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:
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| The Babylonian God Nabu as God of Scribes |
This post is the in the City '26 series and continues our ongoing exploration of the City of a Hundred Gods:
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| 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:
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| 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...
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:
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| Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore, text below |
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| 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
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| The walls of Ichan-Qаl’а, Khiva, Uzbekistan |
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.
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| 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
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.
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| A hex map of a city, repeating endlessly. |
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.
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| Ruins of Çatalhöyük—which could be the title of YOUR next adventure, couldn't it? |
Jewel at the Foot of the Mountain. The Bridge Over the Great River. City of Many Stairs. Gateway to the Sun and Heavens. The Endless village. The city has nearly as many names as the number of deities to whom its inhabitants pray... and it is this peculiar feature that grants its most familiar name: the City of a Hundred Gods.
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| Was going to use this as the cover for PARIAH volume 2 then remembered... ...we ripped it off Assassin's Creed... |
To outsiders these "gods" are hungry, capricious demons that thrive on that unique misery endemic to urbanised societies... but to those born within sight of the city's incredible walls, they are entities worthy of their devotion. The myriad cults venerating these one hundred deities each work in synergy to make the metropolis greater than the sum of its parts.
So come then, let us explore each district via the "gods" venerated there, starting with the outskirts of the city and of course its walls.Part 1 of this 2-part post special can be read here:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/01/exploring-space-procedure-in-different.html
In a previous post I look at play procedures in different environments, in the hope that this might somehow "unlock" the secret to running a city encounter. For many readers I'm trying to solve a problem that isn't there, and I'm not going to argue with you: I think this is probably about my own obsession with cities and what they mean. Hopefully something good can come out of it.
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| Lilith, Anselm Kiefer |
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| Constant's New Babylon Nord. It is upside down, courtesy the internet. |
Work for PARIAH VOLUME 2: CITY OF GHOSTS continues apace. There is no way I am going to be able to have this ready for Zine Quest 3 unfortunately, but I have at least settled on a format. The nature of the space is closer to a dungeon crawl than a city crawl, so there will be a somewhat granular approach to the space... by which I suppose I mean a keyed map with defined locations and routes around.
However, I'm still thinking about a bigger, more urban setting for another project, but feel the need to really define the procedure for exploring an urban environment, as it's the least defined in old school play. To get there I'm first going to have a look at some traditional play procedures with additional commentary regarding how this manifests in PARIAH.
A confluence of currents, including but not limited to...
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| I've said it before and I'll say it again: this 9,000 year old Neolithic dwelling is better than my house. |
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| Pixelart on reddit by u/IRudim ... (Kyrans aren't ersatz arabs, but until I draw a cityscape myself, this evokes the right kind of atmosphere) |