Ultraviolet Grasslands Second Edition Is A Trip Within A Trip

Exploration remains one of the joys of many role playing games. Whether discovering new characters, mapping out deadly dungeons or even just trying to scrape every ounce of gold from an evil lair, players love to take their characters into the unknown. Ultraviolet Grasslands from designer Luka Rejec offer a very strange new world for players to explore. This technofantasy wasteland offers dozens of strange sites, unusual characters and random encounters to spice up the long days, weeks and months characters might spend on the road. Exalted Funeral sent along a review copy of this book for review. Are the grasslands full of dangers and delights? Let’s play to find out.

The book details the titular grasslands as a liminal space between two cities. In discussing the first city the designer presents the kind of weirdness to expect right away. Violet City is a place where psychic, coffee drinking cats are revered and potentially in charge. The book resents over 30 unusual locations like this. Each one is detailed with people to meet, encounters to have and potential hooks that connect storylines through different locations. Drop one of these locations in a standard D&D game and you’ll have a left turn experience in the style of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Running through the Grasslands offers a campaign that feels inspired from the pages of “adult” comic books from the 70's and 80's like Heavy Metal. Rejec’s art supports this feel with art that feels lifted from a sketchbook created while traveling through the area. Massive monsters and structures are given great detail but might have a tiny stick figure on the edge for scale. There’s a psychedelic vibe to it all that feels very refreshing. So many games these days are declaring themselves metal while Ultraviolet Grasslands seems to be going for more of a psychedelic prog rock vibe.

As a campaign, the book sets up the players as leading a caravan through the grasslands to the Black City. There are known roads that pass through the detailed locations and players are given choices when they hit one of the big locales. Random encounters can happen while on the road thanks to a detailed set of charts that generate fellow travellers, interesting distractions on the side of the road and potential misfortunes to befall the caravan. These encounters hammer at the feeling of the game being a railroad but even without them, choosing destinations is more reminiscent of picking the next mission in an open world video game. Game masters can stack the deck a little by seeding rumors and reports on the road but there’s enough material here that should the players look at the map and decide to see The Forest of Meat, the GM will be fine running that location on the fly.

Second Edition offers more detailed rules for running the caravan. It gives the setting a slightly different flavor by shifting focus away from combat and exotic monsters. There are still dangerous creatures and wild spots in the wilderness but Ultraviolet Grasslands wants players to experience its strangeness and not be defeated by it. The book includes a short easy system that’s very loosely based on d20 fantasy systems, though the implication is that you’ll have to port in spells or other special powers for players that might want such things.

The best system to use with Ultraviolet Grasslands is whatever one your group enjoys the most. The flavor of the setting doesn’t need mechanics to reinforce its ideas. This could most obviously be a campaign setup for a setting like Numenera or Gamma World. But I can also see someone who loves Savage Worlds taking it out for a spin with just a few hacks here and there. It could also be run using whatever throwback games you might prefer. Something like Mork Borg could really reinforce the brutality of the frontier.

Bottom line: Ultraviolet Grasslands offers a unique setting for role playing groups that are more interested in exploring a strange new world than conquering one.

 

[Malmuria]

One of the things that makes running UVG tricky for me is Luka Rejec's interesting idea of "anti-cannon worldbuilding." He describes his setting as more like setting-generators:

The thing I’m trying with the anti-canonic setting, like the Ultraviolet Grasslands or Red Sky Dead City, is to explicitly write the world as a toy kit without a single right way of being. It’s a box, a book of parts that demand the players take a few of the pieces, a few of the challenges, and tell their own individual and unique stories as they trace their way through the world.

As one example, in the Ultraviolet Grasslands, the factions are not rigorously defined. Instead, each is presented with lists of rumors and references scattered throughout the book. Any player whose character hails from that group has the choice of shaping them to taste.
...
A closer reading of the rumor table will show that it is internally inconsistent. Multiple entries contradict one another, and this is on purpose—its a small trick to push against the possibility of an established canon, because the text is broken. It forces players to creatively bridge the gaps between the available fragments of information and create their own narrative world and experience.

A second example is the lack of a history. Or, rather, the lack of a consistent history. Again, I use inconsistent tables, where if players and referees take the history as a linear chronology, gaps force them to decide—where are the facts in the crevices between the conflicting accounts?

On the one hand, I think this is fantastic, as it really pushes out the openness of a ttrpg world. Now the creation of the world is left in the hands of the table, and of the player groups. Many story games run this way. On the other hand, the way UVG is written there is just so much that begs for explanation, to the degree that the GM would really have to do some heavy lifting to bring it to life. Every paragraph has evocative references to things that may be but probably aren't referenced anywhere else, seemingly requiring constant filling in the gaps to determine why anything is the way it is, what all these creatures and robots want out of the world, and for that matter what the PCs could possibly want, other than to be tourists. Not sure if I'm explaining all that cogently.

 

[Enaknomolos]

It kind of runs itself, every location has a ton of potential for creating interesting plot threads - only if the players want to reach out and grab them.

I've run it (using modified Traveller for characters, but by the book for the Caravan procedures) and this was my experience as well. With the right players, debt and a chance to get rich has them setting off; and as soon as they're out in the grasslands the caravan procedures mean that events snowball. This is compounded by the constant need to balance supplies and carrying capacity.

We never had a moment where the players were at a loss for something to do, but there were tons of unfollowed hooks every session.

It does take a willingness to improvise; but so long as the players are onboard with it being technicolour weirdness, it's easy. The writing really gives you something to work with

 

[AttentionHorse]

It does take a willingness to improvise; but so long as the players are onboard with it being technicolour weirdness, it's easy. The writing really gives you something to work with

In one of the first random Discoveries ("Rusted Hand of Victory") they've met two goth artist dilettantes that were leaving grafitti all over the area to "cover up old and therefore worse things". I thought that this will be a 5 minute kinda funny/silly scene, but they decided to make a deal with the goths to sell their art on their journey to the Black City. They made a written agreement, ironed out the details, picked apart the Hand to look for any signs of working oldtech, managed to scam the goths a bit with the healing crystals... 5 minute scene became a 1:30 hr scene, and they've also arranged to meet in a different location 4 weeks away from here to split the profits from selling their grafitti and get new ones to sell, so we already have a questline, just like that.

UVG works great when players really love to play with the toys given by the GM or the game.

 

[Enaknomolos]

Yeah, that's what I meant about events just snowballing.

My players came across a radiation ghost while they were quarrying porcelain in Potsherd Crater. It silently pointed off into the distance. After trying some different things, they followed it. It led into an area contaminated by magic radiation, so they went on a two day mission to the nearest nomad camp to get some protective equipment.

When they returned, the ghost led them to its corpse, which was wearing a 'badass bandana' with a treasure map printed on it. Of course, nothing gets my players going like a treasure map; so they went on a multiple day journey to a ruined tower containing a fairly nasty autofac.

On leaving the tower with the autofac's power source, they found the corpse of a member of a porcelain prince's patrol. They stole his power armour which (of course) had a tracking device in it. This led to a multiple-session pursuit and, ultimately, them getting new identities, including new faces, in the Violet City.

All of this came from following the procedures in the book and using some of its handy other tables. I improvised the tower a bit using stuff from the book, but that was all.

At one point, after they had found the power armour but before the pursuit began, a humanoid with crab arms emerged from a small crater and tried to wave down the caravan. They ignored it because they 'had a lot going on'. One of my players uses this to illustrate what UVG is like: in most games a crab-human emerging like that would be a plot-point for players to grab hold of, or at least the strangest thing to happen that session; but in UVG they already had so much stuff going on that they just kept on trucking.