# Ultraviolet Grasslands: narcotic hallucinations of a dropout wizard

I had a pretty cool and interesting first session of a game called Ultraviolet Grasslands. From what I understand, it's part of the "old-school" genre of games that is currently having a mild boom. Aside from the negative comments I always reserve about the use of "OSR" as a marketing term, the game seemed legitimately interesting on its own two feet. In particular, it has an alien and post-apocalyptic aesthetic, with the elements of the setting explained in vague and contradictory terms, thus lending itself to be invented and improvised on the fly using them as prompts.

Plus, it seems heavily influenced by **heavy metal** culture, and so between that and the quality I described earlier, the game is particularly appealing to me. There is a place called "Life Burns Faster Inn" and an official concept drawing looks like the picture below. I don't need much more to be moved to play.

[Picture 1: cool landscape with metal horns sculpture]

I was playing through Discord alongside Dismaster FraNe (Francisco) as the **referee** and four other players. I'm not going to tell you everything that happened beat by beat, since [Dis has already made a report more in terms of "produced story", which you can find here] (https://dismastersden.blogspot.com/2020/12/uvg-session-zero-start.html). This last link is about a "session zero” that I missed and that the other players did without me.

Giocavo tramite Discord insieme a Dismaster FraNe (Francisco) nel ruolo dell'arbitro e altri quattro giocatori. Non sto a dirvi tutto quello che è successo battuta per battuta, [Dis si è già occupato di un resoconto più in termini di “storia prodotta”, che potete trovare qui](https://dismastersden.blogspot.com/2020/12/uvg-sessione-zero-partenza.html). Questo riguarda una “sessione zero” che mi sono perso e che hanno fatto gli altri giocatori senza di me.

I'll talk about the following session instead, but focus more on the things I heard as a player, as a person at the (virtual) table, and the highlights in my opinion. If you want a more diegetic account, Dis is doing his in parallel.

# Character creation

So, first of all I created my character together with a player in advance - thanks for your help! - and the process was already quite fun. I generated the character almost completely randomly, thanks to the use of a variety of tables and a **random name generator**. I rolled from a random table and I got "purple undergraduate wizard". Now, color is related to ethnicity in this setting, it does not mean that I have purple skin but that I come from the purple nation. "Undergraduate" is a word that refers to bachelor's degree students, but I can't find a good Italian translation that fits, so the Italian word for "dropout" comes to mind, which is not a correct translation, but damn it, if we're leaving on a caravan to reach the end of the world, I'm not fucking continuing my studies. And thus I had "dropout magic student". Perfect.

At this point I had half in mind to make a female character, only for the fact that the party was gender-unbalanced, but in the name generator I got **Artificio DaRegret** and I could not resist this beautiful talking name. The character immediately appeared in my head as male [note: Artificio is a male noun in Italian, meaning: "artifice, device"], I found this picture on the internet and added it to the sheet.

[Picture 2: mage portrait]

I went on to pick the skills. I wanted to roll them, but I didn't get anything particularly interesting. So, since the book allowed to choose them, I chose **Comedy**, **Narco-herbalism**, and **Chemistry**, which seemed to me suitable for a student who had perhaps enrolled in the magic program for _some other reason_...

I choose my equipment by buying it from a list, nothing particularly interesting here except for the fact that the equipment is measured in soap, stones and bags, instead of conventional kilograms or abstract weight units. There are some pre-made kits that take up a single bag, but I can't afford them.

# The Caravan

Ok, onto to the first session with everyone. Actually, not everyone, because one arrives late, someone has connection problems, and someone else just doesn't arrive. But we play the same. I was quite impressed with the use of music that Dis made: a playlist in the background - on low volume - with fairly slow psychedelic rock that helped set the mood.

We are traveling with a caravan to go to the Violet City, the first step of our adventure, which will become completely free upon departure in the Ultraviolet Grasslands. The only fixed goal, albeit very vague, is to reach the Black City to the west, and there is a map already provided by the game with different points of interest that have various random and not-random events associated with them.

