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.

Hounds of Hendenburgh is a 20 page module by Liam Pádraig Ó Cuilleanáin, for Cairn. It’s an entry to the A Village, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam that I’ve been looking at select modules from to draw attention to interesting and exciting things up and coming creators are doing. It’s about a village under attack by a pack of spectral hounds.

While the layout choices aren’t the prettiest here, Liam takes excellent advantage of public domain art and chooses an extremely clear layout and formalised structure that makes Hounds very easy to run. It’s broken clearly into sections, often devoting one entire column of its two column layout to a single section. Stat blocks and treasures are separated out and given unique highlighting. It’s a little formal for my aesthetic tastes, but it’s very clear who is who and what must be done.

The writing flits between overly verbose and the colourfully succinct, but needed a second pass. I loved “Shifty and beady-eyed, Elisabeth is avoided by the villagers, who avoid the barn she requisitioned as a makeshift morgue.”, for example, but the entire paragraph on the Crones is full of redundancies. I really like the villagers, who aren’t exactly dense on petty politics, but who often have their own secrets. I think this would be a fun village to run. The formal conceit isn’t too strictly adhered to here, either, to it’s benefit: some characters have the subheading “The Whole Truth” if they’re hiding something, but others do not but rather have “Might ask the party” or “Might offer the party”. This is excellent use of formal structure for usability.

I’m torn about the hooks and the “Defeating the Hounds” sections. The hooks are a little vague, and don’t directly tie into the hounds. One could make the argument the third, a deed worthless until the hounds are gone, is tied in, but it involves a fair bit of fluffing about. I appreciate the clarity the Defeating the Hounds section provides, but it also feels limiting, and I fear the party would become listless if they missed the next step in the algorithm. The adventure relies on the confluence of rumour, hook to make specific plot threads occur, and they feel not quite tight enough. This is actually one reason I pedantically call rumours secrets: The suggestion that this is just stuff people know and will talk about. You’re less generous with rumours. It might also be fun to frame it as gossip in a petty town like this one.

I really like the forest key here; terse punchy and evocative pretty consistently. “The most ancient of the crones. Stands 10 ft tall. Naked apart from the cloud of flies that cling to her old leathery flesh. Speaks in a sonorous and booming voice that shakes the treetops.” It does feel like the Highwaymen’s Tower could have been treated as a dungeon though, given its high importance to a key plot point. I would have preferred the random encounters incorporate a little more world-building, though: The Kryptwood is supposedly an ancient and evil place, so it feels weird that so many of these encounters are relatively mundane.

The dungeon, the Tyrant’s Tomb, has me feeling mixed. There is a lot to love: There are bored riddling skeletons. There is an evil wraith who’ll grant you your wish for its freedom. There’s a very cool sword that needs to be bathed in brains for a day and a night to be recharged. But then, none of the solutions to the spectral hounds involves not clearing the tomb, which is disappointing. More exciting would be for each of them to be very different. Currently you must escort the Pastor there. Make the other two options equal parts special mission. The problem with that (and with the Pastor approach) is the creeping, unstoppable guardian, a feature I feel might be an irritatingly unsolvable problem killing key NPCs, rather than the ticking xenomorph-like clock it’s intended to be. I think it would’ve been best to include a non-combat solution to it, though, so you can succeed at the tomb through planning, or at least given it some personality to influence or a program to manipulate.

Overall, I really liked what Hounds was going for here. It would require a few tweaks in terms of hooks and in the final tomb to make things a bit more exciting and I’d probably straight up provide the three options for defeating the hounds so they can choose the one they find most interesting. I could see it being fun to find one method, fail, then try again, but it might also just be frustrating depending on the group. But it’s flavourful, fun, and generic enough to drop into your home campaign for a few weeks of digressions.

28th September, 2023

Idle Cartulary