What a trip…
ULTRAVIOLET GRASSLANDS AND THE BLACK CITY
Designer: Luka Rejec | Publisher: Exalted Funeral
I’ve long held it to be true that the platonic ideal of a roleplaying game campaign is one where you or your players intend to go and do something important but get side tracked immediately.
Ultraviolet Grasslands is an intentional attempt at this – or at least, that’s what it feels like from the outside.
The book is primarily a collection of 32 locations for adventurers to explore. All of them are weird, some of them are deadly, but most importantly they’re all very intriguing. UVG is a kind of ‘tourism simulator’ for an extremely weird world – and we mean this in the best possible way.
The structure of the adventure is inspired by the Oregon Trail (a videogame most notable for being available in America high school computer labs, and therefore in all popular culture). As such it’s a kind of choose-your-path point crawl, a skinny line that offers ‘high road/ low road’ choices as you travel from the starting location of the Violet City toward Black City on the edge of the world. Getting there is a matter of keeping track of resources, talking to the right people, and not getting too sidetracked by the … is that a glass bridge I see over there? Shall we go have a look? We’ve got time right?...
That’s very much what the game’s about. See cool stuff covered in glinting gold, space age mauve, electric skies and so on. Fix the problems of a local ghost community. Get into a fight into a bar (there’s a dedicated carousing system). It’s a bit messy how everything comes together, but it all gels on the ‘vibes’ of the book. Even experience uses a ‘wonder’ system, where players can just look at something cool and get a benefit. If you’ve looked in wonder at the cover here and thought it looked like a cool place you’d want to go, then you’re sold – go get it.
There is the question of the system that comes packed within the book. Rejec seems to have hidden it deep within the book as a kind of ‘back up’ for whatever system you’d like to use. It turns up on page 134 and is presented in a kind of ‘hey, use it if you must’ kind of way, as if the designer is worried it’s not good enough. Yet it’s a good, light D20 system with some exploding dice and a casual approach to difficulty. Monsters are crunched down to a single level-equalsstats system. Player damage is about an accumulation of fatigue, every time you would die in any other game you add a tick to the fatigue track on the sheet. This represents the grind of the open road as your character goes from grumpy, to half speed to comatose.
UVG is flavour with hidden substance. If you want a rollicking adventure that feels like Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy meets Dune meets the Oregon Trail, then this is the one.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT
WE SAY
Ultraviolet Grasslands is an amazing setting, adventure, and even system (if you can find it). Heading in to the grasslands is about wonder, strangeness and oddities – and you don’t even have to look that hard for it.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED TROIKA!…
Like things weird? Then the Black City beckons! And if you want to keep the Troika! system while you do it you’ll feel right at home.