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Roomless, Mapless, Distanceless - a micro-ruleset for dungeoneering

I am currently running a heavily homebrewed game of Ultraviolet Grasslands with heavily homebrewed rules. Ultraviolet Grasslands, for those not in the know, is Luka Rejec's imminently-to-be-released masterpiece of 'steppe-crawling' goodness.

The setting and rules are phenomenal at simulating looong periods of time over looong distances, tracking your party as they make pilgrimage through a psychedelic landscape over multiple timezones. Along the way you might come across Discoveries - strange ruins or settlements of the long-ago forgotten times potentially brimming with treasure and technology.

One small trade-off is the rules don't really help with smaller distances and times like meters and minutes pottering around a dungeon.

You could just use rules from D&D or another system, but you risk making the game too nitty-gritty and dungeon-centric, and soon you've forgotten about the wild, wide steppe and you're spending eight consecutive sessions hauling gol…
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Ultraviolet Grasslands

In my anticipation of Luka Rejec's radioactively exciting Ultraviolet Grasslands, I've written the roleplaying rules-and-settings equivalent of fanfiction.

I've made my own rules based off of Troika (via David Schirduan) and Moonhop, and I've cobbled together my own setting which crossbred UVG with a few other sources (Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Against the Wicked City, and Luka's other, as-yet-unpublished work, Red Sky Dead City) and stretched them across real-world Central Asia.



My three players were starting waaay to the east, in the City of Flowers on the western periphery of the Empire of Everything. Using UVG's Travel Quests table they established that the Cult of Everflowering Life (the bureaucracy that maintains the computational H.I. (Horticultural Intelligence) of networked flowerbeds, pollinators, and gardens that runs the City) had given them a Letter of Marque to go fuck with one of the City's many rivals out west on the steppe. Come the first se…
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Class: the Godthief (v1.0)

This class uses terminology that relates to my in-progress homebrew rules. The only thing that really matters is the concept of Luck - which exists as a sort of replacement for Saving Throws (see Troika! for how I essentially use Luck). Whenever the rules expect you to "roll Luck" then substitute whatever you find most applicable - saving throw, reaction roll, spell save DC or whatever. Whenever it asks you to "spend Luck" consider replacing this with a "once per day" caveat or "spend 1 HP" if you're into that.

Is this just a rogue with free level-up magic items that have limited battery life? Sure, I guess you could call it that.

Godthief You are an acrobatic vigilante, folk-hero, and rake the sort that features in the stories told to kids - the trickster-vagabond who makes fools of the pompous and always bites off more than they can chew. But you're not alone on your travels. You weave the worship of devata - the little gods - into yo…
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Golem are imprisoned Djinn

Golem are Djinn bound to vehicles of ash, clay, ceramic etc. to serve a prescribed purpose for a pre-determined amount of time.

This Stone Golem is bound to guard the tomb of Lord Alghabhari-Zad for 9,999 days 

This Porcelain Golem is bound to invigilate the archives of the Order of Rings for 1,000 years, 100 days, 10 hours and 1 minute 

This legion of Ash Golem are bound to hold the palace of Zhang ibn-Qing aloft until the 7th generation of the dynasty is dead

This binding is often done by sorcerers, it is never done with the consent of the djinn, who considers it an absolute O U T R A G E

This is semi-ironic, as it is the fire of their outrage which powers the golem. The chimenea-like nature of golem heads are vents for their unbridled literally-burning indignation, which were it not so-vented, would cause the golem to explode. This would free the djinn, which would be very bad news for anyone who was responsible for its entombment.

Pictured: patio furniture, or the war-machine shell c…
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Omnium Gatherum

The art of Julia Morison, especially that of it which is called Omnium Gatherum called, looks like a map of a dungeon, or a dungeon room with a thematic visual aid drawn into the room's space. Like Maze of the Blue Medusa.

That is all




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d66 Magic Teas

Made some random teas. The names are a bit weird - I wanted them to serve as the description without further elaboration, but also be vague enough that players are almost garunteed to get the wrong end of the stick for how most of them work.

Nearly all of them last 24 hours. This isn't necessarily a good idea, it's just easier for me to track. Change that to 1d6 hours or whatever if you want.

I dunno how much these cost. I'm not an authority. I'm just saying that because I have a habit of viewing other random tables and content online as gospel and worrying about "using them wrong" so here's a carte blanche to ignore everything I say you think is dumb.

This is a d66 table just like all the good stuff coming out of Troika! - you roll 2 d6s and count them as the 10s and 1s of a single number.




11        Smokey Lung Wa Chai Breathe grey smoke like dry ice in a 5' radius around you, obscuring yourself.
12        Moon Lotus Enlightened Brew Glow brightly silv…
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d6 Yoon-Suin NPCs

So today in a random turn of events I found myself at the Barbican in London. If you don't know what that is - imagine if the Minotaur was really into Brutalism.

I saw Francis Uprichard's 'Wetwang Slack' exhibition 

I just went because I had an afternoon free in London. I didn't expect to think "hey, this is the kind of asthetic I want more of in my Yoon-Suin campaign"

(my campaign is an ever-evolving beast of hating last week's idea and mourning that next week's idea won't segue naturally into the established rules, mechanics, setting, or lore of the bad ideas I implemented last week. If only I had a time machine, I'd start from the beginning and everything would be perfect. I'm not crazy, you are)

So I went home and googled Francis Uprichard and found a choice curate* of Yoon Suin NPCs from among her wonderful works.

I don't have the names of these sculptures but they're all Francis Uprichard work.

(Ignore the names, descript…
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