Some time back I backed the UVG kickstarter and lo what loot turned up!
Snazzy dice! A stylish T-shirt!
Whats in the book?
UVG is a setting where the embers of the future have guttered so low that we have come all they way back to something like the 'points of light' origins of D&D yore. Wizard Valinard called it a "post-post-apocalyptic setting that feels genuinely distant, weird enough to be wonderful and alien, familiar enough to be engaging, full of relics of a fantastical future-past." I think there scope is fantastic to allow all sorts of odd feed material to be folded in and for it still to make sense. UVG as a setting provides the matrix into which you can embed whatever you like as things the players encounter on the road. To quote the intro page this "is an artbook knitting together my art maps and writing" for those "who want to run a months-long science fantasy Marco Polo-style voyage across a weird, old world." This is not a setting for the big damn heroes to save the day, but for the mystery unravellers, the greedy tomb-raiders and those for whom a voyage of exploration and discovery is the aim.
Within this tome we get:
~ 20 pages of system
~ 120 pages of gazetteer of the Ultraviolet Grasslands
~ 40 pages of generators for factions, backgrounds, gear and adversaries
A modular system
On the system what I particularly like is the caravan rules - stripped down, streamlined yet putting a frame over a whole journey in a way that 'loading up with gear and counting off days' did not give me reading through this system made me want to run not just UVG but planar caravans or Spelljammer or some sort of island-hopping swashbuckler campaign. This is one of very, very few mechanics that has lit a fire under me, I think the last such was the War Captains Companion, which was a while ago.
Setting aside the immediate urge to mash-up, there is a neat way the rules are modular. The SEACAT system is proposed but you can easily stick with whatever you are doing - from B/X to 5e as the way the SEACAT system is expressed comes with great 'relative' tables that are really clear about how it all scales and also allow neat transplantation to your system of choice. Critters and foes are given as a number - hit dice or CR depending on your preference and an adjective which defines its behaviour. Together these pull most of the mechanics out of the inline text and let more ideas be crammed in.
The parts of the system that one might be inclined to bring to your game, even if you decide not to go SEACAT come in nice modular chunks that allow any give bit to be put in. For instances the 2 pages on experience contains almost a whole page of quest generator intended to define what core activities your caravan has set out to do - but this is also a handy generator of random quests for any situation.
I particularly love the 'sacks' abstraction for encumbrance. I partly agree with the Adventuring Party podcast and Don't Split the Party that the tracking of inventory has potential for fun, in the trade offs and the balance. I do not like the RAW D&D encumbrance rules as way too fiddly but the sacks abstraction for unwieldiness hits the sweet spot for me, not to fine grained, not 'I am carrying sixteen suits of plate in my backpack. Similarly the 'milk runs' rules are a great piece of domain scale detail that I can see adapting to many places - once the players have broken the path, made the impossible possible, then there is no need for them to do the tedious (but profitable) think - that can be automated.
The Alexandrian makes the point "to STRONGLY RECOMMEND that even if you rush out and buy a copy of the Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City [...] you should still start by reading the [free] 80-page" Ultraviolet Grasslands: Introduction pdf. I have to agree with this - I got the pdf, printed it out and had it sitting my shelf for a while until the big box of loot arrived at which point I zipped through it, went 'oh, I get it now' and promptly handed it off to another GM. I think this is a great player handout - good for setting the tone, good for mechanics that may be different from other games, and it has a nice roster of locations to go explore which are a handful of lines each that tease while leaving lots of scope for discovery.
An inspiring setting
While the real meat for the book is in the gazetteer, I think it is indicative that the core feel comes of these concepts in that the main work of the kickstarter was to bulk out these locations and create more and more fabulous art. The skeleton was present in the early versions, now it just has more meat.
The many many location ideas are where the "depths of vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of space, time and fuzzy riffs" are truly laid out. I like the detail where each of the locations has an XP rating for its discovery which gives a broad thumb-rule for the challenge level. There are lots of great ideas in all of this, bouncing around across all sorts of different inspiration points. I think the distances involved in the travel between locations are good for offering a tone reset - all these things are islands in the steppe - and it allows a wide variety of things to be brought to the table.
Much of what is gripping about these location is the evocative travel-poster style art from Luka Rejec; you can get a great sample through the Introduction - but as Double Proficiency shows it is a grok-able concept. I have not been able to spin up my own game of it yet beyond bringing the cool dice to my usual table (where they have been coveted by others). I am very glad I picked it up as it provides a setting I like that comes with an incredible, pre-made campaign pitch document. The flavour of what should be happening at a UVG table is clear and original and I think the ignition of excitement around this project shows that there was a gap that many felt that the UVG neatly bridges.
For me, the real kicker is that UVG has created a frame that I can now fold in all of my Numenera and Strange supplements. For whatever reason these all sat on my shelf, somewhat unloved, until Vallinards point above on the similarities electrified me and now I can see how anything from those bestiaries or sourcebooks could be more or less ported into new locations across the grasslands - or the realms found through portals, or wherever. So UVG, not just a great supplement in itself but a blue-print to something potentially even larger which can let you haul any strange old things you never really got to use down off the shelf and get some use out of them. Doubly recommended for an antique like me with a near SABLE stash of books.
More reviews, material, actual plays
For a neat actual play see Coins and Scrolls game which has some good momentum to it or The Yakmen Cometh for a single session complete with rules bricolage or Firelight Will Tell for an early campaign.
For further reivews see Coins and Scrolls or Questing Beast if you want video.
More content for UVG by StratoMetaShip can be found on its Vastlands tag.
No comments:
Post a Comment