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.

Spectacle is a 55 page setting for Troika by Seth Ian and illustrated by Mark Conway, inspired by Jack Kirby cosmic superhero comic books. Spectacle had a complicated funding journey — a failed Kickstarter, and then a re-evaluation and relaunch. Did the challenging landscape of indie development cause this module to falter, or does it thrive despite the cutthroat competition?

Spectacle opens with an introduction, written in purple and opaque prose fitting the silver age of comics that inspired it, and presenting the premise: People of all worlds are thrown together onto a prison planet to fight in an arena for the pleasure of some kind of god-planet. I am filled with excitement for the premise.

It follows it up with 36 Troika backgrounds. This is the meat of the module. These are written in the same florid prose as the introduction, and they’re excellent and communicating the world through implication. I’m truly impressed by the author’s style here, as much as it’s aping Kirby. The backgrounds tend towards combat-centric play — there’s an arena so of course — but surprisingly there are hints of non-arena focused play as well in the Bound Haruspex and Tailypo the good dog. Many cleverly imply their goals here too, which could drive play in a way that the original Troika backgrounds failed to do for me — take the Living Bullet’s need to consume star matter or the Knave of Nihil’s desire to bring oblivion. This is clever writing and I’m here for it.

Next up we have 36 enemies to fight in the arena. Aside from the Occulants, which are specifically servants of Spectacle, I’m not sure what differentiates these enemies from backgrounds. Many are also, simply creatures brought into the arena. However, more clever world-building is here: The implication of rest time between fights, bathhouses, bureaucracies that record information for the Eye, medics and wildlife is all interesting, but leaves me wondering if I’ve missed the point of this module altogether. I thought I was telling a slight tale of rebellion and battle, but perhaps I’m supposed to be telling a tale of living in servitude and under persecution? The Eye itself is started out as number 37: A clear indication to me of the implied story arc here. The player characters are to kill the Eye. After this come a few random tables: Firstly a gladiator name generator, which I appreciate and helps me get into the right state of Kirby-an mind. Then an encounter table suggesting a larger world, endless wastes and a shantytown, but needlessly limiting itself to a d66 table when it probably needed to be more to really communicate this larger world and the activity of the arena in a meaningful way.

This feels like the intended end to the book. The back matter that follows is firstly another six enemies — mini-bosses of a kind, the minor gods of spectacle. These add an interesting wrinkle of faith on Spectacle, but fail to do the interesting thing and provide us with factions with clear or competing goals. Then comes Bitter Herbs, which is intended to be a 2-page scenario, set in a village on Spectacle, however its illegibly laid out, the only place in the book where the purple prose renders the text unusable for me. If written more clearly and with some headings or any layout choices at all to make it usable, this two page scenario has promise in terms of competing factions and is full of seeds about what Spectacle is supposed to be about: Not the arena, but rather existing in this horrible political climate. An unexpected twist I didn’t anticipate, to be honest, is that this is truly a campaign setting, albeit likely a short one, rather than a one-off arena module.

And that’s helpful, and I could see uses for this module, but specially with the glaring omission from the Kickstarter promise of “detailed rules for creating and running adventures on the planet”. These are simply not present at all, and this absence is my most significant problem with Spectacle. Because I would have to do a lot of work to make this playable, given the dearth of locations, and the lack of true hooks into play, and lack of information on the arena or how it works. Too much work, to be honest. Perhaps I could get more inspiration from reading Secret Wars or a similar comic that inspired the setting (I’m sure there are others), but that should be here. The nature of the setting — full of characters from other worlds — means that there isn’t enough here about the world in this format.

Now art. I get the strong impression that the key difference between the first (unsuccessful) and second (successful) crowdfunding campaigns was to do with the art budget on this module, because Mark Conway featured heavily in that first campaign, and contributes 9 pieces of art to my count (aside from the covers) to this. Based on analogous products and of course Troika itself, I would bet that the intent was to have him illustrate every single background here. That would have made for a spectacular book of art, as what he has contributed here are for the most part half-tone masterpieces. But this absence of that art combined with an incredibly pedestrian layout — readable, but not at all compelling or remarkable in any way — Spectacle, sadly, is anything but a feast for the eyes.

Spectacle is a module after the vein and design of Fronds of Benevolence and Acid Death Fantasy, two modules that have been sitting on my desk to review for some time. And Spectacle also shows the reason why they’re sitting in my desk: This background-forward approach to setting is highly appealing to a writer’s writer, an exercise in iteration and communicating setting through implication, and one that I’d enjoy performing myself, but as a playable product, for me it falls terribly short. This is because I don’t want to pay money for a quantum world that only exists by the whims of the players. Spectacle promised more than that — it promised a structure to support an unusual style of play — but it doesn’t fulfil that promise. What I’m left with is the implication of a grander world full of twisted creatures and interesting politics, the planning of a rebellion and the defeat of a malevolent cosmic god — but all I actually have is an arena where characters with different Troika backgrounds fight. And Troika combat in a desert arena isn’t going to keep my table interested for very long.

Could I make Spectacle interesting? Yes, if I tried hard enough. But I don’t want to try hard, I want Spectacle to provide me with an everything I need to run at least a few sessions in this battle-torn world. And sadly, Spectacle fails to do that for me. If you sport a deep familiarity with silver age comic book lore, and think you could improvise the setting or are willing to develop it out yourself based on the nuggets here, then Spectacle is the module for you. Its Dark Sun meets Troika in space with cosmic superheroes! But sadly, Spectacle is not for me.

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