On the principle of 'stack up the gunpowder' I wanted to set up a couple of fault lines within this city to have it in a high energy unstable equilibrium, liable to go careening down into disaster at any moment. Tone setting for the whole city as a hive - in the same way Necromunda has House Helmawr and is a recruiting point for the Imperial Fists Space Marines - is the status of this place as the capital of a world not yet properly established as an Imperial Knight house.
This place is stuck in limbo as a partly completed new Knight world - a cadet branch of an established house were in the process of founding it in the wake of the stilling of the warp storms of Old Night when the Great Crusade arrived (approx ~ 11,000 years ago).
After the chaos of the Horus Heresy finally played out and the weight of the Imperium returned (~ 9000 years ago) debates began over the use of this world - whether to turn it to a standard hive world or whether to continue with the founding of the Knight world.
Imperial bureacracy has been working on the issue ever since.
In the interim, the megafauna introduced thrived, were hunted to near extinction in the northern continent and ill-managed tithe extraction has lead to devastation of that hemisphere. By the God-Emperors Grace, the howling equatorial jetstreams of this fast-spinning world have confined the atmospheric devastation to the north and life, agriplexes and megafauna thrive in the seas and the lands of the south.
** Today **
Hive RT-87, as the planetary capital is built on the model of the fortified keeps of the Long March; with bristling weaponry and garrisons of household militia. The original web of mines, agriplexes and breeding-paddocks have been partly subsumed in the toxic dust-wastes of the blasted northern continent but it remains the capital and thus maintained where other cities and hives on the continent have been abandoned.
Atop the hive you have House Mawcambeth, a cadet branch of a knight house; they have a few legacy Knights but only the manufacturing capacity to sustain those and not to build new. They have managed for millenia to meet the voracious demands of the Imperial tithe while also maintaining viability of the original founding plan. The northern continent and atmosphere has been sacrificed so far and they are struggling to find other ways to meet the ever increasing demands of the tithe.
The Sacristans, keepers of the technologies of the Knight houses, have been kept hard at work by this worlds paucity of metals. A whole raft of cunning work-arounds - including a focus on ceramics and plastek - were part of the original pre-Crusade colonial plan and those have just barely survived. The metals for getting the Knight manufactoria started were to have come from asteroid mining and orbital smelters - and those have all been requisitioned by the Imperium.
Abhumans have always been part of the Knight households vassals, part of the same utilitarian approach to genetic adaptation as the megasaurs. Ogryns and minotaurs were strong enough to wrangle megasaurs in the wilds and in the stockyards and slaughterhouses. Beastmen were valued for their hardiness and more so as the toxic wastelands grew across the northern continent. Because of this and the reduced survival probability of standard humans, abhumans are more welcomed here than many other places in the Imperium and both official and unofficial migratory streams feed in from off-world.
The Imperial institutions are all present in various capacities.
Together these give us d20 Reasons Lord Mawcambeth Has An Ulcer.
1. Every hall he walks down of the echoing spire corridors, he hears the tread of spurred heels at the cusp of his hearing. The flicker at the edge of his vision, echoes from his Throne-Mechanicum. His ancestors hold ceaseless vigil, each carried this 10 millenia inheritance of duty in their own time, now they harry him to carry it forward in his. His fool of a medicae suggests it might be the copious quantities of concentration enhancers he consumes. His dotard of a court psyker swears no spirits stalk the halls but he knows, he knows he cannot rest until this world see new Knights stride forth from the manufactora or the grave. The normally reliable Sacristan-Prime insists no such effects can be happening while he is not seated in his Knight. And yet.
2. His sacristans mutter excuses about failing data-cores, lost knowledge and interfering Adeptus Mechanicus and protest that a thing easily accomplished in his great great great great grand sires age is no longer possible. They badger him for resources and time as if he had either to give.
