So, it is now the beginning of the fourth month of 2026, and that means of course that 2026 is about one quarter over, and that means of course that the City '26 challenge is one quarter over, and I feel like maybe it would be worth making a post about how I feel it's been going so far. I've already written a blog post on how I've been doing with my goals for 2026 in general, but I figure a separate post on my City '26 blog would not be unwarranted.

Well, I have been keeping up with the challenge; I've posted the entries every day; I'm right on track. And, as I said in Monday's post, as of this week I have names for all fifty-two neighborhoods of the city that I'm going to write about. Here's the map:

As also mentioned in Monday's post, that doesn't mean the map is done; I next plan to define the boundaries of the neighborhoods, as well as to refine and perhaps expand the transportation network—the highways, ghostways, and train tracks. And even if all the neighborhoods are named, there are other things that still need names—most notably the river south of the city, but also the large lake in the east part of the city, and the smaller river that runs through that lake (or should the parts of the river above and below the lake have separate names?). And maybe (okay, probably) the forest as well. Also, though it's less of a priority, it would be nice to name the various highways and ghostway and train lines. For that matter, speaking of things that ought to be named, I still haven't decided what currency is used in Djarvin, or what language is spoken there, and those are also things I really need to define.

Still, I feel like I've been doing pretty well with the challenge, and as I've said in a recent post on my main blog, it's helped me firm up quite a bit about the world of Curcalen, even if there are plenty to things I still have to deide. But I've been having an easier time with some of the prompts than others. The Tuesday and Saturday prompts have been particularly difficult and time-consuming, while the Wednesday and Sunday prompts have generally been the quickest and easiest. But let me expand on it by analyzing each particular prompt, and how I feel it's been going.

I hasten to clarify that none of the following is meant to be a criticism of the creators of the City '26 challenge (Pete "Garblag" Lattimore of Garblag Games and Joe Sofinho of Alone in the Labyrinth), or a complaint that they should have done things differently. First of all, these relate to my specific approach to and intent for the challenge, and what was difficult for me or perhaps struck me as less useful than other prompts might be very easy and useful for others who were developing their cities for particular systems or with different ends in mind. Second, even assuming for the sake of argument that some other arrangement of the prompts would have been better overall, it's much easier to see that in retrospect than when creating the challenge for the first time; I'm certainly not saying I would have done better. Anyway, that being said, on to my analysis of the prompts:

Monday: Principal Feature

While this prompt was nominally about the principal feature or landmark of the neighborhood, since it's the first day it also ends up de facto including the overview description of the neighborhood overall. That of course does add to the complexity of the day's entry, since I have to figure out not just the principal feature but also what makes this neighborhood stand out and what its important features are, but still this prompt isn't too bad. It can be, however, a bit tricky to decide on what constitutes the "principal feature" of the neighborhood... some neighborhoods may have so many important sites and structures that it may be hard to choose what would stand out as the principal feature, while others may be more uniform or undistinguished and have no obvious significant features at all. After all, in the real world, if asked what was the principal feature of the neighborhood where I live, I'm not sure what I would say... I'm not sure it has one? (Maybe the park that includes the local library branch, not so much because it's really that notable or prominent but more or less by default because I can't think of anything that fits better.) Still, I've managed to come up with something for this prompt every week, and trying to think of a landmark for each neighborhood has got me coming up with things I probably wouldn't have otherwise.

However, really most if not all neighborhoods have multiple sites of interest, so I'd briefly considered whether it might be a good idea to try to come up with a different landmark every day, just like the daily NPC (more on which below). I still think this wouldn't be a bad idea in principle, but I've been having a hard enough time keeping up with the prompts every day as it is that I don't think trying to add something else to do every day would be practical. I'll return to this notion a bit later, however...

