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.

Ave Nox is a 206 page module with writing, layout and illustration by Charlie Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon. It’s system neutral, which in this case means a kind of melange of 5e and B/X — I think this is the same as Into the Cess & Citadel, and I suspect it’s the team’s house rules. I’m pretty excited about Ave Nox, because back when I read Into the Cess & Citadel, I thought it was beautiful but wasted on what was effectively a book-long city generator, when what I wanted was an actual city. This, however, is a dungeon, not a dungeon generator: One, singular location, filled with denizens and places in relation to each other. This, I think and hope, will play to the teams’ strengths. In Ave Nox, a fissure has been found beneath the Ghost Fields, and you’re venturing into it, for fun, profit, or curiosity, to explore the underground city of Solaris, and uncover its’ secret history.

We open with the dungeons’ history. I was seeking feedback on an upcoming project recently, and one insightful comment was that the timeline was more confusing than it was helpful, because it relied on an understanding of the rest of the module to make sense. This is how I feel about Ave Nox’ history. Front-leading timelines need to be brief clarifying affairs — the best recent one that comes to mind is the dual timeline of Another Bug Hunt — rather than exhaustive histories. I suspect that this could’ve been summarised in less space, and just needed a solid edit, and it all made sense when I went back and reread it after I’d finished the book: But if I were running this, and not reviewing this, I wouldn’t read the 200 or more rooms in order (who honestly would?). I’d wing it, and this would be so much nonsense and context I’d be missing. Four pages of timeline full of names and factions you’re unfamiliar with is entirely unhelpful at the beginning of the book, before you’ve read it; it would be very helpful as an appendix, I think. It’s sadly, not a promising start.

The next 20 or so pages cover Shear, the town that serves as your base to enter the dungeon — simply called “the Dungeon” at this stage, although it will come to be understood as the city of Solaris mentioned in the history. Shear is designed to discourage in-town conflict. The illustrations and descriptions suggest a cosmopolitan, Forgotten Realms-ish setting, although that’s easy to excise. It’s explicitly anarchist, reluctant to take in strangers, and without law enforcement (although there’s an under-explained council of elders — I’d like to know how that interacts with the lack of law enforcement). This all feels like an explicit response to the Keep on the Borderlands model of “lawful outpost close to dungeon”. Most of the characters have quirks — Thracite the blacksmith pays double for adamantine; Mama Xhiri gossips if you help her with her orphans. All of these characters are compelling, but not in a factional, interactive way, just in the way that they make for a lovely background cast. I don’t get the impression Shear is a place for politics or drama, so these aren’t NPCs with desires or relationships. There are also a bunch of merchants (characters with equipment lists, really), and mercenaries (intended to serve as hirelings, or competitors), similarly superficial characters, fun to interact with, but drama-less. Overall, I like it, and it suits the kind of characters and vibes my players tend to be in for — cosmopolitan, Forgotten-Realms-ish settings that justify the PCs being wherever they want to be without racism or sexism. I would have appreciated a map of this town though, or some kind of visual representation to hand to the players, or at least a referee summary (especially with my post on towns recent in my mind). Right now I feel like I’d be flicking through it all, having difficulty figuring out where, who and what they can access or interact with.

One thing Shear doesn’t have is a rumour table, or a list of hooks. Part of this is the lack of needs or desires amongst the Shear NPCs — this is so blatant it feels intentional, rather than an unforced error. Either the authors have fully bought into the hard reading of You Have Been Lied To, or the intention here is that this is a megadungeon in the sense that your play should all be contained in the dungeon, and anything outside the dungeon needs be minimised as much as possible. I like rumours and hooks, so long they impact your interaction with the dungeon. But I this feels as if it’s intended to increase the mystique of the dungeon, which is supposedly newly discovered and unexplored. While rumours and hooks make a lot of sense in many dungeons, I can see this being positioned as a low-prep, low-impact, pick-up dungeon, through this omission, which tracks with the approach to the NPCs: Flavourful scene-setters that don’t delay your returning to the main event. And that, in turn, further clarifies to me what isn’t made explicit otherwise: this is a megadungeon, intended to be the primary mode of play for a long time.

