Year in Review + city26

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Title feels a litle cheeky; I wrote nothing in 2025 T_T

 

What's been up?

I don't have a good reason for not writing anything last year, I just kinda didn't! I'd love to say it's because I was too busy playing instead of theorizing (partially true! I played a lottt of Mausritter) but it's probably just that my work/life balance has gone way in favor of work, and, well, TTRPG theorizing is low on my priority list for the little free time I got.

 

That being said, I did accomplish some things! I...

  • made a Pokemon hack of 2400 (for a home game, probably never going to see the light of itch.io)
  • played a lot of Mausritter, as mentioned
  • wrote up v0.16 of Jangli, my South Asian mythic fantasy game (will be posted soon-ish! for reference, my last update on that game was v0.05, and the playtest announcement was v0.03)
  • thought a lot about character niche protection (will also become a blog post)

 

Blog Resolutions!

With the hope that next year is going to be less stressful work-wise than this year, I want to try and stick to the following resolutions (for the blog, but also for my involvement in online TTRPG communities generally):

  1. Post once a month! Shouldn't be too hard, I think. My favorite posts seem to all be about whatever I'm mulling over at the moment, so I think I'll focus on that kind of stuff
  2. Ask questions on the NSR Cauldron - I very adamantly dislike Discord as a community platform (for many of the same reasons discussed here). So, instead of just commenting here and there on the Cauldron, I probably ought to post a little and support it
  3. Write more Mausritter stuff - I probably should've started this one earlier! Mausritter is the bulk of what I play, mostly for tone reasons, and I have a lot of thoughts. I should talk about them
  4. Make city26 updates! See below 

 

City26

Inspired mostly by this series of Matt Colville videos

 

I don't have a really good drop-and-play city for any of my games, and I want one! I absolutely love the faction politics, the district variations, and the whole urban intrigue thing they've got going on, and, seeing as these things take ages to design thoroughly (ages which usually aren't present in the time between session zero and session one), I thought I'd tackle it for the year!

If anyone else wants to join, feel free - and if you do, please let me know somehow. I'd love to read everyone's stuff and have a community of people doing something similar. I'll put my guidelines down here too:

 

Rule: every day, write *something* for your city. Some ideas:

  •  A culture that calls the city home
  • An important NPC
  • A city district
  • A part or whole of a building or building complex
  • Random encounter tables
  • Random place tables
  • A faction (goals? resources? members?)
  • A monster or monsters that can be found here (and who wants stuff from them?)
  • A point- or hex-crawl map

 

I'm probably going to start with a spatial lens (though you might start with factions or cultures!) and work towards the human/cultural perspective from there. So maybe something like a district a month, and within each month, spend a little time on all the things in that district (cultures, factions, important buildings, an encounter table, a place table, a pointcrawl map, unique monsters, etc.). 

It's getting late now, and I don't want to think too much, but I'll let y'all in on what I've got so far! I'm probably doing a mythic fantasy game after my Mausritter campaign tidies up, so the city I'm making, Ratnali, will be for that setting. General vibes are sorta Rome-after-the-fall (capital of a dying/dead empire, defined both by its present and its past), full of ghosts and demons, but also people living within and around the ruins of what once was the Celestial Dynasty's crown jewel. I'm excited :D

 

 

vibes 

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