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.

When in Rome is a 23 page module for Mothership by Chris Airiau, with illustration by Brandon Yu and Carly AF. In it, to escape your corporate indenture, you need to steal a few items from an abandoned space station to power your stolen ship, but it turns out that the corporation has been experimenting with dangerous beasts that you have to get past to assure your escape. I got a comp copy as a surprise when I reached out to creators about Mothership Month.

I’m going to start with theme: It’s impeccably satirising capitalism here. Not even trying to be subtle, but it works. Mothership always shines when it’s placing the spotlight primarily on the horrors of capitalism; it’s a world where you play the working class and your blood keeps the incompetent rich aloft. It’s a satire that maybe cuts too deep this political cycle, but it’s sound. Your goal is literally to escape to a place with a union. The only problem is, the space station is not decommissioned, but rather a tomb for a crew murdered by aliens that were being experimented on. I love this plot as an introductory one to Mothership, because the original Alien is obviously the perfect onboarding point for what Mothership is about.

The module opens with about 4 pages of character set up. This is good stuff — there are 5 NPCs travelling with you, and you all have connections to them in some way. Those 5 NPCs, given you’re entering a ship abandoned apart from an alien predator, are the juice of the module. You need to be signed up for leaning deeply into them as a referee if you want to run When In Rome. I feel they deserves a little more support, especially given its importance to the progression of the module. The main plot point that emerges there, is El is looking for TVU research, and looking for that research will likely lead to El switching to the alien’s side at some point. This plot line, to me, isn’t adequately foreshadowed or expanded enough for it to make sense to the players, unless you really lean into El’s religion hard. There’s a strong implication that Cap is looking for stuff to sell, too, but values aren’t listed here, and it’s not clear what he’ll try to smuggle out at all, or whether he’ll push to move off course to do it. The third potential crux is the secretly pregnant, possibly to a PC, Isabelle, which if revealed probably just leads to more cautious play, particularly if she’s the PC’s ex-lover. I don’t think that’s intended though, and it might just be a back door to the alien getting off the ship? There are two real options here: You can scrap the social aspects altogether, and run these as hirelings, which I’m kind of inclined to given how deadly this module is. Or, you can lean into them harder. I think the latter means having a scene where you’re getting to know each other prior to boarding, leaning into the unique aspects of them — military, education, religion for example, and really making it apparent how they tick — and then making more explicit what they’ll do on the station, so that they’re going rogue with warning rather than for no apparent reason. If you want this PC-NPC conflict, where the NPCs aren’t villains, I think we need a little more advice regarding how to do it; here we’re relying a little too much on the expertise and foresight of the referee.

Skipping to the key, it starts on page 16, and it’s 10 locations that are quite terse — except for the final location, a maximum of half a page. There’s not a lot of room for clever description in Mothership modules, in my experience, but Airiau manages to squeeze some in here, like “A tunnel of Xenoresin. Black, wet, hot and humid. If a PC examines the biomech surroundings, a piece moves”. It’s very interactive, in a fun way. The way I read it, is that these “rooms” are actually entire sections, and so there’s always something to do, and moving through them or exploring them takes a decent chunk of your maximum of 8 hours of in-game timer. Just an addendum here: There’s no sign of the dead here, anywhere, nor signs of struggle except in the corporate branch. I assume all the dead have been subsumed into the flesh-ship in the reactor core, but the lack of signs of violence is something that rings oddly to me, when the space is described as a tomb.

Finally, we have the endgame scenario (and its variations) at the end. In this, we have the genre trope of “it followed us onto our escape pod!”, which I don’t mind but I do think it comes out of nowhere to some degree. The alternates really make it feel like to the author the outcome of the module is a foregone conclusion, and “winning” is impossible. I’m not sure I love that — I prefer a solvable puzzle — but it is very on genre. But I can see why they feel that way: There are a lot of situations where everyone just might die, and one is unavoidable: Being locked in cryostorage with increasing temperature to withstand and potentially 30 aliens waking up while you’re trapped there. It’s a super deadly module, and there’s no facility for backup characters back on the Conrad (unless you use the NPCs, of course).

I skipped over the general rules of the module, which come before the key: security clearances, activating subsystems, entry points, security, timekeeping, and the doom clock which keeps the 8 hours you have on the ship tense. Then the 7 types of alien and how they relate; and also how they perhaps relate to the religion that one of the NPCs follows. That is 10 pages straight of systems and things for the referee to wrap their head You could strongly argue that more is going on in the station as a whole than is expected to happen in any individual sector of the ship. There was a point in here — the point was the end of page 15, where you discover the alien may be the messiah of an intergalactic religion — that I realised that there may be more going on than I can actually handle. Is that too much? No. I really don’t think so. It feels like these subsystems add up to be significantly more than the sum of their parts. But, the presentation in general of all of these competing and important pieces of information, really needs to be better to facilitate a smoother run of When In Rome (or potentially it could be supplemented with better worksheets).

