UVG Session 2 Play Report | Porcelain Shenanigans and A Giant Camel Worm

Last time, on UV(ball)G!

In line with UVG's design intentions, the session started with a bit of teambrewing in which the players and I determined that:

1) A Porcelain Prince comes into being when a group of people subsume their individualities under a common personality, forsaking originality for power. Kind of like working for a big corporation, but more magitechinical.

2) Everyone thinks that Redland vampires can shapeshift. In fact, they are just excellent at cosplaying. Also, they may live in the Redlands because it has the ideal amount of infrared light, which gives them their power; if they went any further east, the infrared light would be so great as to turn them into overpowered hulks.

UVG Session 1 Play Report | Potsherds, Cake Cars, and Prophecies of Doom

Sequel to the session 0 play report.

While Alroy, the red-brick necromancer folk historian, spent three weeks pondering his orb from the ballpit of the Satrap’s faultless crystal clock, the rest of the party struggled against starvation, danger, and disease as they made their way from the High Road and the Low to deliver Miela’s letter of inheritance to a dangerously laissez-faire trust fund baby in the Potsherd Crater, then set out to resupply amid the brutal enamelware caste-hierarchy of the Porcelain Citadel.

Stormlock: Campaign Retrospective and Final Session Play Report

In 2018, my friend Matt and I drew several fantasy kingdom maps, taking turns making marks, exquisite corpse style. To one he added a bottomless canyon with earth motes floating in it, and I made up that this kingdom had been torn asunder from the wider world and now floated off on its own. Matt also mentioned "the Goddess of Thread" being an important figure in one world. 

Throughout the coming months I developed the idea of a Planescapish demi-plane setting whose edges bleed into various planes of the D&D cosmology. It was created when an ancient spellcaster (seduced by the voices of Demogorgon) simultaneously opened all his magocratic lands' trilothonic plane gates to the various worlds of the World, triggering a multiverse-threatening Plane Storm. This was foreseen by the storm giant Surmos, who worked with the goddess of thread Teyaru to halt the storm and lock it in place with silver cables made from the goddess's body. Thus was born: Stormlock!

UVG Session 0 Play Report | "1,000 Camels" and Outfitting a UVG Caravan

A couple of days ago, I kicked off a much anticipated campaign of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) with a session 0. I laid out the 5-foot-long Grand Long Map and postcards from UVG locations, and printed out sheets and packets from the UVG book so multiple players could review the glossary, languages, and gear. I also introduced players to Hakaba, my homebrew Adventure Hour! hack for UVG (rules one-pager here).

Here's a quick play report:

UVG Factions and Random Events

As I said the other day, I'm gearing up for a UVG campaign. I've just finished a write-up of Mausritter-style factions with resources and goals, along with a table of random events. This is inspired by this post on d66 Classless Kobolds :)

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.