I am so deeply in love with Ultraviolet Grasslands. Luka Rejec wrote it and did all the art. It is put out by our friends at Exalted Funeral.

If I had to give you a one sentence pitch for UVG, it would be “like stepping into the cover art of Sleep’s classic album Dopesmoker.” This RPG’s got some riffs, y’all (not all heavy, either – there’s plenty of BÖC in here too).

In a nutshell, UVG is a road trip game, where players travel a surreal landscape in weathered caravans and strange machines. The book is a gazetteer of settlements, environments and strange locations arranged between the Violet City in the east and the mysterious Black City in the far west (what players will find there if they make it is, well, dangerously transcendent). There are also plenty of factions with their own strange wants and agendas populating the world as well.

Organizationally, there is a lot of similarity between this and Hot Springs Island, though UVG is not a powder keg set to explode. There are adventures to be had, sure, but they emerge from the interaction between the portrayal of the landscape and the decisions of the players, rather than a choreographed module-style structure. Like, you know, the sort of thing that happens when you travel – you see cool things, meet interesting people and sometimes something wild happens. There are dangers in the UVG to be sure, but the game I want to run with it is one focused on exploration and beholding wonders.

I mean, just look at Luka’s enigmatic landscapes. Don’t you want to just SEE them? Poke around them, figure out who made the structures and why? Breathe that purple air.

Anyway, UVG comes packed with a light, flexible and begging-to-be-modified rules system called SEACAT. I like it a lot. You can use your own preferred system though – the substance of UVG is rules agnostic. There are lots of random tables. So many, so full of intriguing possibilities.