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.

I’m continuing Megadungeon July with The Stygian Library, a depth-crawl by Emmy Allen, with art by Alec Sorensen and Layout by David Wilke. Honestly I’m enjoying this, and I’m pretty keen to do Megadungeon July again next year. Let’s make a thing of it. It’s a goth-whimsical adventure through an infinite library.

Now, I realise at this point, in the last week of megadungeon July, that none of these have satisfied all of what one might describe as the megadungeon criteria. Is a point crawl like Gradient Descent or Through Ultan’s Door, or a depthcrawl like the Stygian Library (and the Gardens of Ynn which I’m waiting to receive the remastered print to review), or something without measurements in feet like Tomb of a Thousand Doors a megadungeon, actually? Surely Nightwick Abbey is More Megadungeon? And, like, sure I’ll accept that as a premise. But the foot-by-foot measurement and deep concern for the rules of B/X is not what makes Nightwick Abbey or Dwimmermount (actually I’ll withhold my judgement for when I finally read it) great megadungeons. There are a few factors, but the core factor is that they can remain the focus of play for an entire campaign. That the town, if there is one, is off-screen. That they are perpetual motion machines, their factions and characters bouncing off each other in a never ending cascade of play-inducing unexpected twists. The dungeon need not be without end to be mega, it simply must be infinite in its potential for play. Argue as you will with me on this; a megadungeon is like pornography — you know it when you see it — and a stricter taxonomy in my opinion speaks more to personal preference than meaningful taxonomy.

The Stygian Library is a depth-crawl, a format invented by the author Allen in Gardens of Ynn and replicated here. I’m not actually aware of another released depth crawl aside from my own Hell in Rev-X, which I find surprising, because it’s a compelling format for spaces that are so large as to not be meaningfully mapped, or ones that defy understanding. In brief, the dungeon is mapped anew each time it is entered, from a selection of rooms that changes the deeper you travel into it. This casts aside the spatial aspect of dungeon crawling (except within a trip into the Library), but preserves the strength of your learning about factions, locations and characters as they will still recur. The dungeon becomes a kind of deck of cards, with recurring themes, but which recombines in surprising ways each time you play.

My favourite thing about the Stygian Library as a concept is that it is infinitely flexible, because any knowledge can be found in its depths. So, drop it into any campaign: The place you go to find the secrets you need. There are mechanisms inside the book specifically to facilitate this; it’s assumed this is the primary reason to enter. They’re solid, interesting mechanics, well grounded in the dungeon but with excellent flexibility.

The layout and overall design of Stygian Abyss approaches perfection for me. Just incredibly thoughtful and playable work. Beautiful pages often reminiscent of classic novels but not beholden to them; headings so bold they could not be missed; judicious use of weight and italics as highlighting with clear use cases; adventurous and rare use of sizing for emphasis; simple layers of bullet points for detail; page references throughout; subtle but confident white spaces; alphabetised room order with clear marginalia; a strong attempt to keep information to either a page or a spread, and intelligent use of art and other motifs to facilitate this and maintaining the aesthetic. The art when it appears is bold and striking, is well paired with the choices in typeface. It all makes for a book both beautiful and usable. The main failing is that there are no major headings separating out the details from the monsters and locations — this makes it a little harder to navigate than I’d like, but there are plenty of stylistic differences between the layouts on these pages, so they are differentiated. This approach would have gone a long way to making Through Ultan’s Door a more usable book, while maintaining a similar overall aesthetic goal. I want this book on my shelf; I checked my pledge for Gardens of Ynn to see if I’d backed for a print copy and I’m relieved to say I have.

The challenge with reviewing the Stygian Library is that it’s not a traditional dungeon, but rather a series of locations, characters and factions that are expected to interact in interesting and unexpected ways. It makes the keying difficult to review, in comparison: It’s a list of places, some interesting and some interactive, and some intentionally not. But, they combine with the encounter and detail systems to create some surprising results. The first time you visit the Planetarium it is well lit by 3 portable candlesticks, and haunted by a harmless lost soul. The next time you enter there, after angering the librarians, it might be uncomfortably warm and full of smoke, with an eye sentinel standing guard. Either time, you can interact with the planetarium, but each time you’ll find it in a different place, by different routes. This is an effective method, I think, for variety. I’m not sure it’ll sustain long term play, as the primary driver for play in a campaign, like I would hope for a dungeon this size. But, it would sustain a really fascinating pillar of play, long term, in a campaign, as a recurring location, with developing relationships inside the dungeon, both positive and negative.

It feels like Allen knows this, so I’m a little disappointed that the bestiary isn’t better set up to facilitate interelational play along these lines. As always there’s the proviso that the referee can add these things, but my constant refrain is that I use modules so I don’t have to add things, but so I can choose to. Here, the Archivist-liches are prime recurring character material, but no facility is provided to support that. Educated Rodents and Escaped Fictions, Librarians, Researchers and of course Visitors all would benefit from this kind of support, and would raise the calibre of the dungeon in terms of replayability and attractiveness to players.

It’s a fascinating point of comparison with the others I’ve reviewed this month: Unlike the others, it’s designed as a place to be regularly visited, rather than to tell a story like Gradient Descent, or to facilitate a dreamworlds campaign like Through Ultan’s Door, or to provide a funhouse to play in like Tomb of a Thousand Doors. Even harking back to my preview of Nightwick Abbey, which aims to be a meat grinder that builds faction-related horror stories. The Stygian Library is unique in the role it expects to play in your campaign, and that’s valuable, and likely makes it a more invaluable text to have on your shelf, as you could use it in almost any campaign, even across campaign.

Overall, the Stygian Library is a masterpiece of design, beautiful writing and interesting location, rendered in a way that will make it an invaluable resource. If you’re running DIY elfgames, or honestly even 5th edition or Dungeon Crawl Classics in a campaign, this will be a worthy addition to your table. It has its flaws, most certainly, but they’re more than covered by its advantages. I couldn’t recommend it more to almost any table.

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