I’ve been re-reading The Gardens of Ynn, to understand how it achieves beauty and simple pleasantness. I put most of my thoughts in a previous post, but here are a couple more:

1. Even the killer spores (p17) produce delicate flowers.
2. A “brilliant rainbow of colours” in the silk garden (p18) — explicitly “brilliant”, rather than “garish”, or “clashing” or just flat “rainbow” leaving you to make your own assumptions.
3. The interior of the ruined tower is decayed, yes, but that decay is understated, mundane, more nostalgic than unpleasant:

The interior is dusty, cobwebby and falling apart. Wallpaper peels from the walls, the carpet is mouldy, and water pools by the shutters.”

(p22)

I’ve written some OSR modules, and I think I’m pretty good at invoking ruin, horror, and threat in text. As far as I can tell I’m doing that in a way that would let anyone running those modules invoke that in their descriptions, too. This seems to be a common skill, at least amongst OSR module writers.

What I’m not so good at is beauty — the attractive, the desirable, the sublime. And that’s a skill that I’d like to develop more. It’s very easy for OSR-type modules to become relentless dark and grim, and therefore monotonous, and I want to contrast that with more positive emotions.

So… I’m looking for examples of beauty in adventure module text, to read and learn from.

I started a thread on /r/osr, and one recommendation was Emmy Allen’s The Gardens of Ynn. I’ve read it before, run two sessions in it, but hadn’t thought about it as an example of this. I’ve started to re-read it, and have some initial observations:

1. Allen is explicit from the start that beauty is her aim, even tho it’s a squarely OSR module:

I wrote this to get out of a creative rut, liked what I’d produced, and made it pretty. 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 default weather.

(p5)

2. Its main tactic seems to be simply describing pleasant things — manicured lawns, herbs in raised beds, a trellis of vines that produces dappled shade (those are all from p14).

3. To complement that, there isn’t much horrible here, at least in the first few locations. I.e. some of the effect is achieved by the absence of unpleasant things. IIRC there is an low (though nonzero) proportion of gore and horror throughout.

4. The writing isn’t particularly fancy — it’s quite prosaic and economical. At no point does it push to be evocative and overshoot into verbiage or cringe. It presses a few buttons in the reader and then the reader does most of the work.

5. The tone is lighthearted, not serious, not ominous. For example:

Gazebo

A jolly little wooden pavilion. Bright paint faded and peeling. Within, a few wicker chairs and manky cushions. Cobwebs, perhaps. Knickknacks such as teasets, decks of cards, opium pipes, worth d10+depth gold, plus roll for treasure.

(p16)

6. As an enabling tactic, it does seem to assume sunny daylight at all times. Though it doesn’t quite follow through with that — there is a day and night cycle described on p9 and weather-change event on p12.