Tuesday: Encounter Table

As I said, this has been one of the most difficult and time-consuming days, for two reasons. First, of course, is just the challenge of coming up with that many encounters for each area. The guidelines of the challenge specified a d12 encounter table, with separate encounters for day and night, so that's up to twenty-four encounters per day. In reality, it's not necessarily quite that many. When looking over the other participants' entries (which I haven't done as much as I feel like I ought to have, but I'll return to that later too), I noticed that at least some of them didn't have a different encounter for each die result, but had some of the encounters spread over ranges: e.g. 1–3 (some encounter) 4–7 (some other encounter) etc. That... hadn't even occurred to me, although honestly I'm not sure whether I would have done that even if it had. But aside from that, the day and night encounters aren't necessarily completely different; some encounters might occur either in day or in night. I don't think I've had more than seven duplicate encounters, though (that was for Rosemary Hill), so that still means I need between seventeen and twenty-four different encounters. No, wait, not quite; first of all, I don't know that any of my encounter tables have no duplicate encounters between day and night, but furthermore some of the neighborhoods have had more than two encounter tables—for Nungunny I made separate encounter tables for near the highway and within the residential part of the neighborhood (with day and night for each, so four tables total), and likewise for the City Center I have separate encounter tables for Midtown Station and the rest of the neighborhood. So the most different encounters I've had for a single neighborhood, eliminating duplicates, was... let's see... I believe forty-three, for Nungunny. So, okay, that's between twelve and forty-eight encounters per neighborhood in principle, or between seventeen and forty-three in practice. Coming up with that many different interesting encounters can be a challenge, more so for some neighborhoods than others. Wealthy neighborhoods like East Island and Otter Lake prove particularly challenging, because, really, what do you encounter there? (In the real world, what would you encounter, other than tourists and wealthy residents, in places like Beverly Hills in California or the Golden Triangle in Paris?

The other thing making it a bit of a challenge is that of course I'm not making these encounter tables for particular role-playing games or even particular preëxisting detailed worlds; I'm making them for my own world in an original esture which I... haven't detailed nearly as much as I'd like to have. If I were making encounter tables for, say, a typical Dungeons & Dragons world, I'd have hundreds of monsters and preset NPCs types to choose from to fill out the tables. But since I don't, I have to stretch more for different types of human or animal encounters, or make up new monsters on the fly, both of which I have done.

Oh, wait... there's a third thing that makes Tuesdays a bit more time-consuming, which is the added complication of posting them both to this blog and to the Garblag Discord. For most entries, I just post to the blog first, then copy and paste into Discord. Well, it's not quite that simple, in that I have to manually add italics back in, and split the entries into multiple posts due to Discord's character limits, but still, it's relatively straightforward. But the encounter tables I put in the blog as, well, wikitext tables, and those I can't just copy and paste without losing the formatting and having them look terrible. I have to manually copy the entries into a suitable format for Discord and manually remove the wiki markup—or vice versa, write the entries in the Discord-friendly format first and then copy and paste them into the wikitext table template and add the markup, which I think is mostly what I've actually done. Either way, it's not a huge deal, but it's significantly more of a hassle than the usual copy-and-paste.

(Why am I even bothering to keep posting my entries to the Garblag Discord in the first place, now that I've got this blog for them? Why not just post them here? Is anyone reading the posts in the Discord, especially since the same material is available here with easier navigation? Eh... probably not, but for some reason I still feel like I should keep posting in the Discord as well. I'm not sure exactly why. I mean, I guess I could say it keeps me honest about keeping to the schedule; on this blog I could backdate my posts if I fall behind, but I can't change the timestamps of the Discord posts, so making the posts there means there's no way for me to cheat. But I mean I'm pretty sure I wouldn't cheat even if I could, so I don't think this is really a good reason. Still, like I said, I feel like I should keep posting my City '26 material to the Discord, even if I can't articulate exactly why, so I guess I'll keep doing it, as pointless as it may be.)

Oh, yeah, and one more thing I wanted to add. I think that the fact that the encounter tables come so early in the week also adds to the difficulty. I think they might have been easier, for me at least, if they came later in the week when I'd developed the neighborhood a bit more and so had a better idea of what might be encountered there. But again, I only mean I think that would have made them easier for me; again I'm not saying this is indicative of anything objectively wrong with the challenge as it stands.

Wednesday: Goods and Services

Okay, honestly this one might take me a little longer if I specified prices for the wares and services available in the various neighborhoods, but I haven't been doing that, not least because, as mentioned above, I haven't decided on Djarvin's currency yet. I need to do that. So I've just been listing what goods and services are available in the different neighborhoods. And this... can be a bit tricky, depending on the neighborhood; there are some neighborhoods, like the Arts District or Claystone Heights, where the very nature and themes of the neighborhood make it pretty obvious what kinds of goods and services it's best known for, but there are others—particularly the wealthy neighborhoods and the low-income residential neighborhoods—where it's not obvious at all, and I have to give some more thought to what people might come to this neighborhood for. Still, even if it's not always completely straightforward and I do often have to give it some consideration, overall like I said this is generally one of the easier prompts.

