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.

Ex Inferis is a 19 page module for Liminal Horror by Tyler Welch with layout and art by BoRyan Crum. It won the recent Twisted Classics Jam, so I thought I’d give it a read, as the last in-house twisted classic I read for Liminal Horror did not blow me away. I hope I’ll find some time for a few more modules from this jam over the next few weeks. In Ex Inferis, a haunted ship floats on the Great Lakes, and you’re the first to find it.

Ex Inferis wastes no time, with the first page featuring a 3-part timeline that launches you straight into a tight framing of the premise. It then gives you a unique character creation process (as you’re all sailors) to bind you together quickly. It follows that up with the Doom Clock, which makes Ex Inferis feel like a one-shot scenario, mimicking the structure of a slasher movie in a really compelling way. I like that these events, while they are on a clock, are associated with who you meet and what you do on the ship, which means we anticipate some randomness to its implementation (although obviously you’re more likely to encounter certain things as you venture deeper into the ship).

The cast is pretty streamlined, and none of the NPCs you’ll encounter, names or unnamed, are likely to be hostile until latter events are triggered. The next four pages are random tables: Everything from encounters to artifacts, fallouts and visions. These are individually often pretty good: “You vomit out a sticky black sphere with its own gravitational pull” or “old instant camera that prints photos Polaroid-style. In the background of each photo is a line that leads to danger”, bringing SCP/Control to the table.

The map and key itself is interesting, and I’m very curious if the style of play indicated here is the intended style of play for Liminal Horror, indicating perhaps why the Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow fell flat for me. Random encounters are not room by room, but rather by indication on the key. It says in addition, according to the doom clock, but the doom clock doesn’t indicate any random encounters. There aren’t, therefore, many chances (less than 5?) to roll a random encounter, and so your experience of this ship will be one of unsettling, horrifying scene after horrifying scene, slowly uncovering more of what happened. However, some of the events are predicated on certain random encounters occurring, and the rooms in which they occur aren’t likely to be revisited. I could see this not going as intended, without a little house ruling around when to roll — easily done, each time you enter a room, roll twice for even rooms. It feels like more random encounters are better here anyway, because out of the 19 rooms only 5 of them have significant interactive elements to them — most are scenes or simply rooms.

The layout here is pretty and readable, with creative use of the grid for interest and clever use of minimal art and pictures. The landscape layout makes it feel unique (although, a peeve: it’s not set to landscape in properties, which means it displays in portrait sideways on my phone). I do feel, though, that other choices would make it more usable: The random tables for example are well laid out individually, but I think the module would be better served by squishing these into smaller space, so I don’t have to turn so many pages to find them. After the first few packed pages, and the concluding ones, these spaced out tables feel strangely decompressed.

This all leads to an almost meditative sense of exploration, of delving into something you know you should not, as if the demonic infestation that possesses the ship has possessed the player characters. “I must look a little deeper”, the ship tells you, “Nothing yet has gone wrong.” You feel like the researchers in every horror film until the penny drops. On the hand, there’s not a lot to do in the space: As I said, 4 or 5 things. I’d expect plenty of artifacts to be uncovered, though, which may change how things progress. If you’re looking for a space you’re interacting with, a space you can, so to speak, win, this is not one of those spaces. What it is, is a space where you experience the uneasy sense of creeping horror.

One glaring issue I’m encountering when wrestling with Ex Inferis is perhaps related from my distance from the Liminal Horror community, and not a reflection on the module. I’m not sure what this wants to be? I don’t know how you’re expected to experience this. There are no referee asides, there’s no additional guidance, and it departs from the core rules in a few places and doesn’t explain what these are intended to achieve. I’m making guesses, here, but there is virtue to explaining yourself, sometimes, I’m beginning to realise, when someone else is expected to run it for you.

So, is Ex Inferis for you? Well, I enjoy the kind of horror that’s escapable, and while it’s possible to escape this horror, I don’t think the module is written with that it mind: You’re supposed to be doomed going into this, unable to turn around this demonic horror. At best you may escape. In that way, I can see two uses for it at my table: Either as a one-shot, “Hey friends, do you like Liminal Horror?” or at a con, or as a funnel, where the survivors of this become more typical Liminal Horror investigators. If those use cases call out for you, and you’re looking for a Liminal Horror module, I’d scoop Ex Inferis up, definitely over Hungry Hollow.

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