Back in October of 2019, a long one-shot playtesting session for Dolmendays introduced some of the players to the mechanics and whimsical tone of the game. An incredibly handy online generator sped up play as we sampled the haunting Gardens of Ynn. This recounts the findings of four novice adventurers in one session.
(Since this was written long after the fact, details have been warped by a very fickle memory. Things definitely didn’t happen exactly like this.)
The Gardens of Ynn was written by Emmy Allen.
The Ynn Generator I used was made by David Schirduan.
(During the session, we listened to a bunch of music from the soundtrack for Hollow Knight composed by Christopher Larkin, which can be listened to in long unbroken videos here. I'd recommend Greenpath, Fungal Wastes, City of Tears, and Queen's Gardens, without ambience.)
Our troupe today features ...
Eddie, a human fletcher. Wields an arbalest and a claymore, and throws a mean right hook. Can’t understand talking animals.
Lisabeth Sunderman, a human ex-sailor. Quick on her feet, and always just a bit unclean. Raised by fairies until age six.
John Rhys-Davies, a moss dwarf thief. Grows a large mushroom in place of his left ear, and has a knack for talking to birds.
Glimmering-of-Sun’s-Turning-Tide, an elf wanderer from moonlit Hypnagogia. Has feathered hair and bird-like taloned feet.
On the forest road south of Prigwort, these penniless and thoroughly rain-soaked adventuring troupe stood pondering a tree. Its trunk had a door, quite a large one, and from that open door streamed soft sunlight. Above the door was a sentence etched into the bark: “Ynn, by way of Dolmenwood.”
The troupe didn’t know that this was a troll’s garden, or how even to pronounce the name “Ynn” aloud. The long-lived moss dwarf and ageless elf were skeptical. Their human companions had no such prudence - at least not while they were cold and hungry and poor. Lisabeth dove through the tree-door, Eddie barreled in after her, and John and Glimmering dutifully followed their companions. Loyalty matters doubly when you have little else.
A Fountain Court
On the other side, in Ynn, the sound of rain was replaced with the babble of a fountain and soft birdsong. Sunlight fell on the manicured lawns and terraces of an ornate garden. Flower beds spilled over with unruly vines, hedge growths and iron fences walled in the spaces, and something smelled of wilted roses. Unnaturally large and colorful insects bumbled through the breeze. The troupe drank it all in as they began to dry off.
John the moss dwarf could always understand bird-speech, and these ones seemed to be rather confused. Their twittering carried no joy, only caution and longing. Some of them referenced a tower; others thought it best not to sing of such ghastly things as the horizon. And wherever our troupe looked, there wasn’t a single bird to be found.
Graffiti marked the wall near the door they entered from. In frantic scrawl, it read, “Beware the thorns.” With the warning duly noted, the troupe decided to go deeper into the Gardens.
Vine Trellises
Iron trellises loaded with fruit-bearing vines caught our troupe’s attention. The fruits were grand and blue, unmarred by bug or bird. They tested if the fruits were poisonous or not by scarfing down several each; since nobody keeled over, they bundled away some extras for the road.
Glimmering’s elf-eyes spotted a peculiarity in a vine-covered wall, and some prodding revealed it to be a secret door. The tiny garden shed behind it contained trowels, rakes, clippers, and broken pots, all old and unremarkable. But it also held a skeleton.
The bones were winter-white, smooth, slender, and perfectly symmetrical, as if sculpted by a master of yore. They were light, too, possibly hollow. They rested beneath vines and upturned soil. Rummaging through their pack, Glimmering produced a flask of holy water and carefully poured half its contents on the skeleton. The bones sizzled and melted at the liquid’s touch. Glimmering retreated from the disturbingly familiar remains, and the troupe pressed on.
