31 40k Hivecity NPCs for #City26

Returning to RT-87, our hivecity to peek at a roster of its NPCs and also do the "TTRPG Character Creation Challenge Jam".

1. Morer Baranyx - Carnotaur Arena Knight-Pledge - recently granted their augmented-carnotaur, already a decorated cavalry officer, now they fight in the great arena to prove their worthiness to maybe, one-day pilot a Knight. Deep down they know Knights will not be available in their lifetime.
2. Grak the Crummy - Tallow-works Foreman (abhuman) - fur perpetually slick from the grease-fumes of the tallow-works, they drive their crew hard in their holy duty, rendering down the worthy Ogryn who survived pilgrims way into sacred candles.
3. Yellow Cew - Megasaurherder crew-boss (ogryn) - forest-smart, grizzled and megasaur scarred, they might be found wrestling their team out of the drinking-dens that will have them before departing for another run down to pick up a herd. Speeders would make the journey in hours but the cavernous megasaur carrier ships will take long weeks.
4. Ologus-77 - Augmetic-weapon-lens crafter - senior sacristan tech-magos, so filthy it is hard to tell their affiliation. Obsessed with creating ever more powerful lasing lenses from the favourable native clays. Personal crusade to construct a planetary defense las so mighty his peers will have to accept the replacement of the dark age of technology infernal cannons. Multiple cybernetic adaptations for the making and testing of las-lenses.
5. Venric the Impermeable - Munitorum tithe assessor (lasers, soldiers) - grizzled, dispeptic official in fine but worn uniform, continuously reviewing data slates and hardcopy, shouting observations at a trailing auto-scribe servitor. Certain that everyone is trying to swindle the Imperium from its rightful tithe through wickedness or incompetence and but for their diligent prying it would succeed.
6. Sepia Dismas - Abbess of Hospitaller-sisters - gentle voice and floating choir of servitor-skulls bring an aura of calm, useful for triage of the mutant, industrially-wounded or broken-minded. Equally willing to deploy their medikit or bolt-pistol depending on their assessment of your remaining utility to the Emperor.
7. Astraea the Staunch - Chief of megasaur & abhuman medicine - loud, enthusiastic, brutally scarred from an insufficiently sedated patient. A familiar face to all from popular 'how it works' autopsy videos found on most public pict-displays.
8. Billhoook Pluto - Bone-grading inspector - megasaur-scale apron and elaborate auspex headset complement flak-armour and a fast-draw autopistol holster. Feline-like tendency to turn up unexpectedly, lives for the hunt of stopping bone-smugglers
9. Turquoise-lure Lorell - Tanners-guild head - a burly, elaborately head-dressed micromanager, interrupted by shrilling vox-link of order confirmations. To their great annoyance, megasaur skins refuse to come in standard sizes.
10. Calibre Zaddion - Munitorum strategos-savant - dressed like last seasons fashionista, eyes glittering from dataveil links. Rumoured to have the entire 'big picture' of the planetary tithe in their head, they are frequently found around travel-hubs talking logistics.
11. Milliasaur Balfrymownde - Coordinator of visitors (offworlders) - stoically polite, with perfect etiquette and an encyclopedic knowledge of the off-world customs. Lays ground work for visits by dignitaries which involves telling the locals exactly what they are going to do or face the wrath of the Lord-Castellan.
12. Okheus-44 - Magos Robotica - but for the Sacristan robes this one is the archetypal tech-priest. No sign of flesh remains, often found accompanying robots on field trials, muttering "the flesh is weak".
13. Omion-39 - Servitor-wright - hurried, impatient, trailing a small retinue of servitors with equipment, constantly bemoans the difficulties of pairing augmetics with the varied abhuman bodyforms, blames the servitor-candidates for not being more uniform
14 Displacer Dyademe - Maglev-guild trainboss - canny, greedy, with obvious high quality augmetics, rich garments and prominent exotic shields. Surrounded by vox-chatter from transcontinental maglev crews and traders and emissaries looking for favours and better prices on chunks of salvage from the dead hives
15 Helene the Hexed - Maglev-cleansing inspector - handflamer, sooty armour and a perpetual smell of burnt promethium. Thorough and cunning, expert at finding hidden contraband and stowaway monsters on the hive-city chunks hauled in for recycling from the wastes
