In Corpathium

Overview

This is a city compiler rather than a city map. The core move is to drop a full 7-die set plus extra d20s, treat the dice as borough nodes rather than literal geography, then derive movement, power, law, mood, and local weirdness from the resulting cluster. The city can change radically between campaigns without losing its identity.

Core Procedure

Drop a 7-die polyhedral set plus 5 extra d20s, keeping the cluster reasonably tight.
Treat each die as one borough. The cluster shows social and travel adjacency, not exact street geometry.
Trace the visible points of the upper face of each die. If a point leads toward another die, those boroughs connect.
Assign borough identities by reading the d20 from highest priority first, then the rest of the set, then the extra d20s from highest result downward.
Resolve duplicates by stepping down to the next lowest unused result not already claimed by a smaller die.
If no lower result remains, roll on the Additional Undefined Boroughs tables instead.
Replace the lowest-position die with the Fogwalk constant and place the Emerald Pit nearest the centre.
Apply citywide government and order conditionals by checking the first valid row.
Read the die that generated each borough to determine its local variance and current crisis, ruler, fashion, or hidden condition.

The result is a graph-based metropolis with built-in access logic, default factions, and scenario hooks. It is useful when you want a city to feel internally coherent without reducing it to a fixed canonical map.

Structural Constants

Fogwalk: always replaces the die nearest the bottom edge of the cluster and provides the canal and dock infrastructure that tie the city to the outside world.
Emerald Pit: always replaces the extra d20 nearest the centre. Its surrounding district is generated from the undefined borough tables.
Howling Spire of Time: if the Twin Nests do not exist, place the Spire elsewhere in the city as a displaced landmark.
Deicidium chance: poor boroughs have a 1-in-6 chance, middling boroughs 4-in-6, and rich boroughs 5-in-6. This makes divine policing a structural city feature rather than a special-case district tag.
Guild saturation: every social layer organizes itself. Expect guilds, sects, brotherhoods, and professional cults in nearly every borough.

Government And Order

Government is selected by checking these conditions from top to bottom:

Priority	Government Outcome
1	If there is no Temple District but the Blood-Red Palace exists, the Godless and the Childlike Oracle rule the city.
2	If there is no Temple District or Blood-Red Palace, but the Old Folk exist, the thing from the Emerald Pit rules through the Old Folk.
3	If there is no Temple District or Blood-Red Palace, but the Manifestation of the Monolith exists, the Monolith rules through its speakers.
4	If there is no Temple District, Blood-Red Palace, or Wheel of Gold, the Haugroten trading family dominates the Fogwalk and installs sons over each borough.
5	Otherwise the Corvuscult rules.

Order is then selected in the same first-valid manner:

Priority	Order Outcome
1	If the Blood-Red Palace exists, every borough gets a Deicidium and the Godless maintain order.
2	If the city is ruled by the Emerald Pit power, the Order of a Thousand Eyes replaces Deicidiums with Watch Houses.
3	If the city is ruled by the Monolith, the Silent Ones replace overt policing entirely.
4	If there are three or fewer Deicidiums under Corvuscult rule, private mercenary Whoredens replace them.
5	Otherwise the Godless keep order.

These two tables are one of the article's strongest design moves. They let the same borough roster imply very different campaign states without requiring a second city-building subsystem.

Additional Undefined Boroughs

Use this when duplicate borough results overflow the fixed 1-20 list or when you need satellite districts.

d6	Wealth Band
1-2	Poor
3-4	Middling
5-6	Rich

Poor Borough Templates

d12	Name	Environment
1	The Warren	Fungus-choked and insect-heavy, but never without something edible.
2	Swinehaven	Ramshackle buildings overgrown with plant life.
3	Crone Spawn Commons	Oily slum with notable brewhouses.
4	Black Rose Hill	Streets crowded by crude monumental idols.
5	Corpsewallow	Built around an open sewer with direct undercity access.
6	Red Rookery	The understreets are inhabited while the rich-looking upper borough lies abandoned. Roll a rich district above it.
7	The Drowning Mass	A single towering scrap-built structure rises inside another borough.
8	The Scales	Religious pamphlets and sacred pages cover the walls.
9	Bladderrot Downs	Carrion birds and seed-scattered rooftops dominate the skyline.
10	Syringa Vulgaris	Heavy soot and communal alley fires define the streets.
11	Roach Bottom	Well-kept buildings conceal a sickly population and ominous central mansion.
12	The Pit	Giant leeches serve as grotesque public medicine and food source.

