Latenite Thoughts on Ynn

So Castle Nowhere has had 8 sessions so far. Most sessions have been The Gardens of Ynn material, but I've been running it all adapted to my setting so here's a quick rundown to keep in mind.

1. The gardens are not extraplanar, but the accursed grounds of a decadent noble's estate that time-loop and shuffle every 3 days. This means that they are both perhaps more open to simply 'skipping' points of interest and delving deep immediately, and have a more permeable barrier between the Gardens and the 'outside world.' They are the liminal zone of the megadungeon of the campaign, and as such are being heavily delved into, almost every single session, rather than occasionally visited between other things.
2. The place has no day-night cycle, only the eternal leering light of a Moon. 
3. The random encounter tables have also been heavily mixed up, the main change being that it is jam packed full of time-trapped servants who have grown surly and revolutionary, and nobles who have grown decadent and bizarre after 30 years of being trapped in a 3 day time loop. The place is more human and less monstrous(but, as we all know, man iz de real monshta)
4. Due to said time loop, routes through the place are not necessarily immediately reshuffled, but typically are, between sessions. Points of interest can be found again, if the players have a plan- random wandering has like a 1/400 chance of finding somewhere again.

So bear in mind that my thoughts are derived not wholly from the original Ynn, but from the Ynn as rewoven by me

yeah there's like a web of towers that are a different dungeon and it's in the moonlands so my Ynn is not the Ynn and it won't
be your Ynn

THE INTRODUCTION AND INITIAL MECHANICAL RUNDOWN
I think it’s easy for games to push in darker directions, and to match the unpredictable lethality of old-school games with a particular grim and gritty aesthetic. I wanted to move away from that, into something that, while not blandly pleasant, had a lightness of tone to it. A setting where sunshine is the de-fault weather. -Emmy Allen

 Hear hear, hear hear. I slide into the grim and grit myself constantly, sometimes in response to the players being murderhobos, sometimes simply because I suckle too greedily from the teat of nightmare, so I think this is a good sentiment to bear in mind. As an aside, this post is great and relevant to this notion. Anyway. Other points made in the intro is that the author thinks its not deep enough to be the focus of an entire campaign, but is good to bolt on to other campaigns as a side dungeon. I agree there, even though I went about it weirdly. With the 'canon' methods of entering Ynn, the place is very easy to visit.

Also noted is that it's probably a bit lethal for level 1 players, and not supportive of level 9ish players, with 3-5 being the sweet spot. So far my level 1 hobo squads have been just fine, but I did swap out a lot of 'beast' encounters for humans (though really, shouldn't you be able to talk to beasts in romantic fantasy?) so that may have reduced lethality. And I have a lot of fairly savvy osr players. And I use the BFRPG reaction tables rather than strictly adhering to the 'events' that may indicate hostility of encounters.
BUT THAT ASIDE, I would say, 's not THAT lethal... assuming the players are in the mindset of 'you don't gotta fight the monsters' and aren't straight outta Skyrim and Adventure League and of the belief that they are invincible fated badasses sure to defeat all level-appropriate obstacles. Anywho.

Rumors are lovely, but I didn't use 'em due to the setting being different. I have a bit of a similar 'time limit' for exploration as default Ynn, but the players are too low level for that to be too much of an issue at the moment. My version is also less likely to get players 'stuck' in Ynn but I like the idea. I do think the day/night encounters could have been significantly different rather than just a few changes, but I can't talk much cuz I jammed them together and then changed the resulting table anyway.


THE PROCEDURAL CONTENT
The locations are lovely, and interesting, and I can't wait to stop rolling orchards aaaaaaa. Some are more interesting than others, which is good because of the empty room principle, but can be bad if you roll a lot in a row but them's the breaks with random tables, and you can't blame RNG when you the GM have executive authority to make stuff up in defiance of what the dice say. Anywho, in addition to the locations, they each have additional details that can really differentiate them, and then when an event happens that spices things up further still. One trick of design that has worked well is the events table- when the players are interested, even in 'uninteresting things,' interesting things continue happening, rather than it solely being monsters drawn by the players 'wasting time.' They're easy to ignore if they'd spoil the fun or overcomplicate an already complicated area (after a certain number of secret staircases, I decided to hold off on creating more until the players actually went through one). Such GM fiat in adjudicating random tables is classic gming stuff, and I think experienced GMs will get a kick out of flexing their brains with the content, and inexperienced GMs will quickly learn the pleasures of using random tables rather than trying to shoulder all creative cognitive loads themselves.

Treasure-wise, it's not great for sheer gp-to-xp coinage hauls, but the treasures have a lot of charming little baubles that are very good for lateral thinking. (I would have personally placed the treasure tables immediately after the rest of the random tables, formatting wise, but that's a minor quibble.)

The monsters, though there are loads of good ones, have a distribution of 'types' that I feel leans too heavily towards constructs and animals, which do not lend themselves too well towards factional play. On the one hand, since Ynn is not fixed, factional play would be thwarted by reshuffling the place and this is not as dire a critique as it would be for a stable dungeon, and the esoteric terrain is pretty good for bamboozling low-intelligence monsters such as using an ice rink to remove the mobility of a pursuing statue-golem, as my players did. 'S just that some of the monsters lean more 'hack n slash through awful jungle' than 'whimsical and melancholic exploration of a ruined and alien land.'
Mind you there are plenty of talky monsters, but they tend to be deeper in, so. Myeh? I just don't wanna roll a giant frog, I guess, when there's such cooler fare to be found.

Speaking of 'cooler fare' I found the animate chess sets and their built in factional play to be neato (at least hypothetically)... but being buried deep and difficult to randomly encounter, well, it seems a shame, don't it? My recommendation for people running Ynn is to do away with a few of the early /beast/plant/statue/golem/etc encounters and have them be lone chess pieces off on quests or trysts or whatever, so they can already be entangled with the chess-pieces by the time they roll up the entire chess set. Oh, maybe more animal-servants instead of just animals, too? I am all for 'put the cool stuff first' and don't hide the 'good stuff' for later. That's like, my one complaint about the place- there's a bit of 'you gotta delve DEEP to get the weird stuff' and I am all about weird=good, so I'm like, 'remove the buffer zone!' Or the late wacky stuff might ne'er be seen! o gods it became 3am when I wasn't looking my text is getting rambly


tl;dr Ynn is good and you should consider buying it, and since I eat pizza out of a dumpster and pay rent with plasma money and patreon tips so you better believe I weighed those $5 carefully