This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Trouble in Paradisa is a system neutral pamphlet module by W.F. Smith, based on the Paradisa line of Lego and made for the Summer Lego RPG jam. Honestly, a week into Critique Navidad, I’m grateful for a shorter offering, as just reading a 100+ page book a day is a hell of a challenge, let alone developing a meaningful critique of one. Smith is a friend of mine, but I never shy away from critiquing friends. In Trouble in Paradisa, there’s a murder at the Poolside Paradise Resort: Who did it?

Really, this module is a single page, with 13 characters, 4 pieces of evidence, a brief for the player or players, and an explanation for the referee. The location descriptions are all pictures of the Lego set on which it was based — the characters and props all appear in these set images. In that sense, I wish it came with larger handouts of these images, as they’re an essential part of the investigation, but they’re pretty small in print. I’m sure there’s a dropped icecream in one of them, but at this resolution, I can’t find it.

The implication in the brief is that this is an Agatha Christie set-up: You’re an investigator who by happenstance is in a quiet town with a dark underbelly when a murder occurs. By using implication, Smith avoids having to put a bunch of information into this pamphlet that normally would be considered required for a module like this. In pamphlet adventures — as I discussed in this week’s Bathtub Review, What Child is This? — you’re making a lot of decisions about what is important to this story and to what you consider the referee’s role: By using implication and focusing in characters, Smith is saying he cares about characters and that the referees role is about bringing those characters to life. Anyone who’s read Barkeep on the Borderlands probably wouldn’t be surprised by this conclusion. Although Smith didn’t write On People-centered Adventure Design, he subscribes to it.

These characters, though, are all vapid bangers with excellent roleplay hooks and motives to kill, and it displays the absurdity of an Agatha Christie movie. I’d be inclined, though, because there’s so much going on, to give full information, and the issue there is that they wouldn’t give full information in a murder mystery. When something as minor as “Bree loves Ziggy the monkey” is a clue, I want to give full information. I guess the best approach to this is that, while they’ll lie through their teeth to protect themselves, you can assume the players know they’re lying, and you can assume they’ll turn on their friends to turn the attention of the detectives away from themselves.

Between the 19 information sources, we have a huge amount of information to tease apart, and I think the biggest issue with the pamphlet form factor for this particular story is that the text is so dense, and the size is so restrictive, there’s no redundancy of information. So, if I decide to interview Tanner, the information on Tanner isn’t just in the Tanner section of the pamphlet, but also in the Poolside Paradise and the Who Done It? sections. The end result of this is that as the referee, I personally have trouble holding it all in my head. To run this, I’d need to prep by either drawing connections on the page like a corkboard in a movie, or taking notes so that I knew where to look at the right time in the narrative. I strongly suspect that simply moving relevant information to the character sections would shortcut this, but this would necessitate some repetition and then it wouldn’t fit in the form factor. Really, the form is the challenge here, rather than the mystery itself.

The layout on this pamphlet is vibrant, all sunsets and blue seas, just like the Lego sets that inspired it. Sections are colour differentiated, and font choices are kept simple: Just the two, one resort-inspired display and the other a simple sans serif, evocative of the pamphlets left on your coffee table when you stay at a resort in that country near your own that you take advantage of the exchange rate to holiday in. The use of Lego for all illustrations works perfectly, even though you could change all the names and art and still have a serviceable pamphlet, the plastic-ness of the toys mirrors the superficiality of the characters in a nice way. I think you’d need to get some very cheesy stock photography or collage some 80s tropical resort advertisements to get the same aesthetic in the absence of the toys.

Honestly, the ideal way to run this in my opinion is to actually put it on a giant corkboard, and perform next to it, which means the pamphlet format is largely unnecessary. Make the connections the centre of play. It’s complex enough, I think that the players will drown in information if they’re not given a way to track it: Witchburner has play aids for this, but they’re awfully dry because it’s pretending to be a dungeon crawl. This ain’t pretending, so you might as well lean into the absurdity of the genre.

Trouble in Paradisa is a hell of a one-shot to run FKR, and perfect for a dress up night or a convention spot. It’s a melting pot, and an excellent murder mystery, after the style of Witchburner, one of my favourite modules. But it’s not suited to its format, and it needs a little more space for redundancy to make it more easily run. For a dollar though, Trouble in Paradisa a steal, if you’ve the confidence to run something sans rules.

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