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

The Rumbling Forest is a 32 page module for Cairn and Mangayaw, by Benj “Goobernuts”. It explores a Philippine fantasy setting, in a manner seemingly inspired by the work of Zedeck Siew and Cockamania.

Design here is amateur but clean. It uses public domain art, uses hexkit and dungeon crawl for its maps, and uses Clayton Noteskine’s classic explorer template to good effect. It uses a good but not jarring variety of spreads, and reserves sidebars sensibly for single column pages. This is exactly the type of module it was designed for, and I’m not sure any benefit would’ve been had in modifying it, except to assuage my unnecessary fears of homogenisation.

It opens with a flavourful timeline of events, placing us in a folkloric colonial Phillipines, facing off against cruel conquistadors and a horde of angry boars. I really like the smooth transition from the timeline to hooks used here. The writing is evocative, and alternates between poetic and functional in an appealing way. “A rumbling wave of boars, gracefully weaving in between trees.” I especially like how alien the conquistadors architecture is made to feel.

Information is very succinct, with structural sections serving multiple purposes: The timeline also provides factions with aims, for example, and sets them against each other. I admire this brevity, although I could use a little more formatting for it to stand out if I need to flip back through the zine. It’s brief enough that it may n out be necessary; Benj regularly posts session reports so I suspect this has been playtested at least with one group.

The hex map is a little unwieldy, though functional. It would benefit from having full location names on the spread, or having the empty hex landmarks and the random encounter table condensed. As is, it’s spread out over three and a half pages and I’d probably resent flicking to and fro here.

The keys however, are terse, brief. Absolute fire. Easy to run. I’d rather a denser layout here so that one location is fit to a spread, but it’s a nitpick, I could make this work without any prep at all. I’d like less tables in the village of Barangay Tindigan, mainly because you could have fit a whole cast in the space it took for the generators, and it would’ve been more useful at the table. This village is the least useful section of the book; I’d have trouble running it and making it a bustling village without adding a fair bit of prep. But it’s still flavourful as all get out. The forest and the dungeons in it keep up the quality and the pace. The hooks involve hunting, but I’d prefer clearer hooks to specific hexes when it’s so exploration driven.

A brief aside: I’m not a fan of false rumours, although I like partial truths. I don’t think there’s ever enough player good faith or time to waste on aimless lies. One false rumour here points you to a key location, Sunken River, but deters you from visiting, if you’re playing either major faction as the superstitious folk they are suggested to be. Not a great choice in my opinion.

The Fates of the Forest and Folk section comes towards the end comes with a huge amount of ammunition for the ongoing campaign and the finale, as well as the flow on effects. It’s beautiful and flavourful, but I’d have loved to have this all happening so simultaneously with the rest of the module. I see where you’d want to have a leisurely exploration here, there’s so much to explore. But I think more pressure would only be a positive thing when the outcomes are only apocalyptic. I also don’t think these co sequences are clearly laid out in the text; for example, the Kamagong Diwata is must be killed to game the forest, but this isn’t signalled anywhere else in the text. Some more clarity around these would be better folded into the main text or the character descriptions.

Overall, this is a fantastic effort. It’s mostly playable straight from the zine, you get at least two or three sessions out of the box, and it definitely has room to expand into a larger campaign. It’s got a unique flavour, as well, as most of the south-east asian stuff I’ve read is folkloric rather than leaning on colonial times for its inspiration. Cool stuff. I would definitely make time to run this. It’s affordable and there community copies for the marginalised, I don’t see any reason not to pick this up if you like the idea of playing an apocalyptic dungeon crawl on an island being invaded by Spanish colonisers.

14th September, 2023

Idle Cartulary