REDIRECTIONS XXXVII
⭗ RUNNING THE ULTRAVIOLET GRASSLANDS
ON THE ELECTRUM ARCHIVE ⭗
“In the far, far west, beyond Bara Mar and the Azure Ocean, beyond the Violet City and the long, haze-cloaked march of the Ultraviolet Grasslands, there is an ocean of Elder ink just waiting to be claimed,” the weathered desert hermit said.
“Metaphorically,” Jett countered, her sapphire eyes dark with doubt.
“Literally,” the hermit grinned, showing teeth, a pair of well-worn voidglass incisors catching the light. “I seen’t it. I took all of it I could carry and what I didn’t lose to gambling I lost getting back here, but it is there. An ocean of black as far as the eye can see. There’s so much of it that the ink has turned even the ivory sands and the great city that is there upon that shore black. The whole area is saturated with it. The people are born in it, they die in it, and they see no value in any of it. Everything is bound together with the ink, and everything on those shores, everything, especially The Black City, bleeds into The Realm Beyond like a cascade of dreams, or nightmares.”
“Why did you come back?” Jett asked, putting her elbows on the rough counter of the bar.
“Because I want that ink, and I want to spend it somewhere it has value, like here,” the old man said, grinning again. “I want to pull enough black from that ocean to make all of the merchant houses of Orn sit up and take notice, and I need a team of brave fools to pull it off. You in?”
⭗ THE IDEA, IN PRACTICE ⭗
One of the charming elements of Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands is its caravanning mechanics. At its core, UVG is a journey west from The Violet City to the enigmatic Black City perched at the edge of the Winedark Ocean. It’s a massive pointcrawl across a surreal landscape with a baked-in trade system allowing characters to survive in an Oregon Trail kind of way, hunting, foraging, trading and making alliances during the journey.
Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive (which actually lists Ultraviolet Grasslands among its many inspirations) retains some of this pointcrawling and trade caravanning aspect, but it isn’t as much of a focal point in Boven’s work as it is in Rejec’s setting. For Ultraviolet Grasslands, the journey to the west is pretty much the whole point. Every character has a different, weird reason to travel to The Black City, but they’re all heading there.
So, given that both settings share some DNA in their inspirations, I think they have a lot of potential to be combined to create something new.
Imagine, if you will, that The Black City of The Ultraviolet Grasslands was not simply an enclave of strange, ancient technology perched at the edge of a turbulent sea. What if the Elder ink, the currency so prized in The Electrum Archive’s world of Orn, were the reason for the darkness at this far western edge of the world? An ocean full of Elder ink would be as enticing as an ocean full of diamonds and platinum would be to us. The Black City could be The Electrum Archive’s El Dorado– mystical, impossibly distant, and too intriguing a possibility to ignore. As soon as rumors start to circulate of an ocean of money just sitting out there somewhere, it doesn’t matter how far west it is. Someone will want to put together a crew and take a chance on going there.
The purple haze of The Ultraviolent Grasslands that descends during the night and lingers on into the morning could be treated as a mild form of Warpgas that only starts to mutate the body after an extended period of exposure. Perhaps the very reason why it thickens as you get closer to the Winedark is because it is the vapor that rises off an entire ocean of Elder ink. Get enough Elder ink in one place, and all kinds of weird things could happen. The land itself could turn inky, stained and dreamlike, blurring into The Realm Beyond. If you want to mix a third, dreamy setting in the approach to the “Utter West,” might I suggest Tim Molloy and Chris Willet's "The Painted Wastelands?" Between that content and the megadungeon potential of The Near Moon (Gradient Descent, anyone? Perhaps Anomalous Subsurface Environment? Or– a “Techruin of Long, Long Ago”) you could run a campaign in this beautiful setting for years. Check out Coins and Scrolls GM facing maps for UVG with other things added in for an idea of how this could be done.
The constant offgassing of the inky ocean could also explain some of the truly bizarre flora and fauna of Luka Rejec’s setting. Vomes, The Forest of Meat, and just about anything else could be the product of saturation by ink vapor and warpgas. The purple haze is already a formidable barrier in the setting. How much more so if it has the ability to horribly mutate anything that rises up into it or gets caught out in the open when it descends? Surely an ocean of ink is worth having to brave all those nights and short days choked by the haze.
