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.

Tephrotic Nightmares is a 158 page module for Mörk Borg, styling itself as a campaign. It’s written by Luke Gearing, with art and design by the inestimable Johan Nohr. This is an “official” campaign for Mörk Borg by the author who created the virile phallic uber-druid of the Isle, and is laid out by the hyper-tuned in and vision-breaking creator of Mörk Borg, so I was prepared for a messy and over the top ride, but to be honest there was nothing here that shocked me given that context; just a lot of gore, torture, and violence. Consider that some kind of trigger warning, I suppose?

The first two chapters set up the overriding setting of the Ash Sea and the rules governing crazed profane boats that sail upon it. These seem inspired by Fury Road’s war machines (or perhaps the machines from Descent to Avernus), to be honest. I was surprised how much attention they got — 20 pages or so. I could see the pursuit of new and weirder modules for your boat being a driving force for players of Tephrotic Nightmares. As it is, the boat rules, while interesting, don’t feel incorporated outside of the chapter they’re in. There are no races here. Aside from some random encounters, it feels like your extreme customised ride will be set aside for dungeon crawling in the 25 locations that are included — we’ll get to that in a bit.

Chapter 3 is the bestiary: a bunch of creative and unexpected weirdly dark beasts with darkly humorous descriptions. I like these. They very from fine to exceptional, some such as the dry-witches treading the line between faction and beast. Gearings writing really shines in beastly descriptions. It also includes factions, but I’ll come back to that.

The bulk of the book, though, is 25 locations, scattered across a massive hex map all roughly 5 hexes distant from each other. Some areas on the hex map are modified by their inhabitants — they have their own special encounter table insert; some are raider territory, and subject to their interference. There are 13 lighter locations, designed to be faction bases or places to seemingly rest or interact, and there are 9 heavier locations that are keyed for crawling and plunder; the biggest at 20 odd rooms. There is a lot of breadth here, in terms of type, location and size. At least two of these heavier locations would happily be published in isolation; by contrast the more complex of the lighter locations feel a little undercooked, being settlements with too few levers on play in my opinion. Many in the middle are only 1 or 2 paragraph encounters, appropriately. I’m starting to see cracks, though: If I assume the players are plunderers, they’re just earning enemies across the map. Where are the politics and the interactions? Where is the serendipity?

The locations themselves — the best of them feature the same mythical qualities featured in the Isle, albeit at smaller scale. This is both a positive and negative: This isn’t a sea of interconnections, it’s a sea full of isolated islands, each their own story, scarcely impacting on the others. Finishing a dungeon changes the world or the player characters for the worse, never for the better (I wouldn’t expect it of Mörk Borg) but also never in a way that renders the politics of the world more interesting. They are similar better suited to be individual and divorced from the greater world, as the Isle was. The fulfilment of the myth there did not mean you had wasted the rest of the book. The apocalypse came only at the end of the story. There, I adore the earth-shattering finale. Here, on an already shattered earth, why would we enjoy seeing this uninteresting destruction repeatedly? It lacks the foreboding and tension of the Calendar of Nechrubel, and instead feels written to be read rather than to be played, even though in isolation most would be interesting and commendable one-shots.

The random encounter table, which is hidden in the boating rules, contains a 15% chance at best of encountering anything faction-specific. You roll every day, which means generally once or twice between locations, depending on your boat and the wind speed. Most of those 3-in-20 chance of encounters aren’t going to tie into specific locations or generate narrative spontaneously. There is no chance of encountering more than 1 simultaneously, interacting. This encounter table is simply stuff to encounter. If I were to run this, I’d modify it significantly to make these encounters meaningful or at least potentially filled with meaning if chance favours the players.

The third chapter contains factions as well as beasts, and I’ll come back to them now. Six of them are arranged alphabetically, and vary in size and complexity. But which am I to recall details regarding? Their relative importance (if any) is unclear, except for the raiders who get unique treatment — but individually the encounters with them will be less bespoke, featuring generation rather than specifics. At least it’s clear the raiders are major — I suspect counterintuitively their lack of specificity is by design as they’re meant to be ubiquitous. They are all potentially interesting to involve yourself with, in a twisted apocalyptic way — a bunch of darkly humorous and grim factions. But there is no clear contest between them, except in a few specific moments throughout the locations — the finale of the Sunken Temple for example. A few are recruiting, but their goals and challenges, despite being stated, are somewhat opaque although pretty to behold. A random example: “Ascension begins the world through radical denial / The neighbours, determining the true path out of this world”. I’m sure I could expand on it — a generous read is that it’s supposed to be evocative both of their speech and of their beliefs — but it could have just been less opaque? Good writing isn’t meaningless poetry, it needs to communicate clearly where necessary. Most of these goals and challenges are nigh on useless in this regard to me, without further development on my own. And I could’ve developed my own instead of buying this premium module, if I wanted that. The cumulative effect is a sea without clear goals as to why you’d sail it or where to sail, filled with factions that are ultimately disinterested in interacting with each other, unless you patch it yourself.

