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 Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow is a 117 page module for Liminal Horror by Goblin Archives and Josh Domanski, with art by Amanda Lee Franck. It’s an explicit reimagining of Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles, a module ya’ll are probably aware I have a soft spot for. The introduction is quite vocal about it not being a conversion, but as someone intimately familiar with the original, the parallels here are extreme, and a little stronger, I think, than is indicated, to the point where I can point specific items and characters directly to the original. That’s not a bad thing at all — the original is excellent. I backed a crowdfunding campaign for this, I guess for Zine Month?

We are welcomed to Hungry Hollow, with a description providing a decent sense of place, a brief history and the plans of the villain, Brea. This is an excellent introduction, giving solid X-file-esque vibes and potential for inter-faction drama in a longer campaign. But off the bat it undermines itself, stating that the module is for experienced investigators, but also stating it is designed as a campaign starter (and the background information suggests this too — whatever it says, it’s not a drop in location, it has a very specific sense of place). Then it goes on to recommend how to incorporate it mid-campaign and as a one-shot, but acknowledges that you’d need to rewrite a bunch of ways here for either, rendering it unrecognisable. I understand the urge to be all things to all people, here, but I much prefer a module to simply be what it is. The nature of the hobby is such that anyone buying a module for Liminal Horror likely has the confidence and experience to rejig this module to fit their needs.

The bestiary and introduction to the villains is creepy as hell, especially the primary villain, and using a bee theme in the place of reptiles is an excellent inclination. If you’re planning to run this, though, I’d pay very close attention to the list of content warnings before buying it. It gets pretty intense. Amanda Lee Franck’s art here is absolute creepy-as-hell body horror fire. Best in its class.

The authors clearly think this module needs pace, so they introduce the Doom Clock, intended to keep things moving over 5 days. The problem is, I don’t think it does a good job of escalating obviously enough— although it’s very cute that it uses hexes, given the apiaristic themes at play. The “void crawl” mechanic — this is a hazard die tying to multiple random encounter tables, but named very strangely in my opinion — claims to increase the pressure as well, but it’s not tied to the Doom Clock, and it only really serves to provide interest to moving around the town physically. It’s actually really good — I especially love the bee themed incidentals, that slowly build a sense of dread as the town gets increasingly bee-crowded. Just very weirdly misnamed and its purpose misattributed?

Reading through the key, I have trouble not comparing to the original, because, as I said earlier, it takes more cues than they indicated. While clues are present into as many of the Apiarist locations as possible, like in the original, the town is filled with characters who have very little in the way of interactions going on within the town. The clues provided are of the kind that will make you go “ohhhhh” in retrospect, but aren’t going to be combined to solve the mystery — I’d have loved more informational clues, notes and messages so that you are better placed to solve this mystery, and so these locations are meaningful. If these places and characters are given little to do aside from exist and have their homes searched for loot (most of the loot appears replicated from the original Gygaxian accountancy approach, updated for modern times), a lot of this space isn’t well gamified. Does it have to be? No, not at all. In the context of this story in particular — essentially one about a spreading disease — pre-existing relationships could be used as disease vectors, and hence as ways to drive the investigation. I’m not seeing that here, either, though. I recognise the urge to maintain the large and populated town of Against the Cult of the Reptile God, but more support needs be provided to make the town feel alive if that’s the direction you take — as is, uninfected people are more likely to be hostile to you, resulting in a decent chance you’ll be angering the populace well before you start to solve the mystery.

The flow of the key is interrupted weirdly in the centre of the book because two major dooms occur in the Rec Center, which lies roughly in the middle of the key. The Baby Shower, the second of these dooms and the penultimate doom of the module, immediately doesn’t make sense: Brea is a twisted half-insect creature at this point (you might recall me praising Franck’s art of her earlier), and why the townsfolk aren’t reacting with horror and panic isn’t explained at all. It feels as if this was written before they decided Brea would look like a monster, and forgot to revise it. The final dungeon has been redesigned as a power plant and the hive below it (rather than the swamp dungeon of the original) and it suffers by comparison to the original in its repetitiveness — husk, bee, apiarist, repeat. I’d have loved to have seen theee bee mutations getting much weirder in the depths of Brea’s lair, instead of what we’ve already seen becoming rote. Overall, the town and dungeon are serviceable, but not better than the original, and in some ways worse.

In the back there are a bunch of appendices, mainly pretty cool random tables — the only thing that feels vestigial is the search tables, given the Gygaxian accountancy approach to keying has been adopted here. I especially appreciate the index of characters — useful in a module of this complexity.

The layout here is a functional 2 columns. It wants to be generous with its white space, and is with its margins, but it isn’t generous with padding or leading, creating a crowded visual experience. Spacing leaves large gaps in some pages, where the page is absolutely begging for some art or an alternate layout. The tight leading particularly on the subheadings renders an otherwise easily legible and appropriate font choice challenging to read at a glance. In the location key — most of the book — the pages desperately need filling and art, and the key is confusing, and in a way that infuriates me: Initially, it’s really clear and navigable, with bold location numbers in the upper outside margins. But this changes suddenly half-way through. These changes do make more sense when considered as a print product — I’m reading this in digital — because they still have navigable elements on each spread, but it’s still moving those navigable elements around and in a way that simply doesn’t improve the experience. It’s also not clear why some NPCs belong in the sidebar, while others don’t. Within the key, they have a clearly described hierarchy and iconography though, which works well. That said, the overall aesthetic is bold, monochrome and modern and works well for communicating a modern, procedural vibe, and Amanda Lee Franck’s art is beautiful and terrifying, although sadly it is most prominent in the bestiary.

Against the Cult of the Reptile God is 28 pages long — admittedly the word count on a 1982 TSR module is high for its page count — but this is 91 pages more than that. Hungry Hollow is explicitly calls itself a reimagining and not a conversion, but what do we get out of those additional 91 pages? Not a lot, honestly. There’s a load of empty space — it adheres to the 1 location to a page philosophy strictly to the point where I wish it hadn’t, and doesn’t place enough art to help navigate through the blank spaces. This makes it feel drier than the original, despite the clear improvements in layout. The content is basically the same, with a few major core twists and more attention to the narrative — but it’s also on a tight timeline. I feel like this adventure and any other “stepford cuckoo” adventures are better as things that occur somewhere you’re familiar with, over time. It feels more insidious that way. Otherwise, why isn’t the whole town infected to begin with? The module itself recognises this, saying it’s “based around the slow uncovering of the town’s secrets over several sessions”, so the limitation of the time spent here to 3-9 scenes per day for 5 days seems like not much time to explore something of this complexity, and contrary to its own goals.

Would I run The Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow? No, I wouldn’t. It’s closer to a conversion than I expected (although admittedly just reskinning everything to be modern would have been a huge amount of work), and it’s not significantly better than the original. I’ve written my own version a year ago or so and I don’t think this outdoes that version for me, although looking at the flaws in this I could see my doing a version 2 to address the flaws they have in common — namely the fact that it’s too much. But, the art and villains are exceedingly excellent, and if your table prefers a modern take on the elf game this is a pretty strong place to start. If you’re running a lot of Liminal Horror, I’d suggest you set your investigators up in this town as their hometown, play out a few other modules, then allow this to develop at a more natural pace. That would take a bit of work, but if you don’t mind that work, you’ll find The Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow a whole lot stronger when you get to those final 5 days.

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