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 Incandescent Grottoes is a 48-page dungeon module by Gavin Norman with art by Nate Treme, in the Old School Essentials official line of modules. I have to admit straight up, the 50-page A5 hardcover format for the OSE official adventures is a format I absolutely adore, I’m always thrilled when other modules come in the same format (The Isle and Witchburner come to mind). I can’t afford shipping for every little thing I want to read, and so this affordable but pretty and sturdy format is a winner. I’d really love for the OSE official adventure line to be expanded, as well, because they’re readily available even in places where shipping is difficult.

I’m choosing to start with layout for this one, because the elephant in the room is that the official OSE line has its own conventions that modules published under adhere to. There are some great aspects to these conventions: Maps are always on the endpapers, for example; full colour illustrations increase the potential for text differentiation using colours as well as typefacing; headings are consistently easy to identify and differentiate. Negatives, for me though, are the excessive use of bolding in descriptions. Here’s an example:

For me, at least, in the section starting “Crystal grotto”, I could do without any of the bolded text; for me this is because the text is crowded already, it’s brief already, and because the bolded and unbolded text are already separated by grammatical indicators (parentheses in this case). For the bullet text starting “South-west”, the text is less crowded, so the bolding feels less egregious to me. There are a few other things I don’t love about the OSE conventions, that are trade-offs: For example, there are in-line stat blocks, which I don’t like in games that aren’t tactical combat games, but in this case it means there isn’t a bestiary at the end of the book, which is nice.

The book starts (as convention dictates) with an introduction page, and a dungeon overview spread. These are nice and neat and don’t adhere to the YNAI principle so I find them a little annoying. The faction and relationship summary that’s a part of them is very useful, though, and probably would make great endpaper content, or at least better placed content. There’s a list of rumours and a list of treasures, of which the list of rumours is useful and the list of treasures appears largely rolled straight out of the OSE rulebook. I appreciate not having to flick through the rulebook, but I’d really appreciate some more interesting and unique treasure. Random encounters are good.

The rest of the book is the dungeon itself, which is a fun romp through a light-hearted dungeon involving an ooze-worshipping cult, with four other factions competing for various objectives and who’ve already forged various relationships. These factions are stereotypical enough to be easy to run, have enough characterisation that they won’t bore except in the hands of an exceptional GM, and the writing is stellar (“crystal-eating dragon who is not averse to a morsel of flesh”).

The example I cited above is pretty typical of the writing of the Incandescent Grottoes. It’s functional, brief enough to be usable at the table, but often not particularly inventive. One thing I like about the writing is that the dungeon descriptions are packed full of signs and omens of challenges that are present in the rooms but unseen or yet to come – the information here is traditional in the sense that unusual things are meant to stand out. However, it gives me little to springboard off in terms of improvisation, which means I’m stuck with the point of interest written rather than springboarding off it to something exciting. The writing is not evocative, but it’s a perfection of the dry gygaxian description. Map inserts are provided on most pages, and descriptions are very brief, although most of the time they take up the whole page due to the co-location of stat blocks.

Overall, the Incandescent Grottoes is a well-formatted, solid module that would slot easily into any generic fantasy campaign. It doesn’t shoot for the stars, but it achieves most of its goals. It implies things about the larger setting that could change the direction of your campaign, which for me is a necessity for any good module. I’m a big fan of modules that shoot for the stars, but there’s something to be said for identifying whether what you’re writing is actually going to benefit from your ambition. If I compare this to Beast of Borgenwold, for example, Beast of Borgenwold probably would have been a better adventure if presented in this format with these limitations placed on it. Something like The Isle, however, would lose most of its charm and uniqueness if rearranged into the same format as the Incandescent Grottoes.

Overall, I’d recommend this for lighthearted dungeon-crawling, but it’s not going to blow anyone’s mind.

16th November, 2023

Idle Cartulary