The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of depthcrawl mini-campaigns by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen. It would probably be more accurate to describe them as THE depthcrawl mini-campaigns, since the entire depthcrawl concept was invented by Allen for these books.
The Gardens of Ynn came first. A 79-page, PDF-only book with fairly crude productions values, but golden content. The Stygian Library was more or less the sameF, but a 2020 Kickstarter saw this book revamped with gorgeous gothic illustrations and a deluxe printed edition.
INTO THE GARDENS
One day you may find a strange door in a garden. It wasn’t there yesterday. It may not be there tomorrow. But today it looks as if it’s been there for a hundred years, and above it are written the words The Garden of Ynn by way of Whiteoak. Or Hobbiton. Or Waterdeep. Or Bywater-Under-the-Bay.
On the other side of the door is a different garden. A strange and feyish place of glass-roofed mausoleums, singing orchards, and frozen silk-gardens. Haunting these hedgerows are bonsai turtles, giant caterpillars, animated chessmen, and ferocious white apes. And if you choose to go exploring – to go deeper – there are stranger things to be found as the skein of the garden peels back: steam pipes and splicing vats and the vivisection theatre.
LOST IN THE LIBRARY
“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world.” The Stygian Library is that place between worlds towards which any building stacked high with books (or scrolls or tomes) is bent. Pass between the shelves, explore the chambers of learning, and you may find yourself passing to another realm where the rows of shelves continue without end.
Here there are chained books, silent printing presses, time-locked vaults, and spirit planetariums, all carefully attended by the five Orders of Librarians – Red, Yellow, Black, White, and Grey – who pursue a secret agenda that is somehow related to the spirit tubes and phantom pumps that seem to lace the library’s hidden ways.
Because the Library connects all great stores of knowledge across the multiverse, the answers to almost any question you might ask can be found here… and this is precisely what will lure many into its dusty halls.
WHAT IS A DEPTHCRAWL?
I’ve written up a detailed overview of depthcrawls, but here’s the quickie version: Depthcrawls are a method for procedurally generating an exploration scenario. Each keyed site is created by randomly combining three or four different elements:
- Location
- Detail
- Event
- Encounter
So, for example, in the Stygian Library you might generate:
- Reading Lounge
- Funeral Urns
- Footprints, Litter, Notes, & Other Signs of Passage
- 5 crawling things
These are not, it should be noted, simply enigmatic entries on a random table: Each element is supported by a meaty, play-oriented entry. And so, in this case, I know that the PCs find an assortment of funerary urns arranged around a comfortable room with richly upholstered couches and elegant coffee tables. From several of these urns, there are footprints leading away from them… and as I’ve generated “crawling things” as the encounter, it’s reasonable to intuit that these “foot” prints belong to crawling things which have somehow emerged from the ashes within the urns.
Or perhaps something completely different.
That’s the beautiful alchemy of the depthcrawl: In the process of bringing these disparate elements together (both with each other and with the current circumstances and continuity of the campaign), you – as the GM – will be performing a constant series of creative closures, making every journey into either the Garden of Ynn or the Stygian Library utterly unique. In practice, it very much feels as if you an Allen are engaged in a beautiful dance, your own creative impulses – and those of your players – swirling endlessly with the raw fodder of these setting/adventure books to summon forth something truly magical.
As the PCs journey deeper (into either Garden or Library), their current “depth” serves as a modifier on the random tables, slowly pushing the results towards both greater terrors and terrifying truths.
LIMINAL SPACES
The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are in some ways completely different from each other, but in many others are clearly cut from the same cloth. Indeed, one might say that they are superficially distinct, but unified by a common soul.
What they most essentially share in common is a fey-ish tone that I would describe as “a somber funhouse.”
Funhouse dungeons are designed like carnival rides: Whatever wild whims seize their GM are thrust together, usually with a wacky or comedic result. Ynn and the Library are built to similar effect, but their sense of the absurd is a deliberate invocation of an inhuman and alien environment beyond mortal ken; it hews true to the spirit of Alice in Wonderland, which seeks enlightenment in madness.
“Don’t look too close,” says the funhouse dungeon. “We’re just here to have fun!”
“Look very close,” says Ynn and the Library. “For what could be more fun than the absurdity of truth?”
WHO CAN VISIT THE GARDENS & LIBRARY?
The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are OSR products, designed for that vague smear of pre-1985 D&D and/or the many clones and near-clones of those games which have appeared over the last couple decades.
Personally, I ran The Gardens of Ynn for 5th Edition without any great deal of difficulty. The most troublesome bit are the monster stat blocks, but you can achieve a great deal with some simple re-skinning. Honestly, the adventures find such a unique vibe that any GM with moderate experience could probably easily use them in a wide variety of systems and settings with little difficulty: Numenera, Savage Worlds, Monsterhearts, etc.
QUIBBLES
The Gardens of Ynn and the original edition The Stygian Library both list their locations, details, and so forth in the order that they appear on the random tables. In my experience, this made it unnecessarily difficult to find the entries for stuff as I generated it. Someone appears to have figured this out, however, and the revised edition of The Stygian Library alphabetizes everything.
… that’s it for my quibbles.
CONCLUSION
Either or both of these books get my highest recommendation.
I’ve run The Gardens of Ynn several times, including with the Alexandrian Game Club, and it’s been a smashing success every time. I described it as a “beautiful alchemy” above, and that really is the experience of running it at the table. It’s been such a wonderful experience that I’m looking into the possibility of launching an open table with the campaign.
