What lies behind the madness of Ultraviolet Grasslands?
My interview with Luka Rejec reveals some important answers about one of the most creative RPG settings in recent history.
In this interview I talk with Luka Rejec, the creator of the award-winning Ultraviolet Grasslands, a pillar on the neon side of the OSR. He discusses his creative process and the other UVG-related things that he is working on.
His latest creation, Magitecnica, is available in print, as well as at DrivethruRPG and itch.io now. We discuss Magitecnica in this interview as well.
Hey Luka, can you introduce yourself and let us know what kind of stuff you’ve published over the years?
Hey Thaumavore! Hm. My name is Luka and I’m a Slovenian game designer living in South Korea. I got into rpgs as a kid back in the mid 90s and started looking into more minimalist rulesets in the late 2000s, burned out on 3E and 4E.
In the early 2010s I did my first rpg illustrations for some OSR games and then things sort of snowballed from there. I released Witchburner with Exalted Funeral in 2018, then we did the successful Ultraviolet Grasslands kickstarter in 2019 (has it been four years already?!) and with the help of the awesome heroes of the stratometaship, my patreons, I’ve been writing, designing, and illustrating rpgs full time for the last 3 years or so. Other titles of the last few years have been Longwinter and Holy Mountain Shaker, as well as a few smaller zines, including the most recent one, Magitecnica, which I’m planning as a series of zines of spells, wizards, and weird powers for science fantasy settings.
Ultraviolet Grasslands
I want to get to Magitecnica in particular, but let’s start with Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG). It won a Silver ENNIE in 2019 for Best Free Game, and then another silver in 2020 for Best Cover Art. Congratulations on those. For those of us who want to get our heads around what UVG is at its core, can you explain it for us?
The UVG is a big, rambling roadtrip setting at the end of time and space. The players have a caravan and go trading and exploring and wandering around a vast world, mostly abandoned, beyond the edge of a civilization so old it has forgotten where it came from or when. They meet strange ghosts of forgotten pasts, mind-controlling cats, multi-bodied post-humans trying to live forever, animated environmental suits swapping their minds with crystals, sentient (and carnivorous) plants, vast empty spaces, forgotten demigods, abandoned cities, fragments of a lost past, and at the end of it all, a churning, incomprehensible, living city. In between all these ruins are later humans, living rich and happy lives, trading and raiding and making a life of their own.
There’s a loose OSR-derived ruleset associated with it (SDM, formerly SEACAT), but the core of it is this vast and rambling world and lots and lots of random tables to ensure no two UVG experiences can be quite the same.
It’s a bit like taking Thundarr the Barbarian and Moebius and Sleep and Oregon Trail and mixing them all together, honestly.
How did this come about? What was the first pebble in your head that rolled to become the snowball that is UVG?
The very, very first pebble was a free adventure by Gus L titled The Prison of the Hated Pretender (here’s an expanded version). I used it as an opening adventure for a new group of players who would, in short order, become the Golden Goats. I elaborated a “Yellow Land” around the village where they started, and then we world-built the Rainbow Lands together. Once the Violet City was plonked down in the west, I said, well, obviously, here beyond the Violet City are the Ultraviolet Grasslands. Someone, I don’t remember precisely who, then suggested that far beyond it is a Black City. Going from that color scheme implies there is an Infrared Desert to the east and a White City beyond it.
Then I wondered how I’d run a great honking steppe adventure, to show off a whole world to the players ... and around the same time, I was trying to figure out what to do with patreon. The idea of building a roadtrip for the heroes of the stratometaship and the players of my game came together from there.
You mention that the setting is designed to resist repetition and canon. Can you elaborate on how you achieved this and why it was important to you?
Yeah. The big reason is that my memory’s not the best, but when it comes to games I’m kind of a completionist. A world like Forgotten Realms or the Discworld or the Real World™ is too full of neatly interlocking parts that if I try to run it, I start going a little mad - trying to memorize everything, trying to fit things together ... at the same time, I like improvising and inventing new content, and in such a complete, totally built world, I feel like there isn’t space for my own ideas. Now, folks will counter that - but it’s my subjective experience.
I decided to write a setting for a GM like myself. Full of ideas, but hung loosely together with gaps for the players to fill in. Then I expanded on that a little bit with tables of events, rumors, and “facts” that are mutually contradictory - they can’t all be true, so in play it’s like the abstract superposition of the UVG collapses into a concrete, experienced UVG in the table.
