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crossbred UVG with a few other sources (Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Against the Wicked City, and Luka's other, as-yet-unpublished work, Red Sky Dead City) and stretched them across real-world Central Asia.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 session they had forgotten which city they'd been told to sack and burn, so they're just going to attack one or all of them to be sure.

Their patron, the second-rank bureaucrat Gerald von Outside Acquisitions (so-named as nepotism is so rife in the Cult that offices of state have become hereditary clans), outfitted them with $3,000 and a vague sense of purpose.

Our principle actors are:

• Pepito-46 - a soul-siphoning spectrum satrap sucking on asbestos cigarettes. They (he? it?) were out east on business. Weird crystal necromancy business. They have a walkman and a selection of meditation cassettes including the Audiobook of the Dead. They, like most satraps, have some kind of glass-dome helmet for a head. Everyone promptly called them Mysterio. 
• Baghatur - a Wolf Khan out of the steppes with moody, secretive reasons for leaving his people. He rides a giant wolf called Okha. He has a lance and a submachine gun. God I love this setting.
• Ants Marching - a former eunuch bodyguard from the Cerulean Banner of the Empire turned "bugborg" after he was left for dead in a shallow grave and brought back with the entomological equivalent of cybernetics. His player specifically said "like Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution but with bugs". His hands are detachable hand-shaped spiders. He never asked for this. 

They bought four Rickety Wagons filled with Supplies and six backup ungulates (extra beasts of burden are insurance - misfortune will quickly wipe out your menagerie). I asked them to tell me something unique about each wagon, so in combat or tense situations we would be able to distinguish the carts from one another. This wasn't as elegant or quick as I imagined, but in the end we got Speedwagon, Volkswagen, "Danger Cart #1" (pulled by a shambling bipedal offal-golem) and a wagon pulled by a pink, mohawked, heavily-tattooed and -pierced punk auroch called Gorilla Shampoo.

The six wagonless beasts, for your information, are called Dingledack, Boomblesnatch, Ivanhoe, Rumpledatch, Englebert, and Humpledink.

They decided to go around the mountains by the east road, through the Orchid Colonies and Polychromate Pass, instead of going west by the Lakes of Ecstasy. I thought that was a good idea. This had nothing to do with the fact I hadn't finished writing the Lakes yet.

What follows is Ultraviolet Grasslands but with my own setting, locations, rules, lore, and with me as the GM. So anything good that happens is because I stole it from Luka and his peers, and anything bad is because I sullied his masterwork with my grubby goblin hands.

What Happened

The party set off from the City of Flowers. It took 1 week to get to the Orchid Colonies, in which time they ate their allotted Supplies, successfully passed their Misfortune check, and had one encounter with a trinity of rancid floating Yellow Jellies (L2, stinging) emerging from a rotting tree. They were close and angry, according to my encounter roll, so I ran them like big territorial wasps. 

Pepito the Satrap used their Possession skill to mind-control one in place. Baghatur broke one in twain with his lance but the two parts began to attack him as two seperate, smaller jellies. Ants pounded his jelly into the ground "like mochi". Pepito approached their enthralled jelly and tried to discern the workings of its unfathomable, alien mind. It promptly splotched itself against their helmet for their trouble, and began trying to dissolve them. 

Baghatur and his wolf found themselves similarly facehugged and it came down to Ants Marching to save the day, scraping the gunk off Pepito's glassy dome and saving the doggo to boot. 

Their second week travelling took them up into the hills of the Orchid Colonies, where a vast, yellow sea of orchids drowned the crumbling structures of some archaic battlefield. They decided to take an extra day to explore the nearby Orchid Barracks, a large, dilapidated military bunker with huge concrete "petal"-like fans radiating from a central tower. 

At this point I was in full on "bullshitting" mode because I did not have a single idea what was in there, or how complex a structure it ought to be to explore. 

I ripped a map roughly from somewhere in Red Sky Dead City using Luka's schematic dungeon format and waxed lyrical about dark concrete and dead leaves. Pepito used his spooky ghost powers to get a sense of the last days of this place, seeing ghostly looping gif-like projections of military personnel running around and being rocked by the echoes of long-gone explosions. 

Pepito-46, as drawn by Pepito's player

Ants Marching stayed outside, guarding the animals, because "I don't trust the GM". He detached one of his hands to go inside with the other players and Okha the wolf and have a root around. Pepito led the away team down a brutalist stairwell into a series of service tunnels (think Fallout, or Chernobyl). None of them had a light source, but Pepito could see the ghostly outlines of the building's memory-ghosts, and Baghatur's canine-opathic link with Okha meant he could smell his way around with her nose. 

They turned right at an intersection and found the air getting denser with white, chalky particulate. Deeper still they came across a room where the walls were lined with bleached white coral-like stuff. They heard a noise like the grating of bricks and soon realised the walls were moving. Wrenching and snapping themselves out of the wall were several Zombie Coral who did not seem best pleased with their new guests. Baghatur decided to run, grabbing the less-urgent Satrap as he went. 

