Ten People You Meet in the Undergarden, Zine Review

This is my attempt at taking a look and reviewing the Zinequest 2 projects I backed.

Disclaimer

- In the interest of full disclosure I bought this with my own funds.

- I was a backer on their Kickstarter campaign and paid 5 US$ for the PDF version of the product in February 2020.

- Nobody is paying for this review. All of the opinions you see are my own.
- Nobody is approving or reading this post before it goes up.
- I have no relationship with any of the authors of this product.

 

Overall feel

Ten People You Meet in the Undergarden (TPYMITU from now on) is a 26 page-long zine (including front-, back cover, and notes from both autors), written and edited by Kari Aldrich and collaged/illustrated by Sam Mameli. The digital version is deceivingly arranged in spreads, which can mess up the page count. This Troika!-compatible volume has exactly what it says on the tin: 10 creatures you would meet in the Undergarden (reminiscent strokes of Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, and Gardens of Ynn), with collage art and extensive accompanying prose.

 

Full disclosure here, I'm not really familiar with Troika!, only having skimmed the game that I got in a bundle some time ago. So not very familiar with the underlying game and community. It feels the Troika! creators are more artistic, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a TTRPG. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'll approach the material with an open mind.

TPYMITU is not affiliated with the Melsonian Arts Council.

Reading the digital version for this review, I was listening to a bit of Rachmaninoff whilst enjoying a cold one.

The Ten People

"A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work' CLICK DING!"

There are 10 individuals presented here, with evocative collage art, and extensive descriptive prose. Reading them as short stories makes for the odd chuckle, and they seem taken straight out of (a less decadent and broken version of) Gardens of Ynn. One of my biggest criticisms in that work is the lack of things the players can talk to, so the Undergarden's denizens seem like an excellent fit on paper.

 

In order of appearance, we get the following:

• Anne Fredd, shrub knight of the church
• Geralmine, a mushroom mercenary in the city of broken clocks
• Effum Deffum, a clockwork angler by the pond
• François, a bird thief in town
• Marcot Egglet, a spider archer on the bridge
• Mrs. Hedgemaze, a hedgemaze
• Arry Coole, a spider farmer near the castle
• Mr. Whiskers, a cat merchant on the road
• Broos Greenshoe, a bug cleric in the castle
• Hom Tinsel, an elven carpenter in the tower

My favorites are probably François, Arry Coole, and Broos Greenshoe. But they all were interesting to read.

Example spread for Arry Coole

Prose is written in the second person (with some entries in third person instead). There are not really many situations that could be incorporated into a gaming table, at least not as is. No gaming material here. People from TPYMITU are inspiration, and give ideas to feed and ingrain into the referee's head. Some have merit, and could help me derive my own material for my games: a spider farmer that cares for their population making sure of their sustainable development, a sentient hedgemaze with powerful abilities, an book-rat of a bug that lets you into the castle's library by signing a ledger (you notice: previous entries only have an entrance date in them!). You get the picture.

The implied setting of the Undergarden is vague at best, just strokes here and there. We know that Mr. Alpred is a skilled clockmaker. Bietemoupe is a town. There is a half-ruined tower that is undergoing reparation work. A protected manor. Etc etc. There is even a library in the Undergarden, making the potential crossover between Ynn and Stygian Library a reality for us to enjoy.

Mien are useful words to understand the monster better, they help. To have a sense of these People's beefiness I quickly open the Troika! Numinous Edition and see that Dragons have Stamina 32, and Goblins 6. There is someone with Stamina 40 and 6 in TPYMITU, so a wide range. But gaming statistics hardly matter in this publication at all. They could've been removed, making perhaps a stronger zine.

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This concludes the review.

 

I'm definitely out of my comfort zone with this one. There is almost no actionable material here, but some good food for referee thought. Reading the short stories was an interesting and picturesque 70 minutes, and the collage art was delightful at places. Might incorporate some of these into Ynn's encounter tables if I ever run that again.

Glad I got to do these (belated) reviews to sit down and read material like this, which otherwise would sit in my digital-folder-of-shame for eternity.