City '26 Megapost

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:

• 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
• The Novel Gamemaster presents Myth's Landing a hub of adventure a dozen miles from the entrance to Mythbarrow, the fabled megadungeon
  https://www.thenovelgamemaster.com/2026/01/myths-landing-city-26-project.html
• Clé/Clay is fleshing out the city of Lüm: a major academic centre in their existing fantasy world, Curcalen
  https://www.wongery.com/blog/City26/ 
• Iwar of The Birch and Wolf is sharing their city at this link:
  https://thebirchandwolf.blogspot.com/2026/02/wogatispurk-city-26.html
• Eli is hosting their city-building effort on Google Docs:
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PYOwEVRlfm9ItiTW3vlNOqaE4YMOms9M4CnPWqrMEMY/edit?usp=sharing
• Mkukier presents their city, Lionnis, at their blog:
   https://mahnedan.blogspot.com/2026/02/lionnis-1-wstep-lionnis-1-introduction.html

So What is It?

Essentially it is a 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 we workshopped 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