Middling Borough Templates

d12	Name	Environment
1	The Flower Bed	Tiny carved figures on every doorway; mice are walked on strings.
2	Bloodvessel	Fruit vines, bats, seeds, and guano make the district lush and hazardous.
3	Liberius Waltz	Lanterns and lamplighter packs make it unusually bright.
4	Blackmark	Aqueduct-fed fountains flood the streets.
5	Crowsfoot	Balcony pennons display poems, wards, and nonsense.
6	White Walls	Skull-paved streets suggest something worse beneath.
7	Littledeath Point	Bronze-plated walls depict false wars and over-serious legends.
8	The Festival	Leaning buildings drape silk and lanterns over the street.
9	Blackfriar's	Unwashed zealots produce some of the city's finest crafts.
10	The Gallows	Severe old buildings now house dandies and madams.
11	Tenderloins	Terrace houses conceal decadent alleys behind pink curtains.
12	The Bowery	Entire borough built on a stilted platform above sour marshy ground.

Rich Borough Templates

d12	Name	Environment
1	Dulwich Hill	Pastel buildings with neat hand-lettered signage.
2	Weaver's Cross	Every roof forms a needle-like spire.
3	Bathory	Youthful carved cobbles and daily scrubbing crews.
4	Yellowbrick Court	White walls inscribed in living moss.
5	Moonpond Waltz	A private zoo-world of handlers, shields, and exotic promenades.
6	The Old Rat Ward	Monumental houses arranged in the Yellow Queen's sign.
7	The Spiral Rise	Parapets drip pink wax as if from a thousand giant candles.
8	Copperpin Peak	Bloodlike droplets stain immaculate streets and houses.
9	Blue Points	Goats on chains act as visible status symbols.
10	Willowood	The district behaves like a permanent theatrical performance.
11	Dartmoor	Ceramic major buildings and vulgar yellow stairs spiral underground.
12	Featherwort Downs	Song-trained caged birds announce visitors from doors and lamps.

Borough Catalog

1. Artist's Quarter

Wealth and function: middling borough of galleries, cafes, theatres, and artistic rivalry.
Default play: patronage, sabotage, fashionable disease trade, and public scandals.
Variance hook: the generating die selects the city's current breakout artist and work, ranging from kidnapped-singer sculpture to time-resetting installation.

2. The Rookery of Van Moldus

Wealth and function: poor slum of stacked shelters, flooded basements, gangs, and cult poverty.
Default play: gang balance, extortion, rat-killer packs, and sea-barnacle weirdness if coastal.
Variance hook: Van Moldus may be landlord dynasty, martyr, or religious founder, shifting the borough between criminal stronghold and cult quarter.

3. Temple District

Wealth and function: rich concentration of temples, shrines, bone-pillars, and competing faiths.
Default play: religious fashion swings, sanctuary abuse, and holy street violence.
Variance hook: the die determines the ascendant cult, from Pale Tom to the God Without a Face, changing public doctrine across the whole city.

4. The Twin Nests

Wealth and function: middling paired plateaus of plague and time, joined by bridge and chair-lift infrastructure.
Default play: infection management, chronicle gathering, vertical access, and quarantine events.
Variance hook: the district may be cordoned, airborne, sovereign, or on the verge of airship flight.

5. The Sporous Apiary

Wealth and function: poor fungal hive-district built around mould, narcotics, and shifting paths.
Default play: navigation checks, addiction economies, spore outbreaks, and fungal queens.
Variance hook: the district escalates over time from latent contamination to mobile queens and citywide spore spread.

6. Lilacs

Wealth and function: rich arena and fight-den district disguised as perfumed elegance.
Default play: exotic beast auctions, decadent households, and pet-human class cruelty.
Variance hook: the die selects the scandal currently gripping the elite, such as forbidden marriages or arena-bred horrors.

7. The Wheel of Gold

Wealth and function: rich concentric trade district with merchant priests, specialized spokes, and constant commerce.
Default play: finance, smuggling, trade war, counterfeit cults, and visible class control.
Variance hook: as higher dice apply cumulatively, the district grows from simple mercantile power into a policed money cult with rooftop watchers and coin counters.

8. Von Goethe Gardens

Wealth and function: middling botanical preserve and semi-open zoo with dangerous animals.
Default play: poaching, inheritance feuds, romantic legend, and predatory ecology.
Variance hook: Von Goethe's legacy shifts from sentimental founder to posthumous beast-consciousness haunting the gardens.

9. The Crystal Ponds

Wealth and function: middling eel-fishing and crystal-trade district organized around dark chemically active pools.
Default play: guarded resource extraction, alchemical commerce, and underwater expeditions.
Variance hook: the ponds may conceal drowned mer-creatures, ooze cosmology, a subterranean world, or an alternate Corpathium.

10. Flesh Market

Wealth and function: rich borough of pleasure houses, mercenary auctions, and body-crafting workshops.
Default play: contract violence, flesh modification, clone implications, and patron intrigue.
Variance hook: the Flesh Crafters may be insect-biotech specialists, rogue evolutionists, or builders of a commissioned giant.