Thanks to Luka Rejec for turning my art purple!Ultraviolet Grasslands also contains a lot of useful tables for things like exotic trade goods, NPC details, deaths with flourish, strange artifacts, adventure seeds, weather with real consequences and enough weird things to work into your campaign on the side to keep things interesting forever.
As UVG runs on a different system than The Electrum Archive, there are a very few mechanical modifications that you, as the referee, would need to make. Notations on XP gained for certain things (discoveries, etc.) will need to ignored completely (TEA has its own XP system which includes an increased chance for XP based upon what is achieved, or discovered, etc. during a session.) If one were to use the UVG XP rewards as is, your TEA players would jump levels at insane rates (consider that Level 9, the highest stock level in TEA without mods takes 40XP to achieve, but many discoveries in UVG grant 100xp or 200xp for a couple of hours of exploration.)
Currency will also be something that you will need to look at, as UVG is much more generous with cash than TEA is. If you’re running a game where Elder ink is harder to come by, then you might want to dial back the financial rewards that characters get (instead of going with the stock numbers as outlined in the UVG book) or you can just roll with it. Maybe the UVG’s increased access to ink just reflects that it will be worth less to the people you encounter the further west you go. Maybe it’s perfect for a high level campaign. Maybe it’s a good way to get much more magic going in your games. You can spin it however you’d like!
Another mechanical element that will need to be addressed is converting enemies. While Boven’s TEA system presents very clear and very detailed stat blocks for encounters, Rejec’s UVG system is more abstract. Whether you, as the referee, take the time to flesh out the individual enemies and give them defined abilities is up to you, but I think that a pretty easy conversion strategy to start with would be to take the “L#” value from UVG, use it as the SKL of the encounter and then double it for the HP of the encounter. This won’t work for all encounters in UVG (The Lacquered Chaos of Possibility would be SKL 17, HP 34, and then there are the Radiation Ghosts [L0)]) but it can give you something to start with. If all else fails, follow the advice of Ben from Questing Beast and stat the encounter the same as you would a bear, (or maybe a Morngrowler, the bear-sized badgers of TEA.)
Even if your party of characters manages to get to the Winedark and syphon off a king’s ransom of Elder ink, there’s still the journey back. UVG presents plenty of challenges for the journey home that could make the carting of any significant quantity of liquid extremely difficult. Rivers, chasms, horrors and misfortunes all present obstacles to hauling a fortune back to places as far East as The Violet City, much less even further, back to Titan Port. I would even posit that the further west one goes, the less Elder ink could be worth, so characters will need to spend more of it to achieve anything they might need currency to accomplish. It could be that in and around The Black City, ink is so plentiful that other things are traded as currency in its place, like food, memories, sanity and time. On the off chance that your characters do obtain an insane amount of inky wealth and manage to get it carted back to Titan Port, why not let them live like millionaires? More money, more problems, as they say. Just because your adventurer gained a few levels and became wealthy doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly immune to intrigue or to the events that unfold in Titan Port.
One of the charming elements of Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands is its caravanning mechanics. At its core, UVG is a journey west from The Violet City to the enigmatic Black City perched at the edge of the Winedark Ocean. It’s a massive pointcrawl across a surreal landscape with a baked-in trade system allowing characters to survive in an Oregon Trail kind of way, hunting, foraging, trading and making alliances during the journey.
Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive (which actually lists Ultraviolet Grasslands among its many inspirations) retains some of this pointcrawling and trade caravanning aspect, but it isn’t as much of a focal point in Boven’s work as it is in Rejec’s setting. For Ultraviolet Grasslands, the journey to the west is pretty much the whole point. Every character has a different, weird reason to travel to The Black City, but they’re all heading there.
So, given that both settings share some DNA in their inspirations, I think they have a lot of potential to be combined to create something new.
Imagine, if you will, that The Black City of The Ultraviolet Grasslands was not simply an enclave of strange, ancient technology perched at the edge of a turbulent sea. What if the Elder ink, the currency so prized in The Electrum Archive’s world of Orn, were the reason for the darkness at this far western edge of the world? An ocean full of Elder ink would be as enticing as an ocean full of diamonds and platinum would be to us. The Black City could be The Electrum Archive’s El Dorado– mystical, impossibly distant, and too intriguing a possibility to ignore. As soon as rumors start to circulate of an ocean of money just sitting out there somewhere, it doesn’t matter how far west it is. Someone will want to put together a crew and take a chance on going there.
