A port on the deep astral - Gaus Tschaltis (RPG Blog Carnival )

Hipsters & Dragons gives us this months prompt of fantasy locations and from the long list of prompts they suggest I am going with a "homebrew location that fellow GMs can drop into their games." Find below the astral outpost of Gaus Tschaltis - a leviathan-hunting port on the far fringes of the Githyanki empire.

As mentioned in The Githyanki Main I used the set up of "not enough hands" - a local githyanki regent having to hold down some far-flung reach of the astral with few githyanki and using Letters of Marque and mercenaries to solve problems. This makes this place a great jumping off place for Spelljamming campaigns or a stop-over on astral traverses for Spelljammer or Planescape.

This port is built on the drifting skeleton of a colossal astral whale - the slaying of which was the founding legend of Yvre Tchaltis, first master of the port. These are actual bones not the rocky remnants of a dead god and a roving astral ranger once said it was clear the creature must have been on the verge of death from age if it was this large but noone heeded that liar. The initial butchery and processing of the carcass kept the first crew here busy so long that they did many runs back to other githyanki outposts and the place became known. Some decades of merry anarchy followed before the eye of Vlaakith finally fell upon the activities of her children and since then a Githyanki Knight oversees her will. In practice, Vlaakith mostly wills that the leviathan hunters, pirates and raiders handover a share of their whatever they haul back and otherwise is content to let them about their business.

The port itself has a handful of major locations. The populace is half githyanki, half whatever-came-in-on-a-Spelljammer. Order is held down by House Tschaltis cracking heads if anyone gets too rowdy. The Law extends about as far as Hrin can see. Everything else is at a strangers own risk.

Shiny TTRPG links #261

A punchy set of links to start the week. For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

A shrike for my dreams gives us Overloading the reaction roll

Anxious Mimic asks Marks: What if Saves, Stats, and Hp were all the same thing?

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher creates The Met Collection Hex Tiles v0.2

Revivify Games gives us Running a City, the Ultimate Sandbox

DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER shares Mythic Bastionland: Overloading the Wilderness Roll

I Cast Light! gives us YOUR BACKPACK IS A SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: Don't Let Monsters Steal Them

Goblin's Henchman asks Can we de-quantize D&D? | … did Heisenberg’s Hobgoblins just enter the chat?

To Be Resolved gives us Reliability and Fatigue as Random Processes in Tabletop

Press The Beast shares Prepping & Running Super Adventures

Permanent Cranial Damage gives us Memory Problems

Blog of Forlorn Encystment asks Which Version of Palace of the Silver Princess Should You Run?

abandonedhireling gives us Iron Kingdoms: Full Metal Fantasy Core Rules Review

Community creation - getting that second DM, trying that other system.

Challenged by Trick the Giant to commemorate the founding and server-activation of the Vienna DM Supergroup with a post on the theme of Community - I was brainstorming what I could possibly add to the topic with the in-house testing team and they suggested talking about how in the group and era I started out, everyone was a DM and that this bumps just a gaming table up to a gaming community because it is not just hanging off one DMs effort and availability.

Half of the intention of the Supergroup was to create a game design community - and for thoughts on that I direct you to the excellent A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene by Brackish Draught - their checklist of ideas maps almost perfectly to what we did and what worked.

The other half of the purpose of the Supergroup was giving forever-DM's a chance to play and that is more likely to be the more useful thing for more of you. We short-circuited this by gathering existing forever-GMs, but what about the case where you are the only one?

Why it matters

One DM and their table, no matter how large the roster, is just one gaming group and it thrives or fails based on fate allowing that DM to continue to run their games. It also has a ceiling for activity based on when that one DM gets saturated and needs to fit in other things like sleeping, work, etc.

Should that DM have to quit for whatever reason, then while you might have a circle of friends, with no DM you do not have a gaming community.

A community forms when the gaming is no longer dependent on any one person - when you have multiple DMs. What I often see, with the people who come to our open tables, is that people want to play and few decide to run their own games - maybe 1 in 6 people through the door DM even once over the year and that includes all our existing DM cohort. There seems to be an apprenticeship approach which takes a while. There seems to be a much more solid divide now between DM and players compared to when I started.

Every player a games-master

When I first got into things, pretty much everyone who played at any of the tables also ran something. This was the mid-90s so the games in play were AD&D, WoD in all its flavours, WHFRP, Dragonlance Saga system, Shadowrun, and Conspiracy X. Everyone had their own thing they ran, according to taste, and we rotated. It meant there was never a shortage of folk ready to run things, the load was much more evenly balanced and the group as a whole more resilient to any one person being away.