3. Wretched cousins, minor scions of the knight houses, barking in his court, grandstanding about how they would drive plans faster, further, see the world turned wholly to this or that Imperial purpose. Charlatans all, none have the grit to sit the throne of this world. They think he does not know they call him Goatseller for the abhuman regiments he provides for the tithe.
4. The nagging priests of the Ministorum insist vigilance and the inherent falsity of abhumans, as if it is not they that are tasked with seeing to the souls of all on this world, as if there were not a hundreds of fanatic abhuman orders from centuries to millenia old, sapping the food and labour of the world in their piety.
5. Astra Telepathica griping about the relative paucity of psykers for the black ships, how abhumans are poor stock for the Astronomicon.
6. Ever the Administratum wringing their hands about the tithe, always with problems and demands unanswerable with the resources of this world, never with ideas for how to meet the tithe with things they do have. Faithless in his proudly unbroken record of meeting the tithe whenever asked.
7. Prevaricating Munitorum officials with there balance calculations on the relative utility of another Knight world to the defense of the Imperium - sacriligeous dolts, lucky he has only shot a handful for their impertinence - that a base hiveworld churning out mere lasguns or base soldiers might ever match the grandeur and battlefield shock of a proud Knight house in full charge. Endlessly he has tolerated their comparative studies and their endless reworkings for changed circumstances as the local conflict shift and new foes arise, the endless delays from extra-planetary consultations and data requests, their rework when they find false value in planetary uses that are not Knight houses.
8. The despicable Administratum officials conducting the litigation over the use of this world; demanding fresh studies from the Munitorum, arguing over minutiae, considering, reviewing, questioning the integrity of document seals, seeking testimony, measuring, prying.
9. Grasping Mechanicus, thieves-in-waiting, furious his ancestors swore to the glorious God Emperor and not to them, now they pry and seek heresy in every secret and skill of his faithful Sacristans, demanding he replace everything with their sanctioned technologies, treating his house like a wayward child and not a better steward of the secrets of the mighty Knights than they.
10. Loathsome Mechanicus Biologis with their creeping about, demanding samples and proposing refinements of his wise Sacristans works. Their gleeful enthusiasm for servitorisation of the megasaurs is almost worse than the furious chastisements of their machine-focussed fellows.
11. An endless stream of Imperial Navy squadron commanders and pilot-trainers, fruit of his most catastrophic success in demonstrating his houses Knight-training complex produced exemplary fighter pilots, now they want more, ever more. His favourite problem but a problem nonetheless.
12. Grim Custodes growling about the vile Cold Trade but also incessantly questioning about the beastfolk - insinuating his house runs some wretched abhuman underground railroad, as if they would stoop to such trivia, even if it was so required.
13. Guildscaptain of the Whaler-barges bleating about the risks to the aquatic megafauna of the latest tithe increases, as if he was not well aware, as if they were not the next of his few remaining cards to play to stave off the strip-processing of the southern landmasses.
14. The Master of Dinochrome castigating him on the slipping standards of the new knight-candidates, the deterioration of the training grounds, the difficulty sourcing sufficiently large and fierce carnosaurs, the poor quality of the penal-legion training fodder, as if he had nothing else to concern himself with.
15. Interstellar chartist captains arriving with their cargoesp, never with enough of the right things, always at extortionate prices, always with that scorn the void-faring bear to the planet-borne. Pirates in waiting should he ever take his eye off them.
16. That weakling Master of the Orbital Yards, letting the Navy interdict the metal supplies brought in from the asteroid belts by miners put in place by his ancestors, repairing armour plate on Grand Cruisers while they are forced to recycle old cities on the surface.
17. The looming shadow of the Sector Governor as manifest by a parade of preening useless nobles, clogging his court, abusing his hospitality and condescending to him about the expectation of delivering the tithe, acquiring the charter to establish a Knight world, uphold honour and no doubt chew his food if he ever deigned to let them prattle on long enough.
