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From developers blog...
Preliminary - The Gardens of Ynn
I've gotten inspired and I'm writing up a module. Players explore a procedurally-generated ruined extradimensional garden.
Here's the basics of it, before I come up with the various random tables and entries.
Into the Gardens of Ynn
A module for old-school roleplaying games.
What are the Gardens of Ynn?
Ynn is a perpendicular world. Compare the concept of parallel worlds: from any place in the real world, you can cross over to an equivallent in the parallel world. Any place has it’s parallel version, just shifted slightly. A perpendicular world, meanwhile, exists at right-angles to reality. Crossing over at a certain point, the further one travels into the perpendicular world, the less like reality it becomes.
Of the dazzling variety of such worlds, Ynn is just one. It appears as a vast garden, now untended, overrun, and fallen into ruin. Once, this place was a realm of rarefied luxury, but its masters are long dead and the machinery that maintained it has fallen into disrepair.
How Do You Get to The Gardens of Ynn?
The process is simple to those in the know.
In any garden in any place* find a wall covered in ivy, vines, moss, or similar. Clear that vegetation away, and using chalk and charcoal draw a realistic door (with keyhole, hinges and doorknob) on the surface below. Write upon the door
“Ynn, by way of [the current location]”.
Leave, so the drawing is no longer visible, and on return the drawing will be replaced by a real door. When it is opened, the Gardens of Ynn will be on the other side. The doorway remains there for a full day, after which it fades away as if it never existed, leaving anybody still on the other side stranded.
*any place where there is a garden. In other worlds, if there are gardens, one can access Ynn. One could even escape Hell this way, if one could find a garden there.
How Do the Players Know This?
Roll on the table below. The source of their information only mentions a specific wall in a specific garden, but any one will do.
1. An old gardener tells them in a pub. One of his friends went through by mistake, and when he came back he was stark staring mad.
2. Somebody slips a pamphlet ('Ye Fabulouse Gardyn') into their pocket. It's proscribed by the state as the work of witches, but what if it works?
3. They find an old book ('Journeys in Ynn') in the marketplace. It is written by an old esotericist, detailing their journeys. The text is old and hard to translate.
4. Everybody in town is gossiping about Mad Hettie, who drew a doorway, went through to the world of the fairies, and never came back.
5. A PC inherits the possessions of a dead reletive; a small cottage in the countryside. In the pretty little garden, there is a suitable wall. On the bedside tables, there are instructions on how to get to 'The Other Garden' and a dire warning never to do so.
6. The city guard chased Black Alloicius, the wizard-thief, into the local park, where everybody saw him draw a doorway and then run through it. There's a bounty if you go through after him and bring him back.
How to Run the Adventure.
When the players first step through to Ynn, roll a d20 on table XX (locations) to see where their doorway leads. In addition, roll a d20 on table XX (details) for the specifics of the place, and on table XX (events) for anything that’s going on there. Name the place by rolling 3 d20s on table XX.
You will map out Ynn every time the players visit it.
Take a sheet of paper. In the centre, at the top, write in the location where the players entered. This is layer 0. Here, the players have 3 options. These are:
Stay Here
Go Deeper
Go Back.
When the player’s Stay Here, they remain in the same location. Every turn after the first, roll for Events.
Whenever the players Go Deeper, draw a line from their current location, leading down and write the location they find at the end.
Roll on table XX for the location; a d20 plus the layer they are now on. So, the first time they Go Deeper that takes them down to layer 1, so roll d20+1. If they go down again from there, that’s layer 2, so d20+2.
From a given location, the players can Go Deeper multiple times. Each time they do, draw a new line from the current location, branching off.
When the players Go Back, they travel back up the line, to the previous location on the previous layer. They can Stay Here there, Go Back Again, or Go Deeper again, either to a location they visited before or to a new location (roll it up).
So you end up with a pyramid of branching paths leading down to new areas. The more players explore, the more they open up.
Deeper layers are more dangerous; the further down the tables you go, the weirder and nastier stuff gets. Then again, the treasure down there is better, too.
Every time players visit the Gardens of Ynn, roll up a new starting location from scratch.
More from the developer (posted publicly)
More from Ynn - The Idea Of Thorns
(So Ynn is nearly finished. I'm writing up a few final tables and details, editing stuff, and fiddling with layout. But I'm most of the way there.
The big underlying threat of the setting is the Idea Of Thorns; a memetic virus that's responsible for the gardens being abandoned in the first place. You'll only encounter it very deep in the gardens, and before you do it's likely you'll encounter stuff that foreshadows it in minor ways. Potentially a LotFP-style campaign-warping disaster. Inspired by the Rapture in VotE, but taken in a different direction.)
The Idea Of Thorns is not a physical creature. It is, instead, somewhere between a disease, a hostile meme, and a spiritual presence. It is conscious. It wants to spread.
It does not need host minds to exist, but must find minds to infect if it wishes to affect the physical world. It will try to infect one mind, overtake it utterly, and then spread. It isolates, infects, subverts and controls.