Finally, because this would really have helped me when I started GMing and faced these complete world and Gygaxian roleplaying advice (strict time records! harrumph!), I wrote an explicit instruction that the only UVG that matters is that table’s UVG.
There’s also a little bit about collaborative worldbuilding and sharing invention among all the players, but that’s ... uh ... another path to bushwhack.
You mention that the UVG plays "fast-and-loose" but has a solid, metal roleplaying game skeleton behind it. Can you explain the balance you aimed for between structure and freedom?
Yeah, this again comes from writing to my style of play. I like to improvise as I run a session, so I don’t want over-detailed mechanics and descriptions. I love an intricately described trap or arcane mechanism as much as anyone, but at the table a paragraph of text about one chest is probably going to leave me pretty cold.
What I really need from a description is something evocative, colorful, that sparks my story-telling and a rough mechanical guide for how to present it to my players. When I say mechanical guide, I mean things like, this opponent is easy to trick, picking this lock will be a hard challenge, this enemy is tough as an ox. From an adverb or adjective, I can get a sense of what kind of difficulty a challenge represents, set a target for players and let the dice fly and reveal the outcome.
However, this also works because I play pretty firmly in the d20 (and other D&D variants) tradition, where I know the difference between a +1 bonus and a +5 bonus and advantage. Those are the mechanical underpinnings of UVG and they’re pretty much nailed down. Once you know how the dice behave, target difficulties, bonuses, and initiative, you’re pretty much set.
Folks say the flat probability curve of the d20 isn’t realistic, but for me that’s precisely the point. It makes rare (extreme) results more likely, and those are, frankly, the ones I play for. That’s memorable. When you get a critical and the zombie dragon explodes in a shower of particles? Well, duh. That’s what I want. Hence ... exploding dice, exploding criticals, and all that stuff. So, a bit metal. A bit of an outlet for 13-year-old me, haha.
So there’s a sequel to UVG in the works. What can you tell us about that?
It’s called Our Golden Age and, well, I’m not sure if it’s a se- or pre- or para-quel, so I just call it a [•]quel. Very 2090s venture scavenger, eh?
It’s gone through a bunch of permutations as I tried to figure out how to structure and present it. First I thought of making a more universal book, combining rules and world-building. That turned out to be a blind alley. Eventually, with the help of a buddhist abbot I overcame my despair at writing my way 320 pages up a blind alley and saw that it would all be useful.
The heart I’m building it around is the Circle Sea. The “civilized” counterpoint to the UVG. The UVG is about taking a caravan on a long strange trip into the wilderness, discovering lost places, and making a fortune. Our Golden Age is built around the idea of the Tintin (or Asterix, for that matter) comics: the characters start with a home and a house and go on trips there-and-back-again. It’s geared towards short, two or three-session adventures (since that’s more my wheelhouse now, with limited time thanks to a kid). The characters travel somewhere, bumble around, resolve (or don’t) some weird local situation, and come home with souvenirs and hopefully money. Like the caravan is a group character, here it’s the home, with rules for investing money, upgrading it, and improving it.
As for the setting, it’s a riot of cultures living one on top of another, factions jostling and fighting, and a vibe of almost hilarious overgrowth among the remains of an elder civilization. My goal isn’t to really enmesh the characters in these factions (unless they want to), but to provide the GM with the tools to create the kind of background tapestry that a tourist experiences when visiting a foreign land: all these people, weird customs, strange foods, and oh, there’s a hotel, let’s go hide there ... and then in the hotel run into some weird backroom shenanigans, a plot or two, and then back home.
I think the two books will complement each other quite nicely, but, hey, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Quarterly Zine
You publish a quarterly zine. I have one issue and it’s like an art and text miscellany. The presentation, like a lot of your stuff, is visually restrained and very artistic in its approach, as opposed to being utilitarian and focused on efficient referencing. Who is the ideal target audience for things like this zine and for your sort of art gallery design sensibilities?
I guess I’m thinking of someone a bit like myself: likes zany ideas, art, weird places. Probably not as much time to run games as they once had. The idea is to make fragments: locations, treasures, spells ... something you can lift and drop into your game.
I often run into lovely, detailed adventures, intricate treasure box settings ... and then each individual piece is just a little bit too interconnected to drop in as is.
On the other hand, there’s also a lot of really delightful rpg elements made by folks: maps, items, characters, spells ... but they’re often a little too bland or generic for my taste.
