Hakaba - an Adventure Hour! Hack for Ultraviolet Grasslands

Hakaba v0

I finally finished reading every bit of UVG 2e! I'm putting it beside The Critique of Pure Reason at the top of my most difficult (and most beloved) books. It had me not only trying to picture strange scenes figured in a fundamentally different reality, but also working out how to present them at the table. It also sent me to the dictionary more often than any book I've ever read - beautiful prose!

I've invited a few friends to start up a UVG campaign - which I plan to record and share on YouTube. Looks like we'll be starting sometime in the next month or two :)

This is something I've long been looking forward to, and I've worked up a homebrew system (naturally) to play UVG. It's a mash up of Adventure Hour! - my go to system - and UVG. Here it is: (This system uses Adventure Hour!, Magitechnica, and UVG 2e. Page references are to UVG 2e, unless noted otherwise)

Role-Playing is Not Essential to Adventure Gaming

TL; DR: For me, adventure gaming is funnest when the emphasis is on making consequential choices and creative problem-solving, rather than on strictly "doing what your character would do," and old-school encounter, morale, and reaction checks (and quality OSR modules) support this emphasis and make the game surprising and fun for me as a game-runner.

Why I like Adventure Hour!

I’ve run several games of Adventure Hour! over the past year, and I’m loving it. It feels like I'm finally playing the game I've always wanted D&D to be. Here's some musings on how Adventure Hour! seems to me to combine the best of point-and-click adventure games, cartoon homages to D&D, and ultra-light coin flip action resolution. 

Magic Mishap Dilemmas

Here’s a mechanic: when a player casts a spell, the GM can give them a choice between the usual cost of spell casting (losing an inventory slot to a "fatigue" condition in Adventure Hour!/Cairn; burning a spell slot, etc.) OR taking on some creative and situationally appropriate spell mishap effect. 

Using an ice cream wand to turn the goblin into a giant popsicle? It worked, but you rolled a mishap; do you want to take on a fatigue or suffer from a brain freeze for 2d6 X 10 minutes? 

Undertree Revised!

While recording a play through of Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods, I found looking up details in the text took too long, and while annotating the video with referee commentary I realize that text of the adventure did not include some details that I always mention when I run it. Also, I discovered an exceptional game store in Minneapolis called All Systems Go - not only did they have a bunch of prior-to-3e D&D modules, they had OSR publications AND a rack of indy adventure game zines! I told the owner I'd published an adventure lately and they said they would stock Undertree at the shop.

Undertree Playthrough

Last week I played through Undertree Temple of the Elf Gods using Adventure Hour! with a trio of friends - two of whom had never played an adventure game before! We used the All-Dice Character Generator and I made up a simple character sheet for the occasion - just a 10-slot box for gear and two big open boxes for character details and notes and such, well suited to Adventure Hour!

The players rolled up three characters:

All-Dice Character Generator

Roll 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12, and 1d20. Consult tables (front and back) to create and equip a character. Very fast, very simple.