not to do away with the  +half level to everything, as this removes the ridiculous vertical inflation, which seems to fufill little purpose other than indicating that certain enemies are almost impossible for characters to hit at low level, and that certain low-level enemies can be autohit at higher levels.

It also ads sense of a game world scale and progression that does away with the MMORPG ridiculous vertical value increases.

The vertical inflation just does not seem necessary at all, when it can just be done away with.

Oh and the best thing is that doing away with it on EVERY BEASTY and EVERY NPC or PC means that hey, everyone is at the same disadvantage, so the higher level monsters and characters are working on almost the same to hit and AC values, as PCs should have awesome magic.  It just brings lower level characters and monsters up a notch in  their ability to do damage and perhaps bring down higher level critters.

So yeah, that's my rambling.