In this project I will show off  screen shots of how I use GoogleEarth as a live-action tool for my home, tabletop D&D campaign.

If you are not familiar with GoogleEarth, go look at it at http://www.google.com/earth.

This tool pastes the most recent satellite pictures to the globe and allows you to learn geography on the fly.

Literally, they have a flight simulator built in, but that's noy why I use it.

 

In Google Earth, the application, you can paste your own map images onto an equivelent section of our globe. In this example I've dropped the Pathfinder world of Golarion onto the South Pacific Ocean.

But the real value is that you can add thumbtacks to create locations, and linked views and detailed text as well.

In Golarion I only placed the secret faction centers.

 

In Angathal I placed cities, villages, and even paths and roads.

 

But, in the Forgotten Realms I added amost everything from the Dungeons and Dragons 4E Manuals.

Click upon the table of contents on the left and you immediately fly there, smoothly so that you see the distance and direction that you've flown.

In the example above you will see the high yellow path, which documented the movements of the characters in my Faerun Campaign.

There is even a "Follow Path" command and a timed recording tool that would allow you to create video tours of the important locations for your characters to investigate.
 

Each thumbtack has its own angle/view, so you could be brought down close, looking towards a city on the horizon.

There seems to be no limit to the amount of text that you can attach to the thumbtacks, so you can build a whole campaign world here if you choose.

And if you draw your own city maps, you can paste those in the right locations and see them from above.

I'm actually very surprised that now many years later, there are still very few references to this tool being used by other DMs or designers.

 

The fact that I have a fully fleshed out version of the Forgotten Realms 4E (Post-Spellplague) should be important to someone... Mike Mearls, I'd love to talk! ;-).

 

 

This was very basic to begin with, but I will offer more later.