16 Lucerus Elusyx - Administorum salvage assessor - sleek and glossy, clad in a regulation uniform made from the finest materials. Delights in ferreting out attempts to avoid import tax and claiming the finders bounty.
17 Typhon the Mighty - Butchers guild line-leader (minotaur) - brawny and focussed, views their work in the slaughterhouses as a sacred duty, matching their Emperor-given strenghth and masterwork chainaxe against the tough hides and titanic carcasses of the megasaurs
18. Timon the Silver-lure - Freelance protein procurer - a greasy, wheeling-dealing spiv, able to grade megasaur offcuts, corpse starch and anything else that could be grist for the protein-mills. Laughs to much at his own jokes about "you'd make good sausages yourself"
19. Cilice Gyn Barik - Offworlder abhuman - swathed in venturing robes, even when far too hot to hide their distinctive offworld horn structure. Scrapes out a living trading on their knowledge of far away places and things
20. Garak the Jolterhead - Abhuman redemptionist preacher - festooned in holy-seals, clanking with devotional-icons, bleeding from self-flagellation they will be found braying reprentance to crowds. Fiery eyed in their zealotry and harshest to judge their fellow abhumans
21. Omax-98 - Macro-augmeticist magos - can conceive no greater privilege than what the Omnissiah requires of him in this life, to render megasaurs into the mega-servitors. Massive with exoskeletal augmentation to work on the huge beasts.
22. Lrix the Jackanape - Auspex-whisperer & wreck-surveyor - jittery, shrapnel-scarred, bundled in piecemeal armour, hunched under the weight of the potent auspex-array of uknown provenance they haul around. In demand by the hive-salvage breakers for sniffing out hazards and treasures, good at finding both but not very light on their feet.
23. Stimm Quintos - Breakers guild stimm-dispenser - overly jolly with belts full of sanctioned labor-enhancers and a ready patter of approved encouraging slogans. Dressed like the stereotypical heroic labourer but coughs blood after more than one or two big heaves at a time.
24. Valelan Renard - Houseguard patrol commander (cold one cavalry) - thin-lipped, calculating, spit-shined uniform. Brutal disciplinarian to his men, meaner again to the abhumans among them, irritates the regimental commisar by leaving them little to do. Loves the megaraptor mounts of the patrol, feeds them best prisoner bits.
25. Horgruss Imzel - stevedores guild cold-trader - purposefully fades into the crowd, wary eyes above their guild-jacket collar. Sharp blade, hold-out laspistol and flak armour hidden beneath. Master of the art of casually walking off with contraband from arriving maglevs and innocently stumbling upon interested buyers.
26. Hazael the Antler-wrangler - Maglev network snakehead - duelling scars and prominently cross-strapped pistols. Works to foil screening of arrivals from the wastes habitually. Sometimes it is for a cargo of abhumans from the failed megasaur ranches, sometimes for weirder things, they never ask.
27. Moraner Kasen - Weapon-testing duellist - abrasive and pushy, mercenary for hire. Quick to demand their duelling rights. Paid for field-testing new laslenses.
28. Horrendous Praetus - Dead-ranch ganger - garishly dressed in patched megasaur-skin hand-me-downs, faked wasteland rad-burn, backed up with knife and stubgun. Asserts their rights as a ranch-ganger, though the ranch has long been consumed by the wastelands. Talks a big game about how they will bring a new herd out there are be back in business any month now.
29. Spook Ishkur - Megasaur-runner - genuinely radburned with the scales to prove it hidden beneath their dusty megasaur-skin jacket. Likely found deeply inebriated or foul-temperedly nursing a hangover as they grimly complain about going back out for more megasaurs.
30. Morar Maryan - Houseguard incident sanitiser - disease-gnarled, flamer-toting tabarded agent of the lowest sort for the ruling house. Asks no questions, nonchalantly thorough in their work. Good memory but cares little about whys and wherefores.
31. Smokestack Orl - Deep hive scrap-picker - lethargic elder, grey-skinned where not covered in bandages. Completely divorced from standard day-night cycle, has encyclopedic knowledge of the lower hives. Watched over protectively by most of the locals as their own strange canary - "things cannot be so bad if Smokestack is still trudging about".