A Burned Herb Garden
Part of the gardens had fallen victim to a fire, leaving the hedges and lawns blackened. A few raised beds of herbs remained untouched, and the troupe elected to sample some of them. Lisabeth tasted one, and an old scar vanished from her hand; Eddie tried another, and immediately threw up all the fruit he had eaten. John Rhys-Davies harvested both herbs for future use - medicinally, of course.
A rustle in the charred hedge-growths behind them ended their tasting party and sent hands darting to weapon hafts. They turned to see long, slender legs of serrated green armor extend from the hedge, and razor-sharp pincers above them. The creature’s face-full of faceted eyes and mandibles were unmistakable; a praying mantis, as big as a pony but thankfully far slower. For its own insectoid reasons, this band of interlopers was deemed a tasty snack.
Lisabeth tumbled into action with sickle and hatchet in hand, swiping at its legs and dodging its pincers. Glimmering and John flanked it to block its escape. And Eddie took aim with his arbalest and put a bolt straight through the mantis’ head, leaving it dead. They were all unscathed, but braced for fouler things to find them soon. Stocked up on both healing and hurling herbs, the troupe continued deeper into the maze-like hedges beyond the burned part of the garden.
On their way through, they noticed a large picnic basket tucked away under the hedges. Inside was an entire roasted pheasant, still warm and perfectly seasoned. It was as if it had been cooked thirty minutes ago, yet vines had grown to ensnare the basket’s wicker bottom. Nothing truly terrible had happened as a result of eating strange things thus far, so Glimmering and Lisabeth each tried out a mouth-watering drumstick. Both stopped eating as soon as they noticed peculiar effects manifesting; Lisabeth had certainly not had pointed ears a moment ago, and Glimmering was positive that their tongue had never been forked. This meat was clearly not complimentary to theirs. The troupe abandoned the basket’s temptations, and pressed on.
A Burned Shadow Theater
The hedges looped back into the burned expanses, once again blotting out the garden’s many scents with that of soot. A large semi-circular amphitheater was built into the earth, its stonework stained by ash and smoke. Down on the stage was the charred remnant of a brass and clockwork apparatus, with silhouette puppets of elfin lords and courtiers mounted atop bent and broken arms; a machine for making shadow-plays, were light to ever cast them onto the wall.
Eddie was the only one to get an up-close look at the device. As he tinkered with its melted mechanisms, his shadow began to tug. It resisted the movements of his feet, and began to move of its own accord, twitching rebelliously against Eddie’s gestures. The troupe began to discuss the idea of fleeing before things got out of hand - but before they could act, things got out of hand.
A pair of vibrant blue foxes burst from the blackened hedges, bounding together past the amphitheater. They didn’t even notice the four adventurers, as their attention was still on what pursued them. The ground rumbled, and with a crash of snapping branches and charcoal the scorched hedge growths behind the foxes erupted in a savage cloud of pale fur and slick fangs. Giant white apes, quad-armed and enraged, carved a path of carnage through the garden as they pursued their puny quarry. Eddie’s shadow clapped gleefully at the show. Luckily, shadows are perfectly silent, and the beasts were so engrossed in the hunt that they too failed to notice our troupe. A hasty escape was made. The sounds of the white apes receded, the fate of the foxes unknown. Eddie’s shadow started behaving again, biding its time ...
As they fled through rows of iron fences towards a less-burned part of the garden, John Rhys-Davies made an observation. “We’re definitely not heroes,” he mused. “We’re going into the unknown without any good reason, alone and unprepared, just like those idiots whose corpses would get found by the real heroes.”
After some other comments and jokes, I clicked the button on the generator to roll up the next location for them to find. Turns out John was a prophet - sort of.
A Fountain Court with Those Idiots’ Corpses
A large, unburnt expanse of cracked paving stones and aromatic grass surrounded a grand marble fountain. Four corpses also surrounded the fountain, flat on their backs with their arms and legs spread wide, their hands and feet pinned down by metal stakes. The troupe approached cautiously. The bodies still had equipment on them, and their human flesh was intact; they had been dead for perhaps a week. From each of their open mouths a single white orchid sprouted, delicate and dismal. One of the bodies was clad in knightly chainmail, another in the silk robes of a magician. The other two were rougher mercenary types in quilted gambeson.
