Category: Actual Play

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.

Little Johnny NoGames Finally Loses the Epithet

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

She had lied.

It was not unusual, of course. The Obscured Goddess often did. The elders, unafraid of the simple rank heresy laid out by the neophytes, had once said her mind was muddled, is still muddled. She could not account for every one of her decisions, they would say, their hands heavy with their thick gray beards huddled around the fire, but for Jalick clarity had come, in this moment and no sooner. She had lied.

He was bleeding out. His lungs, probably. Sacks filled with liquid, like trying to carry water across the steppe in a bag. His life mixed with the dust and made some thick black viscous concoction as it spread across the floor. It would not last for the next crew of cutthroats that entered this particular dungeon, of course. By then it would be indiscernible, all but dried to the iron floor. But for now, for some odd reason, the pool comforted him. It was some small sign that he had been here and he had been alive, once. 

He had seen Yalid die this way, once. Of course, that time it had been in the light of the sun, far from any black-damned tomb, a bullet from a scavman’s gun. Jalick remembered holding the boy as blood oozed from the line on his face that carried his smile and the light disappeared from his eyes. Big and blue, his mother had told him. Something “worth loving,” she had said. Jalick wondered if there was some special magic, some element of remembrance, in his own brown eyes. The Goddess had not blessed him with blue eyes. She had just killed him.

It had come from the ceiling. Not a blade or a trap. He’d have seen a trap. No, this was simply wrong place, wrong time. Pipes and cords burst loose from their long-held resting places by a bunch of dumb tribesmen traipsing the place in search of long-forgotten treasure. A luckier looter might have escaped with power burns and a story to tell at the tavern. Not Jalick, though. Jalick just had to take a wild electrified cord through the chest like a man. Jalick just had to die here. As the Goddess willed. 

For a moment, he thought of his crew. One of them must have at least leap to his aid. Someone must have shoved a silk yellow bandage into his bleeding chest. But even from here, he felt the lie. No one had saved him. No one could have saved him. They had lied to him in that brightly lit tavern, just as his Goddess had lied to him here. But not for long. The world was starting to turn. 

At some point, long beyond the confines of his perception, he fell. His mind slipped past its material bonds as he lay on the floor, down, down, down, seeping like grease between the tight metal panels. He was going somewhere, and by the Goddess, he hoped it was somewhere better. He doubted it. 

Damn. She had lied.

Man, it’s been a hot minute. 

I recently ran The Hole In The Oak by Gavin Norman in Old School Essentials over three sessions for my usual group. I really enjoyed it, especially because I didn’t make too many crazy adjustments, and I think they liked it as well. This is my first play report thing on the blog, though it’s a lot more freeform than “and then my party entered Room 2.” I focus more on lessons I can take away and how I can improve my DMing for the future

Spoilers for The Hole In The Oak ahead. 

So to inspire adventure, I told the party that a wizard was looking for three magical chess pieces and had hired them to find in the titular Hole. It forced exploration, and it naturally fell off as characters died and were introduced. At the very end of the dungeon (their time in the dungeon, not the physical end), they discovered Hazrad the Unholy, a wandering wizard with Skyrim style skull face paint who I played as just a pissed-off dude after he found out that they had smashed all the little niknaks in his hidden closet in Room 37. “Uh, I’m Hazrad the Unholy, man that was my stuff what the fuck.” They traded the chess pieces they had collected as an apology and also because they were already loaded with treasure and it was an easy way for them to ditch the quest that got them there. Lesson: Play fast and loose. If this was a longer adventure (and it could be if they decide to venture into the Incandescent Grottoes, see below), I might have that action have consequences, but for the beer and pretzel game I was running, it worked out just fine for me. 

At the end of the adventure, I had everyone pile up all the gold and treasure they had collected and total it out. Because there was a table with all the treasure in it along with the total of the dungeon, I was able to give a video game-style complete percentage (“67%!”) at the end that I just loved doing. Lesson: Stock treasure in your dungeon beforehand and give players a score on how well they did. At the very least, keep a running tally on how much treasure you’re stocking if you’re rolling it randomly as characters in the room. A good rule of thumb would be finding out how much a particular goal of theirs is and modulating so that they are almost there. If they want a tavern, make sure you only include enough for like, 70% of a tavern. I believe it was a piece of Apocalypse World GMing advice that you should give the party “almost enough.”

Also, the treasure is important! There’s no point delving into dangerous tombs if there’s no reward! It’s always better to get a magic item from solving a puzzle than buying it in town or just having it!

I attempted to use THAC0 at the beginning as OSE intended, and I don’t know what my problem was, but I just couldn’t grok it. I’ve used THAC0 in the past but trying to run the dungeon and keep things moving just bogged me down too much. Maybe I was just out of practice. I returned to a lot of 5E style mechanics the longer the dungeon crawl went for. I don’t think the players minded, but it just means the Lesson: Finish my house-ruled system. Have a rule space where everyone understands the rules and everyone feels comfortable suggesting changes.

