War Machine
Because I need to numerically simulate castle sieges, I also need to simulate an economy capable of supporting both castles and sieges. To seed that economy, I need ruins of an old civilization, along with enough old coin to make those ruins matter. From there, everything else follows.
War Machine is the dungeon productivity tool I use to manage these requirements. It tracks resources, degradation, extraction, and reuse. Ruins generate value. Value funds conflict. Conflict creates new ruins. The system is intentionally circular.
It runs on BECMI-era assumptions about scale, abstraction, and bookkeeping. Armies are numbers. Castles are investments. History is an exhaustible resource. The machine doesn’t care why a war happens, only that it can be sustained, paid for, and eventually resolved into debris that can be counted again.
War Machine exists to make large-scale conflict legible enough to use, without resolving it into narrative or tactics. It’s there to keep the background running while everything else happens on top of it. Powered by digital dice and dreams.