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.

Midnight in Bonetown is a 41 page module for Cairn by Luke Simmonds. This is one of a few submissions I’m reviewing from the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam, as a part of boosting up and coming hobbyist creators. It’s about a village of the undead who have lost their necromancer and hire the party to get him back.

Layout-wise, it’s a decent effort. A single-colour effort, layout is clear, uses sidebars well, headings signal information clearly. It’s reminiscent of Clayton’s template, but the proportions are off enough I suspect it’s Luke’s own work. I don’t love the choice of high-level heading font — I find it a little challenging to read — but otherwise typography is simple and helpful. It doesn’t overuse the bold highlighting or use too many stylistic variations like so many modules do. Art is whimsical and suits the adventure; the map is amateurish but enough for its purposes and has character, I just wish the style matched the art better.

The writing here varies from way too wordy and just needs an edit or some dot points (the opening paragraph) but absolutely excels in its tables, a great highlight being the Bonetown Skeletons table which is jam-packed so the iconic, evocative characters to pepper the town with. Terse, punchy writing doesn’t come better than this, and Luke brings a dose of Nightmare Before Christmas whimsy to the narrative voice in spades (“Smoking on the corner in a leather jacket; uses slang incorrectly”). Falls short in other places, which is where a hobbyist like Luke needs an editor, (“Balstrava the witch is a former associate of Gebert who has gone mad from mushroom spores and runs around the forest causing chaos.”). If it weren’t such a huge commitment, I wish I could offer editing services to hobbyists like Luke who show great promise.

The factions and characters around the adventure add a fun amount of complexity to the proceedings, and twist and subvert expectations. There is a red dragon, for example, object of fear and awe and a high lethality game like Cairn, who provides a fairly challenging fetch quest for his freedom, and whose likelihood of betrayal, I suspect, is quite high. I love opportunities for drama and ways to bring disparate characters together and into conflict.

The final dungeon is a solid crawl, and I appreciate the hazard die incorporation but with a twist, the reliance on random encounters to tell the story, and the existence of wildcards foe the PCs to foolishly cause havoc with (what party with a resurrection stone won’t be tempted by the ancient dragon skeleton?).

All in all, Midnight in Bonetown is a commendable effort, that definitely makes for a fun detour in an underdark adventure. I’d throw this into a campaign, but I probably wouldn’t play it in isolation. With a little more consistency and attention to detail, this would be an instant recommendation, but as is, if you want a whimsical skeleton adventure, I honestly don’t know of a better one. It’s for certain worth more than the free it’s going for. I’d download it and see if it’s to your taste, particularly if you’re populating a map.

15th October, 2023

Idle Cartulary