I think it was also beneficial because everyone got some time at the head of the table and so knew first hand about the challenges of marshalling a table of players, running a session, and all the various chores of a DM. Thus folk were easier players, less inclined to grief a DM as they had been there too.

I suspect that the range of systems we played also made folk a bit more relaxed about the DM not being the single source of truth, with others around the table checking rules and picking up minor tasks that would otherwise all be routed through the DM. This made everything quicker, cutting down dead time since some 'DM tasks' were being solved by the players.

Since everyone was less familiar with the systems, prior to the internet being universally available in the palm of your hand, there was a higher tolerance to things being 'good enough for now' - making a ruling in the moment and moving on. Min-maxing was less, since all systems were less familiar and any one exploit was more tolerable because you were not dealing with it all the time.

To be fair this also meant that any given campaign progressed more slowly because it was not the continual focus of a groups game time but this is a feature not a bug. Rapid progress in a campaign is not what we are optimising for with these ideas.

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Samuel Becketts line is one of the things to hold as a north star in getting from just a one-DM gaming group to a gaming community. If everyone involved can get relaxed about trying new things and these things maybe being a bit squeaky but with the anticipation that together, everyone will get better, then you have the fertile ground where a community will grow.

There are greater online communities one can participate in, those are their own thing and not my field of expertise so I defer to the better advice of others. For your local table however, getting together an in-person or hybrid group - any one where there is a good chunk of in person meeting up - then I would suggest that those folk, your local micro-environment, is what you want to be adapting to. There is a torrent of advice and opinion online, a firehose that will occupy all your time if you attempt to take it all in - sip from the torrent, take what works usefully for your table and ignore the rest.

The best thing that can come from online sources - or more slowly through books - are ideas, pointers to possible ways - and being open to trying those things with an attitude of testing to see what works is helpful. That test-and-keep or test-and-drop attitude is a great one to have collectively; it both expands the range of sources from which you might draw that one great idea that makes your games better and makes everyone more forgiving for hiccups and rough bits in games where you are trying something new.

Having an attitude of 'try it and keep/dump' is great - openly acknowledging 'we are going to try these rules for a bit then decide if we like them' is good. It takes the pressure off any set of rules being flawless and lets you test how often game-breaking edge cases actually come up. If some marvelous exploit allows the PCs to massively succeed one time, that if probably fine, a great story - if it happens twice per session and is making the game hard to run - tweak or remove it.

People as a whole are much more willing to give things a go when it is a short-run thing - a new system for a one-shot or a short run campaign is a much easier sell than trying to get people to commit to a weekly slot for an indefinite amount of time. In particular when you are trying to wrangle a group of people, no time will work for everyone so rather than locking in on one time forever and losing some people, try things and then adjust.

Thoughts on community

In the same way that the 90s gamers when I came up were pretty omniverous the mid-2010s local lot here used to have an Indie games night where they ran different things every week. This, with a local board-game bar as the venue and a classic forum has formed the backbone of a community that has now been running for over a decade.

If you are trying to get a community off the ground, in particular if you are starting from a single gaming table, then intermixing your big stuff with one-shots gives a great opportunity for others to shine. Switch the main campaign from weekly to every fortnight and have others run something on the off week, or maybe last week of every month is a one-shot - something like that opens up slots for others to have a go under relatively controlled conditions.

Some folk who turn up will only want to play, some will only want to play 5e, this is fine but do not let them stop you. Geek Social Fallacies say 'friends do everything together' but if one person does not want to do a thing and you've got a potential fledgling DM ready to run something and help take that step up - ask the naysayer to go catch a movie that night. As the DM who is putting in all the elbow grease you get to make the calls that help you cultivate a back-up DM. Go forward with the willing if you have enough of them, do not waste your energy trying to get unanimity or convert the unwilling.

Getting your group on board in general with the goal of learning collectively - figuring out how to run the best games, ideally more folk running good games for each other - is a great attitude to have. It makes everyone a participant and responsible for the collective enjoyment. When folk are just turning up to be entertained, the DM competing with whatever is on Netflix. TTRPGs are the place where people get that social interaction, lean into that part of it.

Not everyone is going to be on for this - some really do just see their DMs as wetware running their entertainment - but don't worry about those folk and do not bother to cater to them. Get one or two people to come along on this journey, encourage them to try new things, try some things with them, then expand the circle and do it again. After a bit you will have tables running in parallel, players swapping about, DMs get a chance to play and the whole group becomes resilient to something happening to any one DM.

