The new edition is, like the shell of a superior Crab-Man fighter, thicker, harder and glossier. There is more content in it, as the initial Kickstarter page made clear - largely in the form of new appendices (including Weapons, Treasure Tables and Collectors of Rarities) and twelve mapped adventure sites. However, the bulk of the text is the same - Opium Plantations, Elephant Shrines, Psionic Gharials and all.
So, we turn to differences in presentation. An obvious distinction is the artwork. The watercolour-like wavering lines of Matthew Adams have been replaced by harder, somewhat pixellated artwork...by Matt Adams. This is consistently inconsistent, if you will. The artwork of Y-S1 didn't make the book: it was secondary to the table and materials inside in a way that isn't the case in a way that - say - wasn't true of something like a Warhammer Codex. I feel about the same way with the artwork of Y-S2. It doesn't get in the way, and nor should it: if each version of the Purple Land generated by a user is meant to be unique, then setting this in stone with definitive, intrusive artwork will rather get in the way of that. Generated is a curiously appropriate word. The illustrations make me think of something that a long-forgotten video game might have produced - and there are touches that make me think back to MS Paint as lovingly provided by Windows 98. There is one piece - towards the end of the chapter on the Hundred Kingdoms - that stands out in a bad way (not ugly, just out of place). None of it feels like it could exist in the Yellow City itself, which (curiously) helps maintain that degree of separation.
(Real Yellow-City art would have to be so much more vivid and densely detailed; a sort of Rococo characterised by abundant, even excessive, use of one or two materials - and almost certainly with some kind of patina or wear. Some of the interior maps approach this.)
Far better about setting the scene or establishing tone are the adventure sites at the end. These take on a number of forms - bounded or open-ended, above ground or as part of a dungeon - and are intended for different regions. Each seems to have a tantalising mix of the social and the violent, which makes excellent sense for Yoon-Suin's blend of cruelty and opulence. There's also some effort being made to make sure they all feel like different places, with a different set of physical challenges and distinct terrains. In several, the weather feels like it could prove as great a threat as anything else. The Mad Sorceress's Blessed Retreat hooks best in my mind.
What's also worth commenting on is the new form of the tables. In place of the curving sans-serif font and alternating grey-and-white tables rows is something sharper, somehow more vertical. It's not always as direct, to my eye - but the tables work in about the same fashion as before.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that I've picked up from dipping back into Yoon-Suin is how I find myself diverging from it. I certainly still admire it, and the structure and restraint it shows were very useful in conceiving some aspects of Punth. But I find that what I've worked on or written or conceived recently tends to have some strong central pillars of a culture or an intellectual system or something of that kind to be played with. This put me sort of at odds with Y-S2 on reading it. Where are the Slug-man lawmakers? The great philosophers and prophets? The conquerors and kingmakers? Even resisting the urge of great man theories of history, movements have figureheads and exemplars. Would I try to work the Purple Land's own home-grown amethyst Napoleon into full realisation? Perhaps not, but I might be tempted to build a pantheon or a set of dynasties or to build resemblances between groups in the interests of knitting all things together.
Of course, this bodes well for play. Can one group pull together the scattered threads of the Purple Land? Knit together magic and statecraft and courage to produce an enduring legacy? One might say that the Yellow City and the great God River have seen an thousand such before, and seen their every statue crumble. If so, then we will be the thousand and first, and none the more ashamed for it.
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