Thursday: Key Faction

This is another one that varies widely by neighborhood. For some neighborhoods it's fairly obvious what organization or government department is most powerful there, but for others there isn't necessarily an obvious candidate and I have to get more creative. (Again, if I think of the real world, who is the key faction of the neighborhood where I live? I don't know! Is there one? I guess if I had to give an answer, I'd say maybe the neighborhood council, because the neighborhood does have one of those, but that's kind of a boring answer because it could be said of many neighborhoods and anyway I don't know how much influence it really has.) Plus, often when there's one specific individual in power, or when the key faction has a clear leader, I feel the need to describe that person as well, which adds a bit more work. Overall, I'd say this ends up being kind of a midrange difficulty prompt... easier than Tuesday and Saturday, but not as easy as Wednesday and Sunday.

Friday: Rival Faction

Most of what's said of the Thursday prompt goes for this prompt as well. I'd say maybe it's a little trickier, in that even if I can come up with one faction that holds power in a particular neighborhood there isn't always a clear space for a second one, but still this prompt isn't too bad; it's still easier than Thursday and Saturday

Saturday: Hooks and Plots

Okay, this is another of the hardest and most time-consuming ones, but largely due to my own self-imposed constraints. I kind of developed a specific template for all my Saturday entries: I would come up with four general types of plot hooks that could occur in this neighborhood, and then give an example of a specific hook of each type. This is kind of a lot, and my Saturday entries tend to be the longest by a significant margin, with the Monday entries a not too close second. Again, some neighborhoods present more difficulty than others; it's harder to think of good plot hooks for a wealthy upscale neighborhood with high security, for instance, than a rough-and-tumble downtown neighborhood with plenty of crime and conflict.

Oh... and this is another one that requires some manual reformatting rather than just copying the text from the blog and pasting it into Discord... although to a lesser extent than Tuesdays. The hooks and plots are entered in the blog in the format of a "definition list", which again loses its formatting when copied and pasted... in addition to the fact that for some reason I took to writing "Example" in all caps on Discord and not in the blog, so I have to change that manually too. Again, not a huge deal, but a bit of extra hassle.

Sunday: Transportation

Like I said, the Saturday entries are on average the longest; Sunday's are the shortest. I just generally don't have that much to say about the transportation to, from, or through a neighborhood. And I guess I don't have that much to say here about that either; sorry.

So those are the prompts for each day of the week, but of course there's one more prompt, the daily NPC:

Daily NPC

Okay, despite being a prompt I have to tackle every day this one is also difficult, though again largely due to self-imposed constraints. It wouldn't be hard, I guess, to just give an example of a typical NPC of different types for each neighborhood: here's a typical guard, here's a typical merchant, etc. Instead, though, I wanted to flesh out some interesting and unique, atypical characters... who still fit in with the neighborhoods and their natures and themes. And that hasn't always been easy... though its been made more difficult, as I described in today's post on my main blog, by the fact that I haven't really taken the time to focus on thinking about them. Anyway, another thing that's made the daily NPCs a little more time-consuming for me, which again is entirely my fault, is the pattern I developed for each NPC entry. Each entry, I apparently at some point decided, would consist of at least three paragraphs, the last of which would be a description of the character. And that last paragraph itself had a particular pattern: it would usually include four sentences, the first two describing the chacacter's appearance (usually the first sentence more focused on the character's body and the second on the face), the third the character's voice and speech patterns, and the fourth the character's usual clothing. I haven't always stuck exactly to that template—in yesterday's NPC entry, for instance, I didn't include a description of the character's clothing because the character in question was a disembodied skull and I didn't see it as necessary or useful to devote a sentence to pointing out that skulls don't usually wear clothes. But I have stuck to that pattern more often than not. And it hasn't always been easy, because I mean... how many different ways are there to describe a character's voice? And how many different ways are there to describe, for example, a nose? Not that I have to mention the noses of every character in their description, but even if I only mention the nose in, say, 10% of the cases (and I think it's probably been more than that), by the end of the year that will still be 36 noses—or rather, given that as mentioned above I'm also providing descriptions of many characters associated with the key and rival factions on Thursdays and Fridays, more like forty noses. I don't want to repeat myself too much, but are there forty different ways to describe noses? Okay, probably, yes, but I don't think I have an especially extensive English vocabulary and I don't know that I can come up with forty different nose descriptions. Let alone four hundred different voice descriptions—again, how many ways are there to describe a character's voice? I think I've somehow managed so far to not have too much repetition between the descriptions of different characters, but we'll see how long I can keep it up.

