Wine River III: The Grey Glow

 They take the road South towards the Jade Baobab past delicate towers rising above a devastated morass of ruins overgrown with slimes and molds. When they make camp for the night a great screen of flickering motes appear on the shore between minimalist ruins. From the glow figures appear phasing in and out of existence resuming their lives from a Long Ago. Hamish, Azure and Kozue decide to pass through the portal while holding hands. Nevertheless a different fate waits for them: While they all pass through the glow to emerge between the buildings they had seen before - now less ruinous - Kozue and Hamish merely flicker while Hamish is lost in phase space, a ghostly echo of him remaining, unable to speak or interact with his environment. 

Among the numerous doors leading to underground shelters one in particular draws Azure's interest indicating the presence of Vile parts. Before they can investigate they hear a nauseating hum coming from a badly vome infected human. Azure delivers them from their pains with a shot to the head. Within its broken body the witch finds the code to open the vault door. Deep inside the shelter they come upon shelves with ceramic tins of biomorphic protein and a boiler room with a Vile lung inside a leaden container.

They pass through the gate again: This time Kozue's fetch is wrapped around Hamish to bind him to the mundane world ... but to no avail: The Folk hero remains a ghost of his former self. On the shore Kozue places items signifying the mundane world, phase space, sun and moon and swings a pendulum between them. When the pendulum circles the mundane world and the sun Kozue concludes that Hamish will be fine. Azure is not convinced, though, and performs her own ritual. She sees Hamish fully restored alone on his black metal motorcycle driving into the sun set. All of a sudden her vision changes and she sees calcinated tendrils snapping one by one and a giant floating island unmooring itself.

The next morning when Azure and Kozue awake they are back in their solid form. They continue their journey South, crossing the rusty bridge, carefully walking next to the autowagon while rat mechs eye them cautiously. Hamish, still in his ghostly body spots a giant porcelain walker peeking out from behind a hill. He finds a camp guarded by two porcelain princes and immediately decides to steal their ride - as soon as he is restored!

The caravan continues to the Jade Baobab in front of which a barge floats above ground guarded by uniformed Rainbowlanders. When they enter the village they are greeted by Brother Of the Second Hand in discussion with a Greenlander lawyer. The brother has temporarily taken over from the leadership as Sister Mercy-is-Weakness is on a pilgrimage to the Three Sticks and Father Time-hath-no-purpose has fallen ill. Seniore Formatore, the Cogflower lawyer, inquires about the Greenlanders the heroes have arrived with. Azure, whose suspicion is awaken, reads the lawyers mind:"The Prophet has handed me a business opportunity. I will sell these fools to the princes!"

Actual Play: https://youtu.be/-M-JBG-8PCA

Wine River II: Cholan Woods

After leaving the vome nest they load the survivors into one of the solid wagons, attach it to the Redlander truck and decide to check out the campfires to the North. They find a camp of nomads dressed in pine needle garments and canvas masks. The nomads invite them in and agree to help the party in crossing the river. Saloc, the elder of the clan, offers to break burned Mandelbrot-flatbread with them – a powerful psychedelic drug. While Naida nibbles on it and gets a pleasant buzz, Hamish naturally takes the whole portion and his reality dissolves into endlessly branching fractal patterns. Azure and Kozue approach the shaman of the Pine Nut clan, his face hidden behind a frightening and improbably tall tree bark mask covered in moss and red paint. Colpec warns Azure of the dangers of collecting vile organs and Kozue of spending too much time in the Cholan Woods, where nightmares roam at night.

The next day is spent crossing the river with ropes, poles and makeshift pontoon bridges, Naida unsuccessfully tries to recruit one of the nomads for the Legion and Azure performs another augury looking for dangers ahead. But her vision of a rusty bridge is soon disturbed by a strange blue glowing figure with three appendices and the red glowing eye atop a multi-colored pyramid she had dreamt of at the Behemoth Shell announcing that they are coming for her.

After an uneventful night they send the Redlander autowagon ahead and ascend the path to the Cholan Woods in order to look for omens of the world’s end. The plateau is sparsely forested by pine trees – many of them dripping with viscous slime - and covered with skin sacks the size of houses. Between them float gaseous jellyfish. Kozue sends her fetch to look for apocalyptic signs and spots a place where the trees had fallen as if hit by an explosion. When they finally arrive there, Kozue realizes to her disappointment that the fragments of star metal that could have had a hidden meaning were partly removed. They spend the rest of the day collecting the fragments. After sunset the nightmares emerge from the toxic goo hanging from the trees. Kozue marks all of them with a ward that enables them to face their worst nightmares with some protection and they flee the Cholan Woods.

