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 harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

I normally don’t review 5e modules, but I was offered two when I reached out for modules by lesser known creators, and read them in close proximity. They gave me enough similar food for thought that I wanted to comment on them together.

Reign of Guano

Reign of Guano is an 18 page module for 5e by Alex Rinehart. It’s documented as a laid out version of his home campaign notes. It features a deadly, fire breathing pigeon.

Reign of Guano is laid out in the classic 5e two column A4 format, functionally but not in an exciting way. I wonder if straying from the format would alienate readers of 5e? To a degree, the Microsoft Word template for 5e has done a wondrous job of democratising production, but on the other hand many of the creators on DM’s Guild would benefit from learning some of the layout skills necessary to put something together in Affinity or Indesign. The art is stock, and there is a simple map of the city in which it takes place.

The introduction neatly includes a summary of the location, what the players know or will quickly learn, and what they don’t know. I like this structure, but overall the summaries are hard to relate (I’m not going to read four paragraphs to the players). This would be better as a list or rumours or secrets, or expressly as handouts or connected to recommended player backgrounds. Another Bug Hunt, recent Mothership introductory module, uses a similar approach t much success. The city description lacks a keyed map, and is also described in paragraph form. The description reminds me of the structure used in Fever Dreaming Marlinko, but it fails to structure in hooks and clear points of interactivity and gameability.

The campaign (a campaign! In 15 pages!) is designed around six set-piece encounters, two side quests and three introductory scenes. All of these encounters are individually fun and weird enough, but they definitely make considerable assumptions about what the PCs are going to be doing. While the module speaks specifically to the fact that the flexibility is necessary and that encounters are likely to occur out of order or not in written fashion, the encounters aren’t written to facilitate that flexibility.

There are nice touches here and there, creative writing flares such as “The stars wouldn’t like to shine here anyway” and a wizard who uses trained parrots to speak his spells for him, but they’re lost in the sea of words. Terseness is not a well-modelled habit in official 5e products, and there is evidence of that here. Most of these could be cut to a paragraph or two; in fact one of them literally has a paragraph in it starting with “let’s cut to the chase” because it knows it can be summarised more simply.

In total, this is a fun, brief campaign that is overly reliant on dense prose. Despite its brevity, it’s complex and weird enough that it’d be messy to incorporate into your campaign. I do think there’s a version of this where all of these encounters, options and quests are rolled into a small city crawl, and structured so that everything would happen independently of the players, and that’s something I’d definitely run, but in its current form it’s too crowded and rigid for me to want to extract the fun that is definitely there.

The Skeleton Closet

The Skeleton Closet is a 36 page single location for 5e, a manual shop. It takes the opposite approach to Reign of Guano: It expands considerably on a specific aspect, rather than present a broad-strokes overview of a series of events.

It riffs on classic 5e layout, but makes some unique decisions in terms of colour choice and matching art to those choices, as well as heading choices that make it a little more readable.

Like Reign of Guano, the Skeleton Closet is overwritten in 5e house style. There are nice touches; like the separate interior and exterior descriptions. The meat here, though (it’s padded out with subclasses and magical items as 5e is wont to do), is in the five magical skeletons each of whom are detailed, provide hooks.

This is a interesting way to draw out the nuance in a location, and I like it a lot. Each shopkeeping skeleton has a spread, with a stat block, fun facts, roleplaying tips, the 5e personality traits block, and a list of chronological relationship events. Now, all of this is a little too much: I think each of these could be better summarised in less words, and there just needn’t be a full stat block for five characters you are unlikely to fight (one will do, add a few minor differences and list them). But this is a fun and interesting location and set of characters to drop into your campaign.

But, a desire to have these characters fit anywhere means that their stories rarely extend outside the four walls of the shop, and that is a missed opportunity. There is sadly no setting these skeletons up on dates or solving the mystery of their murders or anything of the sort. And that means it’s left a little toothless. I’d drop this in my campaign, but I’d probably hack it aggressively do that the PCs could easily slide into these skeletons lives.

Thoughts

These are both interesting perspectives I think on what a 5e module could be. But also, they feel limited by either the authors lack of knowledge of what is happening outside of 5e, or perhaps by the expectations set by 5e itself. I wonder if the lack of experimentation and divergence from the 5e house layout is a factor of ease of entry, or a factor of how non-officially formatted are received on the DMs Guild? There’s a huge range of format experimentation outside the space after all, but I can only think of two major releases that buck the trend, which are Oz and Neverland.

There is eternal harping on about converting these players to new systems, but honestly, the hook for other playstyles is the modules that exist for them. Nobody pays OSE or Cairn because they have the most fascinating rules. But the adventures you can have? Without peer! I admire these two, if flawed, modules for attempting something new. I’d love to see 5e modules structured or inspired by what exists out there already in the wide diy elfgame space, because I think that’s a more realistic vector for exposing people to the joys of elfgaming than, say, Shadowdark ever will be.

23rd November, 2023

Idle Cartulary