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 Curious Creeps in Crimson Creek is a 23 page module for Knave with words, art and layout by Daniel Harila Carlsen. A monster mania descends on Crimson Creek and you’re here to investigate it. what will you find? This was a complementary copy.

Curious Creeps opens with a surprisingly creepy timeline, involving a haunted tower, frankenstein-like bodies made for demon possession, and a crew of hired grave robbers. The random encounters lead mainly into specific locations or plot points, despite their being 20 of them, although the village encounters are less compelling — only half of them point you towards further adventure. The hooks all give the characters specific reasons and ways to involve themselves which will impact their choices, which I love. The rumours, though, are a little less razor sharp — these serve as foreshadowing, but as well as being a fact, right or wrong, I want them to lure the characters into some kind of action when they encounter what is foreshadowed. The list of monster hunters — all characters with ties to the locations or people in them — is exceptional, and many of them hold additional hooks.

The locations are absolutely packed with gameable content — for me, it’s almost too much. But that too much translates to making it impossible for the players not to stumble into interesting things, which is a good thing. There is a huge amount of connectivity between locations, there are so many reasons to find new places from each place you explore. Just banger lines “gilb merchant: Head replaced by a broken gramophone horn, angered if brought up” and powder-kegs all the way through. The dungeon is a six-room affair, with a looping structure, that is far more interested in the experience of exploration rather than of dungeon crawling per se. That said, if you care not about torch counting, it’s as vibrant as the rest of the book.

The inside front cover is a hex map with page references, hooks, and a blurb, random encounters are on page 6 (with their start blocks on the alternate page), and the back cover is rumours. While generally the information design here is clean, accessing these important aspects is a little scrambled — move the random encounters to the back inside spread, put the hooks and rumours together, and the blurb at the back where it’s both expected and where it’s not in proximity to the full summary. This is a really usable text, and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t nail these extra little bit.

Carlen has fully illustrated this module in incredible style, and uses a vibrant salmon as a key colour in both the illustration and text for a really cohesive effect. This eliminates the need for additional font use — for example, read aloud uses this common key colour (occasionally a more vibrant crimson and a contrasting blue), rather than italicised text, and weight is used sparingly, for key words and headings, making for a legible but easy to scan text. The key uses symbols, which take a moment to wrap your head around because they’re not super intuitive iconography — why are monster heads opportunities, and diamonds triggers or consequences? But I like that it differentiates types of information, I just don’t think the iconography makes it work, because I have to flip forward and back constantly, and a simple title or a capital letter would make the keys easier to process, at least for my brain. This isn’t an insignificant problem, because of the complexity of the locations, but it’s a good one to have, as it is only occurring because what’s in the key is super compelling and dense. I really enjoy the art, which walks the line between janky and Fiend Folio inspired with a boldly-inked and polished finish. This is a great example of how a cohesive approach to art and layout can work.

Curious Creeps walks a line between genuinely creepy and funny that reminds me of properties like Over the Garden Wall. To me, that’s a compliment, but it also places this module in the position of being challenging to slot into an existing campaign. This, combined with its intent to be a very open sandbox, means that it might be challenging for it to grip people the way it’s meant to be played — it feels like it’s best as the centre of a short campaign rather than a one-shot. I note from the cover, that’s it’s the first in a series: I hope the series covers adjacent areas in an overworld, because you could get a lot of play time out of a few of these, in a very fun, quirky, and weirdo-filled world.

If you’re looking for an open sandbox, filled with creepily funny encounters and densely packed with gameable moments and social encounters, Curious Creeps in Crimson Creep is a module you should pick up, particularly if that mode suits your current campaign. If you’re willing to drop everything for that vibe, you can pull a hook from the module to gain some immediate direction for your table, and it’ll go damned well I expect. I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for what Carlsen does next.

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