It’s not just the depthcrawl itself, which is a very nifty structure for procedural content generation. It’s Emmy Allen’s crystal-clear creative vision, which effortlessly flows from the page directly into your campaign with soul-searing pathos, innocent whimsy, and a delightfully surprising pulp steampunk.
If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, I’ve done a video on Twitch demonstrating a simulated run of what using the book looks like from the GM perspective.
Regardless, these are both books you should pick up as soon as your pocketbook allows!
GARDENS OF YNN
Style: 3
Substance: 5
Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: Dying Stylishly Games
Cost: $5 (PDF)
Page Count: 79
STYGIAN LIBRARY (Revised)
Style: 5
Substance: 5
Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: SoulMuppet Publishing
Cost: $30 (Physical) / $9 (PDF)
Page Count: 160
I just finished running an excursion into the Gardens of Ynn in a Wildemount 5e campaign. I loved exploring it – it was so surprising and flavorful. I’m definitely looking forward to dropping the library into a future game! Glad you gave these super fun supplements some signal boost.
I watched the Twitch video – it was a great showcase for the Gardens!
I find the depthcrawl idea interesting, but the random nature of the encounters, plus the fact that there is no ultimate goal (even once you reach the Ruins of Ynn, there’s nothing special there), left me feeling like… “that’s it?” There’s nothing to learn, nothing to find… just a few hours of interacting with whimsical nonsense. Not what I’m looking for in an adventure.
@ Tim:
I think that there is an implied step where the GM/DM takes the ideas generated and weaves them together into a narrative and insert things of their own design into depth crawl. Having an empty climax area which the GM can fill with whatever suits their story and players fits in with that idea.
@Tim: These are designed as sandboxes, so what will happen in practice is that the players will focus on something.
One of my groups, for example, got involved in a dynastic struggle between the chessmen.
Another became obsessed with the steam-pipes and tried to discover their ultimate origin.
There are also default goals in both: The Library explicitly so in the form of finding the answer to a question. (Making it quite easy to plug into almost any campaign where the PCs need to discover some bit of hidden lore.) Ynn somewhat more implicitly as the need to find a way of escaping the Gardens (which are set up to trap the PCs).
These look like they are right up my alley thematically (especially the Gardens of Ynn). I watched the Twitch stream and it’s an interesting method, although I wonder if all of the rolling and on-the-spot improvising could be quite cumbersome in actual play, especially if time is at a premium. Do you think these tables would be conducive to being used to construct a dungeon in advance, giving the GM more time to creatively improvise on the relationships between the various elements that come up for a location, and also to deepen connections between different locations, to create a more cohesive scenario? Obviously some things like the events that occur when you stay in a location would have to be rolled on the fly during gameplay but I’m not sure there’s any reason you couldn’t preroll the orchard with the lamppost, the chess lawn, the rose gardens, etc., with defined pathways between each. Kind of like prerolling a journey’s worth of random encounters for a hex crawl.
I think Tim’s comment is interesting and perhaps revealing. I could imagine lots of player groups coming to the end of a session of The Gardens of Ynn only to say, “Wait a minute, you were just making it up as you went along!” Which really isn’t any different from any other dungeon, but somehow the exploration feels more “real” or meaningful when we’re exploring a map that already exists a priori (even if the GM just sketched it out an hour before the game). So maybe disguising the random table-driven of the dungeon would assist in the suspension of disbelief.
@Jesse re: random nature and “you were just making it up as you went along!” – this is absolutely a concern for some players. Years ago we were between real campaigns and no one in our group had time to prepare something and get it up and running (this was in the heyday of 3E). For a few weeks we started an AD&D campaign using the random dungeon generation tables. Everyone rolled up a bunch of 1st level AD&D characters and started exploring this dungeon. It was kind of fun (at least, until everyone was wiped out by stirges) and we would draw connections between encounters. Like, “oh, that bandit that escaped from us early on must have warned his friends” because on a later expedition we encountered a big bunch of bandits, or head-canon-ing that the unattended treasure we found hidden in a fountain in a room must have belonged to those bandits we killed.
After a while, though, we lost interest. And there were several players who explicitly said that “knowing that the dungeon was random” was kind of killing the experience for them. There’s a desire to believe that there is a design behind things even when there isn’t, and when your nose is rubbed in the fact that it’s just dice determining what you find, that definitely turns some players off.
Just wanted to say thank you for introducing me to Emmy’s work. Thanks to your articles, I’m slowly building an understanding that different areas require different approaches, and I’m building out my campaign accordingly. So the unexplored wilderness of the main setting is a hexcrawl, the dwarven tunnels a pointcrawl, and now with depthcrawls, I have a way to model travel in other planes. Much respect to you and the other creators!
I got these books last year and was inspired to make a roguelike text adventure videogame out of the depth crawl system.
A big problem with making procedural text is describing how the space connects to other locations. It makes a lot of room ideas impossible or heavily contrived. If there’s only one way in and out you can relax and focus on writing a good story for the room.
A problem I had to solve – and recommendation for depth crawl writers is to mark entries you’ve visited on the random tables. If you roll them again then step to the next entry (or go to an upgraded version of that entry). For a videogame it was essential not to repeat rooms and keep the story fresh. But I think tabletop crawls would benefit as well – I was dispirited to roll the same room several times when running the library. Whilst a good GM can work with that, there’s an opportunity to add another dimension to the depth crawl, or keep it fresh at the least.
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