#City26 Mid-Year Status

At the mid-point of the year, asking how the #City26 challenge is coming along. On a pure stats, it is not bad - --% of total hex-count for the year achieved with 50% of the time gone. I have not gotten any of this to table but it has proved a nice distraction during travel of all things. Recall the 'rhythm' of the weekly tasks of this challenge with this guide from Pete of Garblag Games. So far I have been all over the place - I tend to do these as one ward in a sitting, with time in between spent considering what might be the 'killer hooks' for incomplete wards so I can just sit down and write when I come to it.

Infographic of City26 Challenge by Peter Lattimore

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 36/52 wards completed
Completion vs target: 69% vs 50% target
Population covered: 76%

Inspirations

A touchstone for all this has been "What is life like on a Hive world?" which has been very helpful to divvy out the fractions of who lives in what conditions across the Upper, Mid and Lower parts of the Hive.

Pure inspiration has been these gorgeous old-school Knight Lancers that I recall from back in the day, in particular this amazing upscaled version someone worked up. These are the few actual Knights that underpin the worlds raison d'etre.

Those of course must be accompanied by dino-riding cavalry - these folk are also the primary Law Enforcers within Hive-RT87

Support will come from beastfolk Imperial Guards all in keeping with the oldest lore.

In parallel I have been reading the Warhammer Crime novels to get that sense of the day-to-day, building on previous reading of the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books and a lifetime marinading in 40k lore.

The City - Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch

Spires

Knights Martial - planetary nobles, house-keeps, bristling defences, boulevards scaled to knight-parades

Upper Hive

College of Heralds - lineage and inheritance lore-keepers, world use litigation, duel ajudication
Adeptus Munitorium - perpetually swamped in comparative weapons studies as factions scuffle to direct the worlds production
1000 Shields (Knight seneschals, fled nobles, fallen quality) - those with means who fled the fallen nearby hives

Upper Mid Hive

Hive defence fire control (knight-vassals) - seat of the atomantic lances defence web
All Hands (Abhuman efficiency bureau) – talent bazaar; clearing house for mercenaries and all sorts
Infernal cannon maintenance (sarcristans) - most secure workshops of the sacristans maintaining the near lost technologies of the defence web
Optical Masters - Admech Lens Crafters make high performance optics from abundant clay while agitating to make ever bigger laser ones
Central Medicae - where man, beast and beastman are patched together to longer serve the Emperor
Megasaur Mastercrafts - artists and craftsfolk turn megasaur parts into finest luxuries for this world and export

Lower Mid Hive

Promethium works - refineries to process abundant feedstock into promethium
Jet Bike lines - Sacristans hand-craft near-forgotten technologies - jetbikes, imperial robots
Mustering grounds / barracks - beastman regiments forming for onworld training, offworld service
Weapons factories (dispensated non metal) - armours, blades and other works that require as little metal as possible
Dino Servitorisation (mech) - megasaurs turned into industrial machinery
Stonework Specialists - fighting the sysphean fight to maintain the hive structure
Dinochrome - Carnosaur refit (sacristans) where megasaurs are turned into training-rigs and knights-in-waiting prove themselves
Ogryn quarter - dino-wranglers, source of dino-run labour & gangs from 'dead' wasteland ranches
Cold-one scout regiments - house guards, order enforcement, wasteland scouts, Adept. Arbites enclave
The Sieves - ministorum and astra telepathica winnow the population, sifting psykers and heretics out of the workforce
Dino stockyards - minotaur butcherguilds slaughter the megasaur herds that arrive by the shipload
Metal reclamation - hive-breaker yards recycling ruined cities from inland
Knight-parts - macromanufactories; knights and armoured trains, refurbishment facilities for offworld houses
Transhipment hub - focus of the intra-continental maglev lines bringing chunks of abandoned hives in and exporting to the starport
Ministorum - local strains on fanatical abhumans seeking to prove themselves worthy of the God-Emperor through acts of faith
Railheads - the giant rail bringing dinosaur-ships from the southern continents