So, I suspect that yeah, someone who wants to run a science fantasy / dying earth / end of time / roadside picnic kind of game and drop strange pieces of a lost time into their game, this is someone who would enjoy these zines.
And, obviously, anyone who likes my art. :)
Magitecnica
Can you tell us what Magitecnica is, when it will be released and how or if it relates to UVG?
The document, Magitecnica Codex 1: The Use and Misuse of Powers, is the first zine (in what I hope will be a series) of magical powers, items, wizards, and weirdness from the broader UVG setting, the Vastlands. This first zine presents the mechanics, elaborating on the very minimal rules in the 2nd edition UVG, presenting play examples, and four albums or compilations of individual powers, giving a total of 24 new powers for science fantasy settings - weird space, dying earth, what have you.
The plan is to release it in late November (Dark Friday and all that), but we’ll see how close we get with the physical production with Exalted Funeral. I’m just a writer-human, I can influence the digital releases, but the hard-world of books and boxes and boxcars is ... ehh ... heavy, haha.
[Editor’s note: Magitecnica is available in print, as well as at DrivethruRPG and itch.io.]
The 52-page document looks beautiful, by the way. In it you mention a variety of powers that range from mundane to reality-altering. What was your thought process on balancing these powers to ensure that each has a unique and meaningful impact on gameplay?
Well, Balancing. That’s an interesting topic, isn’t it? I think the best way to think of game balance is at three levels (heck, this might apply to most things in roleplaying): there’s the balance imagined by the author (in this case me), the balance attempted by the referee (aka. the GM player), and the balance experienced and desired by the players (the folks showing up).
In a very real way, I think an objectively balanced tabletop roleplaying game is impossible, because the designer has a certain play style and players in mind, and this never maps fully to the individual table. So, the designer provides ingredients and structures, but the actual balancing happens at the game table.
Usually, the responsibility for balancing falls almost entirely on the GM (and however much they trust the designer), but I try to broaden out the conversation around balance a little more in Magitecnica. The example I give is the story of the Jekyll and Hyde, where Dr Jekyll’s initial successful formula begins to progressively fail and sputter as the story progresses because, spoiler alert, the initial ingredients used had some impurities, which he can no longer replicate. I use this as a suggestion for the referee and players to have an ongoing, open dialogue about tweaking and calibrating powers (and artifacts, and items, and other new things introduced to the game) to fit the game. After all, especially when it comes to magic in this kind of post-post-post-apocalyptic setting, you’re talking about very poorly understood technologies indistinguishable from magic being used by humans who quite possibly didn’t even evolve to use them. Does a single spell turn out to be far too powerful? Have an open discussion about it and discuss with players how and why it might fail or the side-effects it might involve. Then I provide some tables for side effects, quirks, and hacks to spells. But that’s just inspiration fuel.
At a more design level, I’ve designed the powers to be very roughly similar in power to D&D spells of a comparative level. The characters use life (hit points) to fuel the powers, so at a very basic game play loop - using a power now means your character is likely weaker later. This sets up a sequential balance in the game - as characters use more powers, the risks to them increase (less life), creating a nifty little tension ratchet.
Some of the powers are also balanced by imposing other costs, sacrifices, or attuned items to use, and many of them have casting times that effectively make them a out-of-combat prep, rather than a flashy explosion in the middle of combat (looking at you level 3 Lightning-Fireball).
The concept of power corruption is intriguing. How did you approach the design of this mechanic to make it a compelling aspect of gameplay rather than a punitive measure?
This grows out of the way I’ve treated magic for ages, as a modification of the basic laws of reality - and that this brings the danger of the caster’s power corrupting them as well if they’re careless or unlucky.
At a very basic level, the corruption mechanic means that while a lower-level character can cast higher powers (aka. higher-level spells), this is more dangerous for them. I just really like the idea of players being able to use powerful abilities and items and powers at any level, rather than locking them behind a “wait until you reach level 7! Then you will really rock!” - an outgrowth of being older and just not having the time to play so long (or the faith that my game group will last that long). So, corruption is there as a small-ish risk - yes, mess with powers beyond your ken, but there’s a risk.
The other aspect is that the corruptions generally do not just weaken or damage characters, they change them. Well, ok, there is one where if the character really messes up, their head explodes (but they stay alive, which is weird). I find some players really enjoy embracing the chaos of a mutating character, while others prefer something they can repair ... so this system gives them that option.
Though, to be fair, I do need to elaborate some mechanics for repairing / restoring corrupted characters and creatures. Haha, content for a future magitecnica codex.