Not to say this is a journey for everyone, nor that there is anything wrong with declaring "this is a gaming table that is reliant on this one DM" if all are satisfied with that. But if you find yourself wishing there were others to bear the load with you, then I would suggest some of the above.

Your Sector, Your Problem - a setting told in saves

Considering how to express the setting of "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) through saving throws as conceived by Rise Up Comus in Worldbuilding through Saving Throws.

I like the idea a lot - the list of saves you have tells of the hazards you expect to face in this universe - and that can speak eloquently right there on the character sheet.

The key question to me is where to draw the line between attributes and saves, why not have just one or the other? I like the idea of fewer attributes to keep things simple complemented by a range of saves which show distinction between archetypes. Attributes are things that get used all the time but saves should be infrequent and, conceptually, represent how this character is special and has avoided a problem that would have caught out most people.

My current working thoughts are three attributes - grit, guile and charm. Thinking of these folk as probably existing within an environment with exo-skeletons and other means to physically move things and spending a lot of their time working at terminals and through comms lines, the physical side of things gets backgrounded, the mental side of things foregrounded.

If we assume this is a GLoG-like D&D hack, grit subs for Con and Wis, guile for Dex and Int, charm for Cha.

With those as the base attributes then, what are the saves? After looking at what causes project failures my thoughts are

Save vs
Bureacracy & Bad Planning
Xeno-shock
Inexplicable physics
Gear Failure
Panic & miscommunication

Definitions for these

Bureacracy & Bad Planning - foresight and organisation related questions, the sixth sense to check all the interpersonnel interfaces and confirm yes, someone did indeed get us flight clearance for that no-fly zone, etc.

Xeno-shock - so many aliens, with their smells and their threatening darting motions, their cacophony of sound your translator is struggling with, the mind-bending imagery etched on the walls, the implications, the implications...

Inexplicable physics - sufficiently advanced technology seems magical, logic apparently has no place here but we have to go anyway.

Gear Failure - did you check your seals? Did maintenance? Is that carabiner load-tested for this exo-suit? Is the shuttle scanner resolution good enough to pick you up from this debris field?

Panic - don't.

How it works

If we think of the categories of dealing with things as humans, aliens, stuff - any alien oriented character is going to have better Xeno-shock and Inexplicable Physics saves. Human oriented will have better Bureaucracy & Bad Planning saves. Stuff oriented will have better Gear Failure saves.

This all sits on top of assumptions of what chassis we are using in the first place, which I think is a GLoG-like, for the characters:
A few attributes
A bunch of saves
Traits/Feats for skills etc.

And then the background elements are trait/tag-based to minimise the crunch and crunch-optimisation sides of things, keep this focussed on the character and relationship side of things.

Shiny TTRPG links #260

Shiny links from about the internet! For more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Gorgon Bones gives us Childhood Inspirations

Mediums and Messages gives us The Winners of the 2025 Gloggies

To Distant Lands shares How to Not Do Zines Wrong

Danny Fist's TTRPG Stuff gives us Doing Both

Sivad's Sanctum writes In Favor of Stuff

New School Revolution writes Turning the Dial

Dungeon Merlin asks We Need to Talk About Goodman Games vs. "Eating the Book" - Why not both?

Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us A qualitative Basilisk

Save vs Total Party Kill shares Keying Dungeons

Domain of Many Things gives us How to Really Beat GM Burnout

The Rpg Gazette writes The “Post-OSR(evival)” Identity Crisis

Dungeon Mecha gives us Knowledge Rolls are Good Actually

Juniper-C hosts Old Scan Rip Jam

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes Creating a New Regional Sandbox for B2: The Keep on the Borderlands

madlabgames gives us 👑 The Dungeon Master's Checklist for Geopolitical Worlds

Press The Beast declares The OSR is trapped in Hexes it is addicted to Jaquaysing

CaelReader's Blog gives us How to Run a One-Shot in One Session

Polyhedral Nonsense shares Making a Not-Awful Adventure

A shrike for my dreams writes On sustaining creativity: lessons from my War of Art

Arcane Mutterings gives us Fourth Player Theory of TTRPG Design

Brackish Draught shares A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene

Blogwagon: Xaosseed's Rule of Three

Sam Seer asks of us "Talk about three games that are important to you" and far be it from me to refuse the call.

Dungeons & Dragons - godzilla in my gaming lexicon. I was a trad AD&D DM, then leaned hard into Planescape then after hiatus came back as a follower of the OSR, even if most often the players were looking to run 5e characters. I got the 'run a good session' down way back on the first time around, but more recently I've gotten a grip on what it takes to get a campaign to run and how to run open tables.

