Interviewing Yanahn
By Alex White
- 4 minutes read - 693 wordsPlease tell me a bit about yourselves
I am Yanahn (or Kristen) and I am a Malaysian game designer based in the UK - I got into TTRPGs from a chance encounter with my university's tabletop society years ago, and enjoy making games & adventures with weird creatures and using the word 'eldritch' a lot. In my spare time, I also enjoy drawing and taking up new craft hobbies (like cosplay).
What do you like best about designing games?
A lot of my game design ideas start out as trying to capture a specific theme, vibe or experience and make it a sharable and interactable thing for people, and it's always a really interesting puzzle to solve, whether it's like finding the right mechanic to express an idea or figuring out how to embed context into a game in a fun and easy-to-pick-up way. Also, I see that sharing and interactable-ness to be a big part of TTRPGs - so a big source of joy is seeing how people find bits to engage with or resonate with in the game/adventure once it's out there in the world.
What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?
I have actually just finished writing Enter the Whalefall, a system agnostic underwater fantasy adventure zine about going into the oceanic abyss to stop a bunch of necromancers from reviving and controlling a whale god. It's been published online but I am now working on getting it ready for print. I was really excited during the making of it because I've always loved marine biology fun facts and how weird the deep oceanic ecosystems can get without sunlight as an energy source, and it's been fun working out how to incorporate that into a playable adventure experience. Also, I got to try my hand at drawing some of the dungeon maps in the zine, and it was fun to think about stuff like what would a dungeon set inside a beached whale corpse look like.
Can you tell me more about how ocean ecology has informed this adventure?
Yea, so one of things I was really keen on including is how the various oceanic ecosystems vary by depth, so I investigated lots of exploration mechanics and landed on depthcrawls, where you get a rollable table that is adjusted by how deep players are in the sea - with the tables for the coastal hexes and the abyssal locations having more seafloor or deep ocean things as you go deeper (so you find pelagic snails or jellyfish in the upper layers and buried stargazer fish and giant worms below) Also, I folded some marine critter behaviours into how encounters operate. I read a book on deep sea bioluminescence and how light is both a boon (for finding food, distracting predators) and a bane (it attracts predators) in the depths, and so for the abyssal encounters, a lot of them vary based on how much light the party chooses to use (being more aggro or less, being able to use light to bait in bigger monsters etc.).
What experience(s) are you trying to give to players? Where do they find the fun in your game?
I hope they can have a fun experience in a slightly out-there setting with lots of odd encounters and things to explore or run into. Moreover, perhaps they might find bits of the zine that provide ideas for any marine adventures they run in the future. Also, maybe a bonus bit of looking up some of the odd creatures mentioned in the zine and going oh that is a wacky looking prehistoric fish/jellyfish/etc. (please look up opabinia, it is weird)
Is there anything you would like to promote right now?
Yeap, so if you like quirky marine biology stuff in a fantasy adventure or just want to fight necromancers inside the regenerating corpse of a whale god, Enter the Whalefall is for you. and it can be found here https://yanahn.itch.io/enter-the-whalefall
Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?
I can be found on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/yanahn.bsky.social and my tabletop work is on itch.io via https://yanahn.itch.io/