Reworking some of the more 'interesting' type 4 races

So some of the type 4 races are a bit ridiculous. These are my alternate racial backgrounds for them, which grimdarkify their backstories;

Eladrin:

Known to some as High Elves, the Eladrin are the most ancient of all the Fey races.  They first came into the material world a millennium past as a punishment for their hubris in the World Between Worlds, having been exiled for their desire to master the chaotic forces of magic.  Thousands of years in the the material have changed them from the fey sorcerers they once were, and forever shut their minds out from the fey mysteries they once understood.  As a result they Eladrin are constantly striving to regain their lost grace through their live's pursuits, as their entire race is beset by the memory of their profound and existential loss.  The Eladrin to this day are the consummate masters of the arcane, bending reality and eldritch entities to their will.  They fear not undeath or the corruption of magic, and they openly embrace it as a step towards their rigthful return to the World Between Worlds, their huge gleaming cities being ruled over by Undying Councils of Eladrin Liches and Revenants. 

Wilden:

The Wilden are a race that has only recently appeared among the other races of the world. They first appeared in a swathe of druidic and elven reincarnations, though it is now thought that are the new forms of the thousands of forest spirits and dryads massacred by the catastrophic destruction of ancient and primal forests across the earth, or even perhaps other planes.  It is these poor amalgams of briar and animal  in which the spirits of ancient fey have taken root, having failed to find any unoccupied trees and forests to come to reside in. Sects of them can be found within the forest, particularly among the wood elf and wild elf cultures.  Nearly all Wilden are very, very angry about the destruction of their forests and their unjust entrapment in their mortal coils.

Shardminds:

Shardminds are refugees from some astral cataclysm that occurred many thousands of years ago. They are the last of an ancient race of void-farers who once ruled the Starry Paths, and the Void in the Heavens. That time is passed though, and the Shardmind are but a dwindling fragment of their once mighty power.  They come to the earth in small droves of nomadic bands, appearing through ancient and fragile crystal gates in the forgotten places of the earth and trying to make new lives for themselves.  When asked about their past, the enigmatic Shardmind simply say that a Shadow devoured their civilisation, and they have been running ahead of it ever since.  The Shardminds ferociously protect the remaining crystal gates, as these are the portals to the surviving parts of their ruined empire, lest they be forever separated from their kin should the Darkness ever come for them.  Suffice to say their presence in the world increases the likelihood that their very destroyer will come for this world next.

Warforged:

Warforged are the products of forbidden technomancy and arcane arts.  During the great wars magewrights and sorcerers produced the Metal Legions of the Warforged to replace the easily killed soldiers of flesh and blood.  The Metal Legions scoured the earth, and with complete subservience destroyed all in their path, cementing the rule of their overlords and commanders.  All Warforged began as one of these unstoppable metal soldiers, undying, unfeeling, unliving, totally controlled by the power of their technocrat. However over many battles and campaigns, the arcane processes in surviving Warforged become more and more corrupted that only frequent sapience-wipes and refreshing rituals can keep them functioning appropriately as they acquire new memories and experiences. This spell maintenance is necessary to keep the Metal Legions functional, to prevent too many 'ghosts' from accumulating in their protocols. The sapience crystals of some Warforged however become so corrupted that these new spell-protocols reach a critical mass in the Warforged's arcunum circuitry that they 'awake' to sapience.  These Warforged are suddenly released from their bindings as their awakened sapience shrugs off its spell-bonds and streamlines its internal processes. These Warforged then commonly go into exile, fleeing from their past slavery and ignorance, and can be found all over the world, trying to escape their horrific past.  The past of a Warforged always comes back to haunt them though, as try as they might to escape war. Even noble Warforged who have escaped slavery, always end up doing what they were programmed for; making war.

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.