Black City Blues

After probably three years and two separate starts with the two caravans meeting and merging up, my UVG game has finally come to a close. It’s a good time for it to happen since I’ve moved to pursue the Ph.D. and the regular crew will have to meet online if they want to game with me. I do plan on running games online.

I’d been reading the new 2nd Edition (especially around the Black City) and I think I have something interesting to say about the setting. So often, when we encounter a new game, we want to know what the game is about. What is it trying to say? Some narrative games wear this on their sleeve (My Life with Master is about depression explicitly), and some games are able to be more discrete (Changeling the Lost is about trauma, but you have to push past the fairies to see it) but with UVG, I think there’s a bit of a bait and switch going on. On the tin, it says that UVG is “inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games.” And that’s true, the rules around traveling and the caravan and starving in the steppe are a testament to that. But it’s not just about that, in a way, and the 2nd Edition makes that clearer by removing a lot of the rule clutter around those things. 

There’s something else sitting just below the surface. As I said, the second edition explicitly removes mechanics, but they’re there in the first edition and in the Uranium Butterflies player’s guide: Ha, Ba, and Ka (“…the totality of the sentient creature in the Rainbowlands is divided into a trinity of body (ha), soul (ka), and personality (ba).”). When I first read through UVG, I kind of just dismissed this as kinda neat to think about but ultimately superfluous to the running of the game. It was also an idea that I’d been thinking about at the same time due to the greatest game ever made coming out. But as the party got closer and closer to the Black City, the more I thought that there was more at play in the concept than I first thought. 

I mean, the game has multiple races that play into this motif: the Ultras are ghosts with all soul and personality and no body, the Steppeland Liches are multibody copies of the same personality, there are uplifted mammals who have been granted or forced to have a personality that does not fit their animalistic body, elementals are souls forcibly inflicted on reality, and regular humans sit as the spiritual triumvirate of all three. Players can find soulless body processors in the Forest of Meat. Demon-spirits in the Black City can possess the players and others. Slavery exists as a way of purchasing more bodies for personalities to subjugate (or just to carry your stuff, subjugatation the old-fashioned way). This even goes for the player-characters, who are made of habaka and can gain or lose abilities based on damage to it.

But that’s not exactly accurate: Rejec recently wrote the Synthetic Dream Machine preview, Eternal Return Key, as if a malignant force known as the player was forcing itself into the body of the character. In one interview, he mentioned that you can read the book backward and forward and get two different stories from two different views, which is “hella cool.” You, the character, are afraid, but you, the player, are incapable of feeling fear and have no morale checks to make because, at the end of the day, you’re safe in the wasteland of reality. The players themselves are a force of habaka, forcing themselves on others. 

UVG isn’t just about traveling, it’s about… consent? Foucaultian biopower? Internal power dynamics? A modern liberalist view of self that seeks to separate body and mind in the same way it separated soul and culture or religion or community? I know it feeds into the transhuman belief that these things (body, mind, heart, soul, spirit, personality) are not components of a complete and full being but are actually separate elements that can and must be consented to and against and that you’re the ultimate master of yourself, a brain on a stick able to choose the way the world reacts to you and you to the world, “anything that exists without my knowledge exists without my consent”-style. I don’t know if it was intended implicitly, but that’s something I’m thinking more and more as I read between the lines. And honestly, I think this is completely valid, considering both the “anti-canon” nature of UVG and an outcome of the way the book was written. Because nothing is true and everything is up to interpretation, this reading of the book is just as legitimate as the opposite, with no “real” UVG to speak of, really. I think I’m onto something here, but my game ended before it really moved to a place where I could explore it completely. 

Maybe because of all this thought, the last session got really metaphysical (to the point where I made a big sign of putting both books down as a symbol of “we are off the reservation for this one, boys”), and one of the things I really liked was that three of the last four players, by their own choices, each managed to embody body (ha), soul (ka), and personality (ba) in their totality. One spent eternity in the Black City to reach Nirvana and merge totally with their Ka, one subverted the systems of the Black City to become their Ba, and one simply wandered the pathways of the City until everything save their Ha was forgotten (which I felt was the darkest of all the endings by they seemed okay with).

But the fourth? The fourth found another road, to another steppe, and they knew that the end could wait with another beginning in the here and now. 

I liked how it ended, with all the lore and facts of the setting falling by the wayside as we tried to figure out how to end the time we spent together well. I hope to carve out the bits I like (which is what I’ve been doing for years now) and really apply them to my own personal game and setting. And I think that’s one of the things I love most about this hobby.