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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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