A Dash – to the En[d] (of the year)

It's 31st December! And I'm sad. Sad because I have left it far too late to produce a something like this or even something like this. 

Instead, I'm here to talk about this:

—

...but also, this:

–
!

Solo Blueholme: Second Delve (Part 2 of 3)

This continues the previous post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/12/solo-blueholme-second-delve-part-1-of.html

Illustration by Alec Sorenson

City of 100 Gods Pt. 6, Traders Wake: The Ocean Lord (37), He Who Distributes the Grain (38), He Who Prospers (39); The Temple of Bread (40)

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 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) 

Part 1... City Limits

Part 2... Gates and Ladders
Part 3... Further Along the Ladders

Part 4... The Last Ladders

Part N.... Navigating the City

Part  5... Traders Wake

Variation of a Giving Game (sketch)

 

Photograph of a Rai Stone, unit of currency in pre-colonial Yap (an island in Micronesia)

In a recent post I described a procedure or system for modelling a sort-of domain-level play element for Pariah. It uses a heavily abstracted "labour as time surplus" mechanic that I've tested multiple times and (while I continue to tweak it) works effectively while also being fun! 

I understand fun is subjective and-while Archons Court has found some value in the previous post-the trading rules that follow might not be for everyone. I'm attempting to create a gift-giving and feasting game that:

• ...models gift economy and "prestige giving"
• ...acknowledges scarcity of supply and culture-driven demand
• is actually a GAME where players make CHOICES 

Bear in mind that a) this has not been playtested and b) this grew out of playing (and actually enjoying) an almost endless string of cargo runs in Classic Traveller (solo). 

This is also just a sketch of some ideas, the beginnings of a game. You have been warned.

City '26 Megapost

Previously I provided details of a new world building/RPG design challenge for 2026 and promised to provide comprehensive details in a dedicated post.

This is that post.: 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.

Essentially the challenge is to build a city over the course of one year, each week detailing one ward. Peter Lattimore of Garblag Games came up with this infographic while workshopping the idea on his server:

Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore, text below

City of 100 Gods Pt. 5, Traders Wake: They Who Store The Grain (35); The Deep One (36)

This post is part of a series concerning the City of a Hundred Gods, a proto-Neolithic megalopolis brimming with conflicting factions, a technocratic theocracy and unique encounter tables for each ward.

Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1874)

City of a Hundred Gods: The Story So Far

Part 1... City Limits

Part 2... Gates and Ladders
Part 3... Further Along the Ladders

Part 4... The Last Ladders

Part N....Navigating the City

...but now we turn to a new district, known to poets and administrators alike as Traders Wake, though  common folk know all these wards as The Bread Basket...

The Road to Perdition Could Also Be a Handy Shortcut

It has taken me a very long time to internalise the concept of dungeon as "mythical underworld" but now it's so internalised there's not much space left for alternative ways of understanding subterranean adventure spaces.. except as spaces that sit alongside the mythical underworld, one way or another...

Interior made with sketchup

A dungeon is a dimensional rift. Or rather, a Dungeon is an incursion of Chaos into the Wilderness of the Known World. It can be a castle, a cave or even... a dungeon.

The deeper you go, the weirder it gets. This weirdness connects rifts to one another.

All dungeons are connected.

MAPS (No One Loves You Like I love You)

Yeah yeah yeah... I know. Late to the bandwagon, again. But it has come to my attention that Elmcat has mapped the blogosphere!