18. Cringing manufactorum heirarchs, with their delays and their obfuscation of problems until everything is too late and in crisis. Some competent stalwarts among them but distracted among themselves by feuds and duels and clawing for credits as if any amount of credits would save them if the tithe is missed.
19. Dilatory regional barons squalling about managing their dinosaur herds, protesting what mild share of the tithe he lays upon them, yet another weight to be dragged when they should be kissing his boots for the shield he holds above their heads, ungrateful wretches.
20. Ever changing parade of Astra Millitarum Auxilla commanders as the tithe is paid in regiments and once known and reliable colonels are shipped away. The new ones always full of bragadacio about the readiness of their regiments, needing to be hammered through that quality of soldiers must be beyond outstanding for their abhuman regiments to be accepted by the Munitorum.
28 March 2026
25 March 2026
Flatpack cardboard monsters
I was futzing about with the smallest householder using up cardboard that had come with furniture and stumbled upon correctly scaled dinosaurs standees. Needless to say, this is not the work of Michaelangelo but it shows the concept.
This was ten minutes work with a box cutter, a piece of toilet-roll and a chunk of packing cardboard so relatively little effort. The dinosaur was sketched on from a google-search image. Getting the scale right for 28mm minis was complete coincidence in this case but it then struck me once I saw it as a decent idea to do deliberately.
The toilet-roll to be its torso has serendipitously made it pretty robust. He was supposed to have a second set of 'feet' (another carboard cross) but he was grabbed off the desk and put into service before that bit got done and he stands up well enough with just one. In addition, it slots together and comes apart easily and repeatably so it could be a handy way to have big monsters available for use without hauling around back-breaking amounts of kit.
I started with standees long ago and there are many clever standee sets kicking about - Kala Mandala just made a nice set available - but I think there could be some mileage in some sort of print-and-stick sets which you could use to make big monsters like this that easily break down where necessary.
Order of the Stick had some cunning paper minis in their 'A Monster For Every Season' sets - where the mounts had flat bits you could put a rider on. There is probably a cunning angle here for making the 'support' bit a flat cross piece doubles up as the space for riders.
My primary paper-crafts client is going to be just looking for more dinosaurs, not more cunning designs so I may not get to try this out myself - would love to hear anyone elses versions of big card monster minis and how to do them.
Order of the Stick had some cunning paper minis in their 'A Monster For Every Season' sets - where the mounts had flat bits you could put a rider on. There is probably a cunning angle here for making the 'support' bit a flat cross piece doubles up as the space for riders.
My primary paper-crafts client is going to be just looking for more dinosaurs, not more cunning designs so I may not get to try this out myself - would love to hear anyone elses versions of big card monster minis and how to do them.
23 March 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #269
The most fascinating links from about the internet. For 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.
Papers & Pencils posts Referee Sabotage
Pointless Monument shares 60 systems and 600 sessions. 3 years in the life of a TTRPG meetup.
Dungeon Merlin writes On Meeting a Game Where It's At
The Foot of Blue Mountain posts Open Table Reflections Spring 2026
To Be Resolved writes Circuit Crawls
3x5 Arcana shares Dungeons are People
I Cast Light! posts RATLINGS NOT HALFLINGS: Or Why Beast Folk Are Better Than Demihumans
Correspondence is about Diligence posted Observations on GNS Simulationism
Magnolia Keep writes Prepping Plots, Part Four: Stringing the Beads
Dungeon of Signs wrote Spelljammer - Rocks of Shardspace
cobb.land (re-do as fouled up the link) gives us The Purpose and Size of a Hex
Papers & Pencils posts Referee Sabotage
Pointless Monument shares 60 systems and 600 sessions. 3 years in the life of a TTRPG meetup.
