+Dan D (throneofsalt.blogspot.com) mentioned Darkest Dungeons on G+ which gave me the idea of using the voice lines in the game as taglines for some of my favorite RPG books. I think it works quite well, actually.

"Curious is the trap maker's art. His efficacy unwitnessed by his own eyes."

"Nature herself… a victim to this spreading corruption – malformed with misintent."

“My obsession caused this great foulness, and it is shameful that I must rely upon you to set it right. Our family name once so well-regarded is now barely whispered aloud by decent folk. I can still see their angry faces as they stormed the manor. But I was dead before they found me, and the letter was on its way.”

"Towering. Fierce. Terrible. Nightmare made material."

"Alone in the woods or tunnels, survival is the same. Prepare, persist, and overcome."

"To fall for such a little thing – a bite of bread."

"How many rats will it take to gnaw through a ton of putrid flesh?"

"The cobwebs had been dusted; the pews set straight… the abbey calls to the faithful."

"Women and men, soldiers and outlaws, fools and corpses. All will find their way to us now the way is clear."

"Most will end up here, covered in a poisoned earth, awaiting merciful oblivion."

"Some experiments should have never happened. You are doing just work ending them."

"Secrets and wonders can be found in the most tenebrous corners of this place."

“Madness… our old friend."

"Ynn is a perpendicular world. Compare the concepts of parallel worlds: from any place in the real world, you can cross over to an equivalent 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."

Thus begins The Gardens of Ynn (available as a PDF from DriveThruRPG), devilishly creative pointcrawl written and designed by Emmy Allen. It clocks in at exactly 79 pages of gameable content set in and around a lush, overflowing garden on the edge of reality, one that's slowly being consumed by an intelligent thought-virus called the Idea of Thorns. If the above piques your interest, read on.

Because — as the namesake would imply — I only review things I like on Your RPG is Great, you the reader probably expect a certain, respectable level of praise and flattery. However, such a level would be grossly inappropriate, because The Gardens of Ynn is one of the best RPG products I've read in a very long time.

Where to begin, where to begin: I've read the file cover-to—well, there's no back cover, but it ends on a nice table — twice now, and every bit of it is superb. Like its older sibling A Red and Pleasant Land (from which it draws clear inspiration), Ynn exists as a place divorced from the real world; in fact, it is only accessible by performing a particular ritual to create a door out of a normal garden wall, a door that closes in 24 hours' time. In this way, Ynn is not beholden to the laws of your particular game world, or even the setting: I'd feel just as comfortable dropping this into my current Tomb of Annihilation game as I would Ravenloft, or hell, even Traveler. It's clearly written and statted with Lamentations of the Flame Princess in mind (although the writer states she tested it with a cobbled-together collection of systems and house rules), so anyone experienced with the system should be able to retrofit it to pretty much anything else they want to use.

Once you're inside the gardens, the real fun begins. Characters progress via an ingenious system of reaching a new location and choosing to either stay and investigate, return to a previous location, or push deeper into the unknown landscape. For each new location, several rolls are made to decide areas of interest, possible events, and likely encounters, with things getting weirder and deadlier the further you progress by way of a bonus added to the roll for each new area you explore. In this way, both high and low-lethality areas can be generated by the same table. It reminds me so much of old Wizardry and Ultima games (which were themselves inspired by D&D dungeoncrawls) and makes player mapping and progression an absolute breeze.

The locations themselves shine just as bright. Emmy Allen has managed to marry the sterile beauty of a Hayao Miyazaki backdrop to the weirdness of Wonderland in a way that never feels forced. PCs will encounter plant skeletons and giant frogs amidst vast fields of grass and babbling brooks. They will fight (or preferably, flee) from ethereal, feral sidhe inside a shattered greenhouse with sunlight glinting off of every pane. Ynn is terrifying, yes, but its terror is not the peal of thunder or encroaching shadows; it's primal, like the silence that indicates a predator is nearby or the glimmer of something strange in the tall grass. Your characters are not welcome in Ynn, and it will kill them just as readily as other, darker places; the only difference here is that they will die in a bed of soft flowers, with the sun shining down and a cool breeze blowing overhead.

As if it wasn't enough that we were given a thoroughly unique and interesting setting, The Gardens of Ynn also includes a new player class, to be used when replacing dead PCs. Because the PCs will never encounter other (living) adventurers here, new PCs assume the role of Ynn Changelings, souls that have been twisted by the gardens and as such command unique powers that allow them to subsist solely on foraged vegetation, grant them an increased chance to hide in tall foliage, and even survive rudimentary forms of death by temporarily becoming plants themselves. The overarching plot, The Idea of Thorns, is also given some weight, and includes a Death Frost Doom-style endgame scenario should the PCs unwittingly bring it back with them to the real world. It's cool, and I can easily see an entire campaign spinning off from just a few sessions spent in the Gardens, as the players try to control and quarantine the Idea before it spreads.

Regarding art and layout, this adventure is perfectly serviceable. The artwork, while mostly public domain, has a tight aesthetic fittingly reminiscent of woodcuts. I count 45 distinct pieces over 79 pages, so on the denser side, although the majority of them are quarter and spot illustrations meant to break up the text more than anything. The text itself is two-column, and most pages feature a simple but attractive border that further reinforces the theme of vines and stems. There are more than a few typos, but nothing that seriously impedes comprehension (at least that I could find).

