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.

Crown of Salt is a 120 odd page module, compatible with Mörk Borg, with writing, art and layout by Tania Herrero, published in both English and Spanish, and comes with pregenerated characters and an additional pamphlet-sized one-shot. In it you will venture into a forbidding wilderness and delve a dungeon to face the Cantigaster, a cursed ex-tyrant. It tells the story of the world of Grift through visual storytelling, and is very, very art-heavy. I was provided with a comp digital copy.

First things first: This is the first third-party module for Mörk Borg that in my opinion stands toe-to-toe with Nohr’s original layouts. Herrero is doing amazing work here; few people in elfgames are handling writing, art and layout so elegantly and so boldly; the only other polymath doing work like this who comes to mind is Luka Rejec. Crown of Salt has art consistent with the Mörk Borg oeuvre but unique, is dripping with consistent theme, and the layout walks the line between legibility and aesthetic incredibly well. Often, the layouts make writing choices I normally struggle with engaging and readable.

I think that some people will struggle with it — the same people who have issues with Mörk Borg in its original form — and I do think that more concessions could’ve been made to navigability — there aren’t page numbers, headings can be lost to the art at times, and sometimes the eye doesn’t naturally follow the intended order of text. But like in Nohr’s layouts, often the striking and unique choices can serve as navigable landmarks. It’s not perfect in terms of information design or navigability (I’ll come back to that), but the tradeoff to me is worth it, and if great art and bold layouts are your cup of tea, then this is worth your penny straight up, no need to read further.

What about the module itself? It opens up with a fable illustrated in poems and pages of art that is very compelling, followed by a list of reasons to engage with the Cantigaster — the deadly foe at the heart of the module — at all. These are hooks, and I’ve written about how I love a good hook. These aren’t perfect hooks, but most of them do provide unique perspectives on the module as a whole, which is a damned good start. There is a rumours table as well, but of the eight rumours only two are meaningfully useful, and I wouldn’t hand out any of the others as they’re purely red herrings that don’t provide any additional benefits or interactions.

The village itself, Saltburg, is really only 1 location, with 4 shops. It features 6 characters, each which are simply fantastic. The Crow: Enigmatic and compelling. The hirelings: Engaging, with goals that may be at odds with the player characters, but that at a deeper — perhaps optional? — level, they may be eldritch horrors posing as hirelings to guide the player characters to their own hidden evil ends. These changeling hirelings become the lynchpins of the module, whether or not they’re hired, in really interesting ways. The four shops have very short descriptions, but they’re all pretty striking and interesting. You‘ll come to love them all, I suspect. There are only 4 random encounters in the wilderness: They’re all creepy and fun. I love how this really concentrates the themes and aesthetics, but two of them — the non combat encounters — feel like one-offs to me. I’d like more meat, but the truth is this isn’t really core to the module, it’s all the prelude. You’re not expected to linger in the village or wilderness. The dungeon is what you’re here for.

Descending into the salt rift has its own rules, and is striking in its own ways. Just the imagery is engaging: “Shaky rope ladders left by those who came before vanish into the wounds of the pale earth.”, but I think the exploration rules are overly complex — basically, you encounter 4 things out of a possible 24 on the way to the temple, but you make a number of rolls to get there. This could’ve been folded together into less rolls effectively, I think, especially given each event is given a lot of space and art — a whole spread for 6 items, often less. And these events are stellar and memorable, every one. Masterclasses in how to use maximalist space. Very evocative. Favourites are the Polar Bear (not what you’d expect, but a very clever pun and a fearful creature to encounter in the dark), and Garrik, the party member nobody remembers. There aren’t even only a few, there are 24 of these! It reminds me that we don’t have good excuses for mediocre random encounters.

The first dungeon, Tomb of the Promised Princess, has two methods to find, but the first isn’t actually spelt out (at least where I’d expect it to be) and I suspect it’s code for “when the referee wants them to find it”. Including the fable that precedes it and the boss monster that follows, it’s a one page dungeon, but it does some really neat visual storytelling, with the emergence of the Salinized Dragon being a page turn mid-sentence, and that dragon perhaps being able to tell you the fable that preceded it rendering the earlier narrative not just for the referee.

Next up is the Lost Temple. This is four events deep, which means that if you do not hire hirelings, the chances are that you will venture this far, find the barrier, and return to the village of Saltburg with nothing, encountering the Tomb of the Promised Princess at some point on the return journey to collect the key (a 1-in-6 event chance). It’s not clear to me at all how the players will know that bearing the Immaculate Sword you can claim from the Salinized Dragon will break past the barrier — this is important, and I can’t see evidence of it in any of the stories that will be delivered to the players organically. The only way to do the right thing is to be accompanied by the Latrofax that I can see — It’s rather a little redundancy.

