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.

Trouble at the Rock of Tariq is a module for Orbital Blues by Basheer Ghouse with art by Joshua Clark. It features PCs trapped on an unfamiliar pirate moon, unintentionally involved in a succession crisis that they are likely to decide the direction of. I’m a big fan of Orbital Blue’s vibes, and I’ve big expectations for this, which I’m reading digitally and received as part of the Kickstarter.

Trouble’s writing style is a little too verbose for my liking, writing prose in sentences and paragraphs as if it were aspiring to be a WOTC module. It would benefit from more structure to help me grok the intrigue more easily. The voice is in generic rpg-gazetteer voice, with occasional evocative flourishes like “a towering building of red stone domes and brightly colored steel walls slicing out of the mists.” showing that Ghouse is capable of writing well. My main concern about the writing approach is that both gameable content and evocative writing is buried in the prose, with no consideration for the capacity to find the information as needed. The combination between the amount of prose and its lack of immediate usefulness feels self-indulgent rather than generous. The most usable piece of writing in the module is the table on the 4th last page finally explaining all the buyers and what they’re offering, but this still doesn’t summarise all the information needed to make a decision, present elsewhere in the module. Most of the first paragraphs in each chapter could be two or three dot points, for example. Dot points are part of the already existing layout repertoire so I often wonder why they’re not used more. Just overall, not useful writing decisions for me.

Structurally Trouble is in four chapters and an epilogue, that are entirely written to be on rails. The on rails nature of the story doesn’t bother me (not my jam, but whatever floats your boat), but it does bother me that the location keys and additional character information are both scattered and poorly demonstrated, and won’t support the PCs making inevitable off-rails choices. The outcome of the structure results in difficulty engaging with the characters choices, and the plot itself doesn’t provide strong reasons for the PCs to follow the rails, so I’d expect them to wander.

Layout is flashy, clear, and screams Orbital Blues. The art very much blends in with the layout (in a positive way), doesn’t feel like cheap spot art, and doesn’t detract from the product like much art does. The production values are strong with this one. But it’s not as usable as it first seems. To a significant degree, this book would benefit from boxed text as a structural decision. A lot of the content might as well be read aloud, but it’s not differentiated. Having it boxed would help the author realise how much reading there actually is, and make it easier to run. If the intent isn’t to read aloud, it needs to be more accessible, because currently, i’m pausing to read two to three paragraphs between preset scenes. The lack of references, particularly if the location is optional, is problematic in such a spread out text. There are a few solutions to this not implemented; page references would work well (there is one, once, which is jarring), but so would plot summaries for subplots as well as the main plot.

I have major concerns about the story itself, in which the PCs don’t possess much agency at all, largely shunted from event to event until they have encountered all the major offers for the cargo on their ship, as if these pirates are likely to wait and politely allow them to confer quietly. Information is withheld from the PCs for the greater part of the adventure, and because of that it feels less a mystery and more their being strung along on a goose chase. The information is rarely delivered using the action sequences, but rather in exposition by specific characters. There would be a lot more interest if, for example, the encounters leading up to the main decision point (“Who do we sell the cargo to?”) gradually dropped clues as to the nature of the cargo and the secret intentions of the buyers. Basically, the module doesn’t understand that the most interesting thing to the players is full information resulting in an intentional decision, rather than fumbling around, and the various buyers actions aren’t complex enough for their opaqueness to translate into interesting about-turns. They’re all above-board honest pirates.

The Rock of Tariq has the potential to be a very interesting place, but it comes off as a thoroughly underdeveloped Prospero’s Dream. The agendas and approaches of the various major NPCs and factions are spread out across multiple sections, making them hard to run unless you’re following everything in exact order. Locations are similarly spread out across multiple sections, as are the NPCs inhabiting them. Compressing the information already provided and developing the location and it’s factions more clearly would be a more effective way of achieving the promised intrigue.

As it is, Trouble is so misguided I had trouble reading it and I have trouble being generous towards it. It often feels like the author wanted to write a short story rather than a module. Orbital Blues as a system seems tacked on. There are a bunch of ways this type of intrigue module could be structured to be less boredom-inducing than it is, but from the text I don’t see any way of running it where I wouldn’t be bored out of my mind, and I’m afraid my players would be bored as I read it to them. To make it work for me, I’d be basically rewriting it. I’ve done this before for modules that brought a lot of interesting and exciting potential, but there’s nothing here unique enough for me to bother with that kind of prep. If you love Orbital Blues, I think you’d be better off spending your prep time adapting another business themed module than running this; I’ve already mentioned A Pound of Flesh, and there’s a lot of of sci-fi intrigue in Hull Breach as well, much better handled. That said, it certainly nails the “sad space western” vibe of its mother system Orbital Blues, which is quite the achievement.

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