The next section is entitled “dungeon quirks”, and this is where I start to get excited about the dungeon. There are ghosts throughout the dungeon, who interact with the players through a reputation system that is semi-religious in a really interesting way. There are gas pipes throughout the dungeon that can be manipulated for environmental effects — but not just by you. There are unique “solar” keys — reminiscent of Legend of Zelda dungeons — that wall off certain dungeon areas until you locate them, driving exploration. There is an in-dungeon merchant that can be summoned once a day — likely to be discovered by accident, and also clearly inspired by Legend of Zelda dungeons, but enabling deeper delves through its inclusion. There is a demon whose prison is scattered throughout the dungeon in pieces — the players get powers for each piece they collect, but when they collect them all the demon is freed! There are fast-travel points that you can discover as you get deeper into the dungeon, allowing you to explore deeper without touching the surface levels that you’ve already explored thoroughly. These are all really fun and interesting concepts, that also position this particular megadungeon differently from others: Clearing and re-exploring areas already explored is discouraged, and rather it’s intended to be a long term campaign concerned primarily with forward motion to a clear end point. It’s a video game inspired megadungeon, not inspired by the ambling, treading-in-your-own-footsteps model of Castle Greyhawk at all. And, going back to my earlier hypothesis, this model is perfect for low-commitment pickup games, and I feel like it may also be perfect for open tables, if clear expectations are set.

There are, however, important quirks which aren’t mentioned here, and it also isn’t mentioned where they all are or key points of interaction. So, I had to search for where the mirror shards containing the demon were in the dungeon; and I had to search to find out how the players could find out, how they knew the Solaris Wards might need to be destroyed to defeat the Sun King (I didn’t find the answers, though). It turns out you can switch off all the gas pipes, too, but that isn’t mentioned until well into the book. If we’re going to front-load dungeon-wide concepts, I think we need to front-load them all and give the referee information to use and anticipate their use, especially in a text this dense and long.

We now reach the dungeon itself! I like the key here — not overexplained, simply bold for items of interest, stat blocks set aside from the text, italicised read-aloud text. The flexibility of this key is nice: As opposed to the methods in Nightwick Abbey, Curse of Mizzling Grove and Beyond the Pale — each seemingly inspired by Landmark, Hidden, Secret — this features a lot more flexibility while hitting the same notes. Each area (containing multiple keyed locations) is given an alphabetic prefix, allowing for smooth recognition of different appearing or interacting spaces — an elegant conceit.

The descriptions themselves are a little much for me, but not so overboard that I’d find it difficult to parse. Part of this is the strict length considerations: All keys stay on a single column, or page, or more rarely spread. I like that the history of the dungeon — even as a non-actionable insight — is considered valuable, as research was a primary reason given for venturing in. It does add to the challenge of parsing the description, though. There are missteps though, whose solutions are pretty clear, though, and hence would’ve been caught with either more editing or more playtesting: For example, the sculpture in A4 that provides clues regarding the layout of the dungeon absolutely needs an illustration, and it’s unforgivable it doesn’t have one, given the illustrators also wrote the module. I’d have to draw one, I think, if I ran it. On the other hand, they take advantage of their chosen quirks exceedingly well: In B3, the ghosts, dead by gas leak, warn the players if they’re friendly, but endanger them if they’re angry. At this point in the dungeon, that’s an excellent early foreshadow of the implementation of gas pipes and the ghosts later in the module. It’s tutorialising, just like in a video game.

One thing you might notice this dungeon lacks, though, random encounter tables. Individual rooms have random encounters in them — A2, G3, J2, and U1, for example. Areas M, O and V have their own random encounter tables. King Linnorm leaves area H intermittently to wreak havok on area D. But overall, this is not a dungeon that depends on random encounters. What does this imply about Ave Nox? Well, it’s super reliant on encounters that are in the key. This might be a problem in play — in a traditional dungeon it definitely would be — but noting the jaquaysing in place and the generous fast travel points, I don’t think it’s a dungeon concerned with the resource management minigame that random encounters are designed to encourage, nor with restocking cleared spaces in the dungeon, as it’s not meant to be retread. Rather it uses random encounters to mimic heavily populated areas. In the context of the implied principle “don’t retrace your steps”, summonable in-dungeon merchants, and plenty of empty rooms, the lack of consistent random encounters makes more sense, I think, than my original impression.