Once inside the temple, you are stalked by the Cantigaster, which is a nice piece of horror, and being hunted is one of my favourite horror dungeon conceits. The Latrofax seek the Cantigaster, although it’s not clear, if you break down the barrier, whether they will turn on you or continue to use you to get what they want — the Crown of Salt. It’s notable I think, that the Crown of Salt is not necessarily your goal as players — you might have the rumour that tells you this is how you slay the creature, but more often will not, potentially resulting in some interesting conflicts. The lost temple itself is a compelling, weird dungeon with surprising spatial looping and the same kind of density as the earlier sections of the module. Really good stuff, but not a traditional foot-by-foot crawl. The unconventional layout falls away for no small part of the temple, but splash pages still pepper it, with full spread maps, full page illustrated tables, and boss monsters all getting splashes. The keying can be long-winded for me, but the complexity isn’t wasted — it’s usually describing interesting things to interact with, examples being a time-rifted waterfall or the pelagic armour mechs. Overall, a solid small dungeon (16 rooms), though not in the classic style best embodied in this design generation by Gus L.

One thing I love about this module is how you piece together the story from the various fables throughout the book. Who the king is, who the princess is, and who you’re slaying didn’t become clear to me until half way through the module. This gradual unveiling was an experience akin to something between the Isle’s narrative design and Dark Souls bite-sized lore. It’s very neat. I can imagine the Salinized Dragon revealing facts with a cackle, in and running him as an Elden Ring boss. This comes down to preference: Perhaps the more conventional design decision would be to just explain the history, but taking another route here makes for a very compelling experience, for me at least.

Information design decisions hamper the elegance of the module, though: The module actually opens up, for example, with a table filled with items — this might make sense as an inside cover, but it looks like this is the second spread (I am reading digitally, though), and so the positioning feels like a poor start. Important information on the Face-stealers lies between the exploration rules and the event tables, causing a disconnect and difficulty with interpretation. While it makes sense narratively for the promised princess fable to be placed where it is, it’s jarring and it means you’re flicking through the book to figure out what’s happened and to find the previous page (no page numbers, remember) that referenced it (it was the Face-snatcher page). All of these information design issues really result in a book that I’ll end up putting a lot of sticky tabs in and that I’ll have to read through at least twice before running — that’s really not my preference. This is probably the major negative of one-person shows: I think issues of information design are best noticed by interested and unfamiliar readers, rather than the creator. I think Herrero could’ve been clever with information design by colour coding or using other methods to encode navigation and structure, without sacrificing the other aspects of the text, though: It’s possible, I think, without compromising the integrity of the art.

There is some bonus content available as well: Lost Fools are 20 pregenerated characters, fully illustrated. Feast of Ink is a pamphlet dungeon that is set in the same world as Crown of Salt. And of course it comes with 3 custom character classes. These are handy and cool, but I think they’d be better if they had connections between them or to the module itself. Feast of Ink at least, would make a good introductory one-shot. But none of these are pushing me over the edge of buying or not buying this module. There’s also an OST, which is not so much to my taste, but of course your mileage may vary. I’m a module reviewer, not a music critic: I’d check it out yourself.

Now, it must be said: This is an art book. Many sections of this scream dark children’s book or graphic novel. I’m reviewing this on my phone in digital as I often do, and it’s only available in spreads, so I can’t really strongly recommend the digital version unless you’re reading it in a wide screen format — desktop only, thank you. But, if you can afford the print version of this, you’re in for a hell of a treat. If I could afford postage across the pacific, I’d drop for the print version in a heartbeat. Crown of Salt wants to be held. The print version of this, even if you tend to read digitally, is going to be the best version.

Crown of Salt is not a traditional dungeon crawl — if you’re running a classic style game, like OSE by the book, you’ll struggle here. But running it in a looser style like Mörk Borg and Cairn will suit it really well. It does lack a lot of the details that make it possible to run a more granular approach though — don’t look here if you want that. If your table runs Cairn or Mörk Borg, you enjoy dark fantasy that is in the same ballpark as Dark Souls or Elden Ring, and you don’t mind rereading an incredibly beautiful book a few times to wrap your head around it, this is a strong contender for best module of the year. If you’re like me and love to see when art, layout and writing are coordinated well, and what this medium is capable of when you experiment with excellent writing and coordinated graphic design, I’d put it on your radar irregardless of whether you like Mörk Borgy aesthetics. I’ve not heard of Tania Herrero before this, but she’s solidly on my radar after reading Crown of Salt (digital or print preorders).

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