I've gotten decades of good gaming, it broke me into new circles of friends in three different cities.

I bought in heavily two three editions so far - AD&D/Planescape, 3.5e and 5e. Alongside that I have ramped sideways to OSR content - zines like A Thousand Thousand Islands, Through Ultans Door and NOD Magazine, books like Stygian Library, Veins of the Earth and Petty Gods and the endless font of creativity that is the OSR blogosphere. Ultimately this is me very belatedly buying into my old Black Box I guess? That was a whole other realm of 'important' to my own personal gaming journey but all under "getting more out of D&D".

World of Darkness - one I have largely put down but I was once a big WoD player and fan. One of the earliest campaigns I played in was a crossover Werewolf/Vampire/Mage game which we got tons of fun out of. I understood very little of the implications of the setting at that point, ridiculous things were done but it was a blast. In college I played a Sabbat 1920s game that was a rollercoaster of chaos; tons more fun. There was also a Kindred of the East game where we got TPK'ed which was great just for the beautiful instance of a bunch of gwáilóu running into the unknown hard and getting shredded. There were some other legendary WoD games happening among the folk I played with, it was *the thing* at the time.

The huge setting lore, advancing with each new splat book was novel at the time and multiple long-haul train journeys was spent with a fellow gamer discussing The Implications as they landed. The singular, strongly rendered setting was energising, at the time it was *the* hotness. This is one I have almost completely left behind without much interest in going back to - very much a time and a place. I could only see a return for a 'long-haul' multi-century campaign or a brief stop in as a red-team player (essentially a systemless role). It was great then, chucking double-fistfuls of attack and soak dice on the table, but it does not call me back.

The League - bottled lightning - the kids these days would call it a forum LARP - it had an Over/Under-esque impact on our games group, with significant consipring, discussions, fiction writing, scheming and conspiracy theorising. I am so glad Over/Under was the huge obvious success it was because now there is a highly visible example that I can point to and go 'that, it was like that, but for us, back then'. The world that unfolded drove months of gameplay, fiction writing, and forum discussions.

The world it ignited in my mind has stuck there for decades, if I could ever pull off one such similar game to give others the same experience, I would consider my gaming career well spent.

Turning to the bonus questions from Sam Seer:

* What was your process for making your three choices?

Games that got me where I am today; I've held myself to games that I put significant time in at table; other that existed more conceptually or solo, see below. Those that made the grade were the games were I put in the hundreds of hours during my gaming apprenticeship that shaped how I game.

* Looking back over your three picks, do you see a connection between them?

As above - what I put the most hours on across formative years. The common factor with D&D and WoD is the relative main-stream-ness of them; different mechanics but we ran them in similar styles with different settings. The DM had an adventure in mind, the truth was revealed through players being clever or making good rolls with character abilities, combat was typical. I developed a preference for high-trust gaming, or playing with others who also ran games because they too know the struggle and are less likely to deliberately derail your game.

* Did you have any honorable mentions?

Lots here; things that mostly served as fodder for the types of D&D I like to run today.

Spelljammer - this was the setting that actually had me staring at the tiny pictures in the brochure - the pirates fighting on open decks beneath the stars - going 'how do I get this to table' though it was not until post-pandemic that I was actually able to run a Spelljammer campaign and then in 5e.

Fall from Heaven II - a fantasy mod for 4X game Civilization IV; actually built to bring the creators D&D campaign into being as a playable mod. I put many, many hours on this over most of my fallow TTRPG period including times where I was working and living very remotely indeed. The emergent narratives that sprang from unlikely remixes of the basic fantasy archetypes, terrains, religions and who ended up next too who were fascinating. A masterclass in geography driving destiny.

Magic: The Gathering - for the windows on worlds, particularly Mirage, that were incredibly inspiring. The first few decades of Magic were masterclasses in show-don't-tell worldbuilding; with card art and maybe a sentence or two of flavour text conveying a whole world. If they had dropped a 'Spelljammer: Skyship Weatherlight' module I would have been all over it - it was the 'Voyages of the Princess Ark' for the late 90s generation.