The Big Red Dot is Grognardia, the slightly less big dot is someone called "Jeff"

Elmcat explains their methodology in this post https://elmc.at/mapping-the-blogosphere/. So far as I can tell (and please, do your own research as I am an absolute dolt) they have catalogued and then visually represented the frequency with which blogs link to one another. This establishes 5 RPG blog communities, as follows:

• Community 0, featuring most of the GLOGOSPHERE. Goblin Punch and Coins & Scrolls rank 2nd and 2rd here, but weirdly the "top blog" is Patrick Stuart's False Machine
• Community 1 I originally thought was centred on the Alexandrian but apparently is led by Critical Hits. No, me neither!  
• Community 2 is (I think) the largest and seems to centre on Chris McDowall's Bastionland, but more recently Prismatic Wasteland's Prismatic Wastes  has emerged as the fulcrum.
• Community 3 is centred on the elder statesman of the OSR, Grognardia
• Community 4 is Tenkar's Tavern and a lot of blogs with which I'm unfamiliar   

I'm not sure what any of this really means but the image is beautiful and clearly took a great deal of time and effort to set up. It's fun to look a the changes over time: going back to 2015, when I started this blog, the graphic was far less dense! Also amusing to see the map fluctuate and change in the time since its publication, as Xaosseed notes in this post:

https://seedofworlds.blogspot.com/2025/12/many-faces-of-osr.html

Have a look for your own blog if you haven' t already. It's really useful to see who is linking to you the most (thanks, Xaosseeed!), and who you're linking to the most (you're welcome, Goblin Punch!). 

The aforementioned Xaosseed continues their tireless support for the OSR community with the r/OSR blogroll on Reddit. Please post your blog there if you are a Reddit user and have a look at the other posts shared:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/1pl1k0x/osr_blogroll_12th_to_18th_december_2025/

Finally, a bit of archaeology: have a look at this post from the G+ days:

https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2017/03/mapping-osr.html

Solo Blueholme: Second Delve (part 1 of...)

Illustration by Alec Sorenson

This continues the revived solo series previously explored in this post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-first-delve-into-stygian.html

...with downtime activities detailed here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-between-sessions.html

The game was originally begun in the summer of 2024 and has recently been revived. 

THE SECOND DELVE

In the Wake of a Fallen Goddess: Mark of the Odd Superhero RPG

I began this post last year, with a fairly clear idea in mind of how a Mark-of-the-Odd superhero campaign might work. Coming back to it after... 17 months? ...my ideas are less clear.

Some of the issues are discussed the end—genuinely interested in how anyone reading this thinks you can run a superheroes campaign with an OSR mentality... or a "thinking adventures" mentality.

Anyways, I'll continue with the original post, interrupting myself towards the end.

At some point in the mid 2010s a renegade group of Salafists accidentally released an ancient evil, setting off a cascade of increasingly cataclysmic events across the globe. Kaiju-like demons rose from the depths of the ocean, crawled from the dark corners of the earth and descended from the stars: an era of chaos began, and the timeline of this Other Earth diverged inextricably from our own.

Yet in humanity's darkest hour there shone a beacon of hope: a real-life super hero, The Goddess, stared down the daemons... and the daemons flinched. Her antiquated arms—the sword and shield of a classical warrior—struck trues while the modern marvels of the military machinery could not. With the forces of darkness on the back foot, new heroes joined her: humanity fought back!

I am fully aware that this is a picture of Wonder Woman 

But this triumph would be short-lived. In her humility, the Goddess entrusted herself to the powers-that-be; in their hubris, they sought to coerce, cajole and control the Goddess into following their short-sighted strategies. Alongside her ablest warriors, she was buried beneath millions of tonnes of lava released from an Icelandic volcano by the daemon Leviathan. 

What now for humanity? As the daemon hordes muster once again, will new heroes rise to once again face down the forces of evil?

OD&D/ Delving Deeper Weapon Variations

In a recent reddit post members of r/OSR were asked (probably for the one millionth time since that subreddit's inception) to recommend their favourite OSR "system". I used the invitation to reply as an opportunity to show my appreciation for Delving Deeper, the OD&D clone I favour. 

I've played in one play-by-post campaign and one discord-voice chat game using Delving Deeper as a base. Delving Deeper is also my current OS(R) of choice for the play-by-post game of Ruins of Castle Gygar (affiliate link) I'm running. It's proximity to the original LBBs gives it a particular flavour—a flavour I've come to savour... and part of that is the fact it uses D20s and D6s only.

