In a recent blog post when I analyzed how well I was doing so far with my New Year's resolutions for 2026, I said that I was adding two new resolutions, one of which, a worldbuilding challenge called City '26, I planned to make a place for on the Wongery site within the next week or two. Well, that place has now been made. My work on the City '26 challenge now has its own dedicated blog.

But before I get further into that, what is City '26? I did describe it very briefly in the first post linked above: it's a challenge where "participants create a fictional city over the course of the year, focusing on one area of the city each week, and adding a little information each day according to the prompts provided". Here's a graphic by Pete "Garblag" Lattimore, one of the creators of the challenge, that summarizes the whole thing:

You can also see more information about the challenge and its participants in this megapost by Joe Sofinho, the other creator of the challenge. But to summarize, the idea is to write about the principal feature of the area on Monday; make encounter tables on Tuesday; write about goods and services available in the area on Wednesday; its controlling faction on Thursday; a rival faction on Friday; plot hooks on Saturday; and transportation in the area on Sunday. And create an NPC who lives in the area each day.

As you may surmise from the mention of "NPCs", City '26 was geared toward role-playing games, and most participants are building cities for particular game systems: Lattimore for Mothership, Sofinho for his own OSR RPG PARIAH, etc. While I do of course ultimately plan to create RPG content for the Wongery and have a RPG subspace already created for that purpose (and starting to fill out that subspace with content is another of my resolutions for 2026), the worlds of the Wongery aren't designed for any particular role-playing game, so I'm going to leave all my City '26 writeups system-neutral—no statistics or specific game mechanics. That doesn't mean some of this City '26 material may not be adapted to particular RPG systems later... but more on that in a bit.

So, anyway, like I was saying, my City '26 material now has its own dedicated blog; you can reach it by selecting "City '26" from the dropdown that appears when you hover over "Blog" in the site's main menu. (Or, you know, just click on the link in the previous sentence.) Creating the blog should have been relatively easy, since I could just copy the code from my main blog and make some minor modifications. It should have been easy, but since I am an unskilled and inexperienced programmer I made some stupid mistakes and got stuck for a while for a very silly reason, and it took me a lot longer to get the new blog working than it should have. Still, I got it done eventually.

There were a few other things I wanted to add to the City '26 blog. I thought it might be nice to give viewers the option to sort the posts in increasing or decreasing chronological order, or even in random order if for some reason they felt like that. (I did briefly consider also including the option to order the posts alphabetically by title, but... I don't know why anyone would want to do that.) It would also be convenient to have "Next" and "Previous" buttons, so viewers could go through all the posts without having to return to the main list in between. Oh, and maybe add tags to the posts that they could be filtered by, and change the PHP code to use PHP Data Objects instead of MySQLi for better security and futureproofing. Oh, hey, and maybe add an RSS feed...

I didn't end up doing any of that. For one thing, I figured it would probably take me considerable time to figure out how to implement those things (as I said, I am an unskilled and inexperienced programmer), and it would be better to just focus on getting the blog up and running and then worry about adding features and fixups later. Besides, it occurred to me that all of these are refinements that the main blog would benefit from as well, so when (and if) I do implement them I may as well go ahead and do it for both blogs. So... all those blog improvements may be coming in the future, to both the City '26 blog and this main blog, but... it may be a while before I get to them.

(I did, however, make one minor touchup to both blogs. Previously, when I previewed a post, which I usually did before submitting it, any HTML special character encoding was converted to the corresponding character, and then unless I manually changed it back the post would be stored in the database with those (unencoded) characters—so "—", for instance, would become simply "—". That's corrected now; previewing a post now leaves the special character encodings intact. This turned out to be a very simple fix, basically just adding a single word (and some open and closing parentheses) to the code, and something I probably should have done much earlier, but again, unskilled and inexperienced programmer... Oh, and I also realized that there was an <article> element on the blog main page that was missing a closing tag so I went ahead and put that in; the missing closing tag didn't seem to actually have been causing any problems, but still.)

Anyway, I guess I've been spending quite a lot of time on City '26. Arguably more time than I should have. That has been especially true in the last week or so, between my coming up with a rough map of my city and of course my implementing the City '26 blog that most of this post has been about. Plus, at first I'd missed the bit about daily NPCs and wasn't doing those, and after I did realize my mistake I made two NPCs a day until I was caught up... which I now am, as of this past Tuesday. So maybe I won't be spending quite as much time on it going forward as I had been this past week. Still... it's been a lot of work, and a lot of writing, and so I guess the question remains... what am I going to do with all this City '26 material when it's done?