While morbid, our troupe recognized that all that valuable gear going to waste would only elevate the tragedy, and relieved those that came before of all their equipment. The orchids were left tastefully undisturbed, for they were already disturbing enough. Lisabeth got an intricate disguise kit from one of the mercenaries, and John got a set of lockpicks from the other. Eddie relieved the knight of his chainmail, which had yet to rust, and passed a pike and heater shield off to John. The pike was over twice the moss dwarf’s height; good thing stumplings are so stable.
Glimmering took the spell tome from the magician and flipped through its illuminated pages. The book held all the necessary glyphs and foci for casting two spells: Hear Whispers and Raise Spirits. (This game uses Knave-style spellcasting, so every adventurer can pick up and use spell tomes/scrolls/tablets from the word go.) Whether that second spell was for bolstering morale or calling up the dead remained to be seen. The fountain was burbling away nearby.
Lisabeth washed the dirt from her hands and face in the fountain’s scintillatingly refreshing water, spotting numerous coins glinting at her from the bottom. Everyone tried drinking from the fountain, and felt immediately invigorated by it. Then Lisabeth and John turned to looting the coins from the depths, and subsequently lost the vitality the water had granted them; after taking the coins, the water now appeared murky and uninviting. Still, money was money. Glimmering and Eddie may have been newly empowered by the fountain, but they were also stone broke.
John explored the perimeter of the circular fountain. A stray tile near its base turned out to be a secret cubbyhole, and lovingly stowed inside was an ornate music box wrapped in felt. John tried giving its golden handle a few turns, and was rewarded with an atonal yet strangely soothing melody. The treasure was placed, carefully, near the top of his travel pack.
Before venturing any further, Glimmering decided to give this new spellbook a go by raising some spirits - specifically, the spirit of the book’s original owner, the dead magician. The whole troop gathered around the unnaturally positioned corpse, prepared for trouble. Glimmering wove the words and gestures from the book into something reminiscent of proper magic, and the work was done.
The shivering spirit of the magician was conjured above his corpse, still wrapped up in the throws of his terrifying demise. After taking some time to observe the bodies of his companions and, critically, himself, the magician finally understood his position. The troupe confirmed his fate with some degree of compassion, and asked for his story.
He spoke of his own party’s mission. They were sent into this garden by the Duke of Brackenwold. The Duke’s son was sickly, and it was divined through private means that the only cure for the boy’s malady was the heart of a mythical creature called the Questing Beast. Part leopard, part snake, and thoroughly unique across all of time. So the magician and his team were tasked with finding it. But something far more terrible found them first; the sidhe. (Pronounced sort of like “shee,” because it’s an old Irish word.)
Glimmering knew that name, and had been called by it once before; an ancient term for the strangest of the elves. The magician spoke of the entity that slew his fellows, a floating elf-lord with a coiling grin full of needle-like teeth, and countless jostling pupils in each eye. An impossible beauty and ugliness saturated it. “He kept saying that our minds were wrong,” the spirit said. “That we had to be ‘fixed’. We weren’t ready to die like this, not for the damned Duke ... ”
Eddie questioned the spirit about the afterlife, or whatever else lay beyond the veil, but it didn’t have any answers. As far as it could tell, no time had passed since its death and this conversation. And just as the magician began to question our troupe on their purpose in this garden, the luminous ghost suddenly popped like a soap bubble, gone in an instant. The spell was broken by time alone. Armed with new tools and more knowledge of this ruined world’s inhabitants, the troupe continued deeper into the gardens.
While trekking through rows of rose bushes, everyone noticed a strange iridescent slime clinging to some of the highest branches, as if it had been brushed off there. The skies were empty save for gentle clouds and weak sunlight. Surely the slime meant nothing ...
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