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.

Penumbral Oasis (Part One) is a 40 page module for Vaults of Vaarn written, illustrated and laid out by Jacob Marks. It’s a dungeon crawl beneath an oasis in a far future fantasy, and this features the first 3 floors of the dungeon, to be completed in another release.

The introduction is brief, which I like: A page of history, and a page of instruction. I don’t hate the “how to run a dungeon” section, even though I generally don’t like these sections. I’m torn a little: Obviously not everyone who is seeking out Vaults of Vaarn modules knows how to run a megadungeon, but I just see so much repetition between modules of this advice. That said, it’s a window into what the author thinks is important: Here, Marks places emphasis on restocking, random encounters, and resource management.

The key itself opens with a tight frame directly to the entrance of the dungeon, and a potential combat encounter with a nesting crocodilian. I love the option of tight framing here, and the writing is gorgeous, I just wish it more clearly differentiated between read-aloud and keep-to-yourself text. It has a similar novelistic prose style as, for example, Through Ultan’s Door, which to me is a little challenging to process in the absence of active highlighting choices.

I really like Marks’ word choice, despite my challenges scanning the prose. “Scintillating water reflects caustic patterns up”, “child sized figure made out of boiling liquid mercury […] they wear a moon shaped mask made of iron”, “a spinning zoetrope of light and flesh. Animated within their membraneous frames is the image of a preying mantis: at once delicate orchid, and violent sadist” This kind of description isn’t hard to find in the text; if you gain any joy from striking, evocative writing, you’ll have plenty to love here.

The dungeon itself has a recurring shape, and is intended to be somewhat “true” to the idea that it was once a liveable space, which renders it a fairly inert space, and while looping, doesn’t have a lot of secrets or unexpected links, and no spatial puzzles to speak of. This isn’t so much a criticism of this module, but of the idea of rendering liveable spaces as dungeons, which is challenging at best and misguided at worst. I think I managed it well in the Curse of Mizzling Grove, but I find it’s consistently a challenge to turn domestic spaces into interesting exploratory spaces, and largely this is because most of the spaces are designed to be accessed easily.

Most rooms are only a paragraph long, which minimises some of my concerns about highlighting, and while there are about 25 empty rooms here — a necessity in such a large dungeon in my opinion — there are very few rooms without clear points of interest. They all have some kind of interactive element, treasure or special feature that can play a role in other encounters. I really liked the consistent level of interest maintained in every room over 46 or so rooms — it feels like it’ll be a really compelling dungeon to explore, particularly for the FAFO crowd. I didn’t count them, but I got the impression there were far more combat than trap encounters, and in terms of obvious directions to take these combat encounters that aren’t hostilities: You’re not provided with much in the text to facilitate alternate options such as negotiation. I recognise that a recently revived triceratops or a plastic-laminated crocodile aren’t likely to reason with you, but I do feel like the intelligent daemons could’ve been characterised more strongly, and the explicitly social mantis encounters don’t have a lot of depth by design. I personally would rather that the NPCs that are here and can be interacted with would be able to give some insight into the history of the dungeon (potentially indecipherable to Vaarnian ears), and this feels like a prime space to include interesting puzzles and clues as to what comes next, even if we’re not using it to facilitate a political, factional dungeon, which this is clearly disinterested in being.

In the opening scene, if you remove the lamigator, the dobsonflies it lives off will then occupy the space, causing trouble later on. This little ecosystem is neat, and could tutorialise the restocking well, if it were consistently applied. I just wish that this very clever conceit was carried over in the context of the whole dungeon, rather than being abandoned early. I often encounter problems with restocking in published megadungeons — you’re expected to restock, but they don’t provide you with any support in doing so. Ave Nox does away with restocking altogether; Through Ultan’s Door avoids mentioning it. But incorporating the ecosystem into the footnotes (or in this case sidebar) is a really clever way to facilitate the feeling of a dynamic space that restocking is supposed to create. Instead, there’s a page of restocking options in the appendix, but these options both lack elegance and interest when compared to the method suggested in the initial stages of the book.

The art is in a distinctive, low resolution pixel gouache style that I absolutely adore. The maps are in a similar style, and pretty effective. Layout is in a classic, single column with a sidebar style, but the sidebar is used sparingly to excellent effect. Headings aren’t great — the font for level 1 headings can be indecipherable at times, and the lower level headings are identical to some highlighting choices, making it hard to track. The same level headings are used for different actual levels of hierarchy — for example the whole statue museum is given the same level heading as its constituent level descriptions (both the statues and the areas history as a whole), and as the locations, and the next section, making it hard to see exactly what the subsections are. It’s genuinely confusing to read. Colours are used in highlighting, but the palette choice is maybe a bit too subtle for my eyes, and there’s little to no highlighting aside from separating stat blocks from body text, which renders it difficult to scan or quickly navigate. I love how a lot of art breaks the grid elegantly, though. It’s a superficially gorgeous layout that falls short in the pragmatics of use. Really what we need here are far stronger highlighting and clearer hierarchies, with potentially some reorganisation to minimise really deep obfuscating layers of hierarchy.

Overall, I’m impressed by Penumbral Oasis (Part 1). As a one-person show, it leaves a little to be desired in a few places — the information design needs some work, and the layout needs development to render the information more legible to the user. There need to be more opportunities for non-hostile encounters, or at least it needs to showcase options for when they occur, rather than rely entirely on referee improvisation. I’d love a more labyrinthine map, not limited by the square castle layout, with more interesting multilevel and intralevel looping. But, the rooms have a lot of interest, the tale at the heart of it all is compelling, there’s a lot of exciting things to recover and reasons to delve deeper. The art is stellar, and the overall visual appeal of the zine is super strong. It’s a very strong addition to your Vaults of Vaarn library, if you’re already running it, and I’m always looking for reasons to bring more Vaults of Vaarn to the table to be honest. This module reminded me how much I like the system. If you’re looking for an excellent dungeon crawl that will likely last you 13 to 16 sessions (assuming part 2 is released and is of similar size and quality), and you’ve been looking to get Vaults of Vaarn on your table, and you’re willing to mark it up a little to help you make more sense of it, Penumbral Oasis (Part 1) is absolutely for you.

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