Running Ultraviolet Grasslands with Dungeon World - How and Why?

What is Ultraviolet Grasslands?

    In the author's own words:

The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City is a tabletop role-playing game book, half setting, half adventure, and half epic trip; inspired by psychedelic heavy metal, the Dying Earth genre, and classic Oregon Trail games. It leads a group of ‘heroes’ into the depths of a vast and mythic steppe filled with the detritus of time and space and fuzzy riffs.

    And that's really just scratching the surface. UVG is the brainchild of Luka Rejec, who both wrote and illustrated the entire thing. It is an epic science-fantasy pointcrawl adventure setting illustrated in a gorgeous art style reminiscent of Moebius. It is an absolute god-tier work of art. I've desperately wanted to run it since I learned about it.

Why run it in Dungeon World?

    UVG technically does have its own built-in system. It's an OSR-ish six stat system of the author's own devising.

    Respectfully, it seems a little half-baked. It feels as though the system in the book is intended more to give a recognizable framework to GMs who intend to run it with the system of their choosing. I saw an actual play where they played it with The Black Hack once. I believe Rejec has/is working on a more complete version of the rules on his Patreon or somewhere, but I can't be bothered.

    My group is familiar with Dungeon World, I like and am familiar with Dungeon World, I own tons of materials for it, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to adapt it.

How does one run it in Dungeon World?

The Easy Way

    Turns out, I'm not the first person to think of this. There is a hack for World of Dungeons called World of Ultraviolet Grasslands and a hack for Dungeon World called Ultraviolet World. If you want something in a complete package you can run right away, pick one of those.

The Slightly Harder Way

    I have been working on a hack of Dungeon World to adapt Ultraviolet Grasslands to my own tastes. My design goals were thus:

• Adapt the exploration and commercial mechanics of UVG as faithfully as possible for maximum compatibility.
• Minimal rule changes to the "core" of Dungeon World for player familiarity.
• Complete compatibility with existing Dungeon World playbooks and materials.

    The two hacks I posted above both kind of do their own thing. They were useful for inspiration, but that's not what I had in mind when I arrogantly boasted to my players that we could run UVG in Dungeon World.

    I put the modified rules on a few sheets to hand out to my players along with their basic moves, and I think this is sufficient adaptation for my purposes. I will post the details on subsequent posts.