Thursday 4 August 2011

Second draft of Maps for Peloponnesian Wars

These are my first bash at turning the rough schematics I drafted earlier into something a bit more like a proper campaign map for the Peloponnesian Wars.

Due to the difficulties of squeezing enough detail on to the mainland map for Greece on a large scale map, I've split the schematic into three maps: one for mainland Greece, another larger scale one for the whole of Greece/Aegean, and a third for Sicily.

(Click to enlarge)



I have to confess to the fact that I'm coming to this knowing little about the period, and just about all my knowledge is based on a fast 'skim read' of various Wikipedia articles. Fairly obviously, not much of a substitute for reading Thucycides!



In terms of game play I wanted to get a couple of stages (ie. battles) in between the main states, so that capitals don't fall too easily. I've named some after famous battles of the wars.

We have added Carthage and Thrace into the mix, just to get a bit of variety in terms of armies. Carthage was involved in fighting the Greeks on Sicily 20 years before (at the time of the Persian invasion) and almost immediately after, even though most conflict in Sicily during the Peloponnesian Wars themselves were between Doric/Spartan colonies/allies such as Syracuse and Ionic/Athenian colonies/allies. Thrace is a bit more far fetched, but a 'three-handed' struggle in the north might spice it up a bit.




At the moment we are playing the campaign extremely loosely, just selecting a border 'province' and using that as the name of the battle. We might well fudge things, eg. after a night's gaming the Spartans are already at the gates of Athens, so we might allow the Athenians to counter-attack next session to attempt to evict the Spartans from Attica. And we might throw in a historic twist (eg. Argos persuaded Martinea and Elis to switch sides). And we might expand it to include sea battles.

So for now its just a rough way of 'stringing the battles together' and 'marking the score'.


No comments:

Post a Comment