With thanks to Dread Quill and Fat Dwarf for their respective random name generators.

Stat everyone as a civilian except:
- The Sacristans (Ologus-77, Okheus-44, Omion-39, Omax-98) who stat as tech-priests
- Typhon the Mighty and Yellow Cew who stat as ogryns

Give +10 in the relevant skill of any mentioned equipment.

Anyway, in my 'keep me honest' progress tracker stats:
Progress: 26/56 wards completed
Completion vs target: 50% vs 41% target
Population covered: 58%

Slowed down a lot, been busy but have a couple more good ideas for wards in the can - half way done, a month ahead of schedule.

Review: Fly Me To The Moon

tl;dr: old school hex crawl on the dream-like moon, lots to dip into for inspiration.

Fly Me To The Moon by Kabuki Kaiser - a lunar hex crawl that I grabbed because it looked like a combo of old school gaming and space antics. Broadly pitched as what you find if the vision of the moon from the early 1900s had it right - a steampunky, fin-de-siecle vibe - but I found it much broader (and perhaps more useful) than that. The vibes I was getting was 'fairy tales of that time' - the kind of thing Rackham would have illustrated or Wilde would have written about. It also feels like a different tree grown in the same soil that got us Barsoom, so fine fodder for sword-and-planet escapades too.

Very much wearing its OSR-allegiance with pride, I initially thought this was an older book given its back-to-basics clean set up and introductory approach - it has been a while since I have come to something with quite this flavour of 'let me briefly explain the concept' approach, calling back to the OSR vernacular of "BX or use whatever system suits" in contrast to declaring for one of the many retroclones - OSE, OSRIC, etc. Reminded me of some of the grand old group projects like Petty Gods.

I got a print-on-demand version from DriveThruRPG and received 166 pages worth of neat little soft cover with a sort of black, blues and white scheme throughout. General format is two columns per page with some singe- and double-page art spreads mixed in. All the writing and design credits are at the back - this had been done up pre-AI OSR style with a bunch of artist credits, public domain art and photography. It gives a nice somewhat Art-Nouveau-in-blue look to the whole thing.

So what's actually in here?
A page of an intro section
A page with the hexmap
Four pages of rule mods, denizens and system use comments
A page Lists of linked locations
131 pages of hexes from the hexmap
18 pages worth of spells
A page discussing lycanthropy on the moon
A page of notes on the Lunar wars
Four pages on cats of the moon
Four pages on the moon-bound balloon the Phalene Celestial
A page of an appendix
A page of credits

Going through this in chunks:

Shiny TTRPG links #278

A choice set of fascinating links from about the internet. If you want more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

Cults of Uod posts Uod: A New Campaign in 25 Phrases

Whose Measure God Could Not Take writes Who is the GLOGosphere? 2026 Edition

Roll to Doubt shares By the Sea

Congas.blog writes What is OSR? What is NSR? Survey analysis

The Garden Below gives us Conditional encounter tables

Missile Attack Bonus posts How Do You Want to Do This?

Scipio202 on Patchwork Paladin writes Kickstarter Whales – Guest Post

Routes and Routs shares Rules Fragment - Roll Up to 12d20 for Mass Combat

Garamondia posts A palazzo of some fantastic proportion...

From the Sorcerer's Skull writes Bringing it Into Focus

The hard graft of inspiration-on-demand (RPG Blog Carnival)

Vulcan Stev's Database gives us this months prompt Inspiration! Where Does Yours Come From? for the RPG Blog Carnival. This post is mostly about turning the inspiration you will surely have into whatever you actually want at the end or as Edison put it "Genius is 1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration".