The original Reddit poster picked up on this, pointing out that this means all weapons do 1d6 damage, and therefore have nothing to differentiate them: what's the point in spending more money on a more expensive weapon just for some flavour? 

Below are some reason why.

Alone in the Wilderness

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting several write-ups of the various solo games I've been running (for myself) over the past few months. Whilst born of an absence of opportunity to engage in games with others, it's proven to be a far more rewarding experience than my previous efforts. Indeed: it's encouraged me to revive other games I'd previously abandoned as well as enabled me to test out some new ideas for Pariah, partly inspired by a solo game of Traveller (which I may link here at a later date).

What follows is a kind of mini-game which can be run as alternative to a session 0 and then later as an alternative to “downtime”. You start up by generating a band of outcasts, foraging resources from the wilderness, and seeing what happens along the way. 

It can also be played solo.

In fact, you can play along right now, I dare you. 

Solo Blueholme: Between Sessions

Initially I planned to write-up the second delve in my solo game of Stygian Library using Blueholme as my OS(R) of choice but realised I hadn't actually finished it, and recording experience and downtime activities was taking longer than planned. The previous delve can be read here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-first-delve-into-stygian.html

Some Stygian Librarians by Alec Sorenson

All of this took place in June/July of last year (2024) and has been sat in my drafts for a while: I can't stand clutter! Let the posts be SEEN!

Solo Blueholme: First Delve into the Stygian Library

Continuing on from my previous posts about the Stygian library & Blueholme, this is an Actual Play report of my first solo session in the library June 2024! Related posts can be found here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/06/blueholme-stygian-library-solo.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/07/solo-blueholme-session-0-chargen-etc.html

...both of which detail the minor changes I made to Blueholme (a retroclone of the first D&D introductory basic set) before starting the campaign.

This particular post was inspired by Technoskald's series of reports upon multiple delves into the library:
https://solo.technoskald.me/tagged/stygian-library

Emmy Allen's Stygian Library, cover image by Alec Sorenson 

You can purchase a PDF of Emmy Allen's Stygian Library from DTRPG at this affiliate link or a beautifully produced hardcover print edition from Soulmuppet Be aware that there will be a new edition of the book released relatively soon, to coincide with the re-mastering of Gardens of Ynn. The new edition appears to be an update to the cover only, but if you're planning on buying the Ynn remaster it might be worth holding out for the new print edition of Stygian as they appear to form a rather elegant pair...  the new print edition has been out for a year or so now, the previous remaster (with the Alec Sorenson cover) having been superseded. Otherwise the two book are identical.

City of 100 Gods 4/10: The Last Ladders

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

 31. The Kite-Flyer (Cloud Temple)

White Chalk: Crow Moon 2/12 (Almanac 25)

The Crow Moon is the second month of the year, according to the Neolithic farmers of the White Chalk Coast . Each month I attempt to update this pariah almanac, with the end result being a calendar for an entire year, alongside supporting encounter and foraging tables, which in turn reflect the seasonal changes.

The first past in the series is here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

The firs month is detailed here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/03/white-chalk-cold-moon-almanac-25.html

Further context is provided here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/05/white-chalk.html

I've decided to structure the post with the most specific information up front.

Crow by Leonard Baskin (illustration from Ted Hughes' collection of Crow poems)

The Crow Moon is a month of bitter hope. While there are signs that the Spring Princess is on her way (notably the white snowdrops and purple crocuses), it is still a month of frost and snow and cold, wet winds. So optimism is tempered, and prudence prevails. The month is named for the proliferation of jackdaws, magpies and carrion crows feasting on the worms, emerging from the cold ground with faint hope in their tiny hearts.

The Moon Realm

Since posting about the DAWN REALM a few months back now I've had a rethink about how to approach the spirit realms that sit parallel to the Here & Now. For all the novelty of "switching codes" when dipping toes into other places (and the notion that stripping the character down to its essence could be represented at the table i.e. by taking elements from the character sheet and writing them out afresh) the reality is it's disruptive to play. This isn't necessarily bad, but I'm much less convinced it adds anything to the experience than I was previously.

