Fungi of the Grasslands

UVG, Yeah You Know Me

I mentioned recently that I had been reading Luka Rejec’s Ultraviolet Grasslands. I had, in fact, just been reading it for fun, but, about 50 pages in, I decided the best use for all its tables was in some sort of role-playing game. So, I got my trusty team together and started a campaign. We’ve had a session 0 and two sessions of play so far. It’s still early days. The caravan has not even managed to complete a full week of travel yet but we’re all enjoying the psychedelic vibes and the raw potential of the game and the setting.

I also wrote up character creation and caravan creation posts, which were not directly related to the campaign but were useful to me in getting to grips with some of the rules and the setting.

This post is about one element of the game that gets only a cursory mention in the book, and how I approached its use. That’s Caravan Quests.

Needy Naturalists

It might be a little ungenerous to suggest that the Caravan Quests section gets any less treatment than it deserved in the core UVG 2E book. It has a full page to itself, including illustration. Ten quests grace the page, everything from “Big Game Hunting” to “Ascending into the Sky Like the Shamans of Old.” And there are some great ideas there to spark events in your campaign. Since UVG is very much a play-to-find-out sort of game, very few things are explicitly labelled as quests. The encounter tables and the randomly discovered locations generally contain all the inspiration or trouble or opportunity the players or referee need to fill a session without picking up tasks from question-mark bedecked NPCs.

But I liked the idea of using one of them to further spur the PCs to do stuff on the road that wasn’t just trading and foraging. The one I settled on was 3. Glorious Naturalists. So, before their caravan ever set off, I had them encounter a band of scientists in L’ultim Gastrognôme, one of the most exclusive eateries in the Violet City. These scientists had been hanging around in the city for a while, looking for a group just like the PCs. They had been assigned a task by their Decapolitan university to discover a bunch of new plants, animals and minerals. They had a decent budget but, as academics, had little taste for roughing it in the trackless steppes and Vome-ridden wilderness of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. So obviously, our caravaners, Imssi, Stebra and Phaedred were the ideal choice to get out there and collect evidence of some undiscovered species! This coincided nicely with the drive of one PC. Stebra Osta, a forager and surgeon, is on the hunt for a special vegetable or fungus with incredible curative properties. She’s sure it’s out in the Grasslands somewhere so she wanted to take the scientists’ job as the perfect one to fund her own search. It also added quite a bit to their funds.

Were there more interesting or weirder quests in the list? Absolutely. Would it have been fun for them to have to 8. Witness the End of Time? Well, of course. But then, I wouldn’t have had such a good excuse to crack open a new prized possession.

Fungi of the Far Realms

Just look at this book… Go on. Look at it. These illustrations by Shuyi Zhang are just breath-taking. The concepts of some of these funguses, written by Alex R Clements, are fun and bonkers. I remember thinking to myself, how am I ever going to use this in a game? before backing it. Idiotic question. I backed it because it is a work of art, not for its usefulness. But, I guess a thing can be both useful and beautiful.

The Caravan Quest in UVG never mentioned anything about fungi. I added that myself, just so I could get Fungi of the Far Realms and its attendant cards out at the table and have my players oooh and aaah at it. I was able to hand them their very first fungus card last weekend. They discovered a ka-zombie beneath The Last Chair Salon. It was feeding Crystal Puffballs to an imprisoned, limbless Vome-Mother. The Vome-Mother was hooked up by rubber tubing to a Fermentation Golem which turned her milk(?) into Yellow Beer, which the Salon’s unscrupulous proprietor was selling to her customers. Once they had dealt with that whole situation they discovered a nearby lush garden of tulip-like flowers, which was also dotted with dozens of the puffball fungi. I was able to hand over the relevant card to Stebra the Forager and let her know that a sack of these was worth quite bit to the right customer. What a wonderful alternative to the usual type of treasure!

There are a few valid ways to use this book at the table in many different games. I utilised the wonderful fold-out map that I received as a crowd-funding reward. I knew the type of environment I wanted the PCs to find the fungus in, so I used the grid system pictured above to locate a similar habitat. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an index of fungus per grid-square but each entry in the book highlights the areas of the map that you might find them in. You could also just make a d666 roll and see which entry turns up for you! That’s fun, even if it doesn’t match your needs. The appendices also have tables for afflictions like hallucinogenic effects and fungal infections. If you don’t feel like freaking the PCs out or make them sick, every entry has practical world-building notes like flavour/mouthfeel and aroma. I loved these details in our recent session because it allowed the PCs to know that they had been consuming the fermented Vome-mother milk flavoured with the Crystal Puffball (Flavour/mouthfeel: rotten apples, Aroma: fresh rain.)

And there is another fungus-related adventure afoot already! Stebra, ever on the lookout for foraging opportunities, heard a rumour from a fellow Lime Nomad, that the Great Armadilloids of the Steppes were cultivating mushrooms. Then, as their caravan pushed on across those self-same Steppes they rolled a random encounter. Guess who? That’s right! Armadilloids!