Heroquest - foundational dungeon crawler - treasures, lethal combat, claustrophobic tangles of spaces, the running against the clock of monsters closing in on you, great stuff. Also provided a hook out to Games Workshop which was the slippery slope to White Dwarf magazine, thence to Dragon and onwards to Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Rogue Trader ('87) - the classic 'important game I rarely played' - with the meaty book of skirmish combat wargaming - but it had a bestiary, equipment lists, fat wedges of lore, amazing art - this was a hugely inspiring sci-fi universe to encounter. I deflected away towards Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine (6mm) for yet more windows on the setting but when Dark Heresy finally dropped I snapped it up. After a few years slogging around in the OSR I finally came to the realisation that Rogue Trader could function fairly well as an RPG system - high lethality, sure but so are many others.

Actual Test: d4 Caltrops Wilderness Stocking - Expanded

tl;dr: tested out d4 Caltrops Wilderness Stocking - Expanded - good in itself but elevated to great by the vast library of supporting tables for every circumstance.

I needed to rustle up some off-map hexes that were immediately behind a target site for the players and ktrey launched the 'expanded' version so I decided to give it a whirl. I was running using the Hexcrawl25 set up - 19 sub-hexes within the hex - which for me were 2.5 mile sub-hexes and a 10 mile hex. I am not sure who that relates to the intended density of stuff ktrey had in mind but sticking one main thing in each sub-hex and then teasing out the implications worked pretty well.

The specific hex I was looking at was D8 on the map below (lower left) and I knew a few things about it - that it was the north-west facing entrance to a valley running to the south east, that the terrain was rainforest.

I knew the north-east overlapping hex was occupied by the castle of an infernalist warlord, everything else was open so I rolled up something for each sub-hex. After each roll I popped the suggested linked list elsewhere on d4 Caltrops and refined whatever it was there. This gave me a lot of relatively general things but as I kept going, slowly a pattern emerged - there was a fey-bunch at the eastern side of the hex, something else laired at the west with ambush encounters around it. There were tracks and another lair in the centre and a line of impassible terrain cutting north-east to south-west in the south-east corner.

My main reason for working up the hex and running this exercise was to answer 'what was keeping the infernalist busy?' The fey presense provided part of that answer but what was the other faction/force in the hex? I needed something that was opposed to both the fey and the infernal forces so an aberation fits the bill - given this is a nice damp rainforest, an aboleth works.

I tagged the things I had rolled up to those groups then marked them all out on the hexmap to see patterns - colour-coding the things that seemed to fit together. What appears to emerge is a rainforest with a number of dangerous features within it, an aboleth with thralls at their command an fey that are enchanting the rain-forest to be hostile to try and keep them out.

The huge range of odd things that dropped out of the tables on d4 Caltrops provided tons of interesting little hooks and bits to assemble into an emergent narrative of what is happening in the hex. Not all of them immediately link to that core conflict, which is even better - this is the kind of rut-busting I need when I am doing these things, otherwise I ended up getting too focused and everything ties back to the one big thing going on. Variety is better.

Once this was complete, the mess on their doorstep points to why the infernalists have been unable to fully exert control over their surrounds - and speaks to what their objectives will be when the players turn up on their doorstep. A few things have not been fully hammered out at this point but I will wait for the players to actually get down this direction before applying that last level of polish.

The first layer "Wilderness Stocking - Expanded" table is pretty good, a nice, useable example of the craft. What elevates it to seriously good stuff is the huge depth of additional tables scattered across d4 Caltrops that are pulled together in the links, those make this really useful, driving it down to that next level of detail where the creative juices start to really flow.

Shiny TTRPG links #259

Poring back over holiday activity to harvest a bumper crop of shiny links. For yet more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

The Madman's Menagerie proposes A CHALLENGE FOR 2026: THE STARTER B⬡X

Orthopraxy writes Eating the Book--a response to 'We Need to Talk About Goodman Games'

Shuttered Room asks Secret Santicorn 2025 - What the fuck do adventurers eat?

Unlawful Games gives us Godawful Griffons

Seraphim Seraphina asks What do we mean when we say a game “supports” play?

Archon's Court gives us Rota Fortunae Retrospective (Handling Active Faction Sandboxes)

A Room Containing 1d6 Goblins shares The Underdog Bonus

Connecting the Fictional Dots writes The Human Game Manifesto

The Dolent Chronicle shares Play Worlds Manifesto

Being An Asshole To A Goblin (BAATAG) gives us The Verbs of Play

Brackish Draught writes Answering the Perpetual Questions of RPGs

Spiceomancy gives us Clerics get the sex dice (class)

Crow’s Corner shares Table-Tested Review of The One Ring’s “Tales From the Lone-Lands”

