ONE DAY WE'LL ALL BE MADE OF RUBBER
This post is the in the City '26 series and continues our ongoing exploration of the City of a Hundred Gods:
 |
| The Babylonian God Nabu as God of Scribes |
There's been a resurgence of interest in Classic Traveller across the OSR blogosphere of late, with posts from Chaoclypse, friend-of-the-blog VDonut and and a whole... slew (?) of posts from Old Hawkeyes.It feels like a good opportunity to share the expanded system generation procedure I've adapted from a Mongoose Traveller supplement, The Deep Space Exploration Handbook. This expands the variety of systems that can be generated using the rules as presented in Book 3: Worlds and Adventures, primarily through the addition of unusual and anomalous stellar objects. This is also the system I used to initially populate the sector I generated for the Galaxy 24 project.
 |
| PIA23685: What is a Brown Dwarf? https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA23685 Brown dwarfs are more massive than planets but not quite as massive as stars. Generally speaking, they have between 13 and 80 times the mass of Jupiter. A brown dwarf becomes a star if its core pressure gets high enough to start nuclear fusion |
This post is the in the City '26 series and continues our ongoing exploration of the City of a Hundred Gods:
 |
| Bas relief of Thoth from the Temple of Kom Obo. |
This post is the in the City '26 series and continues our ongoing exploration of the City of a Hundred Gods:
 |
| Roman Serpent Carving |
...this ward centres on the The Temple of the Sky Serpent: being the penultimate ward of the Artisans' District, the Sky Serpent is a god of a particular craft requiring a particular set of skills...
 |
| The Mesopotamian Goddess Bau |
Let us meet the Artisans!
An ongoing project to map a Neolithic proto-Megalopolis, one ward/god at a time. This particular post closes out the city's Breadbasket, poetically known as Traders Wake due to the two major canal basins and grain market. Here is where the tendrils of the city's extensive reach gather the blood they have leached from the land, and here the denizens suck at its acrid teats for sustenance.
_-_The_Destruction_of_Sodom_-_N00474_-_National_Gallery.jpg) |
| The Destruction of Sodom Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) |
LAST UPDATED: 7th March 2026
Previously I hinted at details of a new world building/RPG design challenge for 2026 and here it is: welcome to City '26! It’s also a “megapost” in that I’ll provide links to anyone else participating who wishes to share their blog: please provide details below or give me a shout on Reddit, discord or Instagram.
The participants:
 |
| Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore, text below |
 |
| Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1874) |
These are the final wards of The Ladders, the City of a Hundred Gods' warren of slums lying beyond its perimeter walls. Movement through the district is brought to life by day and night encounter tables in this post. Initial thoughts for abstracting the map and navigating the city are here, but this is up for revision.
The setting assumes PCs are outcast hunting gatherers visiting a Neolithic proto-city, but this could easily be re-skinned for an antediluvian/weird bronze age sword-and-sorcery game
 |
| The walls of Ichan-Qаl’а, Khiva, Uzbekistan |
The Sea of Tents, the Black River and Dusk Gate have previously been described, alongside their patron deities the Shit-Beetle, the Goddess of the Lime-Slake and more. Have a look at that post before coming back here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/02/city-of-hundred-gods-part-110-city.html
Actually, read THIS post and come back here. The Bad Doctor shared this just as I was writing my slightly undercooked entry for the RPG Blog carnival, and I had to postpone reading it until I'd finished it, lest I gave up entirely. I'm glad I did: this is damn fine. Excellently selection of augmenting images, too:
https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2024/12/gods-of-stolen-world.html
Oh and then read THIS post, too, because Shuttered Room has come up with something very, very good for Secret Santicore: an ice age (past? present? future? it'll work as each of those) settlement, partly inspired by module B4. Another great example of minimalist worldbuilding:
https://shutteredroom.blogspot.com/2024/12/no-holidays-this-season-secret.html.
Sometimes it's hard not to feel like the ugly sister to Cinderella when stood beside such luminaries. I don't know if you ever get similar feelings but—assuming that you also have an RPG blog, which is likely—whenever I do I try to be thankful that I'm at least at the ball.