The inventory system for carrying powers is quite unique, with traits, items, and burdens. What was the rationale behind this design choice, and how does it enhance the role-playing experience?
The design goal is to use a limited inventory to encourage meaningful player choices, for example before departing on an adventure or delve, and afterwards - when retreating with treasure. It’s a pretty simple slot inventory system - each character gets 7 slots for “mental” things (traits) and 7 for “physical” things (items) - with more possible if they have high ability scores. The burdens are an additional 20 slots they can fill up with extra gear or loot (or that fill up when characters get hurt or suffer status effects). The goal here is that each game object - in this case a power - imposes a tradeoff. You can’t bring along everything. Or, if you do want to bring a lot of things, you may have to pack them tightly and well, making them inaccessible in combat.
But back to powers as part of the inventory - I just really like the idea of a power being something like an old-timey universal remote turning off a machine (wand of deactivate machines) or an instruction manual for activating the local sprinkler system (scroll of summon rains in the ziggurat of the metal bureaucrats). Or, at the end of the day, Vancian magic, where a wizard drives a spell into their brain? Well, that might take the space of certain skills or other knowledge (so it becomes a burden, you know, the head overstuffed with ideas).
I find it fun when individual game objects are used, subverted, used up, and so on.
Overcharging powers introduces a risk-reward dynamic into the game. Can you discuss how you determined the cost and effects of overcharging, and what strategies you anticipate players will use to leverage this feature?
Right, overcharging is a simplified version of what I had originally (thanks Skerples!). Originally, I gave each power a series of orders at which it could be used, but that made writing the powers pretty unwieldy (and the naming), so ... with overcharging, the cost of a power is simply doubled. Generally this modifies the scope or range or effect of a power - sometimes radically so. However, this also increases the danger of using the power - since a power’s cost is the target number for the corruption roll, and if the power’s cost exceeds a character’s level, well ... danger.
I really like mechanics like this, where a player can push their luck, take a risk. It’s just really fun, and in my experience it bleeds into other parts of a game, so players learn to suggest extra risks they could take, and the GM gives possible boons and bonuses for that.
In the case of the powers? Well, I’m always keen to see players risk blowing up the whole campaign setting with their reckless use of magic, aren’t you? That’s somehow the best ending a campaign could get, I suppose ... a show-stopping finale, everything in pieces and then a chance to jump a ways into the future and figure out the consequences of the players’ er ... courage.
Artwork
Your artwork is really distinctive and evocative. How long did it take you to develop that style?
35 years. Give or take.
But I really managed to start to focus on it after, maybe, 2016 or so, when my wife gave me the courage to switch careers from white-collar text-and-pixel pushing.
How much of your artwork are you able to let go, i.e. not put into a publication of any sort (because you can’t find a place for it or you don’t like it for some reason)?
Oof. That’s a harsh question. Honestly, quite a lot. I have stacks and stacks of notebooks with finished and half-finished pieces that never made it through. Sometimes it’s quite frustrating, but you’ve just gotta keep going, you know?
Part of the challenge is that sometimes the art inspires my writing, and sometimes the other way around ... and sometimes the two just don’t gel and both end up somewhere, half-forgotten.
What are your thoughts on AI-generated artwork?
I wrote a whole long blog post on the topic: https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2023/on-generative-ai/ ... but to boil it down to a few bullet points.
Procedural AI image generators are a disruptive tool. It’s changing our understanding of the art process in a similar way to how photography disrupted painting and the legal ramifications haven’t been ironed out yet.
AI-generated images are not art - they’re images. One can use them as components to make art, but by themselves they’re not art.
I wouldn’t use AI-generated images for my published work, but I can see their utility in many creative or gaming contexts. For an artist they can be great for generating ideas, modifying sketches, trying out compositions, filling in backgrounds, making concept art, and so on. For a GM or player, they can be useful for quickly visualizing locations, generating random content, and so on.
A lot of artists are up in arms about AI-generated imagery, particularly when it’s used to copy existing (or dead) artists’ styles. That’s seems obviously an area where human actors are using a tool to plagiarize human art - the law’s still unsettled (see above), but it seems likely that that kind of work won’t be covered by any kind of copyright. When it comes to arguments about AI “stealing” the images it’s trained on, that becomes ... much messier. I’m no lawyer and I don’t want to even wade into that discussion, but I will point out that Adobe has now rolled out AI art generation as a standard feature in both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. As far as I know, their model is trained on imagery they have the rights to, so at this point the “stolen images” argument is essentially one that favors the biggest corporation in the creative field - Adobe.
