The work
The live product is a Rails 8 table for Ironhedge at empirewargames.net. We built the accounts, games, and session UI so a referee can open a campaign, invite up to seven players, and keep characters, inventories, locations, and dice on the server instead of on paper. Rulebook procedures were encoded as server-side services — character rolls, class eligibility, kits, equipment, languages, spellbooks, potions, coin, and haggling — then laid onto a CSS-grid character card taken from the printed sheet. Referee generators for wilderness travel, encounters, debris, jewels, WAST items, and settlement marketplaces run in the same session. Combat is a shared board. The GM builds and reveals a creature force; missile fire, hand-to-hand, spells, and potion throws resolve against the book’s to-hit and absorb tables. Action Cable and Turbo keep presence, invites, roster, equipment, life points, and map reveals in sync across GM and player tabs. The world map is the original Ironworld scan. Coordinate scanners and an OCR labeler placed settlements and points of interest; the referee paints fog of war and those strokes go live to the party. Mailgun verification, a store for rolls and referee tier, and an admin schema browser sit around the table. Live video and audio are still ahead.
What shipped
- • Registration, session auth, email verification, player / referee tiers
- • Game creation, live invites, join requests, soft-remove seats, connected-player presence
- • Rulebook character generation and CSS-grid character cards (up to 4 living per player)
- • Equipment, shops, haggling, wallets, jewels, spellbook / potionbook, death re-roll
- • Settlement marketplaces (jeweler, alchemist, mage, horse trader, slaver) with merchant wallets
- • GM referee tools: dice, wilderness encounters, debris, jewels, WAST, encounter lookup
- • Shared combat board: creature reveal, yards, groups, missile, HTH, spells, potion throws
- • Ironworld map with fog-of-war paint, live reveal, settlement / POI coordinates from the scan
- • Store for character rolls, referee unlock, and merchandise
- • Production host on empirewargames.net (Puma, PostgreSQL, Mailgun)
Stack
- • Application
- Ruby on Rails 8, PostgreSQL, Hotwire (Turbo / Stimulus), Action Cable
- • Rules
- server-authoritative Ironhedge services plus the ironhedge_tools gem
- • Front end
- ERB, custom SCSS flex utilities, Stimulus combat/map controllers
- • Host
- Linux, Puma, nginx, Mailgun