Anyway, here's some more of my own gods, native to a sprawling Neolithic proto-city.
 |
| Ruins of Çatalhöyük—which could be the title of YOUR next adventure, couldn't it? |
There comes a time in a nerd's life when they have to take a good, long look at what they've done with their time on earth and think to themselves... FUCK! I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD A PROPER STAB AT A CONLANG!
Here is my first contribution to July's RPG BLOG CARNIVAL, hosted by the inestimable Rook. For this post I'm going to draft a syllabary and in doing so lay the foundations for a constructed language (conlang).
 |
| Cuneiform tablet |
More than two years ago I made a post called "demi-humans and alignment: dwarfs" which originally included a bit about elves, later replaced with a bit that promised: "elves update to follow!"...
If you've been reading this for any length of time, you'll be aware of the standard gamut of excuses so let's just crack on.
 |
| Our current position in the solar cycle is determined by whether the discourse is about Rankin's elves |
This post envisions how spirit houses could work in PARIAH (or your animist RPG of choice). Before I get into it I want to say a quick word about its provenance. I've previously written 3 posts on the topic of shrines but they crossed over into real life recently when I started to consider the act of building a birdhouse through an animist lens in this post.
I've also begun watching SCAVENGERS REIGN (only a few episodes in so no spoilers, please): without giving too much away I am completely in love with it. So much resonates with the psychedelic animism I have made my life's mission to evoke (and there's a post percolating as we speak on this very topic) but it was a much more subtle moment that crept into the ultimate genesis of this post, which I will mention towards the end.
But for now, spirit houses...
 |
| Spirits of the Here & Now, visiting the shrine I built to house them |
I had a draft of the post D12 Anomalous Orbs sat unpublished for long enough to justify its "retroactive dating", so it sits neatly in the April posts... but this is genuinely hot-off-the-press, unadulterated May 2024 content just for you.
When I first used the phrase STAR METAL in PARIAH volume 1 I imagined the reader would assume this to be meteoric iron, though I made no explicit statement regarding its nature... though a while back I washed my hands of a monster created by cryptomnesia known as an Ancient One Now fully immersed in UFO lore and the existence of supposed “exotic materials”, I thought it would be fun to come up with a list of alternative material properties for “star metal”. In addition to the usual fantasy sources, this table was inspired by anecdotal accounts from ufology and the preindustrial metallurgists and alchemists. There used to be a spiritual element (pun intended) to material science which is sadly lacking today!
 |
| Cubic of polished meteoric iron illustrating the Widmanstaetten structure |
I'm back out the other side of one of my bi-annual delves into the rabbit-hole of UFOlogy, and my takeaways are two in number:
 |
| Album cover to Metallic Spheres by The Orb and David Gilmour, AI generated |
This is essentially a slush-pile post: last September, user Rook of Beneath Foreign Planets on the Weird and Wonderful Worlds discord server hosted the RPG Blog Carnival with the theme Anthropology and Archaeology. The complete list of posts is at this link is a veritable treasure trove.
 |
| Beautiful Neolithic figurines, Gozo Museum of Archaeology, Malta |
I've been working on making the larger map for Atop the Wailing Dunes more legible, as well as building it up into a more comprehensive sandbox. As I go through, 6 mile hex by 6 mile hex, I'm sharing them here as A4 double-sided zinis, which you can fold enough to make a 4-page pamphlet.
Having recently shared an additional hex for the Atop the Wailing Dunes sandbox (title: randomly generated) it occurred to me that I hadn't posted the second hex in the series, despite it being up on itch already. Anyway, here it is in JPEG format:
Continuing my extrapolation and twisting of original material to create a new chassis to run old school modules I'm jotting down some notes about so-called "demi"-humans.
This was originally meant to be part of the "alignment" post. Likewise my post about elves (forthcoming) was supposed to go on the end of this one, but I started to ramble...
Previous posts in this series:
- Hit Points, Hit Dice, Death and Dismemberment etc.
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/generic-adventure-game-hit-protection.html
- Most pertinent to this post... alignment:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/alignment.html
 |
| Image courtesy The Internet |
When I first started to think about alignment again, may brain did this:
- Law vs Chaos
- Clerics vs Magic-Users
- Dwarfs vs Elves
As with other binary pairs, there are (multiple and interesting) exceptions, but I like this set up as a foundation.