Through Ultans Door describes the dream-city of Immortal Zyan - collectively one of the classic zines of the OSR. I talked about issues #1 and #2 and issue #3 before - today we look at the newly arrived Downtime in Zyan - Actvities Between Adventures.
photo of newly arrived Downtime in Zyan, showing cover art by Evlyn Moreau
Unlike previous zines Downtime in Zyan does not build on our knowledge of Immortal Zyan, it is a pure systems book - we get Zyan used as a frame to describe the systems but this is effectively setting agnostic and portable to whatever campaign you like. The art throughout is by the esteemed Evlyn Moreau and the zine itself is 36 pages in a fastened card cover.
So what do we get in Downtime in Zyan?
4 pages of Downtime Theory
26 pages of The System
2 pages on Downtime as Worldbuilding
1 page of Further Reading
The Downtime Theory describes the origins of this zine as a codification of the house rules of Ben Laurences home campaign - taking the activities his players indulged in and wrapping a system around that to encourage the type of old school play where cooperation between the players happens off the table between sessions too. The objective is to give options for a character to have impact on the world through more than just their dungeon-delving exploits. This is presented as domain-level play equivalent for lower level characters. I like the concept and agree that giving players channels to influence the world is usually good; once an option is known to exist, people will try it.
The System itself has ten sections - one for each of the activities a character can indulge in - Building an Institution, Cultivating a Relationship, Gathering Intelligence, Learning a Skill, Martial Training, Research, Revelry, Spellcraft, [creation of] Splendid Artifacts and Spiritual Exercises. The section start details the core mechanic - 2d6 roll, built off the player describing how they are going about the activity and then modified by situational modifiers as appropriate. Less than 6 is a failure to progress, 7-9 a qualified success and 10+ is a success. The system feels old-school in that you want to tilt the roll as much as you can beforehand as a straight roll is a 50/50 risk of wasting your time. I like this sense of difficulty - it makes progress all the sweeter for being harder won.
The downtime activities split into 'move the story along' (Institutions, Relationships, Intelligence, Research) and 'character improvement' (Skills, Training, Revelry, Spellcraft, Artifacts and Spiritual Exercises) - the first block will drop well into any campaign and make blocks of downtime a valuable resource to be sought and wisely used. The second block are all very old-school in that just gathering XP does not automatically grant you all the potential of your new level. Fighters must train, wizards find spells and so on. This is very much a play-style and may or may not be to your tables tastes. I like it in that I think it adds to world versimillitude more than just waking up one morning and knowing fabulous spells and deadly techniques. Though I would always be inclined to have Revelry as an option, whether or not the rest are being used.
All these elements get a work-out in the Downtime as Worldbuilding which is genius - both in building DM familiarity in how it all works prior to the players asking and as an interesting frame to build up depth in the world - using each of the 10 activities to build out who are the local martial technique masters, where can one research things, what are some significant (and less significant) local institutions. Whether or not you deploy the systems themselves, this is a neat little worldbuilding workflow.
Finally we have a list of the inspirations, compatible peer systems and which old school blogs to check out to find more elements you could also fold in if you like this.
So - not a gazetteer of Zyan but a downtime system with some nice modularity that could be folded into your game depending on the style of play you like. My gut feel is you would want to bring these to the relatively early days of a campaign otherwise it might feel like a big retcon but your mileage may be different. Certainly I will be testing out the worldbuilding workflow - I love a good workflow.
All in all, happy I backed it and potentially something I will get into play sooner than the rest of the Zyan zines due to its universality.
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