Oh... another thing that caused me some unnecessary difficulty with coming up with NPCs, I think, is that at some point I started worrying over whether it was okay to include in a given week an NPC who only worked in that week's neighborhood but lived elsewhere—or vice versa—or whether I had to come up with characters who both lived and worked in that same neighborhood. And then it eventually occurred to me that in the very first week I had included characters who worked in the neighborhoods in question but didn't live there and that I was just overthinking things and creating needless problems for myself.

Anyway, so those are my thoughts on each prompt, or at least how each prompt has gone for me. (Again, none of the foregoing is intended as a criticism of the creators of the challenge.) But overall I'm happy with how the challenge has been going. It's certainly led me to generate a lot of material; I've written nearly seventy thousand words for the challenge so far^[1]. That means I'm on track by the end of the year to have written well over two hundred thousand words on the city of Lüm. And, as I said in my post in my main blog on the City '26 challenge—I feel like I should do something with all that, something other than just leave it all here in this blog (and in the Discord channel). I mean, I'm not going to remove it from this blog, but I feel like with that much material, I should do something else with it. I said in the aforementioned blog post that maybe eventually I'd publish it not just as one sourcebook about Lüm, but as two, separating the NPCs into a different book. But I've since rethought that. Heck, two hundred thousand words is easily enough not just for two books, but for three: maybe a Gazetteer of Lüm with an overview of the city and its neighborhoods (but not including any "secret" information the PCs shouldn't know about), a Gamemaster's Guide to Lüm with the encounter tables and adventure hooks, plus any other information the PCs wouldn't necessarily know (like descriptions of those key and rival factions that don't operate in the open), and third, People of Lüm with the NPC entries. Maybe. Of course, as I also said in the aforementioned post, it'll be a long while before that happens, even after the City '26 challenge winds up at the end of December; I'll have to format everything, add additional material, create maps of each neighborhood, commission illustrations... if I ever get these books done (which I hope I will!), it almost certainly won't be till some time in 2028 at the earliest.

And why stop there? I'm now kind of tempted to tackle another city after this one's done... and/or maybe I'll challenge one of the other Grandmaster Wongers to try a similar challenge. I think rather than these exact prompts, though, I may tailor it more to my purposes and maybe just have an overview of the neighborhood on the first day of the week and then an NPC and a significant location in that neighborhood for each remaining day (or maybe each day including the first day; I'm not sure—or maybe an NPC every day including the first day but a significant site only the other six days). Again, though, I've got a while before I have to worry about that; I'm certainly not going to try to seriously start in on another city until this challenge is over.

I also do really want to read all the other participants' entries in the challenge... like I said, I've started that, but I haven't finished yet. I'll try to get to that soon.

Oh... one more thing. Closing on two hundred entries, the main page for the City '26 blog is becoming a bit unwieldy. I really ought to add pagination soon. And also forward and backward links so readers can go through all the posts without having to return to the main blog page in between (this would have made totalling up the word count so much easier). With my decidedly amateurish programming skills, that's going to be quite a bit of work, though, and I'm not sure when I'm going to get to it—though when I do, I may as well implement those features for my main blog, too. There are other features I also figure the blogs ought to have, like tags and/or categories, but those will be even more time-consuming to implement, and while I do want to get them done, it probably won't be any time soon. (And yes, all this too I discussed before in my post on the main blog about the City '26 challenge, but I figured it was worth mentioning again, especially since the growing length of the City '26 blog main page has brought them back to the forefront of my mind.)

But anyway, I guess that'll do for my look at how the City '26 challenge has been going so far. And now, I haven't done today's entries for the challenge yet, and if I don't want to break my streak of success so far (which I don't), I... really ought to do that.