Explorers Design compiles The Bloggies Hall of Fame

Dungeon Mecha gives us Solving the 1 HP Goblin

Blog of Forlorn Encystment writes Play Environments, Power, Complexity, and Agency in D&D

HiskiH gives us The NWOF Promise

Eleatic stranger on RPG.net writes Resting Pressure: Rules that prompt new problems for characters /a>

mindreader's digest gives us Quality of life, rulesets, and fatigue

Trick's Tales shares Weather Worm Adventure I: A review of Deluge at Drizzle Distillery

Throne of Salt compiles Public Domain Roundup 2026

Traverse Fantasy shares Cinco: Bibliography

Being An Asshole To A Goblin (BAATAG) gives us Elements of a Key 2

I Cast Light! shares CRYPTS OF DOLMENWOOD: Using The Timeline to Determine Motifs of Tombs, Dungeons, And Undead

Francesco Cacciatore on Polygon writes After 8 years of playing D&D nonstop, I've finally tried its biggest alternative

Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch - general info + example ward (City26)

First progress report for City26 challenge - Hive Rejoicing Torch (RT-87) - known in the local vernacular as Rough Times or Regular Torment.

I worked up some schematics as a 'where things are' guide.

Within this we have approx
2 x Spire wards (0.002% population) ~ 45 thousand inhabitants each.
5 x Upper wards (1.5% population) ~ 14 million inhabitants each.
12 x Upper Mid wards (9.8% population) ~ 37 million inhabitants each.
20 x Lower Mid wards (65.3% population) ~ 155 million inhabitants each.
13 x Lower wards (23.5% population) ~ 90 million inhabitants each.

I reworked the size/volume of Hive Primus from Necromunda to get a sense of what was above/below ground, what had surface access and what did not.

Our first ward is T27 - Carnosaur Refit Works - known locally as Dinochrome. Population ~ 155m.

Features
* Carnosaur capture and throne-control installation for knight-aspirant training
* Proving grounds - multi terrain battle simulations
* Antagonist holding yards - dangerous xenos, battle robots, penal companies
* Training arenas for duels and small-team training
* Candidate schools for knight-aspirants

All the above are supported by a large population of technicians, crafts-masters, trainers, ogryn dinosaur wranglers, beastman labourers, wardens, observers and all their habitation and sustainment requirements and secondary logistical support - transit, first-response medicae, authorised leisure and entertainments, shrines and worship facilitation.

Trappings & Trade

Imports of live great beasts for refit from the southern hemisphere and challengers for the arena and proving grounds - anything dangerous and able to put up a fight can work

Specific personnel found here are the knight-aspirants; those born to the knight-houses coming down from the upper hive or, rarely, offworld, those who have earned a place in the tests through outstanding performance in the down-hive cold-one cavalry or jetbike squadrons or as a fighter pilot. Occasionally a candidate swept up in testing for other Adepta is brought in.

Exports are a small handful of qualified knight-pilots so exceptional they warrant offworld transportation to one of the mother Knight-houses plus a large secondary output of pilots for fighters, speeders or sentinels plus candidates for Adeptus Titanicus, they Navy and similar.

Controlling Faction

Sacristan techno-magi of the Knight House Conneinster. They closely guard the secrets of the throne-like technologies which are used to create a control interface for a carnotaur that resembles that of a Knight war-machine. Their overwhelming priority is to prove the quality of the Knight-candidates of this world such that it be granted the right to become a full Knight-house. They oversee the brutal trials that grind carnotaurs, candidates and adversary forces into bloody scraps so that the few truly excellent candidates can be sent forth to glorify their name.

Rival Faction

Adeptus Mechanicus, arrived after the world was rediscovered, are split amongst themselves between three factions - a Mechanicus Biologis group that sees vindication and exhaltation of a cyborgisation approach, an orthodox Adeptus Mechanicus group that sees the Sacristans approach as near-heresy and loudly decries their every deviation from the sacred ways of the Omnissiah and a radical Adeptus Mechanicus group that believes that the Sacristans may have access to some unknown scraps of ancient STC technologies and wishes to learn from them. All three factions think the others utter fools and their internal fighting has let the Sacristans keep control so far.