It also reduces the amount of player-facing chaff and allows them to get down to what the game's really about: exiled stone-age psychonauts exploring the spirit realm, just like Dungeons & Dragons [is/used to mostly be] about dungeons and dragons. 

A map of the Moon

Fly me to the Moon

Travel to the Moon Realm requires:

White Chalk: The Cold Moon 1/12 (Almanac 25)

Each full moon I intend to publish an update to the White Chalk sandbox here on this blog, describing the calendar year of a fantasy proto-Neolithic somewhat parallel to the world in which we live. At the time of writing we have already experienced 2 full moons (14th January 2025 and 12th February 2025), so I have 2 further posts due prior to March's full moon.

To begin I have drawn just one six-mile hex, divided further into 1 mile hexes. You can read an introductory overview in this post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/02/white-chalk-almanac-25.html

Draft planisphere for the first month of the year, discussed below

The Cold Moon rise with bitterness: though the shortest day—the solstice—is already passed, the worst of winter is yet to come. The peoples of the Chalk Coast brace themselves for battery by the cruel winds of the north.

City of a Hundred Gods pt 3/10: further along the Ladders

We return to the Ladders, the slum dwellings on the immediate interior of the City of a Hundred Gods. Day and night encounters are rolled on a 1d20 table found in the post linked below and repeated at the foot of this one.
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/12/city-of-hundred-gods-part-210-remaining.html

The whole city is divided into wards, each one possessing a local spirit elevated to the status of god by those who worship it, both within and without the city. Each ward possess a handful of unique day and night encounters and additional details concerning the god's followers and priests—as well as others living and working in these streets.

Anselm Kiefer, Die fruchtbare Halbmond (The Fertile Crescent)

The Ladders refers  for both the high incidence of ladders to access the irregularly stacked mudbrick housing, but also for the tiny lanes intersecting the two parallel orbital avenues like the rungs of a ladder. It is a tightly packed slum rife with dirt, disease and regular fires.Though the Lord of the Dead treads the clay-tiled streets without fear this is also a place that expresses the wild, complex beauty of human life in all its glorious diversity. The Ladders provide an explosion of colour, scent and sound to rival the most potent entheogenic experience.

CW: animal slaughter, cannibalism

White Chalk (Almanac 25)

I'm so poor at keeping up with these annual challenges, so I thought I'd run my own.

Here is a single, 6 mile hex: it is divided into 30 one mile hexes, because PARIAH is a game of overland exploration (among other things). This is a development of White Chalk, itself an outgrowth of earlier proto-Neolithic Britain thoughts.

Initial 6 mile hex, divided into 1 mile hexes.

.

The aim of this post is to provide an overview of a region by zooming into one six mile hex. Over the course of this year, I'll be producing regular posts providing typical events for this region as the game year. These include:

• seasonal movements of birds, animals and humanoids
• weather hex-flower specific to the season/month
• Star charts and astronomical information (meteor storms, eclipses etc.)
• plant and fungi information (foraging for food and medicine)
• human cultural information (festivals, rituals, transhumance etc.)

Like my other PARIAH sandboxes this is set in a fantasy proto-Neolithic i.e. late stone age with many anachronistic elements. Unlike the other setting (City of 100 Gods, Atop the Wailing Dunes, City of Ghosts) the climate is temperate rather than tropical. In fact, the entire map is based on the south coast of England, not least because this particular part of the UK is right on my doorstep—indeed, it is my doorstep.

N.B. This was largely inspired by the many Neolithic sites around Sussex, Hampshire and Kent. If you have come to this blog as an outsider to the weird hobby of RPGs please understand this as a piece of speculative fiction rather than archaeology.

Sorcerous rituals

Previously we exhumed and revived some mystic rituals, with the added details of where they might go wrong if performed by those not fully practised in their execution. This time we're going to look at sorcerous rituals, accompanied by an appropriate image:

Look at that face and tell me it wasn't done by AI

Mystic rituals produce reliable, specific results through complex procedures.