After regrouping with Ants they decided to try the other tunnel, intrigued by a faint green light Ants Marching's detached hand had found. As they rounded the corner to investigate, the light began flashing, and a horrid, squid-like envelope of meaty biomass erupted from the bio-bomb IED they had just triggered.

That's where we left it, after 3 hours of gameplay. Everyone had a blast. 

What Worked

The travel rules, the driveshaft of Luka's vision, work like a dream. The measuring of weeks relative to days spent dawdling, food eaten, and mishaps suffered, is as simple to run as it is endless in its possibilities for storytelling. 

Even though basically everything they have encountered thus far is not actually in the book called Ultraviolet Grasslands, the vibe, feel, and general sense of "fuck it, why not. Wizards and thermonuclear reactors. Go mad" has really gripped my players and sparked their imaginations.

I am trying out a little mini-thing of asking my players questions about the last week's travel. Things to get them to play out just a bit of all that time we montage'd past. I asked Pepito "What did one of your companions do that annoyed you" and they complained about Ants scratching their very expensive glass helmet. I asked Baghatur "what did one of your companions do that you appreciated" and he said how Ants saved his wolf from the jelly. So both answers were about the combat instead of inventing other events in the week, but the idea is solid and I just need to come up with more novel questions to encourage a bit more improvisational storytelling. 

The mega-minimal stat blocks in the UVG, which boil Health, damage, roll bonuses etc. down to a single Level is inspired. Now I just glance at "feral prairie dog (L2, cowardly)" and I can immediately reference all the numbers I need to run the game from a mechanical standpoint. I feel no sense of loss from not rolling HD or having individualised statblocks for monsters. 

Pointcrawls are my favourite thing, and my last campaign (with different players) was rapidly converted into a pointcrawl once I discovered what they were and what UVG was doing with them, and it ran so much better oh my god I wasted so many months trying to make a hexcrawl work. So it's no surprise that this world, which is built from the ground up to be the best example of a pointcrawl, so effortlessly captures that. All the interesting bits are fleshed out, and travelling between them is quick, painless (to run), and given just enough spice to not make them feel like loading screens. 

What Sorta Worked 

For both the Jellies and the Zombie Coral I used a condensed version of the three-column table in the UVG's SEACAT rules used to establish context for the encounter. I rolled that the jellies were "close", "useful", and "hostile". Close and Hostile helped me, but in the moment I didn't know what to do with useful. Contextualising encounters is something of a weak area of mine, and I like systems that help me in that regard. Unfortunately, and this is a personal preference thing, the very broad categories such as "hostile" or "helpful" don't help someone like me. I'm not good at adlibbing that sort of stuff, and encounters tend to end up being "they meaninglessly and motivelessly charge at you with weapons raised" because I can't find inspiration for anything else. 

Much as I love the minimalism of UVG's monsters and their descriptions, I think for my own sake I'll need a bit more flesh on the bones. In my last game I was creating monster statblocks which were effectively Mien from Troika (i.e. a monster-specific set of encounter behaviours e.g. "drunk", "lackadaisical", "morose", "feigning friendliness" etc.) which helped me give my monsters unique attitudes and personalities, and definitely helped me steer my game towards combatless encounters where hypnotoads invite you to join them in a contest of heraldry trivia, or feckless gremlins cowardly vie for your favour. I also threw a few narrative-style "Moves" from Dungeon World in (e.g. "Pickpocket you mid-melee") 

I'm also quite bad at having encounters be anything other than "right in your face and you're all standing opposite one another like it's Final Fantasy". In a game where the land is so flat and vast you could have an encounter with something several kilometers away, I feel I might need to come up with some kind of subsystem for helping me create more dynamic or contextualised encounter settings. Just something to prompt me "hey, these guys are really really far away and also there's chest-high grass everywhere". The UVG's distance encounter table helps in that regard, but I think I need more support there. 

Most of this is personal preference, but one thing that did strike me when my players began exploring the Barracks is that the UVG is built to represent distances of miles and timeframes of months. Once my players began creeping around an interesting Discovery (what UVG calls these optional landmarks, dungeons, etc.) I realised I wasn't quite sure how to keep track of distances like metres and timeframes of minutes. For the most part I think these sacred cows of D&D can be ignored, but I always feel more comfortable with at least something nominal written down in the rules, so I might have to write something for this, too.

One final comment that has NOTHING to do with UVG in even the most tangential way is my own personal grudge against initiative and rounds in combat meant I tried to run the combats without any of those frameworks. It mostly worked because I just sort of invisibly had turns "hey Baghatur you're up, what do you do?...ok so while he's doing that, Ants what are you doing?" but I want to explore this idea further still. For all the problems I had with the system (which I ultimately abandoned), combat never ran smoother than it did in Dungeon World. I want to catch a bit of that magic again. 

In Summary

UVG is great, even if I technically haven't run much of it yet, and you should buy it.

Smashing OSR materials together is a delight, and the wacky setting of UVG makes it so much easier and reasonable (or unreasonable) 

Luka is a genius and you should support him on his patreon