Encounters
1. Wild carnotaur broken free causing mass chaos - noone wants to damage it during recapture.
2. Mechanicus-affiliated gangers intercepting a cargo of arena-remnants seeking tech to steal.
3. Riot by arena-fodder being suppressed by a cold-one mounted Arbites squadron.
4. Gang fight between rival mechanicum-faction-affiliates.
5. Offworld candidates agitating for consideration at the aspirant colleges - "Don't you know who I am?"
6. Attempted assassination of a champion arena knight.
7. Patrol on cold-ones, very snappish and by-the-book. Demand authorisations.
8. Ogryn carnotaur-wrangler, angry since 'his' carnotaur does not recognise him since refit for the arena.
9. Rowdy arena crowd - demand opinions from passers-by.
10. Rival arena-knight supporters having a grudge brawl.
11. Misfiring mindlink has a rogue beast and pilot on the loose.
12. New arena-champion flush with victory and celebrating - generous to those who respectfully join, furious if snubbed

NPCs
1. Master Sacristan (head of refit) - dour, focussed, ancient. Lives are grit to the long plan.
2. Arena-Knight - expert, glorious, above your concerns.
3. Carnotaur hunter ogryn - grizzled, cunning, wants back out in the jungles to do what he knows
4. Candidate assessor - hideously scarred patched with augmetics, sharp wit & mind, no time for fools.
5. Craftsmaster (reclamations) - hunched, smells of offal and oils, cheerful.
6. Arena superfan - bio-modded, intense, knowledgable, hair-trigger. Leads gang of fans.
7. Mechanicus Biologis - lumpy beneath cloaks, ocular tentacles, asks a lot of questions.

Plot Hooks
1. Black market titan-core was fitted to a carnotaur which has now escaped. Find it, quickly, quietly and retrieve it unharmed.
2. That arena-knight should lose their next bout. Lot of creds on it.
3. A desperate candidate wants intel on the upcoming challenges.
4. A buyer seeks a throne-like control - your choice whether attached to a carnotaur or from the retif works or arena-salvage.
5. Someone has been drugging arena fodder and ruining fight data for the assessors. Backtrack the source, stop them.
6. Expedite escort of the best carnotaur vet to the arena to save a wounded champion beast.

Three more wards worked up this month were:
T17 - Central medicae where man, beast and beastman are patched together to longer serve the Emperor
T39 - Railheads where ships are hauled in from the now distant coast
T41 - Bone reclamation and the meat honey apiaries

Nominations for the Bloggies 2026

Clayton at Explorers Design hosts The Bloggies - a yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games. Below are my nominations for the categories they gave.

Image by Clayton

Theory Category. Thinking about systems, settings, and more.

Idraluna Archives gives us Notebook Kayfabe

Pithy, but a keen insight into how to preserve suspension of disbelief even when blind-sided by players.

Gameable Category. Ready-to-use rules, monsters, and more.

A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads by Garamondia

I repeat what I said for the GLoGgies - so good it kicked off a bandwagon, plus a genius monster that has massive potential to make fascinating campaigns and feel eerie but manageable once you figure out their schtick.

Advice Category. Advice for play, prep, publishing, and more.

Weird Writer's Prep Bandwagon

I rounded up some of the responses on Shiny links #229 and #230 and I know I missed many others - a huge response from the blogosphere with lots and lots of great advice so I think Weird Writer deserves a gong for perfectly timing the zeigeist and drawing forth so much useful blogging.

Strong runner-up for me was Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's hexfill methodology, only posted as a bluesky thread alas. I got a good few gaming sessions and multiple blogposts from this solid, actionable advice for 'regional' hexcrawling.

Critique Category. Critical analysis of books, games, and more.

Elmcats colossal work

I had a glimpse behind the curtain at the blood, sweat and bits that went into this - Elmcat put an unbelievable amount of work into coding this up and hunting down all the legacy blog-feeds of the distant past. Incredible work that helps us put fact-based answers to some bitter arguments and best of all - provides a one-stop shop to explore the greatest legacy hits of the OSR and find new bloggers you would never have stumbled on otherwise.

Best Debut Blog. Recognition for newcomers that make a splash.

Sages Sanctum

Early doors yet but Sage just started blogging and cranked out methodology bangers, lots of great ideas - mentions in the Glatisant & MT Black's newsletter already. I am watching eagerly to see what they come up with next.

Best Series.

Rise Up Comus + Warren D - Designing Dungeons Course

A huge work, a most generous gift of their time to the cause. Deserving of serious recognition.

Shiny TTRPG links #258

A roster of links recommended from peoples backlogs this year - wisdom that has stood the test of time - also a 'mulligan' edition for me while I am back in the aul sod for the New Year.

For more, see last weeks collection found here or on the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

I Cast Light! gives us RPG'S TONISBORG COELACANTH: Or The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg & The Preservation of D&D before D&D, a Review

Links to Wisdom asked What are assumptions about how to play an OSR adventure that you think might not be commonly held as desired?

