Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of 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.

The Undermall is an 18 page dungeon crawl for Electric Bastionland with art, writing and layout by Ari-Matti Toivonen. It features an abandoned mall beneath Bastion, that has been warped by the evil there. If it wasn’t inspired by Warren’s post Megadungeon Malls, it’s a case of remarkable convergent evolution.

This is a comedic dungeon. It’s full of little tidbits like a gelatinous cube collecting appliances and clockwork cops chasing rat teens. The vibes are very much 21st century mall, which clashes a little with my electric-era bastion, but leads to a lot of decent jokes. I think the vibes would’ve been a little better had they been a little more early 20th century mall, and I’d dress it up this way if I were to run it I think; I feel like adding more anachronism would make it a little more fun and weird. But the tension between humour and usable, interesting play is managed well here, which isn’t something I see done well, often.

As far as dungeons go, this doesn’t innovate or skip any essentials, but it nails most of them. The hooks and random encounters are highly relational and location-specific, leading play rather than just interrupting it. I just wish there was a “roll twice” option on the encounter table simply because it would be fun to see these interact; they do occur in rooms as well, though, so perhaps that’s inevitable.

The map has multiple entrances and appears looped, but actually isn’t meaningfully so. Thanks to dimension-warping stretches access to many areas is randomised. There are only six hallways aside from these stretches, making, I would expect, a difficult to navigate space. In addition to this, there are no “empty” rooms on the map, making it a very dense dungeon. There is a random table of empty stores and the map implies, perhaps, that they’re there, but I’d have rathered a 13 room dungeon with a few empty rooms than randomised empty stores with no set locations. All in all, I’d have to put some effort into modifying this dungeon, I think: Adding predictable routes to make navigating it an interesting spatial challenge, and adding a few empty rooms for retreat and pacing purposes.

But the contents of those ten rooms are honestly excellent. They’re weird and wonderful in my opinion, fun twists on what you encounter in a suburban mall: Optometrists that change your vision on a hit, skeletal baristas, murderous plushies. Good stuff. There are non combat encounters here, but they play not as rests but as interludes; I like them, but I don’t see the party barricading in the Starbucks with Jakke. The writing isn’t beautiful, and is very dense, but it’s clever and interesting.

The legibility of these entries could be improved with clearer typographical flagging, better indentation in the bullet points, and perhaps a clearer pattern with bullet use. At a page and text level though, it’s easy and clear to navigate. The art is good, and characterful, and I like the recurring mini-map.

The book finishes with the aforementioned abandoned stores and a few other flavourful tables, all of which I like, but wish they were built into the other procedures: Simple: An encounter is a six, an announcement on 5, perhaps. Then this table isn’t something I need to consider how to incorporate or something I’d forget. Even better: Make the announcements foreshadowing for upcoming events encounters.

All up, yeah, I’d run the Undermall. This is a damned good short module, that just needs a few tweaks to be nigh perfect, with some of those tweaks being entirely personal preference. It’s a no-brainer addition to an Electric Bastionland campaign, and I’m going to keep an eye out for future work from Ari-Matti Toivonen. We have an up-and-comer here.

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