PBEM v93 n03 (15Apr93) ====================================================================== A First Look at Atlantis Greg Lindahl ====================================================================== Atlantis is yet-another ambitious attempt at an open-ended fantasy game. However, unlike the numerous games that preceded it, two of which ran for free on the Internet (T'Nyc and Olympia), Atlantis was written by Russell Wallace, who has a minimalist philosophy on game design, and a willingness to learn from past experiments. Does the feature add a lot to the game, or just it just make it complex for no reason? Throw it out! So, instead of a list of what Atlantis includes, I will instead list what it doesn't have: Cities. Towns. Markets, other than what players set up. Complex movement -- you may only move one region per turn. Stacks. Random encounters. Orc invasions. A large map. What Atlantis does have is simple game mechanics, with some checks and balances. You want a sword? Either find a player who will sell you one, or make one yourself. How do you make a sword? Find some mountains. Train some men in ironworking. Mine some iron. Train more men in weaponsmithing. Produce swords. Despite the simplicity, there are some twists. Food and money are the same thing in Atlantis. The only way to produce food is either to set your people to work growing it, or to tax the peasants. Taxing peasants requires armed men, and a local environment in which there are few enough local peasants, so that they aren't starving. If the local peasants are starving, you aren't going to squeeze anything out of them. If that happens, you can't eat your swords, so you're in trouble. You also can't turn swords into new recruits -- only money can entice recruits. This is unlike most games, in which it's relatively easy to turn assets into money and back into assets again. It requires a bit more planning than normal to prevent your people from starving, and balance production of material possessions like swords and armor against production of money to feed your people and recruit new people. Atlantis contains a magic system. Since none of the spells are in the rules and the game just started, I can't tell you about it. The combat system is totally explained in the rules. It has some features that must be carefully watched, such as the fact that unarmed people are easy pickings for armed soldiers. Troops in fortifications look very difficult to beat. Since many things are left out of Atlantis, they will have to be provided by the players. Olympia provided the flavor of a fantasy world by having GM-controlled pixie and orc units wandering about -- Atlantis doesn't have this. Conflict over resources will drive this game. Players must make their own market for swords and armor. Players who enjoy exploration are not likely to find Atlantis that interesting. I said that the map is small not because I know this for a fact, but because if there were many regions per player, the total production available would be very large and there wouldn't be conflict over resources. So, my guess is that Russell intends on keeping the size of the map small. Atlantis does fit my biases well. Most of the information needed to play the game are in the rules, and all you need to do is sit around, think hard, and play with some numbers to figure out what your starting strategies are. Unlike some games, you won't have to go into combat several times before you begin to understand why you got wiped out repeatedly. The magic system is hidden, but I hope it will be moderate in nature. There are a couple of things that I think might become odd "features" in the future; for example, it seems to me that periodically massacring your peasants could _increase_ your taxation income. However, this is a minor nit, and we'll have to wait and see how it works in practice. The conclusion is: if you like open-ended games, join this one. I hope that it isn't a victim of its own success.