AAR: Zoa of the Vastlands

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.

Emmett & Joshua are seeking ancient truth in the scrolls of the Lime Nomads, in a pink Routemaster autogolem. Joshua wants to cross the Final Barrier and be able to raise the dead. While they’re doing that, they’re also making some money being a tour-guide for Spiral 8-body.

We left the party around a campfire, having tried to defuse an encounter with some pointy horses. But now it’s time for something Completely Different¹…

The UVG game we’re playing is written by Luka Rejec, and another of his projects is called Zoa of the Vastlands². It is a zine for expeditions, safaris, and research trips looking at the flora and fauna of the UVG world. This emphasises one of Luka’s ideas in UVG, which is that the party can gain XP from seeing new animals and new places, as well as the traditional options. One of its ideas is to have the party sit around a campfire, discussing what they saw that day.

So, that’s what happened.

We spent some time first going through in more detail the setting up of the camp and the view of the sunset and the night sky over the steppes. Then described some things the party had seen. This doesn’t require a GM, it’s pure co-operative story-telling, so I took the role of Spiral, the NPC.

Tools

Just the Zoa booklet as mentioned. We ran this slightly differently than RAW - the original concept is:

1. First person describes seeing an animal and why it is odd
2. Second person comes up with an opposing theory as to why
3. Third person “presents a synthesis, suggesting that the creature is something else altogether, thus explaining its odd behaviour in a different way”

I changed this to a more madlibs-style:

1. First person describes some kind of animal/plant
2. Second person adds detail (prompted by the previous person - e.g. “how big is it?”)
3. Third person does the same

Most of the booklet is tables, and we used those to select the sizes, senses, behaviours etc. The former method felt like it required too much thinking on a weekday night!

Flora and fauna

The first creature discussed was a golem that was clearly well-adapted for cold temperatures. Three of them stood in a frost-rimed pond, where the liquid rippled in the wrong direction to the wind. Two stood bipedal, but one was on all fours, like a dog.

Joshua thought they were scouts, engineered by someone else, who then forgot them and left them here. Emmett thinks the golems used to walk the land but have been attacked by nanovomes, which has anchored them to this pool. Spiral thinks they’re having a nice bath.

The second was a giant mushroom. It has a massive flat cup with a fruiting body. Being downwind of its spores gives an effect more severe than telepathy, the group’s thoughts start to bleed together in a truly disturbing experience (although Spiral is unfazed). It looks like the spores are eaten by insects, which are then easily eaten by birds.

The final subject was a set of undead frogs. They were grey with blue glowing eyes, and smelled like dry bones. Emmett thought they ate ghosts. Their effect on living animals though was that their touch paralyzed them for up to an hour. The frogs slowly hopped in a line across the landscape, destination unknown.

Lessons learned

The intent was for an extremely chill³ session. We were about to be skipping over a month’s worth of sessions due to holidays and other events.

This game might have been easier to play in person maybe? Discord’s audio technology is excellent, but when you’re starting to come up with truly weird/non-sequitur biological concepts there’s a lot of “I’m sorry, what?” and “Pardon?” or “Did you say …?”.

It’s a light bit of fun, I feel (especially the way we did it, obviously) it’s alright for an hour or so. Much like any collaborative storytelling (e.g. The Quiet Year) you hear your ideas get pulled apart by others. Unlike TQY, there’s no story-building from this as you play. It’s just some fun creatures I can use later for world-building if I want.