Yoon-Suin Update

I feel as if it's about time for an update on the progress of my long-promised, long-suffering, long-postponed, long-awaited (by me, anyway) and very possibly long-forgotten campaign setting, Yoon-Suin.

The first draft is nearly finished. All I have left to do is fill in encounter tables. However, when I say "first draft", what I mean is, it's written in pencil on graph paper. I now have to begin the laborious process of typing the damn thing up.

Nonetheless, I feel relatively pleased with what's in there. I've had the intention for a long time of doing something which both pays tribute to the old TSR campaign settings of times past, but which avoids the primary pitfall of making things too detailed, too specific, and too focused on canon. The last thing I want is for people to do what I did with all my Planescape books and boxed sets, which was to spend ages gazing at them in awe and wonder, but to wonder about how to set about actually playing it. I set myself the task of coming up with a tool box to allow the reader to create his own Yoon-Suin, rather than play around with my Yoon-Suin.

(This has a poetic appeal to me too, since some tiny part of the inspiration for Yoon-Suin comes from the Viriconium books; M. John Harrison's philosophy, which was that Viriconium is the same place and yet fundamentally different in each story, gets reflected a little bit in the notion that no two DMs will have the same Yoon-Suin setting.)

And I think that's been achieved. Inside, you will find, amongst other things:

• How to create your own nasnas-populated, haunted city
• A way to randomly generate a generic ruin, which can be reskinned into an ancient dwarf fort or temple, a tumbledown palace in the Old Town in the Yellow City, a hidden jungle shrine complex, a mysterious stone circle in Lower Druk Yul, and more besides
• A random oligarchy generator
• Tables for creating your own varieties of tea, opium, and hunting worm
• A plethora of Yellow City-specific generators for tea shops, crab-fighting stables, cockroach tribes, crime families, archives, and guilds
• 20 sample hexes for each of the 4 main regions of Yoon-Suin, which can be arranged to taste or merely serve as inspiration for individual DMs
• A unique (I think) random encounter table, which creates geography of encounters and special "complications" as well as the encounter itself, lickety-split
• Ways to generate characters from any area of Yoon-Suin, from class to caste right down to name

That's not to mention a big fuck-off bestiary and treasure table, as well as lots of pretentious prose.

I don't anticipate imminent release, but the end is now in sight and I should be totally finished by the end of summer, fingers crossed.