Yoon-Suin: Caravanserai of the Hundred Kingdoms

Staying at an "inn" doesn't seem right for Yoon-Suin. Even in the Yellow City it seems like a foreign concept. A caravanserai is a better fit and is a broad enough definition to allow for a range of high and low quality establishments.

A low-quality caravanserai is probably just a house or temple renting rooms or its stable to travellers and pilgrims.

A mid-quality caravanserai would be much like your typical right-aligned-map inn, offering stables, food, private rooms, and perhaps even entertainment for travellers.

A high-quality caravanserai would be nearly indistinguishable from a palace, with spacious suites dedicated to guests from far and wide.

In line with other recent articles, I wrote a few tables to flesh out the details of a stay at a caravanserai. You could roll on the appropriate table each night, every few days, or you could treat them as a random encounter tables (roll a d6 each night and only consult a table if you roll a 6).

I like to give a little prose on the player characters' experiences with an overnight stay. It helps justify the cost of a night's stay in an expensive room. I used the quality-of-life levels presented in the D&D 5th Edition rules but you can equate them to the following Yoon-Suin castes:

D&D5E	Yoon-Suin
Squalid	Slave
Poor	Very Low Caste
Modest	Low Caste
Comfortable	Merchant/Warrior Caste
Wealthy	Artisan Caste
Aristocratic	Noble or Landowner

A lower-quality bed may be a raised stone platform or perhaps just a space on the floor. Mid-quality accommodation usually features a wicker bed supported by a wooden frame and may include a sheet or blanket. Higher-quality beds are sturdy pallets stuffed with straw and covered with blankets; the highest quality beds are stuffed with cotton or feathers, are covered with silk sheets, and accompanied by a mountain of cushions and pillows. Roll on the appropriate table below to randomly determine your character's experience overnight at a shelter, caravanserai, or other lodgings.

Squalid

1. Someone tried to rob you (perhaps successfully?)
2. There was a miserable, permeating stench in your room all night
3. You shivered your way through the night, barely sleeping
4. You were disturbed by vermin (lice, cockroaches, fleas, mosquitoes, rats, pigeons...)

Poor

1. A foul smell drifted in through the windows (a stables, tannery, butcher, the river...)
2. Someone mistook your room for theirs
3. Twice you were disturbed by noises (creaking furniture, window shutter in the wind, other guests, animals fighting, the wind, people outside...)
4. You were thoroughly uncomfortable all night, tossing and turning despite your fatigue

Modest

1. The wicker bed creaked only slightly
2. The window shutters did not close properly (noisome, distracting, or simply a security risk)
3. You were marginally too hot or cold
4. Your room was plain but serviceable

Comfortable

1. A jug of cool, fresh water awaited you (very welcome after a long journey)
2. A large, comfortable cushion served as a bed
3. Clean, smooth, cotton sheets were laid on the bed
4. Dried fruit or herbs scented the room

Wealthy

Accommodation at this level includes a bath, slaves or servants to fetch and carry things, serve as messengers within the local area, refresh the room every day, clean a character's clothes, make minor repairs to weapons and armour, and take care of any non-exotic mounts (or at least help taking care of exotic ones).

1. You have a private bath the size of most families' dinner table
2. A tiger-skin rug lay upon the floor
3. Fine marble floor tiles and statuary decorate the room
4. You have silken sheets paired with the softest of pillows

Aristocratic

The highest quality of accommodation usually includes everything at the Wealthy level and at least one personal valet or handmaiden, a cook, a tea taster, suite guards (typically eunuchs) or a mobile security detail, bath attendants, a bedchamber assistant, and an army of servants and slaves to take care of the guest's concerns. An aristocratic stay is rarely a short affair, and every effort is made to make the guest feel truly at home.

1. A flute was played softly until you drifted off (optionally, it can be played again to wake you)
2. You had a private dining area with seats for twenty guests
3. A rare live beast was displayed in your suite (a talking bird, colourful reptile, fascinating beetle, or caged felid)
4. Slaves fanned you until you fell asleep or dismissed them

Yoon-Suin: Teas of the Hundred Kingdoms

Tea is very important in Yoon-Suin. The people of the Purple Land drink alcohol, but not as much as they might in your generic Not Europe fantasy setting; mostly they drink tea (and smoke opium, but that's another post).

The Yoon-Suin book has a fantastic appendix entry for creating specialist teas, but I wanted to bring some more detail to the regular teas my PCs might be drinking.

I don't drink tea, but I'm fortunate enough to have a good friend who is a tea sommelier and runs his own specialist tea business; sometimes what counts is not what you know, but who you know. I consulted my friend and came up with a random tea flavour table that would make him foam at the mouth with rage over my simplification of his beloved beverage.

A regular pot of tea prompts two rolls: a d20 on the Tea Flavour Table to determine the flavour of the tea, and a d6 on the Tea Sensation Table to determine how your character feels after drinking it.