11. The Sulphurous Spires

Wealth and function: rich tower-maze of intellectuals, apothecaries, alchemists, and philosopher-maids.
Default play: navigation by spire, experimental theft, mercantile pockets, and catastrophe management.
Variance hook: the district's active crisis is keyed to the die, from sealed treasure spires to void contamination.

12. The Library Eternal

Wealth and function: middling borough-scale archive, study complex, and knowledge containment zone.
Default play: book theft, scholar labor, narcotic study aids, and librarian violence.
Variance hook: the die determines whether the library's metaphysics generate ghostly knowledge entities or whether the collection is itself a quarantine for dangerous ideas.

13. The Old Folk

Wealth and function: rich marble district of alien statues, twisting towers, and openable ziggurats.
Default play: archaeological intrusions, tower society, wagers on expeditions, and creeping cosmic ancestry.
Distinctive feature: unlike many other boroughs, its horror is stable and architectural rather than event-driven.

14. The Sprawling Tower

Wealth and function: unique mansion-city where hallways are roads and wings operate as kingdoms.
Default play: tribal youth warfare, diplomacy between internal polities, servant underworlds, and plant taboo enforcement.
Distinctive feature: one borough can replace an entire traditional urban quarter map.

15. Plague Zone

Wealth and function: unique quarantined district turned black-market and bio-experiment economy.
Default play: risky trade, transformed residents, containment breaches, and luxury-through-corruption.
Distinctive feature: if the Twin Nests exist, plague becomes a formal commodity and research substrate.

16. The Black Web

Wealth and function: unique spider borough of silk tunnels and dog-sized social arachnids.
Default play: nocturnal barricades, gossip extraction, web clearance, and monster diplomacy.
Distinctive feature: the spiders are dangerous but culturally legible once communication becomes possible.

17. The Blood-Red Palace of the Godless

Wealth and function: unique red-stone clerical complex centered on the Childlike Oracle.
Default play: petition climbs, ritual interpretation, shifting law, and punitive spectacle.
Distinctive feature: one district can redefine citywide government and order on its own.

18. The Demiurge Pit

Wealth and function: unique impact crater of mutation, plant eruption, and exploratory priesthood.
Default play: crater expeditions, biological hazards, mutation economies, and weaponized lifestone.
Distinctive feature: if linked with the Sulphurous Spires, the district produces explicit science-fantasy biotech and weapon prototypes.

19. The Device

Wealth and function: middling district of ancient black-stone machine architecture and interpretive obsession.
Default play: decipherment, hidden infrastructure, alley surveying, and awakening-the-city stakes.
Distinctive feature: the borough's latent premise is that the entire district may be one dormant machine organism.

20. Manifestation of the Monolith in the Dark

Wealth and function: unique divine darkness district organized around the Monolith and its speakers.
Default play: revelation cults, internal expeditions, Silent One surveillance, and political theocracy.
Distinctive feature: the borough is both place and active deity, making it a direct engine for campaign-scale shifts.

Constant Borough: The Fogwalk

Wealth and function: middling dock and canal district, upgraded to rich if the Haugrotens monopolize it.
Default play: harbour trade, sea weirdness, company rivalry, prophecy fish, and maritime gates.
Variance hook: the die determines which oceanic threat or opportunity is currently real, from barnacle compulsion to merfolk commerce.

Entrances

Entrance	Function In Play
The Tributary	Gate on the Corpusmilch whose required gift or action changes with the moon. Strong ritual checkpoint.
The Common Gate	Goat-head alarm system that reacts to the unnatural and requires constant maintenance.
Fishwall Gullet	Living mouth-gate attended by Fishwives who control whether it opens again behind you.
The Oracle Gate	Exiters must ask a question, entrants must answer one. Excellent for prophecy clocks and quest assignment.

Why It Is Useful

It gives you a metropolis that can survive contradiction. Borough identities shift, but the city remains legible.
It links map generation to faction generation, law, and urban travel without requiring separate subsystems.
It supports campaign refreshes well: keep the same major boroughs, reroll a few variances, and the city evolves instead of resetting.
It is especially strong for science-fantasy, decay cities, dream cities, and other settings where civic instability is part of the appeal.

Practical Use

Generate the full city once, then keep three layers of continuity:

Keep adjacency fixed unless the campaign explicitly destabilizes the city.
Reroll one or two borough variances between arcs to simulate fashion, coups, outbreaks, and strange seasons.
Use the government and order conditionals only when a major borough is destroyed, replaced, or newly revealed.

For shifting megacity play, treat each borough as a major node and each die-link as an access edge that can carry tolls, faction checkpoints, or environmental procedures.