Atlas of the Atlantica's

Making maps reminds me of making scenery. Once made, I appreciate them  but making them is tedium not fun. Once again I wonder if I'm not all that good at because I don't enjoy it or if I don't like doing them because I'm not all that good? However, the entire island has now been mapped in usable fashion. It is with a touch of chagrin that I note that the older map seems much more attractive to me, and that if I had just looked at it first and plotted the new map on the computer, both halves would have matched. I may redraw them at some future point, but somehow I hate to think of myself as that bored. A little touch up perhaps, on a winter's night.

It is also with chagrin that I see that, while both maps were originally plotted on graph paper using Henry Hyde's Battlegames article as a terraforming guide, I managed, somehow, to remove the grid from the southern half.  This suggests that perhaps I didn't plan to use it for actual campaigns when I drew it some 5 years ago? At any rate, as displayed the maps below are at slightly different scales but at 1:1 the width of the 2 maps is equal where the mountains divide the continent. The original intended scale was 1 grid sq=10 miles but since this gave me a mini-continent twice the size of Madagascar, going unnoticed by history while being fought over by armies of a few thousand men at best, I have shrunk it to 1 grid square = 1 mile giving a total area for the island of something like 7,000 sq miles. That's about 3/4 the size of Sicily. Not the vast spaces I originally envisaged but big enough for my purposes and much more reasonable to be missed from the pages of history and it makes the map more relevent for laying out a wargames table and for campaigning. It also helps explain the coziness of the 2 sides to date, the small numbers of Imperial troops and the upcoming cultural similarities of the various Atlantican tribes.

Working out economics and the like (yawnnnn) has been beyond my enthusiasm levels to date.   As long as there is enough lead & tin for toy soldiers and a few bits of wood and lichen for terrain, what more could an island want?     

Northern Atlantica. The chief native Atlantican power is Kyuquat in the north. Kapelle is technically a satellite of Kyuquat but is largely independent and contains a large percentage of people of mixed race. Oerberg in the south-east was formed during the mid 19thC by immigrants, largely from Oberhilse. 

  

South Atlantica (Neuland was the old name used by the first Europeans) The chief powers are Faraway and Oberhilse.

Next up some thoughts on the look and shape of upcoming Colonial games.