I finished a Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign recently, after ~15 sessions. We used Macchiato Monsters, which I chose because it's sort of a combination of Whitehack and Black Hack. I've been wanting to run UVG since I first heard about it, and I picked up the 2E book at my LGS when I saw it.

Originally, this was going to be a five-session game where my players travelled from the Violet City to the Black City, in hopes of wishes being granted and all of that. Five sessions was an... aggressive goal. Each session was only about 2 hours, and there was just no way we were meeting my goal. It worked out in the end, since we got to enjoy more of this weird and wonderful setting, which included recurring characters and all that jazz.

I did very little prep for each session, preferring to improv up whatever I rolled in encounters and discoveries. I did read a little ahead in the book, so I wasn't flying completely blind. This was also challenging. I shouldn't have been that surprised, since I've ran Witchburner, another of Rejec’s modules, before. These games just don't work very well as table resources. Unique to UVG was the fact that every other page had something, usually a word for a monster or an adjective, that I just didn't understand. The Limey Nomads became green sailors by the third session, for instance. Even reading ahead, there's just so many details to keep in mind and so many little things that don't seem very important, until you bring them into play. A discovery and an encounter might seem very different, until you mash them together and create a unique experience. Obviously, that's the entire point of what an anti-canon, the sort of design philosophy UVG follows, game is. Our campaign focused a lot on Ultras, who we encountered quite a few times, and trading. We also spent a lot of time on trading, in order to pay off the caravan debts accrued.

On the topic of trading, I think the travel procedures given in the book were crucial to giving the game at least a modicum of structure. Pick a destination, spend supplies, roll misfortunes, roll encounters, do some bookkeeping and roll some points of interest when the caravan reaches a mapped location. Repeat that again and again. It never gets old! So much of the game came from encounters rolled or engagement in the different actions possible at a resting location. My players were very interested in trading, and they basically spent a week in every location researching prices and buying trade goods. The week scale meant that there were some oddities due to the system we were using. Macchiato Monsters characters have a ton of options even early on, as they stack daily abilities and spells with each level. It is very hard to challenge characters who have so many resources with so few encounters between rests. It wasn't that much of a problem, as the group seemed to enjoy the romp aspects of our game and weren't too concerned with challenge, but a more skill-oriented group might not have had much fun with it.

Before I go into Macchiato Monsters, my overall opinions of UVG are very positive. I'd do some things differently, and probably plan for a much slower, faction oriented game, but there's just so much content here to enjoy.

Macchiato Monsters is... a bit too 'gimmicky' for my liking. There's not a whole lot of structure to it, unlike the game I was mostly comparing it to, Whitehack. This doesn't mean it's bad, but I think I need a little bit more out of a system.

Characters are interesting, and easily the best part. It's almost like Whitehack with multiclassing. Spells, extra attacks, and abilities are locked into "trainings", which are respectively magic, martial, and specialist: very similar to Whitehack's Wise, Strong, and Deft. You take these trainings at level 1, and you can take more at levels 4, 7, and 9. Basically everyone in my group was rocking two different trainings from the start; most of them taking both Magic and Specialist trainings. Macchiato Monsters also has traits, which are basically Whitehack's groups.

There are so many options here, and I like that. If you can almost make anything in Whitehack, you certainly can here.

Magic is similar to Whitehack, though with less guidance on spell costs. It's also a roll-to-cast system, meaning that you can fail to cast spells. You do have the option to roll on the chaos risk die, which means the spell might still work, with some consequences. I'm really not a fan of rolling to cast. There's nothing more deflating than having this awesome spell, negotiating out costs and figuring out what you want to do, and then the spell just doesn't happen. The fact that spells both cost an important resource, health, and also have a chance of failure is just odd. That being said, wording-based magic is still awesome, and my players came up with very creative spells. One player had magic duct tape, another had the ability to vomit different substances.

I think everything else suffers from either a lack of structure or a reliance on usage die. Usage dice, referred to as risk die, are EVERYWHERE. In armour, ammo, money, encounters, monster reactions, morale, spell mishaps, everywhere. I don't quite get applying it to the last 4 options in that list, though admittedly I never used them. I'm not the biggest usage die proponent, but I'm not terribly opposed to using it in place of tracking a static number. In armour, it's wildly swingy. We changed the numbers which cause the risk die to step down from 1,2, and 3 to the last 3 numbers on whatever die is rolled; for example, on a d8 the die would step down on 6, 7, and 8. This prevented the double whammy of getting a bad roll on something like armour, meaning you have bad damage reduction for that entire combat, and also having that die stepped down.

On the topic of combat, the game has a one-roll philosophy with no set initiative. If you succeed your roll, you do whatever action you declared. If you don't, you take however many attacks are coming your way. This is surprisingly hard to run at scale, when your players are all creative and thinking of novel ways of dealing with a situation. Because of UVG’s nature, a lot of combats weren't straight 'I hit you, you hit me' fights, and it's hard to adjudicate who gets attacked when characters are just not directly involved with the combat. My players also had high ability scores, which is a great boon in a roll-under system. About halfway through, we decided that if you were within range of combat, but not actively fighting, you would still get hit on a successful roll. It helped a little bit, but I would still have preferred a more traditional combat system. One highlight of this style, though, is that they use a neat hit dice system to reflect a monster’s combat skill. You have disadvantage when fighting a monster, or monsters, who collectively have more hit die than your level. You can level the playing field by having more characters join the melee. Because my players were all very wacky and very squishy, this was a common occurrence for our two fighter-y types. One of them had an 18 Strength, though, so it didn't mean all that much.

Overall, it's a fine little system that I wouldn't play again without massive changes. I would mostly keep the character creation and mechanics, which could serve very nicely for a very open-concept game.

That's about it for this post. My next retrospective/review will probably be on Esoteric Enterprises, which I'll be running next semester!