I don’t think Ave Nox assumes the use of a reaction roll, which most megadungeons do, but it’s not entirely clear, and it would be better and easier to run if this was in the brief rules section at the front. It would be hard to intuit the intent of the “ragged cultists” in area A if I rolled a positive result. The “summer cultists” of area J are simply living in their quarters when you encounter them, and you encounter them doing mundane activities — but in the absence of any faction or individual agendas, there’s not a clear suggestion for how to interact with them if the reaction roll is positive. There’s “alarm” for the summer cult in their second area, K, to determine how they pursue the players — this further suggests you shouldn’t be interacting with them, as “being spotted” increases alarm. In O8, there is a stat block that varies according to your reputation with ghosts — but is still hostile irregardless. There is an actual reaction table in area U, which strongly implies that there shouldn’t be one used elsewhere. Given all of this, it appears Ave Nox is intended to be a combat gauntlet, rather than a dungeon of social interaction and faction politics.

To further support that hypothesis, there are only six named characters in the dungeon with any kind of agenda that imply you can interact with them — Knife Man on page 57, Tul-Yafshalamr on page 144, Serdati on page 170, Goloch on page 174, Vox Solaris on page 178, and The Zealous Many on page 193. It’s worth noting that only 1 of these is in the first quarter of the dungeon, and three of them are in the last quarter: Most of the interaction will be in the depths of the dungeon, not in the surface levels. Two-thirds of them are gated behind the three solar keys. This does not promise to draw people in and provide them gifts or drive, and it threatens to contradict the reluctance of the dungeon to retread its steps by placing all the interesting characters behind closed doors. I’d prefer this interactivity be more evenly spaced, or more common, for my taste. The presence of fetch-questgivers like Knife Man in E2, further support this as a video game inspired dungeon, where you’re given goals to achieve to gain rewards, and that contextualises the choice that violent hostilities are the norm. Most of these characters occupy videogame-like roles, reminding me a lot of Dead Cells, to be honest. I’m disappointed, though, in the lack of factions here. There are factions that clearly should be able to be played off each other — the exiled cultists who can change form seem to be perfect to stir into revolution against the cultists of the city above who literally defecate on them, for example. The city is supposed to have decayed into turmoil in 30 years, but in the subsequent 470 years the remaining factions never clashed or developed enmity? Entire areas filled with inhabitants were shut off by the summer cultists, and their violent ghosts remain. It feels like a missed opportunity, albeit one that is, again, intentional. Cultists here aren’t characters, they’re goombas: Generic enemies with regional variations. They’re not actually inhabitants of the city. They might be directly inspired by the inhabitants of the City of Tears in Hollow Knight — that’s the strong vibe I get. Like it or not, this is internally consistent with the videogame inspired design.

In terms of spatial design, the maps are clear and legible, and the dungeon, particularly between levels, is interestingly jaquaysed — the sewer accesses lavatories everywhere, for example, and there’s an elevator connecting trade levels for another — so at a macro level it’s quite satisfying. One really smart decision is the solar keys I mentioned earlier — the big finale section of the dungeon is visible more or less from entry (it’s a dungeon, so it’s not a mountain looming over everything, but it’s a left turn from your entry), effectively reminding you the whole time you play, as you slowly collect the keys to unlock it. This keeps the ending of the dungeon in sight, which is really important, I think, for a megadungeon that is positioning itself as potentially able to be completed. It also provides drives: “This is locked? We’ll go the other way. There’s a key? Oh cool! Wait we need three? Let’s keep delving.” Clever design, I think. At a micro level, loops are present on the map, but a closer examination — so close I almost missed them — reveals some missed opportunities. An example of this, is that the fantastic R7 — “a tight passage filled with statues piled upon each other. They appear to be climbing over each other, their faces filled with fear and shock” —lies between two distant rooms, rather than being used to foreshadow the cockatrice-like creature that created the barrier. Still a great room! But it could’ve been the centrepiece of a spatial story, whose climax was the hostile encounter; instead it’s incidental. These small missteps are common, and unlikely to affect your experience negatively, but rather they could have had a significantly more positive impact had they been more thoughtfully implemented.