Lower Hive - description


Bonecraft workcamps - grinding labor to handcarve parts from megasaur bones, squeezed by bone suppliers and predatory acceptance inspectors
Bone reclamation, corpse processing, fleshbees - post-butchery megasaur carcasses sent for scavenging
scalies in deeps + zombies by radioactive archaeotech - the hardiest of mutant survivors
Off-worlder ghetto - for those too strange to be taken by the workcamps, a hub of the cold-trade
Sumpside - abhuman underground railroad, coldtraders - where the paperless arrivals from starport, maglevs wind up
Redemptionists - fanatical beastfolk, eager to prove faith by cleansing with fire any hint of less perfect faith
old ways tribalists / beastman paleoculture - the caverns where the original colony landed hosts beastfolk who cling to the most ancient ways
Slums of the Lost (hives Polaris, FK91) - refugees from the broken hives to sorry or unfortunate to claw into the lower-mid hives
ogryn tallow-works - where worn out ogryns make pilgrimage to be turned into sacred candles
extraction bay slums - clinging beneath the maglevs, above the reactor wastes, but close to patrolled zones above. Safer, not safe.

All told this ccounts for some 3.5 billion souls - out of the 4.6 in the city as a whole. Any one of those wards could be a whole world of adventure to itself.

Round-up of City26 posts

City '26 Launch - outlines the rules of the challenge and my goals to create a hivecity of the old school.

Hive RT-87 Rejoicing Torch - general info + example ward (City26) - gives some layout for the whole hive and delves into the Carnosaur Refit Works - known locally as Dinochrome.

Incentivising challenges with tactility (City26) - talks about the process and about how recycling old boarding passes keeps it interesting and focussed.

Evolving city surroundings (City26) talks about the world emerging around the hive.

Piling high the burdens of ruling #City26 - some historical and high politics background and d20 Reasons Lord Mawcambeth Has An Ulcer.

Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26 takes a diversion into various megacity adventures for different systems seeking a tone match.

31 40k Hivecity NPCs for #City26 pulls together a selection that represents some of the more interesting adventures hooks walking around the hive.

Getting to City adventures in 26

So far, with a good fraction of the challenge done, the trick ahead is going to be pulling this to table in some form. I need to decide a system, pick which are the most interesting adventures to run - there are campaigns worth of adventure in here unpicking all the knots - and I have a decent idea for a starter one.

With a bit of luck I can get it hacked together, lure some test subjects to an... Imperium Maledictum? Dark Heresy?... table and set them loose. Tempted as I am to roll with Chapter Serf or Warpstar! I think I will stick to the mainline system for just now to give good template adventures to work off while I figure out how to run them myself.

Dredging old adventures for a campaign #City26

I have been pondering the nature of adventures to run in this hive-city - what is interesting to run *here* as opposed to just anywhere else.

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.

Piling high the burdens of ruling #City26

On the principle of 'stack up the gunpowder' I wanted to set up a couple of fault lines within this city to have it in a high energy unstable equilibrium, liable to go careening down into disaster at any moment. Tone setting for the whole city as a hive - in the same way Necromunda has House Helmawr and is a recruiting point for the Imperial Fists Space Marines - is the status of this place as the capital of a world not yet properly established as an Imperial Knight house.

This place is stuck in limbo as a partly completed new Knight world - a cadet branch of an established house were in the process of founding it in the wake of the stilling of the warp storms of Old Night when the Great Crusade arrived (approx ~ 11,000 years ago).

After the chaos of the Horus Heresy finally played out and the weight of the Imperium returned (~ 9000 years ago) debates began over the use of this world - whether to turn it to a standard hive world or whether to continue with the founding of the Knight world.

Imperial bureacracy has been working on the issue ever since.

In the interim, the megafauna introduced thrived, were hunted to near extinction in the northern continent and ill-managed tithe extraction has lead to devastation of that hemisphere. By the God-Emperors Grace, the howling equatorial jetstreams of this fast-spinning world have confined the atmospheric devastation to the north and life, agriplexes and megafauna thrive in the seas and the lands of the south.

