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 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:

• A 1920s Midwestern City: New Babylon with a beautiful map
  https://crimewave.blot.im/tagged/city-26
• Seed of Worlds produces Hive RT-87 a homage to Rogue Trader '87 Hiveworlds: Necromunda before it was Necromunda!
  https://seedofworlds.blogspot.com/search/label/city26
• Wenya Lagoon by Nova @Idle Cartulary: "Hot, wet, sweat-drenched, salty, long-legged birds, crabs, fish, mosquitos, octopus, sharks, coral, sailing ships, blue waters, mangroves, anchors, shipwrecks, tidal pools..."
  https://idlecartulary.com/2026/01/03/preparing-for-city-26-week-0/
• Bogblins is doing something.... more to be revealed! 
  https://bogblins.blogspot.com/2026/01/year-in-review-city26.html
• Christopher Kurts introduces Rainbow City "a post-scarcity, anarcho-mutualist, megacity gift society " over on Playtest Dummies: 
  https://playtestdummies.substack.com/p/skyfield-a-rainbow-city-neighborhood

So What is It?

Essentially it is achallenge 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 we workshoppedg 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.