AI generated imagery is a genie that’s well and truly out of the box and now simply a fact of life to engage with constructively. It’s not going away. Who knows - perhaps in exposing all images, even photos, as mere pictures - not facts - it’ll encourage people to be more critical with the content they consume in general.
Korea
You’re currently in Seoul, right? What brought you there and do you ever make it back to Slovenia?
Actually a satellite city of Seoul proper, but part of the metro area, yeah. I ended up here because of my wife, who’s Korean. We met in Switzerland, she was doing a postgraduate course and I was working there. We’d initially thought of moving to the UK, then they voted for Brexit making themselves much less accessible to folks with passports like ours (i.e. European), so ... she convinced me to give Korea a try.
I tend to get back to Europe once a year (less during the corona times). I’d love to make it more often, but now with a devoted (emotionally very attached) dog and a child unit (baby edition), I’m a bit loathe to leave the family all alone.
How’s your spoken Korean at this point?
Hahaha. How much of a vegetable is an abalone?
It’s atrocious. Really atrocious. Enough to survive, but well ... I make a living writing in English, so I guess I’m waiting for technology to save me. Samsung just announced that their new Galaxy S model phones will have, on-phone, live audio and text call translation, like closed captions.
The babel fish is coming.
What’s the state of TTRPGs in R.O.K.? Do you have much of a fanbase there?
They’ve become much more popular recently. A few years they crowdfunded a very successful Korean translation of 5E and since then it’s quite taken off - unlike Japan, they didn’t really see rpgs take off in the 80s, 90s.
That said, there’s also a big video game scene, so ... there’s some overlap for sure.
Not too much of an overlap yet, but I’ve been approached about a Korean translation of the UVG. That might well happen at some point, maybe next year?
Social Media
I’ve become very restrictive on the use of social media, and it’s only been upside as far as I can tell. But I’m sure I’m missing out on some self-promotion opportunities as a creator. What’s your current relationship with social media?
Hmm. You’re not wrong in being restrictive about it.
I found G+ very useful for finding “my people” in the OSR, with other folks keen to play and tinker and tweak roleplaying games. But G+ was quite specific - it encouraged users to share different types of content in different buckets (well, circles). In that it copied normal human interactions, where sharing a hobby didn’t mean you had to share political views, religious preferences, favorite brands, and on and on.
After G+ I spent a fair amount of time on Twitter, and it was frankly terrible for my brain. The sort of mental, defensive crouch you had to take on there, the posturing and “banter” to be cool and visible. In retrospect, the Elon helped me by turning it into Xitter. Now that I’ve left, I’ve got more time and a clearer head.
Weirdly, nowadays, Facebook with its groups is quite decent - find the right space, with decent moderation, and it’s not so different from the forums of old. Same for Reddit. As for instagram, it’s a complete slog building visibility, but I use it for sharing art and at least I don’t get hostile interactions there.
Overall, though I don’t use it regularly enough, it’s Patreon and my blog and my substack that feel the most pleasant way to interact. I can write out my thoughts in longer form and there are far fewer people who want to swoop in just to have a fight.
I’d also say, since the baby came around, my relationship with social media is a lot healthier because I just don’t have the time for it anymore!
Can you give us all your links so people know where to find your stuff?
Oooh. Gosh. Terribly messy. Most of my stuff is hiding around the internet under the handle “wizardthieffighter”.
The most regular place for my new stuff is my patreon: http://patreon.com/wizardthieffighter - patrons also get access to the stratometaship discord, which is where I do most of my online interactions these days.
Irregularly, I share fiction on my substack: http://lukarejec.substack.com/
Also irregularly, I blog about games on my blog: http://wizardthieffighter.com/
Regularly I share art and drawings on instagram: http://instagram.com/wizardthieffighter/
Quite surprisingly for me, the Facebook UVG group has grown quite big:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/uvgrasslands
My physical books are mostly available via Exalted Funeral:
https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/uvg-2e (as well as various FLGS etc.)
For PDFs, I’ve got storefronts on itch.io:
https://wizardthieffighter.itch.io/
... and DTRPG: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/14157/wtf-studio
Sorry for spamming you with so many links!
[Magitecnica is now available in print, as well as at DrivethruRPG and itch.io.]
One of the things I really like about Luka's work, in all its forms, is how there's a central sort of premise that lingers waaaaaaay in the background that his materials orbit around. Really great interview!