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. During Zinequest I’m doing some bonus reviews, to give more visibility during this great month of gaming!

Planet Vesta was a 6 page system agnostic setting supplement by Joie Yong, detailing a pair of science fiction worlds. Crowdfunding now for Zine Month is the expanded version, a 14 page version with a whole lot more added content. I’ll be focusing on the expanded version.

I really like the brevity that Yong brings to this. The entire planetary system is described in 1 page, focusing on the unusual: The planets are tidally locked, and everyone lives on a thin strip along the equator where temperatures aren’t too extreme. Play is clearly focused on the biodomes, a network of tunnel-connected habitats, most of which are focused on mining by necessity, but many of which are used for smuggling if they’re away from central inhabitable strip. There are four example domes, clearly describing the Kremmen Dome, Redbank Mushroom Farm, Bandera Commune, and Huayi Research Station geographically speaking. The expansion adds most of these, and more importantly adds some characters

A series of mission prompts comes next, ideas that help you plan a Planet Vesta session. I’d always prefer some specific names and places mentioned in prompt like this — I was called out in a recent Dice Exploder episode for being hard on the “you can never be too specific in a prompt” bandwagon — but they’re all solid mission prompts as they stand. The expansion spends a load of time here too, giving them concrete locations, relates them to specific domes or areas, and expands them and relates them together into a mission tree.

There are two missing pieces here for me, though: Firstly, I want the characters in a border planet like this to be a bit more desperate — this all honestly feels like a Duskvol style setup, but nobody has projects or goals. Whether that’s important depends on wider kind of game we’re going to use this for — that’s the second missing piece. I’m personally starting to prefer non-system agnostic supplements for this reason — if the use case was, say Into the Blind, then this might be more specific in certain ways, but would broadly fit the collaborative playstyle, and the things I feel are missing aren’t a problem at all. If I’m wanting to play Mothership — which is admittedly my default frame for sci-fi roleplaying — this is missing a lot of necessary detail for that to be easy. That said, this is also very obviously a setting that would fit a game like Dialect very well, so your mileage may vary significantly depending on what you want to put this to use for.

I prefer these kinds of supplements to focus on the relationships and characters in a location, and care less about the specific geography and science around them — I’m a hand-waver by nature. Planet Vesta doesn’t hand-wave. If you really like having a solid geographical pinning to a setting, and prefers to bring relationships, characters and politics more independently or collaboratively, Planet Vesta is precisely the supplement for you, and I’d consider backing the campaign.

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