More great Elf pics from the D&D site...

Again, these may not all be labelled as Elves but I don'r really care. Any or all may be liberally used as inspiration for my Guardians of the One Tree. I may have found some minis to actually do the project - from the Reaper site: if you go here - http://www.reapermini.com/FigureFinder - you can browse their beautiful range to your heart's content...

Your very good Elf...

If I am ever to paint up my Guardians of the World Tree, I really need to know how I'm painting them. Perusing the D&D site has produced a lot of inspiration - here are a great variety of Elven (and Half-Elven and other similar) types.

Not all are listed as Elves; some are of creature-types of which I've never even heard (after my time I suppose). I think one picture is something like 'Aasymar' or similar. But they look like Elves to me. Not really certain what the differences are. But never mind.

I like the snowy ones - the blue-skinned male and white-skinned female. In the Lankhmar encounter tables from the edition of DDG I have, 'Winter Elf (as Wood Elf)' is listed as one of the entries for encounters in cold regions. Those two look like they may make good 'Winter Elves'. Though perhaps 'Winter Elves' should be Drow? Then again, Drow are more like the opposite of High Elves - lots of metal armour and whatnot. But, there are more lightly-armoured Drow I suppose. Perhaps I should work out some actual differences between Elves here, which groups have what chance of wearing metal armour, leather or none, wielding bows, spears, longswords etc etc...

The D&D Archives are at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ag - warning, it is a bit addictive.

Not sure this will work...

... but I've been exploring GoogleMaps' new map-making tools.

This should be a link to a map what I wrote: https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zKdauIst7i38.ko9DR0GXDUls

I started messing around with the idea that the adventures of various heroes could be mapped onto the British landscape. I posted about this idea a while ago in Lead Adventurers, but a recent trip to North Yorkshire, where there are several sites named after 'Brom', the old dragon-rider from the Eragon series, reminded me of the idea. So for a couple of days I've been messing around with 'Brom' names.

Then I decided to branch out, and map sites associated with Conan of Cimmeria (which on this reading, is likely to be Cumbria), Ingold Inglorion (from the Darwath books) and Frodo. Doing Frodo made me think of other places that Hobbits live (all those 'pucel' names, like Pucklechurch and Pocklington) so I put them on the map, and then I started looking for Elves. Elves are hard.

Anyway, the results are there. Do say if you can't access the map, or see all the layers (one for Brom, one for Conan, Ingold & Frodo, one for Elves) or whatever. I can see this being a useful tool for games set in some version of 'our' world.