Welcome to my blog for City '26, a worldbuilding challenge proposed by Pete "Garblag" Lattimore, founder of Garblag Games and creator of the (brand new) RPG Heroic Deeds; and Joe Sofinho, writer of the blog Alone in the Labyrinth and creator of the OSR RPG PARIAH. The goal of the City '26 challenge is to build out a city, one "ward" a week, over the course of a year. For more information about the City '26 challenge and its participants, you can see this "megapost" on Alone in the Labyrinth, and for more information about my plans in particular for City '26, you can see my post about it on my main blog. This graphic, however, gives a good summary of the challenge:

You may note that the terms of the challenge leave at least two open questions. First of all, fifty-two seven-day weeks add up to 364 days, one day short of the full year. Secondly, the weekly challenges run from Monday to Sunday... but 2026 started on a Wednesday. While obviously there were other options, what I decided to do about these quandaries was that I would spend January 1 on the big picture doing some planning and preparation and then I'd start following the daily challenges on January 2, and I would split one ward over the beginning and ending of the year, doing the Thursday through Sunday challenges for that ward in the first partial week of 2026, and the Monday through Wednesday challenges the last.

Oh... there's one more important question, I guess. What exactly is a "ward"? Well, someone asked Lattimore that on a Reddit post about the challenge, and here's how he responded:

Geographic areas of a city that have a similar theme/function/demographic. Just a handy way to chop it up into weekly chunks as well.

So... fair enough. Not formal administrative divisions of the city, just... neighborhoods. Sure, a large city could definitely easily have fifty-two of those. Although near the end of the year I may possibly get even more flexible with the definition of "ward" and start counting things like the city's sewers as a "ward", for instance, and other similar citywide environments. Or maybe not... we'll see once I have my city more thoroughly mapped out.

Anyway, I've kept up with the challenge since January 1 (except the daily NPCs, but more on that shortly), but I only made this blog on January 25, so all the posts before that were actually posted on January 25 and backdated^[1]. They are, however, mostly dated to the days on which I wrote the material and posted it to the Garblag Discord. The main exceptions are this introductory post, which of course is new and was not posted to the Discord, and the first nine daily NPCs... I didn't notice that the daily NPCs were included in the challenge until January 11, but starting on January 12 I made two daily NPCs a day until I was caught up. So, for the record, each of the daily NPCs from January 2 through 10 was actually created ten days after the (backdated) date of the corresponding post^[2]. Anyway, going forward the dates of the posts here should correspond to the dates the material in them was written and posted on Discord (although if for any reason discrepancies do end up arising, I'll let you know).

Unless specified otherwise, the content here is exactly as it was posted to the Garblag Discord^[3], except for the addition of links and other wiki markup, and some correction of typos.

So, all that being said, let's begin...