Atalantes a beginning

The goal of Atalantes is to create a campaign world for historical war games, or even fantasy war games. I have been contemplating how to do this since I started war gaming over 30 years ago.

It seems to me most War Games are more accurately described as battle games. The stimulus for the game is to play a game (nothing wrong with that, it is a hobby of gaming wars after all), and the outcome generally makes no impact on any other battles (again nothing wrong with that). 

I've always wanted to have a reason to fight and a reason for the battle to end, for the winners and the losers.  It is hard to imagine soldiers, companies of men, battalions and larger units fight to the death to the last man and without thinking about what happens next.

So, for 30 odd years I have wanted to play games that had a reason for the foes to be there, beyond me wanting to play and for there to be an impact beyond my win-loss ratio (it would certainly be heavily weighted to the loss side). 

But I do not have the skills to create a place that could work (I am no cartographer), or the knowledge to string together a coherent story that hangs it all together. But even if I did, I couldn't sculpt figures for the inevitable mashups of technology and uniforms that could be needed.

Then time passed, my wargaming continued and my dream of a Campaign Setting expanded and developed. I role played and I enjoyed the efforts that authors and artists went to, to create a place and a story filled land that I and others could play in and on and enjoy. Building on what was to enjoy what could be.

Enter Wonderdraft (there are lots of others but I like this one), Copilot AI (it uses ChatGPT and comes with my MS365 subscription) and 3D printing (this is the one I have had for a year and a bit), and suddenly all my excuses evaporate, and it was time to put pixels to paper and start a place where anything can happen at any time for my wargames, my friends, and eventually I decided that I could put this out into the web for others to maybe use as well.

So, over the next posts I will be world crafting, building maps, populating the continent of Atalantes and setting things up so I can play games in that place that impact the outcomes of the wars on Atalantes.