Oh, it’s from 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, where you can multi-class as a Wizard-Thief-Fighter. The multi-classing mechanics there were hilarious, and slow, and cumbersome, but they gave a chance to just adopt this funny character class - which also represents that I write and draw and design my own games.
An interview with Luka Rejec, creator of Ultraviolet Grasslands and other games. Latest in the RPG interviews. (quote from this question).
Chat with Luka Rejec, Creator of Ultraviolet Grasslands
Luka is the writer, artist and designer for Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City (UVG) and other games. The games can be found at WTF Studios. There's a solo actual play of UVG on this site.
We have how uvg came to be, creative challenges, longwinter, finishing golden age, and future work on single session games. Among other questions.
What was your gaming story before writing Ultraviolet Grasslands?
Whoah. That’s a big opening question and I’m not sure I can do it justice in a short answer. Still, let’s try.
I’d been playing roleplaying games for roughly 20 years and designing my own for about 15 years.
Probably 5 years before the Ultraviolet Grasslands I collaborated with Chris Kutalik on some modules for the Hill Cantons, supplying art and such. The Grasslands eventually grew out of my own campaign that I’d run for several years in Lausanne.
How did Ultraviolet Grasslands come to be?
It grew out of the shared world we built with my gaming group, the Golden Goats, in Lausanne.
I’d enjoyed dragooning in players to cocreate settings for years, and that formed the basis for the Circle Sea, the “civilized” centre of the setting, and the Ultraviolet Grasslands was my chance to go on a creative exploration of my own (together with my Patreon subscribers) to see what lay beyond the edge of that setting.
How has your Patreon fit in with your creative work?
Well, it’s frankly been crucial.
The support, financial and creative and emotional, of all my backers has made it possible for me to draw and write full-time. Without that, anything of this sort would have been far, far harder - if not impossible - to accomplish.
It’s been a long journey, but they’ve backed me this far and I hope to bring them more fun worlds and places to enjoy.
Where is the handle WizardThiefFighter from?
Oh, it’s from 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, where you can multi-class as a Wizard-Thief-Fighter.
The multi-classing mechanics there were hilarious, and slow, and cumbersome, but they gave a chance to just adopt this funny character class - which also represents that I write and draw and design my own games.
Convenient.
Oh, and the acronym is silly, which appealed to me at a certain point. Of course, it’s worn a bit thin over the years, but eh … it’s a bit memorable, so fine. Better than some of my other regular online handles from waybac!
How would you summarise Longwinter to someone curious about it?
Longwinter is a fantasy pointcrawl icebox set in an isolated barony, techno-socially set somewhere between a “French” and a “Russian” revolution, with a terrible threat mounting in the background.
For the referee, the game master, I’d add that it has a bit of an escape mechanic and a decent place to set various weird fantasy locations.
What have been the biggest challenges and highlights of creating games?
Challenges. Oh, so many challenges.
But probably the hardest part for me is the layout, the graphic design, information design, making sure it translates my ideas to the players and referee.
I feel like I continually fail in that and it’s incredibly exhausting. Also slow. It’s so slow. And painstaking. That is the biggest challenge, straining my eyes and hands and mind to make pixels behave.
The highlights definitely telling stories, illustrating them, and then hearing from people who’ve run the games and reinterpreted them in their own way.
If you could go on holiday in UVG for a week, where would you go?
A holiday to the UVG? That sounds like a terrible proposition!
But, ok, I’d go visit the Penglings, off the map, down by the Cyan Sea. They’re peaceful.
What are you favourite games to play (that aren't yours)?
I enjoy experiencing all kinds of games as a player, seeing other referee’s styles and other systems, though I have a preference for relatively simpler systems.
I’ve enjoyed various kinds of old school dungeon delves, had a lot of fun with GLOG games, mothership one shots.
I do like a game with game systems to it, where the resolution is somewhat randomized. For example, I enjoyed the premise of the Quiet Year a lot, but it didn’t have enough “game” to it for my taste.
I’m also a big fan of board games, especially board games that make me feel like I’m playing the role on another character or faction. That said, the last few years I’ve had far too little time to play other games!
Which has been your favourite art to make for you games?
The favorite to make is always the last one that works out nicely, where I experience flow as I make it, and that I don’t hate once I finish it.
I tend to judge my works pretty harshly, but that motivates me to keep making new ones.
In the sense of which do I like … I quite like the Castle of the Living Flesh in the Our Golden Age book. That one’s wild. And the cover piece of the Flying City, too.
Those look great. But probably my favorites are the ones that are very simple, clean, and still effective. One piece I titled Stargazer, I think that one came out superb.
What are your next big projects that you can talk about?
Right now I’m finishing Our Golden Age, the []quel to the UVG, which will bring the whole Vastlands trilogy to something of an end - three A4 books: guidebook, setting book for the Circle Sea + setting book for the Ultraviolet Grasslands.
A total of 600 illustrated, written, laid-out pages.
After that I actually want to not do big projects for a while. I haven’t decided exactly what I’ll do, but I’m doodling on the idea of making a series of one-shots, single-session games - largely set in the same setting, but we’ll see about that.
I just want to do smaller things that I can finish faster - and that I can play/run reasonably easily with the time constraints of small children in the house.
Where can people find you online?
The best place is probably at my patreon. I’m also on instagram, same handle, and on substack under @lukarejec or xenon elasmotherium if you search for it.
I recently ended my www.wizardthieffighter.com blog and am going to rebuild (some) of it on another host, but that’s a “working on it” thing for now.
Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
I guess I’d like to elaborate on what I want to find / explore with the single-session games.
I feel like there’s a continually under-served space between roleplaying games and board games, where you can have the roleplaying experience of being a character in a world - and perhaps even experience a continuity of story between sessions - that I’d like to explore more.
Certainly there are the Legacy-type board games, which are nice enough, and I’ve tried a few rounds of Oath - but I’m really curious to find more ways to tack into that space from the roleplaying side, so starting with the open-ness, the presence of the referee as arbiter of the world rather than an elaborate rule-book in the same place.
I might crash and burn trying to make games to fit that, but I hope not. And they feel like the kinds of games I should be able to run over the next, say, five years while also having my time a bit limited with, uh, being a Dad and all that.
I have this loose outline of where I’d like to end up with these projects and I’m hoping to announce a clearer initial outline on my Patreon within the next few weeks.
At least to start - as with all design projects, there’ll be iteration and revision as we go. But who knows … maybe it’ll work out? If it doesn’t, there will still be a lot of pretty one-shot locations and characters to use and reuse, so that’s great, working with a backup plan.
Finishing Up
If you haven't looked at Ultraviolet Grasslands, now's as good a time as any! There's an Intro to Ultraviolet Grasslands and solo actual play on Rand Roll.
There are many more articles on Rand Roll. Plus a Rand Roll Discord and instagram of Random Tables. I also create Generators at Chaos Gen and have a monthly random tools Newsletter.