** Today **

Hive RT-87, as the planetary capital is built on the model of the fortified keeps of the Long March; with bristling weaponry and garrisons of household militia. The original web of mines, agriplexes and breeding-paddocks have been partly subsumed in the toxic dust-wastes of the blasted northern continent but it remains the capital and thus maintained where other cities and hives on the continent have been abandoned.

Atop the hive you have House Mawcambeth, a cadet branch of a knight house; they have a few legacy Knights but only the manufacturing capacity to sustain those and not to build new. They have managed for millenia to meet the voracious demands of the Imperial tithe while also maintaining viability of the original founding plan. The northern continent and atmosphere has been sacrificed so far and they are struggling to find other ways to meet the ever increasing demands of the tithe.

The Sacristans, keepers of the technologies of the Knight houses, have been kept hard at work by this worlds paucity of metals. A whole raft of cunning work-arounds - including a focus on ceramics and plastek - were part of the original pre-Crusade colonial plan and those have just barely survived. The metals for getting the Knight manufactoria started were to have come from asteroid mining and orbital smelters - and those have all been requisitioned by the Imperium.

Abhumans have always been part of the Knight households vassals, part of the same utilitarian approach to genetic adaptation as the megasaurs. Ogryns and minotaurs were strong enough to wrangle megasaurs in the wilds and in the stockyards and slaughterhouses. Beastmen were valued for their hardiness and more so as the toxic wastelands grew across the northern continent. Because of this and the reduced survival probability of standard humans, abhumans are more welcomed here than many other places in the Imperium and both official and unofficial migratory streams feed in from off-world.

The Imperial institutions are all present in various capacities.

Together these give us d20 Reasons Lord Mawcambeth Has An Ulcer.

