Prologue
I love roleplaying games, I love being a storyteller and taking my friends into incredible adventures that they will never forget, but I also deeply love strategy and building things. Since I was three years old I would take my LEGOs and create massive cities and buildings that would fill my room and write stories about them that would get my father to doubt the heck he just heard. Age nine I was writing my very first world, an eternal war between two kingdoms which was actually a journal of my real life efforts to win the heart of a girl against one of my friends.
I failed that endeavour, but it left me with a deep need to create worlds and kingdoms and explore the stories and the impact of sapience to these worlds. In 2015, Janet Forbes and I started the Lost Kingdom blog, our effort to take what we knew abou the real world and bring it to the realm of fantasy storytelling and worldbuilding. It was during the early days of 2017 that I have decided to take everything we've learnt during our 2 years of research and create a kingdom building system, a website or application that would allow people to create kingdoms for their tabletop games and play them in parallel with their campaigns and then ... I took a very big arrow to the knee, one might even say ballista bolt. It's name was World Anvil and it came to my life in June 2017, six months into my kingdom building project and, out of nowhere, completely changed my life. My free time went from 5 hours a day to minus 2 hours a day. For the next 5 years, World Anvil consumed every minute of my life.
And that brings me to today, January 2023. The development team of World Anvil now counts seven members, I am not alone any more. As Elsa would have said, for the first time in forever, I have a little bit of time, two-three hours a day that I might be able to work on my own projects again. And if nothing else, I am persistent. Once again I will try to create for myself and everyone else who wishes to use it a system that will, hopefully, add a new dimension to tabletop roleplaying and storytelling (yes Kingdom Building can be super fun for the storyteller, because you are playing all the other kingdoms and people). It is my hope that motivated by the fact that my players will need this system as soon as possible (starting on a new Pathfinder Kingmaker campaign) I will be able to get ruleset ready for testing on the table soon.
So, here's to a new-old endeavour and to the most incredible type of adventure, building your own Kingdom!
If you are interested, follow this project, and create with me a Kingdom Building system by giving me your feedback I cannot wait to hear your thoughts as the project grows.
I'm always interested to see how folk approach things like this! Some make roll tables, some make spreadsheets, and a rare few (such as yourself) make software! Your approach being in the rarest group makes it the most interesting to see, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm sure whatever comes out of this will be rad!