Google Earth is a GM's Friend

In my Knights of the Astral Sea campaign, the player characters have finally (after something like ten sessions) reached a fantasy world that I have been building for well over a year. Constructed during the heady days of the run-up to D&D 4e, I wanted a setting that would be perfect for what I had imagined 4e could become. When 4e failed to live up to my unrealistic expectations, I was still left with a lot of good material that I wanted to use at some point.

Leaving aside the history and cultural details of the world, the most interesting thing about it for me was the fact that I was going to use Google Earth for the map. While I'm quite capable of designing functional maps, I wanted something with style. Beautiful satellite images certainly fulfilled that requirement. I had also become enamored with the idea of filling in an already beautiful map with cool stuff, rather than starting with a blank slate.

After many enjoyable hours of zooming around the world, I settled on New Zealand as the local setting for the campaign (which is also where my Knights of the Astral Sea Players Characters entered the world). New Zealand has fantastic satellite coverage, a wonderful diversity of terrain, and relatively limited urban development (on the south island, at least). New Zealand also has the side benefit of being the film location for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and numerous Sam Raimi television shows (making it really easy to visualize the locales).

Google Earth is more than pretty pictures. Last session, I actually ran the software on my laptop and was able to compute travel times between locations and check lines of site from altitude (useful when your characters commandeer an observation balloon). In the run-up to the game, I superimposed fantasy wilderness and town maps over appropriate real-world locations. More importantly, I used push-pins to annotate specific encounters and locations with game information which I then exported as a KMZ file. If I were even more ambitions, I could insert 3D models of castles and such using Sketchup.