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.

What Child Is This? is a 2 page module by Nate Treme for 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s one of my favourite pamphlet adventures to play in the holidays, so I thought I’d interrupt my regular programming (and Critique Navidad) for a holiday Bathtub Review!

On page 1: The 5th edition stat block of the God-baby. All who hear it cry must care for it; animals adore it. I love the 5th-edition-ness of statting up a baby for combat, but this baby’s powers are largely a stone around the neck of the party as they carry out their goal.

Their goal is to carry it across page 2, a 20-hex crawl with 6 keyed hexes. You start in the village of Holluck, and are aiming for city of Cortezia, which you can follow the road to in just 4 random and 1 mandatory encounter. This is the main issue with the module, to be honest — there’s not many reasons to stray off the path. I’d add some — I’d scrap the mandatory ambush and make that a blockade of soldiers from the evil King Bazbet hoping to kill the child, and hence driving the PCs off course. There are 21 random encounters on the third page. Most of these are great, and the biggest disappointment running this is that you’ll never encounter enough of them. The main reason you want to drive people off the road, is because they need to find the minidungeon on page 4: It’s not part of the “plot” or the critical path of the module, but it’s a whole quarter of it.

Nate Treme’s simple but effective art is convincingly child-like, which suits the lightheartedness of the module well. The layout is very simple but effective, clearly intended to be a bifold. The nature of a short module is that it’s going to be a bit crowded, though. It’s useable, though.

It’s interesting to look at this excellent micro-module as a lens through which to look at the challenges that face designers of them, and how we might overcome them. There are a few challenges here: You can’t provide complexity for puzzles enough in the space, so it’s perfect for a concept that is focused on vibes like this one. You need to rely on existing stat blocks in your core books, because stat blocks take up space. But, you need to connect things together in an interesting way. I think this third area is where What Child Is Born falls down, even though I’ve run it a few times and really like it.

If I were to redesign this, what I’d do is place a Mines of Moria style decision in front of the player characters — you can take a trip through the dungeon, a short cut to avoid foes that know you’re coming, or you can face the empire or try to avoid them. By doing this, you keep agency with the players, without preventing them from encountering all the cool stuff — it’s just 4 pages, you want to use as much of it as possible! I’d probably also key the space more closely, because by doing so you can move the random encounters into set spaces, and hence the plethora of demon encounters suddenly become a third faction seeking the baby. If we take these random encounters and seed them, we get far more interactivity, rather than just a series of encounters. All of this is very doable with just the encounters already there, I think, in fact it’s subtraction rather than addition (aside from naming a faction or two, and having that chat at the outset about choosing your route).

Anyway! What Child Is This is an excellent holiday one-shot, it’s cheap, and it’s written for 5th edition so it’ll work for basically everything. What are your favourite holiday modules?

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