For the last two years I ran a primarily Yoon-Suin based campaign for my Friday night group, we just finished up...

For the last two years I ran a primarily Yoon-Suin based campaign for my Friday night group, we just finished up last week. I don't have a blog and I barely tune in to G+, but I wanted to write a post about it given that I have been running D&D off & on since I was 10 years old and the only other campaign setting I've used as deeply and continuously for multiple real life years with one group was Eberron . I think this has everything to do with how the book generates content and flavor. Specifically in that the book can quickly generate a new location with NPCs and is always attached with a quirk or flavor that makes it different then the last time even within the same area of the campaign or type of social group you are generating.

Initially Yoon-Suin was bolted on as a travel location in my homemade medieval Thailand campaign I wrote while bedridden. However, once the PCs got into the strange polities of the Hundred Kingdoms and then splendor of the Yellow City, it organically became a Yoon-Suin game. They gained a slug-man patron in the Yellow City and actually spent time exploring that relationship and Old Town so much so that I had to track their social movements within the city for each session for about three months in a spreadsheet (eventually the PCs left to go exploring again).

According to my personal taste of information organization, more campaign settings should set out to be like Yoon-Suin. Instead of getting paragraphs upon paragraphs of gazetteer-like text to sift through for details of the world, you are given sketches, but have to create the world yourself and decide how its parts interact. By definition that basis of customization is implicit in every rpg product , but Yoon-Suin makes it explicit and provides useful tools to that end.

Stray happenings from using the campaign setting:
-amazingly the PCs non-trivially explored every area provided in the book except Sughd the Mountains of the Moon, which I had accidentally scared them off of somehow that I can't remember. This was sad for me because I had planted the answer to my version of The First Mystery there and they had actually spent time trying to understand the people of the Yellow City's obsessions and fear with the Outsiders.
-they encountered about 70% of the monsters unique to the setting. The most memorable being a night time encounter with a Masan vampire child that ended up being quite horrifying to them.
-the PCs adored crab-men. One of them spent time learning how to communicate in gestures to them. For a hot moment it seemed like the PCs were going to try to liberate some crab-men from a Fighting Stable, but they just went back to treasure hunting.
-I utilized every appendix except appendix H: Trade Tongues. Just never came up.
-if you've read the anecdote that early player's of D&D said that the game was as addicting as heroin (somewhere in Playing at the World) my players really did get addicted to the play loop of exploring Old Town to find artifacts or get random powers. I eventually had to just make them leave the area.
-it probably had more to do with learning a new computer language, but I automated almost every table in the book in Python so I could make up content on the fly without having to slow down at the table. During preparation this also let me populate places in the world faster and decide what else I wanted to add.
-I adore adding strange mounts to my campaigns and the PCs (except one who was too grossed out) spent time on the God River riding around on giant cockroaches. I extrapolated that it would make them come off as lower caste given that cockroach butchering clans are very low status and they would be walking around smelling like cockroach pheromones. They didn't care.

The only reason we stopped the campaign was that I am writing a new world and wanted to run some games that I've read, but haven't played before that begins next year.

I'm sure I will run it again.