Azure has a vision of the blue god rejecting her offering at the Black City and decides to kick off the Golden Amber for good. After a painful ceremony conducted by the Moon Witch, the Greenlanders who carry Azure's unconscious body to the wagon avert they eyes from Kozue.

Actual Play: https://youtu.be/IDxnacCRisU

Wine River I: Inside the Vome Nest

Characters:

Naida: A Yellowlander Climate Refugee and Scope (member of the Legion of the Far Sight). The Legion is a semi-secret society that tries to fight crime on the roads of the Grasslands and around the Circular Sea. She is accompanied by Ajax, a grumpy exiled Cat Lord with a serpent tail and Otis, the animatronic bear. Sometimes visited by Laila, a ghost.

Azure Dee: A Blue God Cultist on her journey to the Black City where she is supposed to bring the apocalypse by sacrificing Vile organs. The Vile are a species of (demonic?) rulers from the Long Long Ago. She is accompanied by Cataract, a Wire-and-bone biomechanical salamander. She has undergone mutation after being exposed to a vome infection that made her muscles grow uncontrollably. The mutation has slowed down after a week of therapy sessions in the solarium of the Pylon Kraal. Addicted to Golden Amber.

Hamish Mac Rainbow: A Redland District Folk Hero with a black motorbike and rainbow-colored beard. Wielder of the Fractal Blade. Slayer of  a maddened Ka-Elemental. His heroic reputation vastly exceeds his actual deeds but he's working on living up to the legend.

Kozue: An Elven Moon Mountain Witch, a soothsayer from the Sister of the Near Moon. Her singing spirit (appearing as a wingless, serpentine creature to those who can see it) in a pink bottle aids her in her auguries.

Inside the Vome nest Naida, Hamish and Azure kill the acid spitting vomes while Kozue sends her fetch to establish a connection with the vomeish autofac. She realizes that the machine is experiencing fear but not of the heroes but some other faction within the vome community. Kozue senses an opportunity to establish the heroes as allies and deepens the connection. 

It appears that the autofac comes from the void or the Outer Dark as the Sisters of the Near Moon refer to it. Its purpose is to grow and harvest biofuel and it has captured the Greenlanders to add them to its resources. Deep in her trance Kozue doesn't hear the explosion coming from the East. While Naida and Hamish investigate the origin of the sound Azure stays behind to keep an eye on Kozue. Naida and Hamish find a cavern with rail tracks leading into a tunnel, concrete barriers that feel like cold meat to the touch and the dead bodies of three giant white crab vomes. Naida pokes at a smoking pile of scrap metal and concludes that it is a spidery kamikaze vome. She also finds some dead mushrooms and harvests them while Hamish cuts the shell of one of the crab vomes. Kozue learns that the Greenlanders are held prisoner in the mines and when the party reunites they head back North. 

Azure immediately recognizes the place from her vision: A dark room with pools and Spitters sitting inside. Kozue greets them and to her surprise the vomes bow and let them pass. In the mines they find the traumatized Greenlanders who had made part of the caves their home, surviving on pink goo. The leader of the group, a haggard looking woman, approaches them and whispers her thanks when she hears that they had come to rescue them. They lead them out of the nest leaving three of the travellers who had become obsessed with the goo behind. 

Actual Play: https://youtu.be/rnU7sVuSA0I

UVG after 25 sessions: Example of Prep

Running UVG out of the book with no prep whatsoever can be extremely fun. As the referee you can discover locations together with the group, give yourself over to the randomness of encounters, read the entries as boxed text and prompt the players for additional details. One of my favorite location in the ongoing campaign was the Gemstone Tomb in the Lake of Oil, a random discovery at the Spectrum Run. I assigned numbers to the possible discoveries as they show up in the book and when the PCs scouted the area they rolled a 2 (Satrap Outpost) and a 3 (The Tomb) on a d4. I had skimmed the dungeon beforehand but didn't take any notes and improvised the whole thing. 

Gemstone Tomb in the Lake of Oil

You can also take a low prep approach, read likely locations and discoveries beforehand and / or pick the ones you find the most fun, as David Schirduan showcased in his auditory review of UVG.

And finally you can take a location you expect the players to be interested in and use the outline given in the book as an inspiration for a fleshed out place. At the Behemoth Shell the players found the Ideal Island through augury and the Lurid Pines by climbing the Shell and scanning the area. The players were weary of the mysterious eye atop the pyramid on the floating island so they decided to explore the Pines. I had a week to prep the location.

The Lurid Pines

I wanted a small dungeon with several entrances, branching or looping paths, random encounters, someone to talk to and a risk reward structure for loot.

