Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique well-regarded modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

Barrow Keep: Den of Spies is a 70 page fully illustrated setting module written by Richard Ruane with stellar art by Minerva Fox. It’s written for generically OSR settings. It’s broken into two larger sections, the first being an introduction to the setting for GM and players alike, the second being secrets and further expansion on the setting for the GM only.

The introduction immediately falls into a pitfall that renders it not for players of characters in the setting: Random tables. It just pitched wrong. The random tables, also, are something I rail against: I don’t need a generator for the three most important political characters in the setting, I’d rather you give me all three on one page and let me stew in the possibilities. The first three pages cover three characters who aren’t named and have 2–3 sentences of characterisation. This makes me twitch.

Locations within Barrow Keep are well-structured and evocatively written. I would have loved the layout to be more consistent: A location to a spread or page, perhaps. And they’re a little wordy for my liking for locations stretched across multiple pages. But there are no wasted words, and my main criticism is in the usability at the table. Faces in Barrow Keep absolutely nails it, with a bunch of useful and short 2–3 sentence descriptions. They aren’t beautiful, but they’re unique and characterful. Great.

Next up is rules for equipment and ritual magic, which, I understand that this is intended to bring the vibe in line with romantic fantasy, but I just don’t think belongs. It particularly jars because it isn’t modifying an existing system, but rather generic DIY adventure games. Luke Gearing’s Wolves upon the Coast (something too big to read in the bath) does this, but it assumes the use of a specific hack for that campaign. I just don’t find any of it to be flavourful enough to justify the space or my bothering with it.

Then we’re onto the second section: Secrets of Barrow Keep. Here, the module absolutely falls apart structurally, which may be because outside contributors take some of the load. There is no map of the keep, which feels intentional, but I had the impression that most of the keep had already been covered. This section adds sections to the keep, including “how to navigate” which simply does not do as titled. Then, it digresses to a heist adventure suggestion, a rumour list, a few new characters, some delegations, and it continues. Just a hodgepodge that is desperately in need of structure and recommendation.

The individual sections here, though are as strong as the earlier ones: Well structured (although some of the structures aren’t consistent with earlier ones), evocatively written if not beautifully or wittily. It’s all very useful, but not usable at the table, mainly in preparation. The secrets section also luxuriates in an overuse of tables, which, once again, seems a misunderstanding of the purpose of a table. Give me great relationships and interesting situations, and then vary things within them. Well-written is better that randomised; randomised tables fit a specific use-case of things that need and want variation.

I should stop here, and note that looking through the inspirations list and reading this, we’re talking about running a campaign that is likely to be high intrigue, minimal combat and dungeon-crawling. That’s not how I would characterise romantic fantasy, but honestly, genre labels are always kind of vague.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed in Barrow Keep. It’s a module that brings a great first impression, the art is beautiful and sucked me in, and that has a lot of good to excellent writing that works well with the stated aims of running a romantic fantasy adventure game, but whose structural failures and lack of clarity on how to incorporate your player characters into the setting leaves it falling flat for me. I don’t mean to be scathing, but it reminds me of an excellent WOTC adventure: Lots of great content, requiring lots of work to turn into an actual campaign. Even if I’m buying a setting, I’m not looking to spend tens of hours preparing to run it.

Barrow Keep comes strongly recommended if you’re looking to run a romantic fantasy adventure game, and are willing to put in a fair amount of effort to fill in gaps (or if you have a campaign where you could drop this in and incorporate its politics with yours). Lots of excellent content, all useful, but you need to make it useable yourself. Not a module for my table, but maybe one for yours.

16th June, 2023

Idle Cartulary