My suggestions to anyone trying to reliably 'create on demand':
1. Have your tools ready to catch the sparks
2. Get from zero to something, because you can work with something.
3. Stand on something
4. Sketch out your structure if you risk interruption
5. Save all your ideas

I lay this out for blogging but so too for adventures.

First - have your tools ready

I follow the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is being ready to seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. Small progress, made often, adds to a sizeable movement in the end. To get specific, I put together this list of d20 small viable blogging tasks to illustrate what I mean.

Practically this means being ready to fill in the blanks around the spark of inspiration you have had elsewhere - hitting your slush-list, finding that quote, linking to the survey, jam or challenge that is relevant. You can hack out the *tasks* around putting a post together in chunks once you have the core idea in place.

When I am completely dry, I set up reviews - the block-and-tackle numbers work like counting the section sizes, or block-out weekly link posts. Something from the pile of background tasks I continuously run on the blog that allow me to make progress when I'm not having a moment of inspiration.

Second - getting from zero to something

This blog has always been an advocate of "don't get it right, get it written". Of late, one of my handier tools has been voice transcription - used as for this post while doing laundry. My key learning is that this voice log will be trash. Far more hassle to try and whip it into shape than to just re-read, steal the ideas and re-write. For getting from nothing to something, perfectly adequate.

On getting stuff written, I can point back to one of my ancient blogposts on lessons learned from NaNoWriMo - back before it collapsed in disgrace, I participated often and there were a couple of useful tricks for getting drafts done I learned. Key from the point of view of inspiration was to try and stop in the middle of a thought, so when you came back to the work, you could reread your last bit, finish out that thought and presto, you had a bit of momentum already.

Third - stand on something - use jams and challenges

Question sets, prompt lists and blogwagons help to jump start a post. Just writing down whatever you are participating in or joining gets you that first start. The more structured the challenge, the easier it is to get something done. Working down a question list is usually easier than answering an unstructured, wide-open question.

Campaign retrospectives, session reports and other "factual" write ups can help - one might say those sidestep the idea of "inspiration" entirely since you are documenting what actually happened. However one feels on that question I think those reporting type posts are good for building the muscles of drafting posts and talking about your gaming to make that part easier when you are trying to capture some fickle spark of an idea.

Fourth - sketch out your structure to guard against interruption.

I have of late started this, blocking out my section headers where once I would have just got cracking, Ian Fleming style. Having the key ideas noted down - make your points without justification, enough to remind you what you planned to say. This gets you off zero and gives you a structure you can then build out when time presents itself. It also prevents and untimely interruption causing some chunk of your great idea to be lost before you could commit it to ink.

At this point do no research, do not tab away from the page or change focus until you have the whole outline down. This is not so much about inducing inspiration but about capturing the sparks you do get. Inspiration strikes at the most unlikely places, but then you walk through a doorway or get out of the shower and it is gone. Here my point is to jot down the outline of your whole idea before someone interrupts you and it is all gone like the back three quarters of Kubla Khan. Once you have that view from 50,000ft then you can weather fate trying to mess with you a touch more robustly.

Fifth - Save all your ideas

Then where does inspiration come in and of itself? This can be the hardest - d4 caltrops wrote a good piece on this worth reading. I find frequently rereading the prompt and going away and focussing on something else is helpful, If an idea does not immediately come, nor arrive after a few minutes pondering, then put it down. Tab away to something else and let your subconscious chew on it.

There is a difference between "I have no idea" and "I am not sure how to articulate my point" that warrants slightly different treatment. Above is for "no idea" but if you can feel something nagging you, the classic splinter-in-the-mind, then blocking out the points you do have, leaving a gap for what you are missing can help. I feel this as clearing out mental capacity of the stuff that is solved to give more room for the things remaining unclear. The content of the blank bits sometimes becomes apparent once you have formed the shape of them by putting down what goes around them.

For "no idea" instances - you are going to capture many ideas while out walking around - so have means to capture them. Write yourself a WhatsApp, leave a voicenote, email something to yourself, whatever, just capture the idea, get it down. Once down, it gets soaked into your workflow and feeds into step one.

