To follow our Cosmic Defence Brigade piece, a setting, leaning heavily on Dream by Wombo. Inspired by events of the Empyrean Dynasty game.

For those of you working with cities; d4 Caltrops did this is a cool approach to quickly setting up city crawls with voronoi-tesselations. It took me a little button-mashing with my various browsers to get what I wanted so this is my how-to walk through to complement the original article.

Driving factor - I need detail on a city in my game, one that has suddenly skidded into focus. I have found it is good to do this before the party actually hits the place so you can get the 'famous for' right when they ask around about the place before they go. In my experience when randomly generating cities you will often find some really cool feature of that city that would be a famous custom or landmark - canals of Venice or fine cuisine of Paris type of thing - and it would seem reasonable for NPCs and investigation checks to mention this.

Process -
I. Created a map with Watabous magnificent fantasy city map generator.

Starting with a d16 block of ideas from old folk tales, family stories and legends from North West Ireland.

Near shore graveyard marker, Co. Mayo

Mythic seashore encounters:
1. Shellfishers with baskets and large rakes, working along the tide line. They can tell you any movements along the coast and are happy to trade a delicious dinner for any extra hands to help them carry away the palm-sized cockles and hand-long razorfish they are raking up.
2. Lights at low tide, the spirits of a long dead chieftan and his warriors holding a moot on the strand exposed by the sea. Anyone who keeps distant and watches will see a full re-enactment of a key meeting before a battle that changed the local history. Reading lips by those who understand the old tongue is possible. The key point to be gleaned is where the battle took place and where the mighty artefacts the chief and his companions are wearing fell.
3. An ancient fey defense - a standing stone that flings iron far out to sea. The fey have long moved on after tide wore away a portion of their keep. The defense still stands, allowing those with fey-ancestry to pass while throwing any others who wear metal off the cliff it stands near.

This was another 'rapid encounter table generation' exercise. Original prompt was a post the r/DnDAcademy prompt for 'Living Locks'. This time I tried bulking it out through gygaxian democracy on the OSR discord then fed that to the Bellard tool to bulk it out.

This was another 'rapid encounter table generation' exercise. Prompt was a post on Reddit requesting random encounters inside the academy. Another good opportunity to test the Bellard tool for quickly boosting tables.

A few ideas thrown together to challenge high-level PCs. The core assumption being that once the villain is in the clutches of the party, they will be torn down pretty quickly so the theme here is how to prolong the fight.

This is generic as much as possible to allow tailoring to the specific terrains you want.
1. Traversible but difficult terrain between the PC and foe; presents the puzzle of just slogging across (a known factor) vs spending resources to rapidly come to grips.
2. Terrain the foe can trigger - e.g. hiding on the far side of a tarpit or oil slick that sucks up movement to cross, that the foe can then ignite while the players are traversing
3. Multi-level close quarters - allowing crossing of paths without opponents blocking; e.g. running around on top of shelves in a library or facing something that can swim under the ice of a shallow lake
4. Highly visible, obvious traps - snares, pitfalls, things that won't kill but will delay individuals either de-activating or extricating themselves from - all action soaks while allowing the foe freedom to attack or flee
5. Living terrain - the foes are in a howdah of a large beast or fleeing past a sleeping dragon - both cases where slips or wild attacks risk bringing a new foe into the fight
6. Collateral innocents - fight happens atop a creature or with the foes holding a hostage - PCs need to defeat them with precision
7. A time limit for action - the foes have escaped into a mine with an avalanche descending or into a passenger pod on a giant turtle about to dive - the PCs must address the environmental challenge before their access is cut off.
8. For truly advanced challenge, crack out the non-eucidean architecture (part 1, and part 2) starting with part 3; wierd gravity.
9. Avoiding multiple objects in one spot - e.g. having to worry about multiple objects being piled up against a wall to allow foe to climb and escape; or bones tumbling from opening tombs that will rise to fight once enough falls in to allow skeletons to form
10. Avoid being surrounded by obstacles - foe tries to keep you in a place because they know they will be able to escape but not you - e.g. water rising toward a drain chute or other exit path that they will be able to slip away down, spiders building webs that will trap the PCs but the foe can slip through
11. Random encounters - The enemy won't just randomly drop on the map when they die e.g. they need to be brought to a place where they can be pinned to finish them off or else will likely escape - e.g. a planar being or vampire will reform elsewhere if killed
12. Endless encounters - prolonged or loud clashes are likely to bring reinforcements or generally worsen the situation - e.g. both parties are thieves/assassins where an alert will rouse the guards
13. Unwanted enemies - crushing the known foes at current location will turn current friendlies against the party - mistakenly assuming you are attacking innocents or breaking hospitality rules or some such
14. Moving on to the next phase - roll twice on this table and combine; success in the first phase shifts the fight to the second so more tactics need to be employed e.g. front-running an avalanche then having to negotiate traps in the cavern everyone is sheltered in
15. Raining - a thunderstorm on icy or rocky surfaces, making them first slick, then flooding, bringing a risk of lightning strikes to those near tall things and making communications and sight difficult as flashes disrupt vision
16. Water - a large area may have pools, rivers, bogs, lakes, swamps, rivers, ponds, deep waters, rivers in tributaries or even entire lakes making pursuit difficult for heavily armoured adventurers
17. Fences - some fortifications with solid walls or fences or trenches that regularly block line of sight and provide lots of close cover
18. Ropes - an area is a maze of spikes that requires pursuit by swinging on ropes- e.g. a huge cave with a lot of spikes or large pits within tunnels
19. Crumbling - an ancient stone floor is crumbling and pursuit paths must be judged by the weight of the pursuer
20. Narrows - the path to the foe requires that players can engage only piecemeal - some must power a lift or hold a rope bridge while others cross - requiring careful choice on who gets to grips in what order

A mightier list of terrain features can be found here to flesh out and modify the high level concepts described above.

Items 1-8 above were standard off the cuff responses to a prompt but from 9 onwards are slightly cleaned up outputs from the GPT-2 network at Bellard.org. I found this through Eldritch Fields. I fed it sub-sets of the 8 prompts I had created, chopping and changing to get more responses. A neat tool for beefing up some content that may be a bit scant.

Note 11 was originally "the map is randomly generated each time you start a new playthrough"
12 was "enemies can be friendly (for instance you can see where they are coming from or they can"
20 was "Tidal wave - a time warp from earlier phases of the fight - either the foes are still trapped deep into the cavern or they are under attack or drowning and need to escape quickly" - too similar to 7