The purple haze of The Ultraviolent Grasslands that descends during the night and lingers on into the morning could be treated as a mild form of Warpgas that only starts to mutate the body after an extended period of exposure. Perhaps the very reason why it thickens as you get closer to the Winedark is because it is the vapor that rises off an entire ocean of Elder ink. Get enough Elder ink in one place, and all kinds of weird things could happen. The land itself could turn inky, stained and dreamlike, blurring into The Realm Beyond. If you want to mix a third, dreamy setting in the approach to the “Utter West,” might I suggest Tim Molloy and Chris Willet's "The Painted Wastelands?" Between that content and the megadungeon potential of The Near Moon (Gradient Descent, anyone? Perhaps Anomalous Subsurface Environment? Or– a “Techruin of Long, Long Ago”) you could run a campaign in this beautiful setting for years. Check out Coins and Scrolls GM facing maps for UVG with other things added in for an idea of how this could be done.
The constant offgassing of the inky ocean could also explain some of the truly bizarre flora and fauna of Luka Rejec’s setting. Vomes, The Forest of Meat, and just about anything else could be the product of saturation by ink vapor and warpgas. The purple haze is already a formidable barrier in the setting. How much more so if it has the ability to horribly mutate anything that rises up into it or gets caught out in the open when it descends? Surely an ocean of ink is worth having to brave all those nights and short days choked by the haze.
Ultraviolet Grasslands also contains a lot of useful tables for things like exotic trade goods, NPC details, deaths with flourish, strange artifacts, adventure seeds, weather with real consequences and enough weird things to work into your campaign on the side to keep things interesting forever.
As UVG runs on a different system than The Electrum Archive, there are a very few mechanical modifications that you, as the referee, would need to make. Notations on XP gained for certain things (discoveries, etc.) will need to ignored completely (TEA has its own XP system which includes an increased chance for XP based upon what is achieved, or discovered, etc. during a session.) If one were to use the UVG XP rewards as is, your TEA players would jump levels at insane rates (consider that Level 9, the highest stock level in TEA without mods takes 40XP to achieve, but many discoveries in UVG grant 100xp or 200xp for a couple of hours of exploration.)
Currency will also be something that you will need to look at, as UVG is much more generous with cash than TEA is. If you’re running a game where Elder ink is harder to come by, then you might want to dial back the financial rewards that characters get (instead of going with the stock numbers as outlined in the UVG book) or you can just roll with it. Maybe the UVG’s increased access to ink just reflects that it will be worth less to the people you encounter the further west you go. Maybe it’s perfect for a high level campaign. Maybe it’s a good way to get much more magic going in your games. You can spin it however you’d like!
Another mechanical element that will need to be addressed is converting enemies. While Boven’s TEA system presents very clear and very detailed stat blocks for encounters, Rejec’s UVG system is more abstract. Whether you, as the referee, take the time to flesh out the individual enemies and give them defined abilities is up to you, but I think that a pretty easy conversion strategy to start with would be to take the “L#” value from UVG, use it as the SKL of the encounter and then double it for the HP of the encounter. This won’t work for all encounters in UVG (The Lacquered Chaos of Possibility would be SKL 17, HP 34, and then there are the Radiation Ghosts [L0)]) but it can give you something to start with. If all else fails, follow the advice of Ben from Questing Beast and stat the encounter the same as you would a bear, (or maybe a Morngrowler, the bear-sized badgers of TEA.)
Even if your party of characters manages to get to the Winedark and syphon off a king’s ransom of Elder ink, there’s still the journey back. UVG presents plenty of challenges for the journey home that could make the carting of any significant quantity of liquid extremely difficult. Rivers, chasms, horrors and misfortunes all present obstacles to hauling a fortune back to places as far East as The Violet City, much less even further, back to Titan Port. I would even posit that the further west one goes, the less Elder ink could be worth, so characters will need to spend more of it to achieve anything they might need currency to accomplish. It could be that in and around The Black City, ink is so plentiful that other things are traded as currency in its place, like food, memories, sanity and time. On the off chance that your characters do obtain an insane amount of inky wealth and manage to get it carted back to Titan Port, why not let them live like millionaires? More money, more problems, as they say. Just because your adventurer gained a few levels and became wealthy doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly immune to intrigue or to the events that unfold in Titan Port.
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