In July 2024 we presented the Ultraviolet Grasslands Bundle featuring The Ultraviolet Grasslands, the psychedelic fantascience Rainbowlands caravan pointcrawl campaign setting for Old School FRPGs by designer-illustrator Luka Rejec at WTF Studio. At the edge of the Rainbowlands stands the Violet City, the last bastion of civilization. Your player characters, seeking money or ancient secrets, lead epic caravan journeys across the Ultraviolet Grasslands – past the Way Stone Graveyard, the Behemoth Shell, Dead Bridge, the Near Moon, the Cauldron of Revitalized Divinity, and dozens more locations – to the fabled Black City on the shore of time and space. In both its 2020 First Edition (funded in a February 2019 Kickstarter campaign and its 2022 “director’s cut” enhanced version, Ultraviolet Grasslands has earned praise for its fevered vision of a dying-earth world inspired by Moebius’ Airtight Garage, Jodorowsky, Fury Road, and heavy metal. (And, uh, Heavy Metal.)
This new offer promoted Luka’s newly launched Backerkit crowdfunding campaign for the Vastlands Guidebook rules set and an expansion of the UVG setting, Our Golden Age. Our Golden Age is a setting book for escapades in the deep undying future.
Ultraviolet Grasslands is essentially an Old School Revival pointcrawl template (lots of tables, terse less-is-more descriptions, sink-or-swim attitude) filled with Luka Rejec’s hallucinatory imaginings:
- The Porcelain Princes: “Decadent not-quite-liches that have spread their cognitive essence among several bodies with glandular psychic links.”
- The Hall of the Umber King: “Under the dry decay, a scent of spices and incense, smell-ghosts of a golden age, linger. Dilettante artists come here to sigh upon the folly of humanity, while perfumists send harvesters to collect ancient spores. Mind-emptied husks wander about, sustained on the perfumed air for months until they dry out.”
- The Memorium: “The vibrating, immortal, telepathic community-qua-machine of personalities created of the Satraps and the Absorbed Ecstatics, fueled by the sacrificed souls of the Lacking Ecstatics.”
- One Ageless Spire of the Only Onager: “A spire of luminous green microalgal glass and shimmering oldsteel. Nothing but a fracture in time wards it, and within its walls time seems still. Chronotopic magic or the dictats of plot alone can provide entry into the spire.”
Even leaving aside the galleries of weirdness, Ultraviolet Grasslands offers lots of gameable material for running caravans. The campaign structure encourages repeat journeys, and a full campaign can fill months of play.
The Synthetic Dream Machine system is a simple (not to say spartan) d20 + ability + skill roll to exceed a target number. You spend life points to cast spells. Hero Dice let you modify rolls and regain life. The SDM rulebook itself is characteristically eccentric: The character generation rules (pages 3-14) are read front-to-back, whereas the system rules (pages 32-16) are read back-to-front, manga-style. Learn more about the system at SyntheticDreamMachine.com.
Justin Alexander at The Alexandrian blog called the Ultraviolet Grasslands setting “absolutely enchanting. […] This might be what you’d end up with if Hayao Miyazaki adapted Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: It embodies a seemingly impossible nostalgia for something so alien it shouldn’t be able to resonate with our own sense of a lost past – and yet somehow does, capturing a serene beauty which is nevertheless filled with pulse-pounding savagery.”
And Jim Rossignol, in his excellent weekly TEETH newsletter, said of UVG, “I adore this book. Its creator (both artist and author) is a sorcerer of an order I can only aspire to. […]
“The structure of UVG is one I particularly like: a long, node-based map linking together a series of locations that can be explored in their own right. Your cast of wild-sounding word-salad characters – ‘Volkan diesel dwarf barista,’ ‘Ashen deserter from the flower war,’ and so on – make up a caravan whose resource-management and misfortunes will define much of what happens to the characters on their great journey. Their choices about where to go, and what actions to perform when they get there, will make the rest.
“UVG is a journey across a landscape in which the players will encounter biometallic tumor trees and parasitic charcoal fetishes, not to mention migrating grass colonies ‘shot through with vampire varietals’ or perhaps even grubby itinerant chitin foragers. Working out what most of these things are or do is really up to the GM, as they’re generally given a name, a level, and a behavior, and little else. There’s a great deal here, but it’s invoked impressionistically, as if from a great distance. Additionally, this is not an inherently dangerous landscape; NPCs know things, and have an attitude, but they aren’t necessarily enemies, despite some of the many, many random encounters being weird and dangerous. Which is fine! But it does mean you need to work out what things are for. It is sweet and heady, and best imbibed patiently, like hallucinogenic mead.”
The only point of disagreement between these two reviews is, How easily can you lead this caravan to your table? Alexander: “Despite how fresh and unique and deep the Ultraviolet Grasslands are, I nevertheless feel I could sit down and start playing this with little more effort than any other game of D&D. [..] Perhaps it’s because Rejec encapsulates so much of the setting into immediately utilitarian elements (like equipment lists) that the players will engage with in play, while making the discovery of the rest of the setting de rigeur the object of play itself. Whatever the case, what Ultraviolet Grasslands overwhelmingly instills in me is a sense of not only how gameable it is, but how much I want to game it right now.”
On the other hand, Rossignol: “UVG would take me, as a GM, serious work to get to the table. And serious work at the table. Many of the descriptions of people, things, creatures, and locations are hugely poetic and beautiful, evocative and eerie. There’s a lot of language here. But there’s a clear challenge to a GM to do the heavy lifting to transform those colorful strings into the meat and skeleton of a coherent campaign. […] I personally would happily wander in an improvised meander through these strange gardens of thought. But at the same time, I wonder whether my players would buy in without the pressure and drama other game setups provide. I personally adore watching psychedelic movies in which nothing really happens, but it’s hard to recommend them to other people. I think that’s what I’d be selling here.”
This new Ultraviolet Grasslands Bundle presented the entire UVG line to date, plus an array of Luka Rejec’s other creative effusions, for an unbeatable bargain price. There were seven titles in our UVG Collection (retail value $81) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 2022 Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City campaign setting, along with the 2020 UVG First Edition (previously in our November 2021 Cornucopia 9); the Synthetic Dream Machine rules and the SDM spellbook Magitecnica; the UVG creature generator Zoa of the Vastlands; the Zardoz-inspired adventure Rrypo: Get a Head; and the one-shot horror adventure Let Us In.