Admittedly, part of the reason I decided to do City '26 was to give me another way and more motivation to further flesh out one of my worlds. I decided to choose a city in the nation of Djarvin on the world of Curcalen, because Djarvin is what I intend to be Curcalen's main focal area (at least for now), and Curcalen is a world I really want to prioritize developing—both because the Curcalen article is due for a rewrite soon (there are still five other articles to rewrite before I get to it, but it's the next world that I'll be rewriting the main article about), and because I still plan to try to start writing an epic set on Curcalen this coming November. And already the City '26 challenge has led to significant development of Curcalen; I've come up with several new folks for the world, some new countries, and at least one religion, as well as a couple of important new bits of terminology ("laither", "lathery") and some more notions about the workings of élan vital. (It's also led to my realizing that there are some significant things missing in my article on Djarvin, such as what languages are spoken there, and what currency is used. Oops.)

But while in that regard my participation in City '26 has already served a purpose (and I'm sure it'll lead me to more upbuilding of Curcalen as it continues), it still seems like I ought to do something with all the material I'm writing. I mean, I have been posting all the material here and in Gartopia, the Discord channel for Lattimore's company (Garblag Games), so it's all publicly available. But for the first twenty-three days of the challenge (not counting the first day when I just did the overview) I've written a total of just over eighteen thousand words, which means if I continue at the rate I'm going then by the end of the year I'll have written well over two hundred thousand words for City '26—closer to three hundred thousand, in fact. That's a lot of material to just leave languishing in a blog and a Discord channel. if I keep going at the rate I am, I'll have well over two hundred thousand words written about the city of Lüm by the end of the month, and probably closer to three hundred thousand. That's a lot of work to leave languishing in an obscure blog and on a Discord channel. If I'm writing that much material, I ought to do something more with it.

I guess probably the most obvious thing to do with it is, well, publish it, as a system-neutral RPG supplement. I plan to publish RPG material set in Wongery worlds anyway, and hope to get some out there by the end of the year, so this can certainly be a part of that. In fact, heck, two hundred thousand words is easily enough for multiple books. I'll probably separate the daily NPCs into a separate book, tentatively called People of Lüm.

But of course that won't be a matter of just slapping everything I've written for City '26 into a single document, exporting it to a PDF, and calling it good. It's going to take a lot of work, beyond the writing of the City '26 entries. I'll have to do some editing and polishing of the text, of course, write some introductory material and an overview of the city. And I'll probably want to add more sites of interest in each neighborhood, and maps, too. In fact, to expedite having all that ready to go, I briefly considered making my own additions to the City '26 challenge and also coming up with a new site of interest each day, and a map of the neighborhood each week (probably on Sunday, since that's the lightest day otherwise—honestly I find that I generally just don't have that much to say about transportation). Fortunately, I realized that that was a very, very stupid idea. I mean, I'm already having trouble keeping up with all my resolutions and getting things done; putting more daily to-dos on my plate would be an exercise in Icarian folly. So... yeah, I do plan to release all this material in book form eventually, with additional material and maps and illustrations, but don't expect it to come out in January 2027 as soon as the challenge is over. It's going to be at least a few months before I have it all compiled and completed, and realistically may not be till 2028.

Now, one question that might arise is this: If I'm writing so much material for the City '26 challenge, why am I not getting more writing done for articles in the Central Wongery? Well, one major difference between my writing for the Central Wongery and what I'm writing for City '26 is that the former is intended to be a lot more... final. Not that I haven't made changes to material there, but it's not something I like to do, and I try to avoid it. On the other hand, I'm far looser with what I'm writing for City '26; this material is not final, and there may well be changes before it sees publication outside the City '26 blog (and Gartopia). So, anyway, don't assume that everything in the City '26 blog is necessarily Wongery canon until it appears elsewhere. The majority of it probably will end up becoming canon, but there may be some alterations, especially to names—like I said, I haven't really decided what languages were widely spoken in Djarvin (I should probably give some thought to that soon), so I didn't have a language to source Djarvish names from. Although because Lüm is a cosmopolitan city with people from all over the world the names of characters there could of course easily come from many different languages anyway.

So, anyway, if you haven't yet, please go ahead and check out the new City '26 blog. I've also made a forum thread for discussion of the challenge. As for me... I've got to get to writing my City '26 entry for today, January 25...