I have a giant slush pile of blog article headers. One cell in Excel, maybe with a comment and the inspirational link or thought. Typical would be somebodys blog plus my thoughts on a comment or response.

And if you are still stuck try d4 Caltrops great "brainfood for burgeoning blogs" d100 list.

Putting it all together

Moments of inspiration rarely happen when you are sitting down at your desk ready to go - they can, but are typically not so convenient. For me time at desk is processing the ideas list into something useful. Taking those three words on a post-it note and expanding that up to the skeleton sketch, the headers. Then when there is time, fill in each of those headers. Then go back over the whole thing, make sure it's coherent. Then up it goes.

Those are my general tips for inspiration. As you will have no doubt noticed, very little of that is actually about inspiration. Inspiration will happen to you. The key thing is making sure to capture that inspiration, nail it down and turn it into something useful.

do As for blogging, so for adventures

All of the above can replace blog post with D&D adventures and the principles still stand. Capture your ideas when you are out and about. Hack out the outline of the adventure when you get a chance, but skip detail like monster stats or rule lookup or anything like that. Then once you are happy you have the whole idea, go back around and put in the detail to make it table-ready.

Picks of #Spelljammer on tumblr

Whenever I trawl through RPG-tumblr I am struck that there is this persistent Spelljammer vibe, a sense that that setting thrives there in campaigns, fan-art, home-brew and general chatter more than anywhere else. I have no explanation but I am fascinated and I think it is great to see.

To contrast, the Planescape tag is channel-jammed by the old computer RPG Planescape: Torment and then what remains is mostly all Sigil - not bad if you like those sort of things but once you go past those two the rest of everything you get is so much more diffuse. There are flashes of brilliance in there for any given thing you might be interested in but with so much involved in the Planescape setting as a whole, you don't get much for any single thing.

I was pondering why I like what I see in the Spelljammer tag and I think it is because you can pretty much grab any good idea you see there and drop it into your own campaign as a wandering encounter, an NPC you run into or a site you find because you could come across anything in Wildspace, anything at all, whereas most other settings, require a touch more filtering for terrain-appropriate ideas (Planescape included, though swap in 'plane-appropriate').

I do not know why Spelljammer strikes a nerve - perhaps 'D&D in Spaaaace' falls closer to peoples hearts than it did, perhaps the kaleidoscopic-skies aesthetic aligns, who knows - but for whatever reason it is, if you are at all interested in Spelljammer, browsing the tag on tumblr is a good place for inspiration. Afterwards Reddit will give you crunch and answer questions once you have specific ones or you can delve into the vast wells of knowledge on forums like The Piazza.

Some of my favourite things I found:

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting an Adventure: Setting Sail in the Astral Sea - good content for the Astral.

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Drafting the Adventure: Spelljamming - significant thought on running Spelljammer right.

@leavingautumn13 gives us Reimagining the Neogi

@madlabgames writes Spelljamming, Reimagined: The Flow, The Void, and The Hull - delving back into AD&D lore and doing a complete rework of the whole concept. A solid alternate concept.

@spyglassrealms shares a More interesting Realmspace

@honourablejester throws out a bunch of Spelljammer Concepts for characters.

@dnd-5e-homebrew compiles some hombrew rules for Sailing the Astral Flow

@flailsnails gives us A Spelljammer Buyer's Guide - your grand list of capsule reviews for all the old AD&D products.

@nothingrpgzone gives us Spelljammer Advanced Sphere Generator - a nice revamp of the old AD&D sphere generator way, way more cleanly put together.

@thatboomerkid collates their SpellJammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon (Special Rules) from their campaign - for Pathfinder, but ideas useable whatever your system.

@madlabgames gives us 🦗 The Orthopterans: Threat Assessment & Cosmic Order ⚙️

@dailyadventureprompts gives us Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers

@elbiotipo has Some thoughts for a D&D Spelljammer setting and gives us another trove of 'take as you please' ideas to tweak your own tables version.

@amarynceus compiles Old Spelljammer Artwork from their high-school game - great notes from someone who used the setting in anger.

@d20-dimwit worked up alternate 5e versions of the Spelljammer Races.