The layout here is very reminiscent of Into the Cess and Citadel, and not at all in a bad way. It’s consistent, dense, but also readable and largely legible. It appears written or at least edited in layout, which brings blessings of less page-turning and more awareness of relative content size. The art is very evocative and there’s plenty of it, and the maps are stellar. It actually comes with a map supplement which you can print and have on your wall or your table, which is pretty great. It strikes I think a good balance between this becoming an unmanageable tome, and it being overcrowded, and for a low-white space, densely spaced text it’s about as good as it gets. These kind of books could always use more breathing space, but it uses its’ claustrophobia well. It would’ve benefited from some quality of life additions, though, namely an index or page references, because sometimes even word searching the pdf couldn’t find what I was looking for.

An interesting twist are the limited tables — there are dozens of places where the random tables of items or treasures that often feature in dungeons are accompanied by a set of check boxes — you can continue to search, but once all the check boxes are gone, you’ll find no more things off the list. There are also trackers in the book for ghostly reputation, for example. This also implies the book is intended to be written in, and this adds to the sense that Ave Nox is disposable and not intended to be retreaded or restocked. I think that a disposable workbook concept could’ve been leant into harder, though, if that was the intent: Destructible, modifiable maps are suddenly an option, player contributions to lore, sections for impacts of rival adventurers. All of these things become more viable options if the megadungeon is a workbook to be completed; this is a step towards legacy megadungeon, which is interesting as hell. But, the layout itself doesn’t facilitate this approach well in my opinion — this stuff isn’t in the printable workbook, they aren’t sitting in easy to find places like at the beginning, end, or center spreads. There aren’t clear indexing in the margins to find different sections easily to facilitate note taking and modification. Again, this is a clever idea that needs to be leant into and iterated on, but has huge potential in my opinion.

Ave Nox’s themes bounce a little off the cosmopolitan Forgotten-Realms-ness of Shear, I fear, as it gets dark and gloomy and messy in the depths. I don’t mind this, but if you were taking rosy-cheeked wide-eyed 5e players into the city of Solaris, I’d give them warning. The combat-heavy gameplay and less traditional dungeon crawl structure really feels like it would sing in Errant in particular, though, and 5th edition or Pathfinder 2R as well. I think I’d fatigue on the combat in Old School Essentials, and it feels utterly incompatible with something like Cairn or Knave, at least the way I play them.

Would I bring this to my table? There is a lot to recommend it. I think Ave Nox brings some absolutely fascinating innovations from videogame dungeons into TTRPGs in a way that I haven’t seen successfully implemented in one module before. I think that these innovations together make it an exceptional beer and pretzels game for dropping in and dropping out, which is precisely a gap that needs filling on a lot of people’s tables. But it leans away from my favoured styles of play in order to achieve these goals. I think it could’ve fairly easily walked the tightrope of achieving both, and I think if I had some time, I could add faction play, without much trouble. The dearth of NPCs could be mitigated by running rival adventurers — a bunch of which are already provided — and in combination with multiple groups of players, this would quickly become a quite dynamic space to play in.

Irregardless of whether or not I’d run it, if you’re looking for a megadungeon that you can run sessions in quickly, if you run a table in Errant or 5e already and they want a megadungeon, and if you’re willing to describe some grotesque monsters, Ave Nox is probably the best thing to come out in a while. Looking at my recent megadungeon series, this is the strongest out of them all, except His Majesty the Worm, which you’ll have to learn a new system for. If you’re happy to modify it significantly to make it more political, or must lean into it and go combat-heavy, there’s nothing as strong as Ave Nox in recent memory, I think. But it’s not beholden to tradition, if that’s what you’re looking for.

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