A typical page. In particular, note how the art and layout play off each other.

All of this brings me to a realization: that this $3 module self-published using public domain art is better than 99% of the professional RPG stuff I've bought and consumed over the past 4 years. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in charm; what it lacks in production value, it compensates for with tremendous ease-of-use and density of ideas. It's long been said that more free RPG content is released in a year than a person could run in a lifetime, but what does that mean for the future of the hobby? What right do the big game companies have to charge $40 a book just to sell me the same tired plotlines and threadbare characterization that can be found in any bargain-bin fantasy novel?

Go and buy this right now, before Emmy realizes what she's done and jacks up the price. Hell, buy it after she jacks up the price: I bought it at $3, and I would buy it again at $30 just to know that my money was going towards making more things like it. Emmy Allen, Your RPG is Great.

Kickstarter-exclusive cover

On the Shoulders of Giants is the breakout supplement from 15-year old RPG wunderkind Chance Phillips. After a tremendously successful kickstarter campaign (1337% funded), OSG was released to the world in full-color pdf and print-on-demand, which I am happy to say is fully worth your money.

OSG is a difficult book to summarize, because it manages to cram a lot of content into its slender bindings. I would dare say that not since Vornheim has so much been said in so few pages, which is all the more impressive for the sheer amount of art that designer Glenn Seal has managed to cram in. Within this module are 18 unique pieces by the eminent Scrap Princess, ranging from the macabre:

Dinner time in the tunnels.

to the strangely beautiful:

This deserves to be framed.

to the nightmarish:


"I AM NATURES CRUELEST MISTAKE"

If the pictures above haven't given you an idea of what this is all about, let's start again from the beginning. OSG posits a world wherein the Greek pantheon — Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysius — have waged war upon each other, to their mutual destruction. From their godly carcasses were born maggots, and from the maggots Men, each inheriting an aspect of the god they live in and feast on. It's all very Lamentations in that dark fantasy/grindhouse way, so fans of other such works (Fire on the Velvet Horizon, Veins of the Earth, and Carcosa come to mind) will find quite a lot to love here.

So far as interacting with the world, the book offers four new character classes (the Conspirator, the Corpse Worker, the Prize Fighter, and the Witchdoctor), who — for the most part — play surprisingly different from both each other and the existing LotFP classes. Conspirators are your conmen, your masterminds, your big-picture guys and gals always three steps ahead of their opponents. Prize Fighters are your glass cannons, strong but fragile; that makes Corpse Workers your tanks, hardy but lacking punch. The real cream of the crop here is the Witchdoctor, which uses a new system of magic titled "Experiments," allowing them to perform terrible atrocities for the sake of power. The interesting thing here is that experiments require materials, and that nearly all of the experiments must be performed before combat begins (preferably before you begin your expedition!): of the thirteen experiments detailed here, only two can be performed in a single round, and of those one must be prepped beforehand.

This necessary foresight lends a deliberate and cautious tone to adventures. It is entirely possible to plan several expeditions for the sole purpose of obtaining the materials needed to perform the necessary experiment to proceed further. In a video game this would be meaningless grind; here it's progress through gritty resolve.

The next two chapter revolve around equipment (mostly maggot-based) and monsters, each distinct and unique to the setting. Once again, fans of VotE and FotVH (god these acronyms) will be pleased with the offerings. Of the three pictures above, the second illustrates the Sky Squid, a living, fungoid transportation device. The third illustrates the Maggot. I hate it. I hate its face, I hate its tiny arms, I hate that they function as infants in this world. If the word "hate" was engraved on every nano— ah, ignore that.

The penultimate chapter is devoted to an adventure outline, "The Gray Pools." This lays the groundwork for a campaign based around finding and exploring the titular pools, areas of intense magic activity that warp and distort anything that enters them. It also introduces that most beloved and maligned RPG mechanic of all: psionics. While not my thing personally, I must say the system here is one of the more elegant I've seen. I'll need to run it in order to see how it plays at-the-table. The book ends with a brief Appendix N (I'm a fan), and the hope that I can find time to run this with friends.

Though it is slightly against my intent for Your RPG is Great, I do have two small gripes with OSG. One is the file size: even the printer-friendly file weighs in at 33 MB, and the regular file clocks in at a hefty 113 MB. That is nearly 3 times the size of VotE for a document 1/6 the length, and it might be frustrating for those like me who generally keep their RPG collection on the cloud to have to download it every time. The only other complaint I have is that some of the writing comes off as stilted. The talent is clearly there, it simply lacks the polish that invariably comes with experience and a keen eye for flow. As I said, minor gripes.

I would be happy to see an expansion to On the Shoulders of Giants. What it has laid the groundwork for is impressive, and where it has striven to distance itself from other, similar products — the classes, monsters, bloody psionics — it has shown great promise. Get yourself a new editor and someone who knows how to optimize pdfs (my door is always open) and you've got a great career ahead of you, Chance, because Your RPG is Great.