Dungeon Merlin writes On Meeting a Game Where It's At
The Foot of Blue Mountain posts Open Table Reflections Spring 2026
To Be Resolved writes Circuit Crawls
3x5 Arcana shares Dungeons are People
I Cast Light! posts RATLINGS NOT HALFLINGS: Or Why Beast Folk Are Better Than Demihumans
Correspondence is about Diligence posted Observations on GNS Simulationism
Magnolia Keep writes Prepping Plots, Part Four: Stringing the Beads
Dungeon of Signs wrote Spelljammer - Rocks of Shardspace
cobb.land (re-do as fouled up the link) gives us The Purpose and Size of a Hex
21 March 2026
Rescaling encounter maps for Tiny Epics (RPG Blog Carnival)
Errant Thinking proposes Tiny Epics: Small Souls in a Big World! for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Thinking about the "Dungeons in miniscule" point, I was thinking about the fun to be had with messing with scale. Take a map and tweak the scale from 5' to 10', 15' or 20' as you like.
Castles and dungeons get a whole new lease of life - a window ledge is a great archery position, cavalry charges down corridors make sense, a doorway is not such an easy choke point, an open hall takes more than one turn to cross, all the calculus of moving and fighting within a space changes.
Fun with scale switching
To try and illustrate; I scanned and dropped a grid onto Castle Balronco from the fondly remembered Southern Reaches campaign - it actually looms over the Flytrap bar, haunt of the diminuitive flylings; so was already a place where scales were being fiddled with.
This place started as a repaint of a genuine castle on the Dordogne in France which provided ample detail for the outside - the skeleton of rooms drawn here are wrapped in walls at least as thick as the pointy arrow-slits along the top and bottom left and similarly some of the interior structural walls are very thick indeed. It provides a dungeon-appropriate level of connectivity and served well for the sessions I ran using approx 1 square = 5' scale.
If you bunch that up to 1 square is 15' then once you get into room 1, that big hall, it is a long dash to get across to any other exit leaving you exposed to ranged attacks or vulnerable to hit-and-run from mounted foes. Similiarly the doorways go from normal ~ 3' width to treble that, needing two adventurers shoulder to shoulder to hold it. Fireballs and other such area effects are not guaranteed room-clearers anymore. The list goes on.
None of this is too wild - there have been big maps in modules forever, but it is the ease of getting a second solid use out of a map by massively upscaling it, calling it a giants fortress, and setting your adventurer there. There are quite a few examples of this for existing giants fortress but I would also suggest calling it a giants ruin and having anything but giants there would also get you good mileage.
Continuing massively in this direction; bumping the scale up to 100' and making it a floating titans lair that must be traversed with a Spelljammer or some manner of underwater lair needing a submersible could also be fun.
The invert of all of this - down-scaling a map - can also be done but gets tricky because doors and passages rapidly become impassible to adventurers. This could be a neat puzzle, with an entire miniature dungeon that has to be navigated only through use of mage hand, familiars and hooks on lines, but unless size-changing magic is widely available to your party, it is not such a useful trick.
Castle Balronco in play
The Castle had three factions in it; fly-ling smugglers on the ground floor using the lower left rooms, beetlefolk wanderers where were flying in and out of the top of the castle and unbeknownst to the other two groups, a spider-vampire in some isolated rooms near the roof.
It meant that the ground floor was a combination of well trafficked but also partly-trapped - the unsound structure was not being disturbed by the small, light fly-lings marching about but the bigger player characters would set things off.
Beneath the castle was a dungeon - lifted from a photo of woodworm damage - which proved suitably labyrinthine.
If I were to run the place again, rescaled, suddenly all of those arrow slits become an entryway into some sort of grand temple and the now-huge central spiral staircase demands some sort of set-piece confrontation on it.
To close
Running on an up-scaled map changes the calculus of encounters - moves take you less far, ranges matter more, lines of sight, darkvision ranges, all the mechanics of encounters changes. At a minimum, it allows a straight-up recycle of a map, at best you could get some really memorable second uses by re-working who is present and making things different.
