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.

Stalls of the Blood Queen is a 5 page module for Mausritter by the prolific Matthew Morris with art by Alex Demaceno in trifold format, to match the Mausritter house style to some degree. It’s a location-based module, where you investigate a stable that has been colonised by a vampire bat queen and her followers. It’s obviously intended as an homage to Diogo Nogueira’s Halls of the Blood King, but honestly it has the potential to be more than just a one-off joke.

Stalls of the Blood Queen is a 7 location dungeon with a very small town and surrounds. When I say 7, 1 of those is repeated 10 times. The town probably doesn’t need to be there: It’s an excuse for a rumours table, with no characters attached to it, and the rumours aren’t juicy or sharp, and neither provide reasons to explore the stable, reflect the locals in interesting ways, or provide or preference interesting options once you’re in the dungeon. I quite like, however, the innocuous encounters that effectively serve as foreshadowing of what is to come when you enter the barn. These are my favourite kind of random encounters, and if you’re going to only have a few, you should in my opinion make them omen-like foreshadowing rather than pointless combats.

The blurb on the back cover, I think, is intended to double as the role of the village, providing a hook and hard framing the events and the why the player characters want to go into this barn at all. Because of the order that you read it in, though, it doesn’t quite work as intended. I’m reading digitally, but even if I had this zine in my hands, I don’t ever read the back page immediately before reading the module itself, and I might skip it altogether; it’s something I use when I buy a book. This doesn’t encourage you to consider it differently through it’s layout, although I think it could by framing it differently (or even by simply titling it). One other way to do this is to make it more explicitly a hard frame: Have it in the voice of the mayor of Willownest, for example, or framed as a conversation, rather than have it fit the expected format of a blurb. A clever idea when it comes to maximising page use in a small package, but not well executed, in the same way that the back cover inclusion of a token for “blood sucked” is neat, except I’d have to cut out half of the “Silver items” table to use it (in the module’s defence, it comes with a separate sheet of cut-out tokens in digital).

If you were running this in a densely populated hex crawl —which is the intent — the unique creatures here would be stellar, giving you interesting opportunities have emergent interactions with the hexes around them and wanderers into this hex, because they have drives like “a good meal”, and “collect servants”. I’d rather be given a little more juice there, “a good meal, cold blooded or feathered” for example would be better, but it has potential for non-combat interaction: The players characters may not be the meal or the servant, and they’re likely to be friends, allies or innocents. It’s part of the “Adventure Continues Jam“, which populates a hex crawl on a collaborative community basis, but due to the nature of that jam, you can’t really predict what other contributors are going to make, so you can’t write responsive or interactive content. This was the issue with the previous Mausritter collaborative project, Tomb of a Thousand Doors. Lots of good content, but no connectivity. Given the lack of connectivity, in isolation, though, the creatures in Stalls of the Blood Queen are all combat only creatures, which doesn’t in my opinion or experience lean into Mausritter’s strengths. I’d want at least one example of a fun interaction to be present in the module, ideally.

The dungeon itself, is flavourful and interesting, its descriptions are beautiful (“Scratching of claws reverberates from the recesses above, dark ledges hide what stalks”), but the reliance on the real-world structure of a stable causes problems. Given it’s a dilapidated stable, I’d probably prefer if it leant into that dilapidation, to make it less linear and more interesting a space to explore. As is, because of the central aisle, it isn’t looped in a way that’s interesting, or that you can explore in alternative ways like “climb” or “sneak” without diverging from the apparent intent in a way that likely won’t be satisfying. In a module that feels quite hostile, I’d love to see more support for ways other than combat to solve these encounters.

Layout and art-wise, this is good stuff. It feels very Mork Börg, with its striking pink-and-burgundy palette and its colour shifted art. Alex Demasceco’s art is gorgeous, and there’s a lot of it — 2 or more items per page. The layout is very legible, with striking but strong headings, simple font choices that don’t crowd the eye, and smart use of white space despite the density of text and the page count. My only criticism is that the isometric map is not functional at all — it might as well not be there in its current form, as you can’t actually see ways around the map. In a different map format, perhaps the issues I have around the design of the dungeon would not be present.

Honestly, thematically, I don’t know how we haven’t had any previous bat-themed Mausritter modules, given that bats are effectively sky mice. There’s a really neat line here drawn between the mouse-born cultists, who wish to sprout wings and “ascend to bathood”, who are effectively the Renfeilds to the Blood Queen’s Dracula, the fruit bats themselves, who have begun the process of ascension, and are the “Dracula’s wife” equivalents (although in this case, less seductive), and the vampire bats themselves, fully “sired” bats. It’s at once incredibly obvious, but also very elegant and I love it. It’s a kind of simple puzzle, that once the players figure it out, will make them realise the system made sense all along, and will make them anticipate what comes next.

In this way, it’s kind of begging for a sequel, and this one location isn’t quite enough. You want, when you’re using theme in this elegant way, to carry it forward, and then subvert it, see where you can take these analogies and where you can manipulate them in interesting ways. This is where the Ravenloft urge came from (regardless of how you feel about the end result 40 years later), and I honestly think it’s pretty exciting to consider what a Mausritter demiplane of dread might look like, if you leant into these thematic directions and then started to subvert and surprise your players with what you find. This is a far more interesting direction for Matthew Morris to take this, in my opinion.

This obviation of complexity feels like a symptom of the eternal striving for brevity that is characteristic of the Mausritter line and community. This is such a cool concept, and a very cool module, but it’s begging for more exploration. I think most Mausritter authors would respond to this with something along the lines of “It provides a chance for the referee to make the module their own”, but I have two objections to that response: Firstly, I purchase modules primarily so that I don’t have to do this, because I work, have 2 children, and have a long-term chronic illness, all of which make doing extensive prep challenging. It’s the value proposition of a module for me, that I don’t have to make it my own, that’s something I do by choice. But secondly, and more importantly, I consider module design to some degree an art, and I think that art benefits from its’ creators digging deeper and expanding on their work in ways that are interesting and thematic. The fact that I see so many people doing this is heartening, and it’s how I can keep up reading modules still, coming up on my 100^th Bathtub Review. Now, there’s absolutely a place for a one-off, location based module; and there’s a place for these community driven projects like Tomb of a Thousand Doors and Hull Breach that I think are exploring a fascinating and important direction for our hobby. It’s just that Stalls of the Blood Queen, specifically, is clever twists the themes of Mausritter in interesting ways, and would benefit from letting the mind and creative eye wander and explore those themes more thoroughly, rather than regarding itself as a one-off joke module.

Stalls of the Blood Queen is a banger of a little Mausritter module, which, like most of my recent Mausritter reviews, requires a fair bit of improvisation on behalf of the referee. Usually, they’re punchy enough that I’d throw them on the table for use with my kids anyway — Stalls of the Blood Queen might be a bit too gory for my kids ages, though, so it’s unlikely to see play at my table. If you play Mausritter with an adult table, though, this is a striking change, it’s gorgeous, and it’s interesting. More than anything else, though, I’d love to see Matthew Morris and Alex Demasceno work together to expand this into a Ravenloft-esque Mausritter hexcrawl (“Ritterloft”, you can have that one Matthew Morris, if you’d like), because as a starting point, this is really compelling starting point to a unique take on Mausritter. If a one-off horror location appeals to you, or you don’t mind writing your own Ritterloft, Stalls of the Blood Queen is an excellent choice.

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