Upon prodding by the referee - who presented all choices in an extremely neutral way - we have to decide whether to stop and rest and maybe look for something or continue onwards. I suggest we stop and look for "herbs", which is something my character would do, and in any case they are ingredients that could be useful for using my abilities later. Malachite (another character) comes along, as her character also had an interest in doing that type of research.

The referee uses a mechanic that seemed better designed for longer searches. I roll my attribute (0 reason, great mage huh), plus the +1 bonus for narco-herbalism proficiency, and we use the result to retrieve a row from a table. I quite like this, because each of these tabular tests has a number of outcomes with various prompts instead of just success or failure. In any case, the result requires me to search 6 days to obtain a certain amount of provisions or ingredients. Realizing that I had actually declared a shorter search, the referee reduced the time and herb results to about a third, which seemed to me a good choice for the context. I pack my herbs and we proceed.

Here the referee introduced a dog to the group, you will find a more detailed description in his upcoming post. We actively chose to adopt it, it wasn't forced on us, and we did it because we felt sorry for it. From what I understand [the dog is a technique he uses quite often] (https://dismastersden.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-perro-different-kind-of-dog-for-osr.html), and it has the sole purpose of being a mascot: if we try to use it to do any kind of dangerous task, it will be completely useless - at least for now. I don't know if Dis is trying to show that not everything should be used as a resource, but I like the idea. Malachite takes him as an animal companion.

# On-the-road meetings

Enough diegetic time having passed - in UVG you have to keep track of it quite precisely - we do a roll on a random table to see if any injuries or illnesses occur on the way. That's when I find myself writing this on my character sheet.

[Picture 2: "I have a tentacular tapeworm"]

Up until that point, let's say I was trying a little bit to find my "voice" in contributing to the game. I was trying to create potential for conflict to see how Artifice DaRegret would resolve it and how he would change. It is at that point that I realized that _Artificio is not a protagonist. He could die in two weeks from the consequences of the tapeworm, and I'll have fun playing it._

On the road we meet another caravan, relatively antagonistic due to previous negative encounters, in the opposite direction - an event generated by a roll. We have a spoken confrontation, and we decide to de-escalate the situation by keeping away as we continue in different directions. Here I really felt that _we had done something different, the situation could have gone very differently_. Had we raised our weapons, maybe we would have fought. Maybe we would be dead.

I expressed this feeling a little awkwardly in the Ruling the Game telegram chat immediately after the session:

> Nothing, I have been thinking for an hour "uh whats the gm trying to do, what conflict is he trying to bring forward, how can I help him to enhance this conflict, how can I get involved". Then I realized that I just had to sit back and hear what was going on, that the caravan we met was for no reason other than the fact that a caravan could pass by. That we don't actually know if something will be important or not, if there will be a conflict, etc.

Clearly I'm used to a type of play where _you play to put things in conflict, and to find out what this says about our characters and what happens next_. And where then my job in the game is also to help put my character in the potential for conflict, or to generate questions that others have to answer, or to give others the opportunity to ask me questions that I have to answer.

In short, here the caravan was just a caravan, no dramatic agenda on the part of the referee, no attempt to pursue a theme, other than to honestly present us the game world and the dangers that surrounded us.

# The violet city

When we arrived at the violet city we played a couple of other scenes where we found that there were some kind of sentient cats worshiped in the city, who were not very fond of our patchy, smelly dog. We only had to deliver a letter, a job that was to repay whoever had lent us the caravan, but we got into trouble with a local feline leader because of the mutt.

Dis will probably describe this scene much better, but I don't wanna go into too much detail, because the only thing I have to say is that in the moment I was feeling quite good about the game and had a lot of fun directing my character and making him react to what he was seeing. We haven't had a chance for very consequential choices yet, but I'm sure it will show up next time.