Note, there is nothing to stop you just rescaling the opposing forces; having small folk doing 'big' battlefield tactics in medium scaled places.
There is a map there, so I am counting my Joesky tax paid.
This was for the ever appreciated RPG Blog Carnival organised by Of Dice & Dragons.
Castles and dungeons get a whole new lease of life - a window ledge is a great archery position, cavalry charges down corridors make sense, a doorway is not such an easy choke point, an open hall takes more than one turn to cross, all the calculus of moving and fighting within a space changes.
Fun with scale switching
To try and illustrate; I scanned and dropped a grid onto Castle Balronco from the fondly remembered Southern Reaches campaign - it actually looms over the Flytrap bar, haunt of the diminuitive flylings; so was already a place where scales were being fiddled with.
This place started as a repaint of a genuine castle on the Dordogne in France which provided ample detail for the outside - the skeleton of rooms drawn here are wrapped in walls at least as thick as the pointy arrow-slits along the top and bottom left and similarly some of the interior structural walls are very thick indeed. It provides a dungeon-appropriate level of connectivity and served well for the sessions I ran using approx 1 square = 5' scale.
If you bunch that up to 1 square is 15' then once you get into room 1, that big hall, it is a long dash to get across to any other exit leaving you exposed to ranged attacks or vulnerable to hit-and-run from mounted foes. Similiarly the doorways go from normal ~ 3' width to treble that, needing two adventurers shoulder to shoulder to hold it. Fireballs and other such area effects are not guaranteed room-clearers anymore. The list goes on.
None of this is too wild - there have been big maps in modules forever, but it is the ease of getting a second solid use out of a map by massively upscaling it, calling it a giants fortress, and setting your adventurer there. There are quite a few examples of this for existing giants fortress but I would also suggest calling it a giants ruin and having anything but giants there would also get you good mileage.
Continuing massively in this direction; bumping the scale up to 100' and making it a floating titans lair that must be traversed with a Spelljammer or some manner of underwater lair needing a submersible could also be fun.
The invert of all of this - down-scaling a map - can also be done but gets tricky because doors and passages rapidly become impassible to adventurers. This could be a neat puzzle, with an entire miniature dungeon that has to be navigated only through use of mage hand, familiars and hooks on lines, but unless size-changing magic is widely available to your party, it is not such a useful trick.
Castle Balronco in play
The Castle had three factions in it; fly-ling smugglers on the ground floor using the lower left rooms, beetlefolk wanderers where were flying in and out of the top of the castle and unbeknownst to the other two groups, a spider-vampire in some isolated rooms near the roof.
It meant that the ground floor was a combination of well trafficked but also partly-trapped - the unsound structure was not being disturbed by the small, light fly-lings marching about but the bigger player characters would set things off.
Beneath the castle was a dungeon - lifted from a photo of woodworm damage - which proved suitably labyrinthine.
If I were to run the place again, rescaled, suddenly all of those arrow slits become an entryway into some sort of grand temple and the now-huge central spiral staircase demands some sort of set-piece confrontation on it.
To close
Running on an up-scaled map changes the calculus of encounters - moves take you less far, ranges matter more, lines of sight, darkvision ranges, all the mechanics of encounters changes. At a minimum, it allows a straight-up recycle of a map, at best you could get some really memorable second uses by re-working who is present and making things different.
Note, there is nothing to stop you just rescaling the opposing forces; having small folk doing 'big' battlefield tactics in medium scaled places.
There is a map there, so I am counting my Joesky tax paid.
This was for the ever appreciated RPG Blog Carnival organised by Of Dice & Dragons.
18 March 2026
And further; Dungeonize the Property Section
Rise Up Comus makes an excellent point in Unblocking Yourself: Dungeonize your Home look to draw inspiration for your hexes and dungeon rooms from what you see about you. They made the point in particular reference to dungeon rooms by looking at what is about your own house. I think that is an excellent idea; I have gotten good mileage out of a variation - finding inspiration for sites in newspaper property sections: "d30 dwellings and sites"
Normally these would be going straight into recycling but they are often great sources of quirky dwellings that you can get some nice ideas for odd features.