Rise Up Comus gave us GM Principles

Coins and Scrolls shared Sci-Fi: Squishy Space

@inbabylontheywept gave us Babylon's 6 D&D Tips

DIY & dragons asked Who is the GLOGosphere?

Was It Likely? shared iconography and alignment

Rise Up Comus wrote c o z y

d4 Caltrops gave us d100 - Connections & Coincidences for Character Convergence

Rise Up Comus wrote Advice for Running Horror Games

False Machine shared Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

DIY & dragons gave us Learning from Boardgames - Tokaido and Things to do on a Journey

ars ludi wrote Grand Experiments: West Marches

Thalian Musings shared Hexcrawling the Blogosphere

Don't Split the Party gave us Modern Minds and Medieval Distances

Archbrick shared Hexmap Terrain Generator

Ars Magisterii gsve us Your Giant Spiders Are Boring

Rise Up Comus wrote Conversational Spirals - Closure in RPGs

Jay Dragon gave us Systems of Relation

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux shared A Metagaming manifesto

DIY & dragons gave us Roguelike Advice for Tabletop Games from @Play and Golden Krone Hotel

City '26 Launch

For the new year I will be taking on City '26, running with a Warhammer 40k hivecity - perhaps a precursor to running an Imperium Maledictum campaign in 2027, or some oneshots between this and then.

My initial concept was "a hiveworld from 40k as seen in the original Rogue Trader '87" and the more I thought, the more wrinkles popped up that provided more fodder. Elements I wanted to tie in were the Knight Worlds with their dinosaur herding, more abhumans, and a general stronger alignment to the aesthetic in Rogue Trader '87.

Launch concept, that may get tweaked, is an abhuman-heavy hiveworld serving as a support to a small domain of Knight Worlds. They have a weird slate of technology due to the Knight World Sacristans having held onto an odd set of things. The place is metal poor but promethium rich. They continue to process the dwindling herds of megasaurs from the non-poluted hemisphere and spend a lot of effort on synthetics, ceramics and other work-arounds to make up for the metal shortage.

The large abhuman population has made this place a focus of Adeptus Ministorum attention with multiple factions with a range of views on whether or not abhumans can truly be brought to the light of the Emperor and whether it is worth the effort. Adeptus Mechanicus is present both prying into the odds and ends of Sacristan preserved technologies and using the place as a backwater test-bed for unorthodox ideas. Adeptus Munitorium bureaus continuously fight over whether it is acceptable for the tithe to be met by well-trained but ill-equiped abhuman regiments.

This is a better place than many for abhumans, though the relentless demands of the Imperial Tithe are getting no lighter and life is no garden of flowers. The somewhat odd status of being ruled over by a Knight House brings a range of unusual pressures and suspicions along with a scattered handful of small mercies.

Approach

We got this handy graphical guide from Pete of Garblag Games which gives the 'rhythm' of the weekly tasks of this challenge.

Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore

I rummaged through various hivecity posts about the web and found some good breakdowns of life in a Hive which gives me a rough breakdown of
2 x Spire wards (0.002% population)
5 x Upper wards (1.5% population)
12 x Upper Mid wards (9.8% population)
20 x Lower Mid wards (65.3% population)
13 x Lower wards (23.5% population)

Some unknown netizen did trojan work estimating the size/volume of Hive Primus from Necromunda - I will be using a smaller version of that (taking the ground layer at 5-volumes down, not seven). Assuming we are ~ 46% the size of Necromunda with equivalent population density, we have 4.7 billion Imperial citizens packed in here, ~90 millon per ward. Each ward, the population of Germany more or less.

From #hexcrawl25 I found one of the handiest things to have was a template for the repeated bits so I bashed together this weekly worksheet. I may tweak this as we go but for now, it will do to start.

Inspirations

Rogue Trader '87 and 'Imperial Army' contemporary illustrations with fighting abhumans.

Chapter Serf from Zedeck Siew and that study on what esoteric crafts support the elite fighting forces of the Imperium.

Imperial Knights as per White Dwarf #126.

Genestealers cultists for the industrial aesthetic - we will tap the new generation of models like the goliath truck because it gives an glimpse into the functioning Imperium.

Necromunda for the general deep-hive vibe - particularly the mercenaries and hangers-on - for the rot that festers in the abandoned bits of hivecities.

Killteam for the broader range of Imperial weirdness.

Rogue Trader (Owlcat Games) for that sense of the sheer scale of nonsense, politics and weirdness that is constantly churning even when things are not in eminent peril.