Tea Flavour Table

1. Wood (oak, cedar, bark, sawdust)
2. Earth (compost, forest floor, peat)
3. Mineral (chalk, salt, sulphur, metal)
4. Marine (fish, seaweed, ocean breeze)
5. Animal (leather, blood, musk)
6. Herbal (lavender, mint, fennel)
7. Vegetable (asparagus, spinach, green beans)
8. Grass (hay, straw, bamboo)
9. Tree/Vine Fruit (grape, apricot, apple)
10. Citrus (lemon, orange, mandarin)
11. Berry (strawberry, blueberry, blackcurrant)
12. Tropical Fruit (pineapple, mango, plantain)
13. Floral (rose, dandelion, hops)
14. Spice (cinnamon, vanilla, ginger)
15. Sweet (honey, burnt sugarcane, caramel)
16. Nutty (peanut, almond, roasted hazelnut)
17. Char (ash, smoke, tobacco)
18. Milky (milk, cream, butter)
19. Bland (dead leaves in hot water...)
20. Roll twice, duplicates indicate a particularly strong flavour

Tea Sensation Table

1. Extended toilet break: you will have to relieve yourself several times over the next hour, not doing so will cause great discomfort and an inability to stand still
2. Toilet break: did you know that all mammals take the same amount of time to urinate?
3. Revitalising: you feel energized, ready to take on the world; this will cure almost any hangover
4. Deep satisfaction: you needed this tea more than you realised; you experience a profound contentment
5. Clear-headedness: electricity arcs across your mind and awakens your synapses
6. Cleansing: the steam from the tea strips impurities from your mind, body, and spirit; you feel renewed

You could expand this with tea colours, tea preparation and ceremonies, a table for the shape, texture, and colour of tea leaves... but I think there's enough detail here unless you really want to drill down into every cup of tea in the Hundred Kingdoms and beyond.

Yoon-Suin: Brothels of the Hundred Kingdoms

On the very first session of my 5E Yoon-Suin game, my players visited a brothel, more because they needed a place to stay than anything else (I forgot to mention the caravanserai outside the city); but since we're running gold-as-experience, one of my players wanted his character to pay for two courtesans to accompany him.

The campaign's character development will require the PCs to spend a lot of money, so I'm in the process of writing a table to randomly generate food, tea, opium, accommodation, bactrian camels, palanquin bearers, crab-man slaves, etc. of varying quality. This is also a good opportunity to introduce the setting's flavour - slavery is a part of everyday life, people sit on cushions instead of stools, drink tea instead of ale, wield tulwars instead of longswords, etc.

I don't want to stray into Book of Erotic Fantasy territory (stick that in a search engine at your own risk), but equally I don't want to just ignore anyone who is willing to act like an adult at the table and talk about adult things in an adult manner; nobody is prepared to narrate the specifics but since I'd normally describe a tavern's ale as "dry" or "fruity" or "bitter" then I thought I should do something similar for brothels in Yoon-Suin.

You roll different dice on the Brothel Experience Table depending on the quality of the brothel. The more expensive the brothel the more likely your character is to enjoy themselves and avoid any complications.

Brothel Quality	Dice
Pathetic Den	d6
Humble Parlour	2d6
Successful Academy	3d6
Exclusive House	3d6 + 2

Note: Temples that offer sacred prostitution should probably not be of the lowest quality except in special circumstances.

Brothel Experience Table

Dice Roll	Experience
1 - 2	Awful - roll on the Brothel Mishap Table
3 - 4	Disappointing
5 - 9	Pleasing
10 - 13	Skilled courtesan
14 - 15	Tremendously skilled courtesan
16 - 17	Pleasures undreamed of
18+	Spiritual experience

Brothel Mishap Table

Sometimes pleasure turns into pain. Roll on the following table to determine the outcome of a bad experience at a brothel.

D6	Result
1	Roll twice, ignoring duplicates
2	Disease
3	Injury
4	Robbed
5	Humiliated
6	Expelled

Injury: A courtesan, a eunuch bodyguard, a rival client, an accident, or some creative detail of the tryst inflicts one level of Exhaustion.

Disease: Make a DC 14 Constitution save or develop spots, lesions, or a rash. Roll a d6 to determine the visibility of the disease: on a 1, 2, or 3 the disease is clearly visible to any who socially interact with you (sores on the hands or face, growth on the tongue that causes speech impediment, a specific odour, etc.); on a 4, 5, or 6 the disease is only visible to those who become physically intimate with you.

Anyone who notices the symptoms will react accordingly, usually imposing a -4 penalty to all Charisma-based checks; some people will laugh at you, others will refuse to deal with you, whereas some will not care so long as you keep your distance.

Diseases such as these can be cured with the lesser restoration spell, by an apothecary or herbalist's concoction (costing 3d6×10 shekels, half if a PC herbalist or apothecary can make a DC 16 check to find the appropriate reagents themselves over the course of at least one day), or by succeeding a DC 20 Constitution save during a long rest three times.

Robbed: Lose double the cost of the brothel visit in coins or equipment (e.g. items of clothing), with little chance of recovering what was lost.

Humiliated: You are mocked or ridiculed, restrained and abandoned, discovered in a compromising situation, or otherwise publicly humiliated; you leave the brothel with less dignity than you entered with, embarrassed and frustrated. 

Expelled: You are thrown out of the brothel and will not be admitted again. Your reputation in local brothels suffers as news spreads; you may find yourself barred from other establishments in the area.

Players are free to interpret their rolls however they please within the confines of the rules and situation. You could expand this with hijra, different races, restrictions (participants must imbibe a specific kind of opium or chant a certain mantra, a priest of a fertility god must curse or disapprove of the act, participants must never learn each other's names, the brothel's madam must perform a thorough examination of the client beforehand, etc.), and other background flavour if you really wanted, but I'm only going into as much detail as I would for ale, tea, or rooms at an inn.