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.

The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak is a 22 page module for Knave written by Robin Fjärem. It’s a snowy dungeon crawl inspired by Norse folklore.

The dungeon itself is a 3 part, 32 area dungeon, pretty huge for such a short zine. The first level of 11 rooms features only 2 encounters (a trap and a monster), although there is some random chance of something interesting occurring there. The second level of 6 areas (not rooms, a lake with islands) at least features an NPC, although nothing is mentioned of what he might know or how he might respond. The final level of 15 locations has a fair few NPCs, a faction and a final boss of sorts — this is good dungeon levell. I’m on board the third level here, it seems like fun, but is still a little anaemic, particularly with regards to the intentions of the inhabitants. I can rely on a reaction roll, but I’d rather just have these characters and factions goals and intentions spelled out for me. It can be done subtly — Mausritter has brief factions down to a fine art — but here we have very little to go on. There are a few key oversights here. It’s not said that the background lore should be known to the players — my assumption is always that it’s not unless it’s stated — which means nowhere in the rumours or by dungeon inhabitants are the player characters cued to do certain important things, like swim through the bioluminescent pool to the spirit world, for example. I could see players getting stuck on these forsaken easter eggs.

Also like Knave 2, The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak is bookended by a bunch of pretty decent random tables. I love this kind of support, although I’d prefer a little more flagging for their use in the text. The inside front cover is full of random tables that cover the wilderness travel to the temple, the inside back cover covers the spirit realm and magical mushrooms within the dungeon. There are also a bunch of random treasure tables in the text, rather than set treasure in any area. This is fun because you can customise the treasure for your party, but overall the dungeon seems a little soft on financial rewards. We have two sets of random events, a wandering monster table, and a table of both hooks and rumours. Fjärem loves randomness as much as Ben Milton does.

The quality of the random tables varies a lot. The rumours and hooks are simply uninteresting: There isn’t anything here that would change the behaviour of the players, and nothing that links these hooks or rumours into the world at large. In my opinion, there’s a place for hooks and rumours, but they need to change play for them to have value, whether it be by colouring the players perceptions before they hit the situation at hand, or by giving them information to act on (false or true) when they hit a challenge they wouldn’t other use have had. The random event and wandering monster tables are largely uninspired, too, with the main redeeming factor being that the monsters are all plucked from norse folklore. Luckily, the treasure tables aren’t boring, mostly consisting interesting interactive things. Especially in a game like Knave, interesting inventory is key, and it’s just disappointing the same attention to interactivity wasn’t considered in the other tables.

Layout is an overstuffed 2-column affair, with minimal padding and leading and narrow margins. It’s a layout designed to fit it into as few pages as possible, and honestly it suffers for it. At 22 pages, everything could use a little more breathing space. Points of interest are bolded in the text, but this is a prose dungeon rather than a bullet-point dungeon, and this highlighting doesn’t overcome the density for me. It works for short areas, but the larger areas suffer from poor readability simply because the text isn’t easily scanned. What different things apply to gets muddled because of the lack of readability as well; after some tackling, it’s evident the multiple random event and monster tables apply only to certain sections of the module, but this isn’t at all clear on first glance, as they’re crammed in with everything else. Interestingly, this fits Ben Milton of Knave’s oeuvre, and a lot of the same things were challenging for me in Knave 2. A little additional white space goes a long way to rendering things more readable, in my opinion.

Overall, I think this dungeon is a little undercooked. The factions and characters need to be sprinkled throughout the entire dungeon, not just the third level. Those NPCs need a bit more personality — perhaps these are implicit to someone with a stronger sense of Norse mythology than I, but they aren’t to me. The random events and monsters similarly need a little more bite, a little more of a “oh! the arena has changed” every time the dice are rolled. But all the ingredients for an interesting, unique dungeon are here, the three levels have unique and interesting themes that I want to see explored, and the writing at its best is strong. If you’re interested in Norse-folktale dungeons, I’m genuinely not aware of anything else out there that fits the bill, although the Polish (I am assured by my Polish friends not Scandinavian) Beyond Corny Grön would neverrhless supplement this well in terms of the fairytale elements. If you’re willing to put a bit of effort in — give the NPCs some flavour and the factions some goals, add some points of interest and romance to the upper levels — The Frozen Temple of Glacier Peak will probably be a memorable few sessions of play, with a very unique theme.

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