Property sections give inspiration for dungeon rooms or for me more often for hex locations or just general encounters.
The photography of these places give a great sense of how to treat the whole site - things like this persons sculpture garden attached to their house. Is it the lair of a Medusa? Is it living statues? Is it some kind of stone giant sacred space?
Elaborate gardens would be really difficult terrain to have to advance stealthily over or could be stuffed full of killer plants or traps. Interiors that serve exactly as in Dungeonize your Home but with the clutter of hundreds of strangers.
Often the interiors of our dungeons or structures end up quite sparse so it can be good to look at some of these places and consider "what would it be like if you had to get across this room?" Maybe there is only a narrow path between the piles of books between the chair and the door. Maybe it would be quicker to just trot across all the shin-high coffee tables and take the risk of them breaking. There can be some good ideas for shaking things up a bit.
The inspiration can be whatever you like and it also serves to use these property sections somehow instead of sending them straight into recycling.
=== Joesky Tax ===
d12 more dwellings and sites
1. Crooked paths tree - giant old moss covered tree of sprawling branches, home to a group of local woodlands folk who cheerfully abide it being the local easy access to the canopy above and a range of other fey destinations
2. Hags slab - somewhat unkindly named mid-lake foundation of an ancient structure. When not being used by local coven, often used for fisherfolk and a good source of local news
3. Ogres sauna - once a dwarven forge, now sealed over with crude daub-and-straw where an ogre is often found sweating or traipsing between it and a local pool
4. House of Mirrors - a cottage amid a garden festooned with broken mirror shards, home to an enchantress and their faithful minions, and filled within with mirrors from all corners of the world. Every magic mirror type is in here somewhere.
5. The strange interior shutters of this battered little cottage is the shell of the colossal centipede currently asleep within.
6. This clearing is festooned with battered but impressive furniture around a firepit. A trail through the forest leads up a hill to a smashed open wizards tower, still smouldering.
7. A line of collapsed trees bridge a ravine and provide a lively highway for local critters. A significant shortcut but very noisy to take.
8. The perfectly sheared away tower of a flying castle is slowly sinking into this wetland.
9. A ruin sits within perfectly tended gardens. Thirty feet from the walls the grass has been nibbled down by the sheep and geese that live here. Within skeletons continue to tidy and neaten what remains of the crumbling structure.
10. A fantastically arched structure, glassy domes of mystical construction, within a garden of plants from a much hotter clime and a small group of natives from a land far away.
11. Walls of ice make an otherwise normal local structure, inhabited by bundled-up halflings running a tavern in a tent in the garden.
12. A magnificent manor sits within a dell, its gardens a cornucopia of psychotropic plants. Grimly unsmiling, armed staff will sweep up any visitors/intruders to meet the master and be subjected to their interminable lectures about the liberating powers of vast quantities of their home-brewed psychadelics.
Normally these would be going straight into recycling but they are often great sources of quirky dwellings that you can get some nice ideas for odd features.
Property sections give inspiration for dungeon rooms or for me more often for hex locations or just general encounters.
The photography of these places give a great sense of how to treat the whole site - things like this persons sculpture garden attached to their house. Is it the lair of a Medusa? Is it living statues? Is it some kind of stone giant sacred space?
Elaborate gardens would be really difficult terrain to have to advance stealthily over or could be stuffed full of killer plants or traps. Interiors that serve exactly as in Dungeonize your Home but with the clutter of hundreds of strangers.
Often the interiors of our dungeons or structures end up quite sparse so it can be good to look at some of these places and consider "what would it be like if you had to get across this room?" Maybe there is only a narrow path between the piles of books between the chair and the door. Maybe it would be quicker to just trot across all the shin-high coffee tables and take the risk of them breaking. There can be some good ideas for shaking things up a bit.
