The Heart of the Army Ants RPG

I've made no secret that all of my fantasy RPG work is an effort to recreate the vibe of B/X, while my supers work is always trying to evoke FASERIP. Army Ants comes from a different place, and is very much rooted in the WEG Star Wars game. I specifically loved how the core rules presented the foundation of the game world, but how each supplement fleshed out a specific era or facet. There was the Rebel Alliance sourcebook, the Empire sourcebook, one for each of the movies... it was a pretty cool way to go about building on the core game. I've always envisioned the Army Ants game in the same way; I still have a draft of the 'Ant Forces Sourcebook' and the 'Empire of the Wasps Sourcebook' on my hard drive somewhere, that I started thirty years ago. In a perfect world, I would have been publishing Army Ants supplements for the last thirty years, a la GURPS.

At present, I'm envisioning the latest Army Ants core rules being in the same format as Hack'D and Slash'D. I LOVE that little booklet - it's 48 pages, but the complete rules you need to play. Lulu helps a lot with this; I love the little saddle-stitched format, but they only print those up to 48 pages; it becomes a design challenge to get the core rules down to 48 pages, but I have always liked design challenges. However, it also means that I know a deeper Ant Forces sourcebook and a deeper Wasp Empire book (at the least) are on deck. I mean, I'll probably never get around to actually publishing these, and nobody would buy them if I did, but they're still in my imagination somewhere.

That's the funny thing about Army Ants; I literally have no reason to ever go back to it. It is, far and away, my least successful creative project of all time. I mean, people know me for it, but few people really like it very much. When I release game material for Army Ants, it always sells less than fantasy or supers work. In fact, I kind of know the trends at this point; I will sell 100+ books of a supers system (I've released a few), maybe 50 of a fantasy system, and will struggle to get to 20 copies sold of Army Ants.

But I'm also at the point in my creative process (and in life) where I don't really care how many books I sell. That used to be my primary (if not only) measure of success. Now, my primary (if not only) measure of success is how I feel about it when I'm done. I guess that makes it a vanity project, but I'm okay with that.