I love anytime I can be a creepy motherfucker as a DM, and the Faces of the Deep in Room 4 was a great opportunity to do that. Discordant overlapping voices are always a fun gimmick, especially when you use them to bring up backstory and explain to players how to interact with the dungeon. I had each player roll a rumor when they started a new character, and that also helped with pushing them forward. The Faces were a place where more rumors could be generated. As for roleplay, I remember running an ancient ruin once overrun with giant undead snake monsters with human faces crying black tears who were looking for their long-dead loved ones, moaning and screaming in the darkness. Had a lot of players uncomfortable that night. Lesson: Know when to tone it back.

Speaking of “creepy motherfucker,” at the Altar of the Stump in Room 60, I gave the evil stump god the heretic gnomes worshiped this stupid “heh heh heh” evil villain laugh, solely because I liked doing it. I did it at completely inappropriate times, which made the combat a bit more goofy and comical, but this is OSR, there are places for seriousness and it’s in the total party wipe, which my players almost suffered in that fight. Speaking of the gnomes, I had a picture in the Faun’s house be a drawing done by the gnomes with “remember what they took from us” scrawled on the back, and I rolled a random encounter where the heretic gnomes had kidnapped a forest gnome that the party saved, so the gnomes took on this sectarian violence angle I enjoyed playing up. 

The Fauns I reskinned for a twist. Instead of fauns, they were Chaotic goatmen masquerading as Lawful sheepmen. I left lots of clues that they weren’t the original owners of the house, like how there were only three of them despite there being eleven sheepmen in all the photos on the walls (no one questioned how they could have photos in a medieval land, and it comes up later in Room 54 with all the pictures on the wall). When the goatmen threw off their literal sheepskins and attacked the players they all freaked. Two characters died before they could get away, but going back and getting revenge on them was very important close to the end of the dungeon. 

My players never encountered two really big elements of the dungeon: the Hunter in Room 13 and the troglodytes in Room 16. Might have just been part of not playing it more up considering they are a full faction (though the ghouls were also a “faction” and there was no option to dialog with them), but I don’t think I suffered for it. Lesson: A good faction is one with goals that can be communicated beyond violence, preferably with words. Violence is scary for people who don’t get to simply pick a new pregen when they die.

Likewise, for the Hunter, I’ve run the LotFP module The God that Crawls before, so I know how much fun it can be to have a monster that spurs exploration because you’re constantly running away from it. If it had been a more central part of the module, I could imagine adding more triggers for it to activate, but I don’t think my experience suffered because it wasn’t. Lesson: Sometimes a lot of elements of a dungeon mesh together, sometimes they don’t. Having a quest and a monster chasing and no map and rumors all might be too many cooks in the kitchen for a dungeon crawl, and it might raise the tension when it doesn’t need to be raised.

Actually, make that three things my players never encountered: they never made it to the last third of the dungeon, with all the forest and vegetation rooms that lead to the tombs. I don’t have much to say on that, save that one of the rooms is on the map in such a way that it might be difficult for the player mapper to record it accurately. Lesson: Always have a player mapping and be open and honest about where doorways and entries/exits are. I still think that Google Sheets is the best mapping software/dungeon generator out there, it just requires a little know-how in macros to pull it off.  

My players found the Reptile Cultist’s giant altar in Room 46 just as I randomly rolled the Ogre to show up from Room 25, which was a hectic fight but the party won without getting too messed up by the Orge’s mutagenic breath. After that, they decided to dedicate themselves to who they thought was the god of the dungeon, the Lizard God Kezek. I’m a sucker for religious stuff in roleplay, so I let them have their fun, sacrificing gnomes to the Scaled God, with Kezek bordering on the consciousness of his new followers.

There’s a control room, Room 24, that turns the giant stone statues in The Hall of Kings, Room 22, into solid gold. The shine in my player’s eyes was worth the trapped first lever, as was the disappointment when the statues turned back to stone. I also like how rooms in a dungeon can affect rooms in another part of the dungeon, but I think there have to be more explicit rumors or info about what changed because sometimes you pull a lever and nothing happens and you go “oh, don’t know if that was good”. 

I love the river. Having the ability to traverse into different rooms by throwing your big dumb body into ice-cold, fast running water, I love it. Fishing, clean water, a good place to camp on the shore… Every time I make a dungeon, I have to include a river. Not to mention waterfalls and sumps ensure that as players navigate via a river levels of the dungeon can be locked off and they have to find alternate routes to return to the surface. The river in Hole in the Oak is especially good because it is connected to the Incandescent Grottoes, another dungeon you can run in tandem. I think they’re a little tonally different, but more content is more content. I had two players float down the river at the end of the dungeon and I tried my best to play up the Satania vibes. Lesson: If you haven’t yet, buy Veins of the Earth. You don’t have to use anything, but I can’t think of a product that gets you more in the headspace of darkness and caving more.

That’s pretty much it. I’ve been working on the Masters so I haven’t had the flexibility to get behind the screen as often as I’d like, but I’m still trying to finish my house rules and post a copy of them here. Likewise, I’m working on getting a podcast set up with a gaming buddy of mine and posting it here. All in all, good stuff.

Strong recommend on The Hole in the Oak.