The inspiration can be whatever you like and it also serves to use these property sections somehow instead of sending them straight into recycling.
=== Joesky Tax ===
d12 more dwellings and sites
1. Crooked paths tree - giant old moss covered tree of sprawling branches, home to a group of local woodlands folk who cheerfully abide it being the local easy access to the canopy above and a range of other fey destinations
2. Hags slab - somewhat unkindly named mid-lake foundation of an ancient structure. When not being used by local coven, often used for fisherfolk and a good source of local news
3. Ogres sauna - once a dwarven forge, now sealed over with crude daub-and-straw where an ogre is often found sweating or traipsing between it and a local pool
4. House of Mirrors - a cottage amid a garden festooned with broken mirror shards, home to an enchantress and their faithful minions, and filled within with mirrors from all corners of the world. Every magic mirror type is in here somewhere.
5. The strange interior shutters of this battered little cottage is the shell of the colossal centipede currently asleep within.
6. This clearing is festooned with battered but impressive furniture around a firepit. A trail through the forest leads up a hill to a smashed open wizards tower, still smouldering.
7. A line of collapsed trees bridge a ravine and provide a lively highway for local critters. A significant shortcut but very noisy to take.
8. The perfectly sheared away tower of a flying castle is slowly sinking into this wetland.
9. A ruin sits within perfectly tended gardens. Thirty feet from the walls the grass has been nibbled down by the sheep and geese that live here. Within skeletons continue to tidy and neaten what remains of the crumbling structure.
10. A fantastically arched structure, glassy domes of mystical construction, within a garden of plants from a much hotter clime and a small group of natives from a land far away.
11. Walls of ice make an otherwise normal local structure, inhabited by bundled-up halflings running a tavern in a tent in the garden.
12. A magnificent manor sits within a dell, its gardens a cornucopia of psychotropic plants. Grimly unsmiling, armed staff will sweep up any visitors/intruders to meet the master and be subjected to their interminable lectures about the liberating powers of vast quantities of their home-brewed psychadelics.
16 March 2026
Shiny TTRPG links #268
Only the most interesting links from about the web. For 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.
Lonely Star posts The Poster's Code
Humberto Tramujas - Lupiron Press shares Rules are not neutral!
rose quarter-drifting / w.s. healed posts THE COIN DON’T HAVE NO SAY
The Foot of Blue Mountain gives us How to Chew Your Food
Crypt Of The Rambling Dead shares Less planning, more playing
Lonely Star posts How the OSR corroded my brain
Sam Sorensen writes Apologia for Plain Paragraphs
Table 46 asks Why don't the monsters simply eat the people?
Daniel Sell posts Bullet POINT
The DDS Board shares There is no BBEG
Lonely Star posts The Poster's Code
Humberto Tramujas - Lupiron Press shares Rules are not neutral!
rose quarter-drifting / w.s. healed posts THE COIN DON’T HAVE NO SAY
The Foot of Blue Mountain gives us How to Chew Your Food
Crypt Of The Rambling Dead shares Less planning, more playing
Lonely Star posts How the OSR corroded my brain
Sam Sorensen writes Apologia for Plain Paragraphs
Table 46 asks Why don't the monsters simply eat the people?
Daniel Sell posts Bullet POINT
The DDS Board shares There is no BBEG
14 March 2026
Iconography of a history yet to happen
I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.
I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)
Alien gestures
While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.
The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.
One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.
From the history of a far future
For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.
For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.
I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.
A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.
What use to you, a DM?
Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.
I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.
= = = Joesky tax = = =
d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"
Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda
I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)
Alien gestures
While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.
The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.
One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.
From the history of a far future
For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.
For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.
I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.
A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.
What use to you, a DM?
Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.
I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.
= = = Joesky tax = = =
d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"
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