When the Idea Of Thorns is first encountered, it will be as information. Writing scrawled on a wall, a little notebook with poetry in it, the sound of distant singing.
Anybody who refuses to look, covers their ears, etc, is not attacked by the Idea.
Those exposed to the Idea must save vs Magic. Any who fail have the first seeds of the Idea planted in their mind. At this stage, the only sign is that they see all plant life as having thorns. The thorns are real to them, and can cause damage.
Hearing somebody infected with the Idea talk about the Idea or their experience of it causes you to make a Save to avoid infection.
The Idea can compel an infected victim to take an action: roll a d20: if the result is equal to or higher than the victim’s Sense of Self (which equals charisma + constitution), the victim performs whatever action the Idea wishes.
The victim does not realise that the compulsion originated from outside their own mind.
The Idea will attempt to lower its victims’ sense of self by attacking the victim’s minds in the following situations:
à If a victim experiences an altered state of consciousness, such as drunkenness.
à If a victim sleeps.
à If a victim tries to work out an explanation for the Idea.
à If a victim tries to express the Idea or their experience of it to somebody not yet infected..
When one of these happens, all those nearby who are infected experience a sudden vision. They are faced with the Idea Of Thorns, incarnate as a towering being made of tangled vines, its form mimicking those whose minds are infected. It has all the moustache-twirling villainous bombast you can hope for. They must fight it. The fight lasts a single round and then ends. The next vision continues the fight where the last left off.
Treat the Idea Of Thorns as having the following stats:
à HD as the highest Intelligence out of those infected.
à 2 HP per HD.
à Armour Class is the highest Wisdom out of those infected.
à 3 Attacks with a bonus equal to the highest Charisma out of those infected.
à Saves as a fighter, level is the lowest Wisdom out of those infected.
à Immunity to mind-affecting effects. Immunity to poison. Double damage from fire and electricity.
The Idea does not attack hit-points, instead it attacks Sense of Self. Each successful hit halves the victim’s Sense of Self (round down).
As the victim’s sense of self falls, they will be prone to increasingly irrational behaviour.
If a victim has lost any sense of self, the Idea will make the following actions seem appropriate:
à Producing texts and artworks that express the Idea Of Thorns.
à Killing those that seek to oppose the Idea Of Thorns.
à Planting roses, briars, thistles and other thorny plants in places where they will flourish.
à Abandoning the trappings of civilisation and returning to a more feral state.
à Destroying buildings and replacing them with plants.
A victim who does one of these in a way that amuses, impresses or surprises the GM can, at the GM’s whim, earn an XP reward. The amount of XP granted is 50 multiplied by the total amount of Sense of Self they have lost.
If the victim’s sense of self reaches 0, they become an NPC, totally enslaved by the Idea.
If the Idea Of Thorns reaches the mortal world:
This is bad. It will spread exponentially quickly, rapidly taking hold among the common civilians who have comparatively little defence against it.
à After one day, several NPCs the players have spoken to are infected. They behave strangely, abandoning their normal lives. Hunting down and dealing with those infected to prevent the idea’s spread is reasonably practical. Minor surreal magic occurs; plants grown where they shouldn’t.
à After three days, a large amount of NPCs in the local settlement are infected. Graffiti expressing the idea springs up in public places. Arrests for crimes such as vandalism and arson spike massively. Hunting down those infected is still possible, if difficult. More surreal magic manifests, such as strange weather.
à After one week, the idea has spread to other settlements. Major powers in the world become aware of the problem. The settlement first infected is basically fully-infested by the Idea. Buildings are destroyed, plants begin growing over the ruins. The infected turn on one another. The only practical way to stop the infection is to burn it out with massive collateral damage. The dream-like effects on reality become pronounced. Plants move at night, animals behave weirdly.
à After three weeks, other local settlements are in an uproar. Major powers in the world send serious force to deal with the problem - armies, inquisitors and skilled mages. Pitched battles ensue. Brutal force or inventive tactics can still contain the infection, at great cost. The world becomes increasingly odd and dream-like magical effects manifest frequently.
à After a month, attempts to contain the Idea fail. Those infected run rampant. The world shifts and warps under the strange magic released. The infection cannot be contained.
à After three months, the world begins to resemble a slow, surreal zombie apocalypse. Plants grow everywhere, those infected who survive form gibbering packs, settlements are in ruins, the world follows dream-logic rather than the laws of science. Survivors cluster together in paranoid communites for support.
à After one year, survivors form xenophobic closed communities, cut off from the outside world. Outside these fortresses of sanity, the world is a plant-choked wasteland, as surreal as any extra-planar space.
à After three years, the communities of survivors begin reclaiming land from the Idea, slowly and carefully.
à After a decade, the Idea is pushed back and contained. The world becomes somewhat less surreal, although the lingering effects never truly leave. Society starts rebuilding, after the massive upheaval that was the idea. Sporadic outbreaks every few years threaten this stability.
This message was last edited by the GM at 01:56, Sun 30 Aug 2020.