Gearing recently wrote a screed declaring that hooks are unnecessary, though rumours are valuable. Tephrotic Nightmares opens with 42 (or so) rumours (of course, no hooks), and I really don’t care for them, which compounds this issue. There is indeed a social contract in sitting down to play a game — we should want to engage with the world around us — but the rumours here are all places to avoid and glimmers of the world, and only 5 (maybe 7 — the additional 2 are vague at best) out of the 42 are tempting further exploration. I don’t need hooks to want to engage with the world, but I need something to decide what to do when you drop me into it; I need a lever to pull. This is a terrifying world, and there’s not even a suggestion of who you could play in it or why you’re taking to the seas in the first place, beyond a gesture in the first paragraph: “The dark, forgotten places full of things from below. Much safer atop the ash, they say. Yet what has been forgotten will hold value”. To whom? What rumours direct us to any of these forgotten places? Why would you go into any of these locations at all, hidden in your blank map with no indication of their presence?

Layout-wise, this is a vanilla design by a clearly masterful hand. The masterful, first. Flagging is clear: San-serif for rules text, serif for flavour and in-world text, bold and centered blackletter for headings, kept to 3 levels only. 2 raggedy columns scratched onto the page in the same fountain pen the illustrations are sketched in; tricks you can only pull off if you’re doing both the design and the art. But, a lot of the Nohr flourishes feel hampered by the writing: sketched frames seem crowded out by the words; spectacular illustrations often seem similarly crowded when not full page (although as a response, there are a lot of full page artworks — very impressive); the maps while gorgeous are pedestrian compared to other Nohr maps like those in A Wizard; there are no really striking layout surprises as I’d expect in a Nohr designed book. All of these, I think, are a result of the tension between Gearing’s drive to write text that stands alone without art (exemplified by the nigh artless efforts, Empire of Texas, Wolves Upon the Coast and the Isle), and Nohr’s vision-first approach, rather than a failure of design per se. This feels inevitable with this coupling. The only visual decision I find baffling, is that at no point did my brain learn to parse that heading blackletter “A” as anything but a “U”, and given a not insignificant part of this module begins with the letter A (“The Ash Sea”, “Ashcrawling”) there could’ve been a better choice made there. I’m reading the digital version, but of course the print version is both beautiful and in this case an interactive art object that requires you to crack it open “like you would a human spine. If you want to read this book, you have to first defeat it”. I don’t know how practical this would be at the table, but if it floats your boat?

Fascinating to see this and Seas of Sand, two waterless sea-crawling campaigns, released in such close succession. The differences in approach are striking: Where Seas of Sand is a sea generator strapped to an interesting world narrative, Tephrotic Nightmares is a book filled to the brim with locations. It acts like a megadungeon — a series of dungeons with common factions, linked together by sea rather than stairs. You’re travelling blindly, more a megadungeon than any wilderness travel. Unlike Seas of Stars, the wilderness has no interest in and itself. An ashy desolation and naught else. Seas of Sand feels like it’s intended to feel like sailing, albeit a fantastic version of sailing. Tephrotic Nightmares seems at first more interested in being a post-apocalyptic machine battlefield — except this aspect of play feels utterly divorced from crawling that fills the second half of the book, wherein it switches gears and seems interested in the mechanics of specific locations. They are utterly dissimilar, except in that they’re both providing quite high preparation games. The key dissimilarity is that in Tephrotic Nightmares my prep is patching areas where it falls short for me, whereas with Seas of Sand my prep is simply part of following the rules as written. When I saw these two had similar concepts, I was excited, because I was quite up front with my disappointment in Seas of Sand’s hard lean into anticanon and prep-heavy play, and lack of concrete places and people. But it turns out, I miss the connective tissue that Seas of Sand really compelling, here. A mix would be what I like best, I now suspect.

Overall, I feel like I’ve come down more negative on this book than I actually feel, so I’ll tamp my criticisms down a bit and reiterate its strengths: The boat combat here seems a lot of fun, the bestiary is a-grade, and there are 25 locations most of which are compelling places to find adventure or at least horror. Gearing’s writing shines as always: “If a group of crows is a murder, this is a statistic”, “They have abandoned language—it was insufficient to express their torment.”, “roots force it ever-wider. You could just about fit. The smell of smoke and blood emanates”, to pick a few random sentences from random pages. There is so much content here for only 150 pages, and that’s ignoring a lot of frankly spectacular art. If your aesthetic and humour matches Mörk Borg, you simply have to overlook the flawed factions and make them more ambitious and driven (an easy enough task), fix the random encounter table to make it more interactive, and then you have a compelling campaign that will last you…I’d estimate over 30 hours of play, probably more.

I think, aside from the flaws — ones that are dealbreakers for me but perhaps not for you — this is a perfectly worthwhile read, an exceptional value book of encounters, and if you’re willing to amend it a little, it’s a banging post-apocalyptic doom metal vehicle battle simulator with dungeon crawl elements. If that amended pitch (the one on the back of the book and on the website is frankly uninspiring) catches your attention, and you like Mörk Borg, I’d take a serious look at Tephrotic Nightmares.

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