The layout is a major part of what could be involved in improving this. Mothership modules tend to have a very dense layout, and in this case, a reluctance to leave space on the page (likely accompanied by a limited art budget) results in information not always being given priority on the page, or being moved to places it doesn’t quite make sense. There’s the interjection of the serum in the middle of the key, for example, and the clearance levels being deferred to a sidebar rather than being with the doors they lock or directly in the section on clearance levels. These feel like issues of page count to me; they don’t make sense in terms of consistency at all, and that has to be obvious to the creator as well. I quite like the mini maps, but their presence multiple times per page, on already busy spreads, with the exits also included on the text, make them redundant (or the exit text redundant) and make the page less clear to read. I don’t think it’s a universal rule — I’ve gotten feedback on a module of mine with mini maps that plenty of people prefer both — but in this particular layout, I think the exit text being removed would make for a clearer read. There’s a lot of art here — only 6 pages don’t have illustrations, and those all have mini maps — and it’s good and on theme, as are the cyberpunk assets used to adorn the page, but all put together with up sometimes 7 fonts (to my count) on a single page make this challenging in terms of legibility at times for me. Most of this, though, would be easily forgiven if big concepts were given a little more room to breathe in terms of space on the page.

From an information design perspective, I think it’s challenging front loading referee with 10 pages of information to absorb, especially when the tracking tools given to the referee don’t summarise it. I think some of it could be offloaded to players — it would probably be a more interesting module, for example, if the players knew what they needed to access certain areas, because they had that intel going in. I also think that, given there are plenty of surprises and interconnections to be found throughout the key, some of that ten pages could be deferred into sidebar or footnote if the keys themselves had been 1-to-a-page. I also think that it could benefit from more referee asides in general, to guide them through what is a complex module. This reduces the need for referee expertise and foresight that I mentioned much earlier.

I think it’s clear that these problems were on the author’s mind, though. When In Rome leans very hard into a particular OSR-style challenge style, which peppers potential solutions throughout the module, but provides no answers. I think this is misguided: It helps the referee to know what’s going on, when there’s a lot to juggle like there is here. But it means that hidden in sector 4 is a way to see that there’s an alien in the pregnant woman’s belly, and that’s going to be a surprise because not even the referee is flagged that that’s a possibility. That’s fun! I love being surprised! But in the context of the broader complexity, I think more clarification (perhaps even just footnotes or page references) would go a long way.

If I were to run When in Rome, I’d have to put a fair bit of work into streamlining it, I think. I’d give the players lots of information — it’s a heist, after all. They know what the security levels are, and where they have to go to find things. Their goal is to get in and out, and the aliens, androids and other horrors are the barriers in their way. This might break the module though, due to the map structure: If you know where everything is, you know you have to go to 2, 5 and 6, and nowhere else (well, there’s a surprise detour in there, but even that doesn’t take you off that track). The direct route through the main entrance would only take you 3 hours, and you’d only be exposed to one potential alien threat that I can see. The doom clock is what is supposed to circumvent this quickly in and quickly out route, I think: There are plenty of terminals in this half of the station, but I suspect you’re not supposed to be able to fix the gravity plates and temperature regulation errors that occur in the first 3 hours on the doom clock at these terminals, but rather you have to head to the terminals at 9 and 10, diverting you into the alien storyline. But this really isn’t made clear, and if I weren’t really studying this module, I think I’d probably have allowed any terminal, because that’s what the instructions seem to indicate. Again, the lack of clarity means that the authorial intent, unless you’re interrogating it closely, is likely to be missed.

Overall, in When In Rome’s favour, we have a really intricate set of rules, events, and interactions, all designed to draw players further into a dangerous place despite their misgivings, and likely resulting in a massive disaster of their own making. This is really, really clever design; some of the best I’ve seen this year, in terms of systemic interactions, although the brevity sometimes backfires. I think, though, that if you want social interaction to be a cornerstone of your module, you really need to make it clearer what the NPCs are after and how they’ll act in response to the events and locations; they’re a referee-specific wildcard as it is, where I think they have more specific design objectives to satisfy that aren’t well spelt out. Nevertheless, When In Rome a slam dunk when it comes to a particular kind of module design.

Against it, comes the information design and layout flaws, leading to a lack of clarity and legibility, and making it much, much harder to run as intended, and in fact much harder to parse how it’s supposed to play out and what’s intended. This is one of those occasions where I’ve done the heavy lifting by virtue of writing this review: I know how to run this, and it’s a hell of a module, full of drama and danger. But, I’ve just talked about the module for almost as many words as the module actually runs. I really like the complexity and density here, but I think that one way creators need to innovate on in Rube Goldberg modules like this is how to make it legible to the referee and how to defer some of that load onto the players. That means, sadly, bringing the powers of layout, information design and art and applying them to other things than affordable printing and aesthetics. I think we’ll get there as a hobby, as I keep seeing authors creating amazing things like these, and improving every time.

In the meantime, if you’re willing to put in the effort to understand it, or willing to take a punt and run it blind and hope it turns out perfectly, When In Rome is compelling module that will fill a few sessions of Mothership. That said, Mothership month isn’t over yet, and Chris Airiau is running a campaign that apparently shares a world with this module over there — based on the promise in this, I’d be considering throwing a few dollars his way.

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