The City26 template itself does mandate adventure hooks, random encounters and NPCs and these are useful but do not quite snap together into full sessions. I also realised as I have been preparing this graphic that I misread the instructions and have been coming up with d6 plot hooks & quests for each ward to go with the d12 random encounters and 7 NPCs - which is not actually what is requested.
I think the unique stories to tell here are the 'teeter-totter' ones - where there is motivation to minimise damage as opposed to just glass everything. Looking at the corpus of Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy adventures, we do not actually get a lot of them, in particular there are not so many that see you committed to a single hive as opposed to doing the Inquisitions will across the sector.
Casting about for other potential sources I looked at a few -
- Riffing off the 'megacity' aspect - old Judge Dredd adventures in White Dwarf / elsewhere
- Focussing on the 'weird investigation' aspect - Delta Green
- Taking the 'anachronistic technology' swords-and-robots angle - Eberron and Iron Kingdoms
- Returning to the sources - Necromunda skirmish wargame scenarios
It was a fascinating dive to fish out the best-of Judge Dredd adventures and recall my old 2000AD reading days but ultimately while there are some interesting adventures the flavour is too gonzo in Dredd and only a few could be retrofitted without wringing all the interesting bits out. There were a couple of potential ones - a murder investigation on a mobile mega-highway rest stop and a bang raid by rubber-ball bouncing thieves - that could potentially be workable but this is not the rich deep vein of adventures I wanted.
The Delta Green angle seems most promising - having read through Warhammer Crime novels recently, I appreciate that a standard criminal investigation gets interesting when you have to contend with all the nonsense of the 40k universe. There are libraries of freely available one-shots and the 'mythos threat' and cultists of Delta Green is easily reskinned as 'chaos threat' for 40k. This is a motherlode of content but complex and requiring a fair amount of red-penning to re-align it from mythos to chaos.
Looking at Eberron there are good adventures here - lightning rail heists, intrigue and mystery as a focus - but a lot of running around the continents. Similarly with Iron Kingdoms - much of the action takes place out in the wilds. There are probably some good things here but when I look at the recommendations for urban adventures, the advice seems to be to convert yet other standard D&D campaigns to Ebberon, so not quite what I need.
There is good thematic fodder in the Necromunda scenarios - a pair of good summaries are here and here but these are more fodder for tactical combats or conflicts to work around than for the overarching framing of an adventure. Useful, because once you get any sort of big hook you can then bulk it out with some of these encounters en route, but not the whole thing.
All told this suggest that tailoring an adventure creation workflow for the investigations in this hive-city might actually be the way to go - identify the factions in play and clarify their resources, pull on some of the plot-hooks and then fold the whole thing together by picking some of the random encounters or some Necromunda fight scenarios to be site of interest, salt those with clues to the plot hooks (potentially delivered via the 7 NPCs) and then think through the locations where resolution could happen.
The key difference compared to most of the standard fantasy adventuring I would run is that there are a lot more opportunities to do stand-off investigating and research in such a setting - pulling auspex logs, querying records with local Arbites divisions, etc.
The other bit I think I need to ponder is capturing the different flavours of adventures available on a Hive of a Knight-world. I think a campaign set here would be an exploration of all the dreadful things that can go wrong just on world, as inspired by my recent Rogue Trader CRPG run where nothing ever stayed fixed. It points towards the players being potentially Administratum tithe-auditors or their equivalents working directly for the Knight-house Sacristans - the classic general trouble-shooters with a strong side-order of getting things done quietly before higher authorities decide to stop being subtle and drop the hammer on the whole world.
All this does point back to the importance of 'intro adventures' to showcase a setting. Once more, we discover the wheel.
Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 23/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 42% vs 33% target
Population covered: 56%
So far doing ok but I think I have creamed off the best inspiration and things are slowing down a chunk. I already reworked my initial list of wards to drop in a new trio I came up with, I think this approach will serve well as we go because things that are currently looking a bit beige to me will become interesting as two or more previous things get mashed together because I need the space for other good ideas.
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