@kor-artificer works up Skyship Weatherlight as a vehicle so needs a touch more conversion work but a good start for a Spelljammer.

@dmsden gives us Shiver Me Timbers - Notes on running a pirate-themed campaign

@madlabgames shares 🔮⚓ Arcane Engines: Three Unique Spelljamming Helms for Your Crew! ⚙️💫

Shiny TTRPG links #277

A short set this week due to computer hardware failure. If you want more, see last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request.

ATMOSPHERIC UNDERWORLD posts Investigation as Exploration - Designing an OSR Style Scenario for Call of Cthulhu

Dark Pupil shares Zone Crawls

A shrike for my dreams gives us The OSR is not dead, it’s sleeping

3×5 Arcana shares The Bonkers Loop

In My Campaign posts My New Campaign: Geography

Against the Cult of the Commodity posts 1 Weekend, 7 Sessions, 18 players, 15 modules, 115 Rooms - The Tower of Collage (Super Adventure 4)

Modified with the approval of creator Evlyn Moreau

Exeunt Omnes posts How I'd change my next game design workshop

Jay Dragon writes The Three Secrets of Making Games

Trick's Tales writes Lore and Factions of the Endless Plains (For a Game About the Mongolian Empire)

How quickly can a new D&D edition take over?

I was fascinated by Troy Press recent piece "D&D Rules, According to Past Players" based on a general survey they did which found the D&D players among a broad sample of the population but also asked when and which edition they had last played - with the fascinating insight in that article that where 20% of the respondents had played in 2026 (the past four months), only 7% of respondents had played 5.5e as their last game.

This prompted me to mention this to the author on Mastodon who further revealed "The sample size for those who played in the last three months is small: n=40. Of those: 10% played 5.5, 66% played 5e, 14% played 4e, and no other edition was in the double digits."

This is fascinating - my first question was then "how does this look for an adoption trend for the new edition?" - how does the share of games being played with 5.5e compare to how many folk were playing 4e or 5e this many years after the launch of those editions?

To get an idea, we turn to the Obsidian Portal campaigns launched - taking annual slices we can get a sense of popularity of editions back to 2008.

To recap - this was done by loading the Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal and noting the campaigns per system for each year available (back to 2008) using the Wayback Machine so we capture from 4e dropping through to now.

Originally inspired by Troy Press writing in 2019 on RPG campaigns played by system and I have been tracking this and updating annually for a few years now (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)

We also have the now-discontinued Orr Reports which gave us the same insight for Roll20. With that and the Obsidian Portal data we can pull three continuous trends and then chuck on whatever single points we have for 5.5e from various sources for comparison.

Looking at what we get we see a pretty clear rapid-switch over to 5e from 4e when it launched. We see an initial high take-up of 4e that started to fade off pretty rapidly (competition from Pathfinder at that point). Pathfinder 1e had a pretty good start to a solid 60% of new campaigns launched on Obsidian Portal the year before 5e dropped.

Comparing those to what we see for 5.5e - the few dots we can scrape together - we do not appear to be seeing the unambiguous take-off that was obvious at this stage for 5e. One could have maybe told a story last year about how 5.5e was having a 5e-equivalent take off as seen on Roll20 but it is hard to continue that. While fully acknowledging that these points are a grab-bag of sources, they are clustering between 10-45% - this is not the ~66-80% range one might expect to see if most folk were playing 5.5e these days.

So returning to our initial seed - that Troy Press finding of only 10% playing 5.5e - it seems on the low side but maybe a real marker for 5.5e being significantly less adopted than 5e was.

Notes

The Roll20 track above was checked against surveys from each end of that time span and matched up with what else I could find online.

The Obsidian Portal data is no longer useful for this because they do not distinguish between 5e and 5.5e - apparently taking WotC at their word that it was not a new edition but not helpful for this exercise.

Sources:

2026 Survey by Researchscape (N = 1253)

Campaigns page on Obsidian Portal

D&DBeyond poll (Feb 2025)

Facebook Hombrewers poll (Dec 2025)

Reddit r/LFG analysis (2024)