At some point in my fledgling adolescence, I was obsessed with magic. “Real” magic. And all things demonic. The horror stories they told in the 80s about Dungeons & Dragons corrupting the youth, maybe slightly true. But I wasn’t sacrificing small animals, doing drugs, or anything cruel or cool — I was drawing up diagrams and schedules for processions of infernal armies, mapping out war camps and itineraries. It was probably the most boring possible way to be into the occult.

Maybe that’s the earliest example I can concoct of my fascination with the mundane minutiae of magical worlds and stories. I’ve constantly tried to drag my friends into elaborate kingdom management games, all with rules I’ve cobbled together from a book here, a board game there, never coherent enough to actually support an ongoing campaign. When the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 came out for 3.5, one of my favorite sections was the chapter about running a business. Yeah, sure, fighting monsters and looting dungeons is great, but you know what’s really cool? Being an innkeeper, designing the best possible sign to bring in customers, sabotaging the competition and watching your profits rise.

I play Skyrim with all the survival mods on, focusing more on the process of crossing the Reach without starving, freezing, or going broke. It’s why Project Starland last year (2023) fascinated me so much. The ruleset was ridiculously detailed and filled with minutiae. Running it required adding multiple new systems onto 5e, systems that didn’t follow what I consider to be the 5e Philosophy — simplification and generalization, adherence to existing systems. But I loved the idea. A whole campaign about surviving and building a civilization from scratch? Separate skill trees for leatherworking vs metallurgy vs cooking? Hell yes.

The problem of course is that I am a weirdo, shunned by the daywalkers, and while I might think that managing taxes and foreign diplomacy are the tops, most of the people you can play TTRPGs with are kinda there to kill monsters and take their stuff — or tell a dramatic, emotional story filled with highs, lows, and laughs. Quarterly crop rotation reports don’t really check off any of those boxes. More than once, I’ve crammed an ongoing campaign full of my nonsense, only to watch my players blink and glaze over.

So, War of the Sun is partially an effort to scratch that itch (along with the MMO compulsion, which I’ll talk about later), as well as a way to organically generate storylines and events in the world of Anacra. Behind the scenes, I’m currently doing some solo stuff with outrageous supplements like the Merchant’s Guide by Angry Golem Games, which has rules for supply & demand, trade routes, all that stuff. The only way I can reasonably see myself running this for a table is in a big sandbox or West Marches style game — and I cannot add any projects right now. I’m literally two years behind on stuff.

So, for now, I’ll continue running silly simulations by myself while tending to community, content, and crap.