Here is the description of the Lurid Pines by Luka: 

In the narrow defiles of a nondescript mountain ornate and buxom pines have grown fat on the biomantic pollution left behind by a magical test site. The surface has been thoroughly looted, but in the caverns below, amid ancient biomantic gear (€10,000, 40 sacks), generation after generation of mutated rodents has come and gone ...

...followed by a d6 table of different inhabitants of the dungeon: Sessile photosynthesizing rodents, ornately baroque rats, tinker gerbils, hardy and grim hamsters (grown cannibalistic and vicious in tunnels beneath the pines), an eloquent mole rat hive and a vomish autofac which pumps out cybernetic enhancements to create higher life-form prairie dogs. I rolled the HP randomly and got a 22 for the cannibal hamsters: Ouch!

Terrifying Rodents

There are three entrances to the first level: The main entrance through a vault door, a cannibal hamster tunnel and a service tunnel to the autofac - which I imagined was buried after centuries of immobility. There are two ways to get to the next level: A staircase to the ballroom of the ornately baroque rats and the hamster tunnel. The autofac and the cybernetic prairie dogs would provide a way to communicate and the cannibal hamsters and the ka-zombies served as a threat that made looting the crates of biomantic gear a trade off between risk and reward.

In the ballroom there is an opportunity for conversation (although the rats would never pass a turing test), the organ is slightly problematic loot (as it is fragile and heavy) and the proximity to the hamster nest in level 3 means constant danger. The magical testing site has some toys to play with, hazards and a major price to win: The Fractal Blade.

All in all the players spent five nail biting sessions in a handful of rooms. They never made it to level 3: After blowing up the force field around the Fractal Blade with the overdrive machine and being constantly harassed by the hamsters they decided to leave the place and never looked back.

Actual Play:     Session 1 https://youtu.be/jqlVGNuYNEI

                        Session 2 https://youtu.be/TiFjLBCrWH4

                        Session 3 https://youtu.be/M1Tkmop7pYA

                        Session 4 https://youtu.be/XhYiO1NQPZ8

                        Session 5 https://youtu.be/f6hZdDgKZYM

Gall Grass II

They travel East, leaving the majestic towers of Three Sticks behind until they reach the shores of a strikingly blue river. The wild water swirls around three huge, slightly fake looking boulders with the faces of sages carved into them. As the sun disappears a radiation ghost manifests  and sings a sad song in Old Steppe. Ostens who understands the language is unimpressed. They spot a makeshift dam made from lodged steel pines but it appears to be too difficult to traverse. Beyond the dam the river is less wild but still too deep to cross. Moving North they come upon large whale shaped structures with green patina. Saffron detects a strange time distortion emanating from the hulls that gets stronger the closer they get and which affects their positronic brain until it is completely overpowered. Naida finds a ford across the river and they slowly make their way through the muddy water. After a nights rest they continue travelling through marshland dotted with groping willows and half phantom birches.

Copper Hulls

Finally they arrive at the Garnet Ford, where they expect to find the Greenlander Caravan. There is a campfire nearby and indeed beyond a causeway of cinnamon stones on the burgundy gravel alongside the Wine River they see wagons belonging to the Cogflower Church. While Azure performs an augury and under the watchful eyes of the Legionnaires, Hamish and Saffron search the wagons and the beach. The wagons are picked clean but they find a wide concrete tunnel leading underground and a steel pipe sticking out of the water.

In her vision Azure sees a cavern with pools of water and strange figures with long limbs and elongated heads sitting motionless inside on them. She hears a clinking sound and out of the dark a girl appears adorned with the metal beads and coins of a Cogflower devotee. She puts her finger to her mouth and shushes before the vision fades.

Vomeish Caverns

When they enter the tunnel Azure recognizes the luminescent moss growing on the walls. They reach a cavern with many large silver vats out of which fleshy cables grow that lead East. Saffron finds a straw doll and spots the shell of a large crab-like figure leaning against a vat. They come upon several tunnels and a staircase but follow drag marks South. In another cavern they sense movement and identify a humanoid vome with just the barest of facial  features and large glands growing out of their jawline. When Hamish approaches the vome it produces the whirring and beeping sound of a dial up modem and sprays him with acid from its glands. Hamish burns the acid with a swift movement of his Fractal Blade.

Outside Otis the animatronic bear guards the Redlander Autowagon. On the flatbed something stirs.

Somewhere in the Grasslands: Inside a pyramid. A figure clad in black metal with sharp angles and a glowing red eye. A hologram of the Redlander autowagon. The vile organs in their leaden sarcophagi slowly move.

Actual Play: https://youtu.be/AmRZh7st7fQ