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 end of January marks my 100th Bathtub Review (not counting my I Read Reviews, so the number may be closer to 150), so I’m celebrating with an Introductory Extravaganza, where I review a different Dungeons and Dragons starter module every week for a few weeks. In the last three weeks I covered the Village of Hommlet (AD&D), the Sunless Citadel (D&D 3e), and the Lost Mine of Phandelver (D&D 5e), covering most of the mainline D&D starters. This week we venture further afield with the Iron Coral (Into the Odd). We’ll finish next week with Blancmange and Thistle (Troika!).

The Iron Coral is a 26 page module by Chris McDowall, included as the introductory adventure for Into the Odd Remastered. There was a briefer version of the same module in the original Into the Odd, which I’m not reviewing here. It notably has art and layout by Johan Nohr. In it, a strange alien structure has sprung up in the ocean, and is rumoured to be filled with large mysterious powers.

Nohr’s layout gives away the larger layout trends of Into the Odd Remastered — the wide margins, thoughtful white spaces and striking use of colour — for a busy mess of a layout. We have a clear heading, but the 8 potential bullet types while heavy on information aren’t particularly clear at all (to be clear, I don’t think all 8 ever appear in one spot, but it’s a lot nevertheless. It doesn’t say what the different font flagging means — so I’m not sure why something is bold or why it’s underlined at all, aside from the fact that underlining appears to apply to specifically exits (which are also flagged by bullet points), and the italicised text for every description feels like overuse in a context where 10 lines in a row do not use any un-modified text. I don’t know that the italics actually confers any meaning here — perhaps it differentiates mechanical description from sensory? What little meaning it may have is contradicted in the wandering encounters, where instead italics means location, bolding means creature name, and plain text indicates sensory description — but positively wandering encounters are signified by colour, as are stat blocks. Wandering encounter tables appear on the top right of any spread with a top right, but really this placement would be better signified with white in blue text, because initially I thought that they were each different in each spread rather than a repeating element.

Of course, part of the issue here is that McDowall’s aggressively minimalist keying and the pre-existing Into the Odd Remastered layout aren’t entirely compatible. We’ve switched from an entirely prose book, for which the layout is elegant in the extreme, and struggled to translate, I suspect because McDowall presented an Iron Coral manuscript that already had a dense system for communicating information, and it was hard to come up with ways to present that in a way that didn’t end up way too busy for me to read easily. That said, I think it works for simpler rooms.

For a beginner referee, I don’t think the Iron Coral will be an easy module to run; it relies heavily on your ability to improvise: Striking when Into the Odd is strongly presented by its community as great for those new to RPGs given its simplicity. It doesn’t have narrative or throughlines or NPCs to speak of. Factions are not planned or presented strongly, but expected to be an emergent element. There’s an interesting tension here, because it’s also a 3 level 60 room dungeon, not insignificant in size.

Certainly, though, compared to Lost Mine of Phandelver, the Iron Coral relies entirely on its simpler ruleset rather than providing onboarding throughout, and suffers for the bold assumption that I can remember the entire ruleset of Into the Odd that preceded it. It’s closer in scale to Sunless Citadel — entirely gameable content here, with very little else, all in a dense location — in comparison to the Village of Hommlet, which has a decent amount of rooms that don’t feature interesting or exciting play. Implicitly, though, unlike Sunless Citadel, there’s Bastion, the city to retreat to that is featured. although with far less detail than Village of Hommlet (for good or ill).

It feels like a module for a referee experienced in a certain style of play, rather than a new one. I don’t think it’s going to require much prep if you’re that referee — experienced with a flair for improvisation — but if you’re new to the style, it would be overwhelming, I suspect. You’re going to have to spend time building connections to make this a more interactive and exciting space to be in for that long, which in my opinion is an advanced refereeing skill.

Does it onboard players to Into the Odd? Not with much success at all, I don’t think. It does a little tutorialising for players — the first secret door and the first trap are easy puzzles to solve if you’re occupying the fiction appropriately as a player, for example, and random encounters are given center stage in every room. But it’s mainly oriented at the referee, and I think that by not providing that scaffolding, you’re relying on that referee for a lot. The Iron Coral in the hands of a well-experienced referee? Gold. As your first dungeon? I’m not so convinced it will be an exceptional experience. Certainly it doesn’t scaffold anywhere near as much as either Sunless Citadel or Lost Mine of Phandelver.

That said, when added to the Fallen Marsh, which is in the same book, you can probably play Into the Odd: Remastered for a year before buying or creating anything else, so in that sense it’s better value than anything else I’ve looked at, and it comes for free with the book. That, by itself, sets it apart from everything else so far.

But I think that Into the Odd Remastered’s dedication to simplicity does the Iron Coral no favours as an introductory module. Despite being attached to the rules text, it doesn’t really give opportunities to engage with the rules text, and provides no page references to assist the novice referee. Rather than being a true introductory module, it doesn’t feel intended to tutorialise at all, but rather feels like an exemplar. In some ways, this is a good thing: The messy layout does clearly communicate some of McDowall’s key refereeing principles implicitly, such as the ICI doctrine. If it’s intended to say “oh hey, this is how easy it is to make a dungeon for Into the Odd! See, how you don’t have to write like Tolkien? See how you don’t need or want a story?” rather than be the perfect tutorial dungeon for Into the Odd, it succeeds in spades. And to a degree, as much as it’s not as good a tutorial dungeon as any of the others so far, it’s as much an excellent tool for communicating what Into the Odd is about: Really, it’s a tool to communicate the DIY nature of elfgames and how easy it can be to participate in the hobby yourself. In that way, The Iron Coral is still something very special.

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