1. Every hall he walks down of the echoing spire corridors, he hears the tread of spurred heels at the cusp of his hearing. The flicker at the edge of his vision, echoes from his Throne-Mechanicum. His ancestors hold ceaseless vigil, each carried this 10 millenia inheritance of duty in their own time, now they harry him to carry it forward in his. His fool of a medicae suggests it might be the copious quantities of concentration enhancers he consumes. His dotard of a court psyker swears no spirits stalk the halls but he knows, he knows he cannot rest until this world see new Knights stride forth from the manufactora or the grave. The normally reliable Sacristan-Prime insists no such effects can be happening while he is not seated in his Knight. And yet.
2. His sacristans mutter excuses about failing data-cores, lost knowledge and interfering Adeptus Mechanicus and protest that a thing easily accomplished in his great great great great grand sires age is no longer possible. They badger him for resources and time as if he had either to give.
3. Wretched cousins, minor scions of the knight houses, barking in his court, grandstanding about how they would drive plans faster, further, see the world turned wholly to this or that Imperial purpose. Charlatans all, none have the grit to sit the throne of this world. They think he does not know they call him Goatseller for the abhuman regiments he provides for the tithe.
4. The nagging priests of the Ministorum insist vigilance and the inherent falsity of abhumans, as if it is not they that are tasked with seeing to the souls of all on this world, as if there were not a hundreds of fanatic abhuman orders from centuries to millenia old, sapping the food and labour of the world in their piety.
5. Astra Telepathica griping about the relative paucity of psykers for the black ships, how abhumans are poor stock for the Astronomicon.
6. Ever the Administratum wringing their hands about the tithe, always with problems and demands unanswerable with the resources of this world, never with ideas for how to meet the tithe with things they do have. Faithless in his proudly unbroken record of meeting the tithe whenever asked.
7. Prevaricating Munitorum officials with there balance calculations on the relative utility of another Knight world to the defense of the Imperium - sacriligeous dolts, lucky he has only shot a handful for their impertinence - that a base hiveworld churning out mere lasguns or base soldiers might ever match the grandeur and battlefield shock of a proud Knight house in full charge. Endlessly he has tolerated their comparative studies and their endless reworkings for changed circumstances as the local conflict shift and new foes arise, the endless delays from extra-planetary consultations and data requests, their rework when they find false value in planetary uses that are not Knight houses.
8. The despicable Administratum officials conducting the litigation over the use of this world; demanding fresh studies from the Munitorum, arguing over minutiae, considering, reviewing, questioning the integrity of document seals, seeking testimony, measuring, prying.
9. Grasping Mechanicus, thieves-in-waiting, furious his ancestors swore to the glorious God Emperor and not to them, now they pry and seek heresy in every secret and skill of his faithful Sacristans, demanding he replace everything with their sanctioned technologies, treating his house like a wayward child and not a better steward of the secrets of the mighty Knights than they.
10. Loathsome Mechanicus Biologis with their creeping about, demanding samples and proposing refinements of his wise Sacristans works. Their gleeful enthusiasm for servitorisation of the megasaurs is almost worse than the furious chastisements of their machine-focussed fellows.
11. An endless stream of Imperial Navy squadron commanders and pilot-trainers, fruit of his most catastrophic success in demonstrating his houses Knight-training complex produced exemplary fighter pilots, now they want more, ever more. His favourite problem but a problem nonetheless.
12. Grim Custodes growling about the vile Cold Trade but also incessantly questioning about the beastfolk - insinuating his house runs some wretched abhuman underground railroad, as if they would stoop to such trivia, even if it was so required.
13. Guildscaptain of the Whaler-barges bleating about the risks to the aquatic megafauna of the latest tithe increases, as if he was not well aware, as if they were not the next of his few remaining cards to play to stave off the strip-processing of the southern landmasses.
14. The Master of Dinochrome castigating him on the slipping standards of the new knight-candidates, the deterioration of the training grounds, the difficulty sourcing sufficiently large and fierce carnosaurs, the poor quality of the penal-legion training fodder, as if he had nothing else to concern himself with.
15. Interstellar chartist captains arriving with their cargoesp, never with enough of the right things, always at extortionate prices, always with that scorn the void-faring bear to the planet-borne. Pirates in waiting should he ever take his eye off them.
16. That weakling Master of the Orbital Yards, letting the Navy interdict the metal supplies brought in from the asteroid belts by miners put in place by his ancestors, repairing armour plate on Grand Cruisers while they are forced to recycle old cities on the surface.
17. The looming shadow of the Sector Governor as manifest by a parade of preening useless nobles, clogging his court, abusing his hospitality and condescending to him about the expectation of delivering the tithe, acquiring the charter to establish a Knight world, uphold honour and no doubt chew his food if he ever deigned to let them prattle on long enough.
18. Cringing manufactorum heirarchs, with their delays and their obfuscation of problems until everything is too late and in crisis. Some competent stalwarts among them but distracted among themselves by feuds and duels and clawing for credits as if any amount of credits would save them if the tithe is missed.
19. Dilatory regional barons squalling about managing their dinosaur herds, protesting what mild share of the tithe he lays upon them, yet another weight to be dragged when they should be kissing his boots for the shield he holds above their heads, ungrateful wretches.
20. Ever changing parade of Astra Millitarum Auxilla commanders as the tithe is paid in regiments and once known and reliable colonels are shipped away. The new ones always full of bragadacio about the readiness of their regiments, needing to be hammered through that quality of soldiers must be beyond outstanding for their abhuman regiments to be accepted by the Munitorum.

Iconography of a history yet to happen

I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.

Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda

I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)

Alien gestures

While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.

The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.

One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.

From the history of a far future

For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.

For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.

I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.

A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.

What use to you, a DM?

Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.

I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.

= = = Joesky tax = = =

d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"

Evolving city surroundings (City26)

I have been hammering away at the City '26 challenge; running it faster and shallower than originally envisaged I would imagine. I have about ~37% of the wards done with ~16% of the year gone so am comfortably ahead of schedule. Concept is "a hiveworld from 40k as seen in the original Rogue Trader '87" including elements such as the Knight Worlds with their dinosaur herding, more abhumans, more Imperial Robots and a general stronger alignment to the aesthetic in Rogue Trader '87.

