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.

The Weeps is a 15 page module for Cairn by Tony Jaguar and Spooky Rusty, the best named pair of writers in elfgames in my opinion. It’s one of the submissions to the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam that I’m reviewing to highlight lower budget hobbyist work.

In terms of layout, I think it would’ve been better to lay this out in more pages, perhaps in a two-column format. There’s a lot of text here, and it’s a bit intimidating to the eye, and not broken up with spot art, with very narrow margins. The art is amateurish but appropriate, as are the maps. The cover art is striking but compromised by the logo placements which I assume are a reference to the village’s makeup habits or perhaps a pun on the title.

I don’t like the introductory page at all; a lot of words that inadequately communicate the hook and the character of the village and it’s people. But it is flavourfully written, and that flavour carries over into the more conceptually dense writing that follows.

What follows is a bunch of tables, a forest and it’s key, and a dungeon and it’s key. The longest single block of writing is seven sentences, and most are one to two. This is completely what I look for in terms of terseness, but is it up to scratch with regards to evocativeness?

“Filthy rodents mating loudly, d6 Cave Cassowaries are feasting on crawlers and shrooms”, “town filled with dreams and black lungs”, “Has a small medical practice. Practice makes perfect, and he needs a lot of it. “We’re going to have to amputate.” He jokes constantly.”. Most of it is like this. Funny, memorable, evocative, brief and when it uses words, valuable.

The negative of such a table-heavy module is that it could be clearer where and what they’re all for. I could wing it, but with such excellent and specific tables, I’d like brief but specific guidance to their use. It would make them just a little bit more useful.

In terms of connective tissue, it doesn’t do well, however. It relies heavily on the players acting in the spirit of the game; while the introduction suggests the PCs should be seeking flasks of magic water, they needn’t access the dungeon to do that, and the given hooks are colourful and don’t include that. None of the hooks point to the mines or the forest lake, actually. There’s a good chance that the PCs wouldn’t delve into these locations, despite the pleasure it would be to run them.

Overall, this module is full of fantastic, colourful characters and locations, well written. It’s a module devoid of hooks, so I’d be remiss to recommend running it by itself, as it’d take some effort to add them; but popping these three locations onto your map for a campaign or a West Marches, and they’d make for a great contribution to your world.

2nd November, 2023

Idle Cartulary