Less reliable (but more flexible) is the magic of sorcery: rituals of invocation, conjuration and binding. Practitioners are called “sorcerers” but possess no special power—beyond knowledge.

• Invocations bring forth a wisp of elemental power: a spell-spirit (see also AHPZ19)
• Conjurations summon elemental spirits of definite form, strong personality and great intelligence.
• Bindings enable the sorcerer to place contingencies on summoned entities, usually through a device and/or a command word
• Summonings are elaborate and highly specific rituals to conjure the most powerful spirits i.e. demons.
• Banishings return spirits to their realm of origin.

DEATH TO THE BLOGGIES

Hahaha only joking. I love the bloggies! 

Consider yourself clickbaited. 

I never do that: haven't previously will never do so again... but I just couldn't resist after Prismatic Wasteland's substack post titled Are the Bloggies Rigged?, which also featured my hilarious Goblin punch joke (uncited). I mean, anything I have to say has to be taken with a pinch of salt given that I was overlooked (thank you, general public) after being a finalist in 2023—see my handmade-by -Zedeck 2023 finalist pin, below!

This is very cute and I love it

Honestly, no sour grapes here, but I do have one or two things to say.

Rituals—including when they go wrong

The process of revising PARIAH continues apace. The most recent uploads to itch.io include two zinis-worth of rituals (amounting to a total of 3500 words), most of which are updated versions of magic previously published here or in PARIAH Vol. Rituals come in two distinct flavours: 

• Sorcerous rituals are concerned with invoking, conjuring, binding and banishing spirits to achieve a variety of magical ends. There are set procedures to follow, but these can be varied.
• Mystic rituals (formerly known as "shamanic") are much more specific in terms of both the procedure and the outcome

Within the world of pariah these rituals can be learned by anyone: there are no special talents or gifts required beyond knowledge. All of the Mystic rituals are learned by pariahs after assisting a set number of times. though not made explicit, the implication is that assisting in a ritual at least once offers some chance of it succeeding if attempted. Simply put, if usually I need to have assisted this ritual 3 times before "knowing" it: if I have assisted on only 1 occasion, I could ty doing it for myself... with a 33% chance of succeeding.

Spread from AHPZ21: Sorcerous Rituals

But what does failure mean, beyond the ritual not working. The sorcerous rituals have a failure system built in: there are displeased spirits, the necessity of entering their debt, and a series of random mishaps. But the mystic rituals are highly specific: it stands to reason that there should be highly specific outcomes for when they go wrong, too... so while I was at first reluctant to share these again, providing failure scenarios alongside them presents a good enough excuse to do so.

Exploring the Dawn Realm (RPG Blog Carnival Worlds Beyond)

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is curated by VDoughnut of VDonnut Valley and is titled: Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond. I have several of these parallel realities sitting around (or stacked on top of each other, like paper plates), many of which I'm actively working on. So this feels almost a little cheeky. I may have to do another before the month is out to show my seriousness.

This is a post about the DAWN REALM, the nearest thing Pariah has to a the feywilde. It's the source of organic life, illusion magic, charms and mutations where nothing is ever created or destroyed but often converted into other forms.

And while it bleeds, constantly, into the Here & Now, the best way to experience it first hand is through a heroic dose of Dawn Mushrooms.

In essence this is a depth crawl with a guaranteed end, as it uses real time (10 mins = 1 turn, ends after 12 turns) and most encounters are resolved conversationally.

An ink drawing by Jef Cox from Pariah volume 1

Navigating the City of a Hundred Gods—Another Approach to the City

In ancient times a man named Patrick Stuart shared a post about wrapping a dungeon around a die to create a non-Euclidean adventure site: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/did-i-invent-this.html

I think about it a lot, and have been playing with multiple iterations of the concept for a number of years... but only recently did I consider it an interesting way to approach the "city crawl", specifically the settlement slowly being described in the City of a Hundred Gods series of posts. 

A hex map of a city, repeating endlessly.