I find I have chipped away at lots of the more fascinating wards and blown off much of the initial spurt of inspiration but that has laid down lots of solid foundations and crystallised the core character of the place. 52 wards is *a lot* for a city; with just the ones done so far there is ample good gameable content. I am quite satisfied with the choice to make it a 40k hivecity because it is turning into a suitably complex behemoth.

As I have been filling out the various places I have ended up with one place where there is scarcity - ground level exterior access. Quite a few of the various wards should sensibly have external access - waste dumps, promethium vat fields, stock yards, maglev access, etc. Blocking those in has rapidly created a picture of the surroundings in a neat emergent manner.

We end up with the city surrounded by a number of military grounds - marshalling yards for the planetary guard regiments and the training fields for the Knight-candidates with their cyborged-carnotaurs. Stockyards for dinosaurs and bone heaps from their processing also need room. It became apparent that the hivecity was once a port but that the seas have long receded necessitating a 'ship-rail' to haul ships in over the saltmires.

One thing this has made me realise is that this means certain regions should have 'associated with' adventure hooks out in the linked spaces beyond the hive - be that a trip down into the dinosaur pens, riding out with the coldone cavalry on a wasteland patrol, stopping a raid on a ship being hauled up on the ship-rail, intercepting smugglers coming in on the maglev or some other thematically appropriate out-of-hive escapade. These could be very different to the 'in ward' encounters which may be dominated by just the groups that have presence there.

Incentivising challenges with tactility (City26)

Like any 'creation project' the tactility of it is important for me; I find myself picking some slightly novel approach to note taking each time to keep things interesting and to make the projects distinct.

Previous examples:
* For the Spelljammer Academy run, it started as a print of the four official adventures held with treasury tags then various odds and ends of loose paper were added to the back, including some experiments with gate-fold-type planetary system overlays. It was messy but a characterful mess.
* My home campaign is a double stack - world notes plus session notes - all done on the backs of scrap paper and old bills.
* My Friday night hexcrawl campaign is a similar double stack plus a GM binder of plastic-pocket ready reference stuff for gaming-on-the-move; one-page monster manual, code of conduct, treasure tables, etc.

For this City26 campaign I actually got started while flying - so I had some boarding passes to hand and started with those. I have a big stack of old boarding passes that were kept with a half-notion of needing bookmarks, now they can finally be used and it makes this project feel distinct.

A personal quirk, working on the small surface of the back of a boarding pass makes the demand feel less onerous; even if the output demanded is broadly alike, I only have to fill a boarding pass so feels less. I also habitually like to write very small which helps.

This also makes the project feel nicely tactile; as observed by many others elsewhere, it can be easier to get stuff done working physically than typing it up.

After a few weeks of working on this I am broadly following a refinement of my NaNoWriMo process:
- following Fleming - set yourself up to start the next session hot by stopping halfway through a paragraph
- this translates to 'create the template for the next session' by blocking out the next boarding pass
- all good ideas get noted onto the master sheets
- starting a session means blocking out the obvious stuff first, principal features, maybe controlling faction
- with that start done, block out some encounters, maybe plot hooks as they become obvious
- flesh out everything more, only a boarding pass of space to be terse
- NPCs are last; they usually are obvious by then - who is evidently around from the encounters, factions and plot hooks
- do not attempt to roll straight into a second session; take a break first

After a break you may do a second whole session on the same structure. Make your restart as low friction as possible, but do not pre-pick it; leave yourself room to be inspired anew.

My other aides I use;
* Some powerpoint image creation to help understand the shape, block-out how many districts in each part of the hive.
* Voice-transcription to ramble away about ideas while doing laundry.
* Reading through the old Rogue Trader book and noting ideas; trying to stay away from the modern stuff and that 'orthodox 40k' approach.

I am waiting for inspiration to slow and then I will sift back over those ideas and tease out the ones not yet used.

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

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.