Return to Yoon-Suin

As you are probably more than aware, there's a second edition of Yoon-Suin in the works. This is going to contain the original text - cleared up and corrected, along with several 'fully-mapped adventure sites'.

There's many a review of the first edition out there already - I won't try and do that again. But it strikes me as worth putting down some notes on the first edition (hereafter Y-S1) as a book, an object.

Dimensions first. Y-S1 was (infamously?) landscape and of very different proportions to other RPG books - see the photographs below.

Y-S1 compared with normal paperback in contrasting colours.

This gave it plenty of room to show off tables. The main thing you read in Y-S1 is tables, scanning across an entry on teahouses in the Yellow City or river tribes to determine quite what makes the House of the Rosy Half-Hour or the Mauvewater tribe unique, what assets and personality they have. 

The only book I really have of a comparable size.

In some ways, one would almost like the Journal of Laxmi Gupta Dahl to be a separate item - a pamphlet you could give players, or peruse separately. Reading this cover-to-cover is arguably a mistake. Y-S1's bestiary should be read with a particular region's chapter. 

Those regions themselves go out from the Yellow City at the delta of the God River. Mentally, between the Hundred Kingdoms* and the Yellow City, there are the haunted, claustrophobic jungles of Lamarkh and Lahag - as if in order to go from Byzantium to the Italian city-states you had to pass through Aguirre, the Wrath of God. (I know that doesn't makes much sense. I can only imagine that as you travel, you listen to this.) It's a strange contrast - the utterly untamed next to the height of (slug-man) civilisation. However, returning to the contents one sees that the Chapter on the Hundred Kingdoms follows that on the Yellow City and the Topaz Isles. 

Away from Lahag, then, on up to the Mountains of the Moon - to the tea and opium plantations. Again, we see the tables shine here, laying out the variety of commodities that drift down to the city. As that atlas of the Soviet Union above makes clear, there's a great many crops and foodstuffs that a society needs - the strategy-game streamlining of food-wood-metal never quite tells you enough. The eye dances across columns showing what this particular temple could be - and you weigh the possibilities of the options - the NPC options that would obviously compete, the rumours that they might spout, the bizarre options that may or may not fit the tone you want.

Further contrasts.

It is not for me to tell you how to hold a book while you read it - but I cannot really picture spread Y-S1 flat on the desk. The book needs to be cradled, the heaviest part resting on the inside of your forearm. It is not heavy, but its dimensions do give it a slight propensity to flop. 

Illustrations are by Matthew Adams. They generally fit the tone, but - perhaps down to the greyscale, perhaps due to the mental weight of the tables - makes relatively little impact. They punctuate the text, and (quite suitably) don't try and set the image of Yoon-Suin in stone. 

Fonts are generally quite plain - with the exception of some titles, set in something a little fancier and twining. This focuses the mind on the exoticism and wonder of the Purple Land before getting down to brass tacks. 

There is no particular conclusion to all this, of course. You will struggle to find a copy of Y-S1 anytime soon. But here's a little record of the first edition before we see what new things await us in the second.

 

*Realised in the course of writing this that Para Bellum Games named a faction in Conquest this. No especial resemblance to Y-S1, of course. The evocative name is not a hard one to conceive.