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.

Titans of the Verdant Maw is a 26 page module for Old School Essentials by Gabe L, with art by Carlos Castilho. In it, you are hired to destroy a behemoth built by a mad cyborg goblin, and must venture into a deadly dungeon populated by savage machines to find it.

Titans opens with 4 pages of random tables. The rumours sadly don’t really contribute much to play. We need them to have juicier worms, else they’re set dressing. I would rewrite all of these so they change how you interact with the encounters. Random anomalies and nighttime events are interesting and evocative, although I don’t know why they’re always happening. I’d love for them to be tied into lore, for more impact. They’re lovely though: “Spectral figures from a long-lost era sweep through the area” or “Mirage cats stalk the adventurers, testing their defences.”. I’d rather a little more from fourth, notable NPCs table, though: Striking as figures, none of these have any goals or relationships to tie them to the world. Interestingly the random encounter table does not get a whole page, although it would benefit from the space, as they’re all just “1d4 goblin” encounters with stat blocks rather than creatures with goals or needs. It’s a fairly small space, this jungle, and I’m assuming they follow the OSE rules, so I suspect that the ten random encounters occurring 1-in-6, plus the 3-in-6 chance of night time events, plus the 1-in-6 chance of an anomaly…if they’re exclusive, you’ll have a lot of encounters, and if they’re not, that’s a lot of dice rolls. I think we’d benefit from an overloaded table, anomalies being folded into the random encounter table, or another alternative. Even folding all of these into a single, 3-tier table would be better, and more space efficient, to boot.

The locations are impressionistic, very evocative, each with a few points of interest. They aren’t very interactive, though — no puzzles, lots of potential combat encounters, not a lot of support for social play. If you want something other than a fight, you’re relying heavily on the referee to do the heavy lifting. In a lot of ways, this feels like best possible version of a key from ‘80s Dungeon Magazine, brief, simple; but without supporting a lot of complexity or broader play options even though the potential is present.

Interestingly, there’s no map of this jungle — no hex map, no point crawl, and no random table of locations, and guidance regarding how to navigate. I was surprised — I even checked if there was an extra file I’d missed. No map makes it hard to follow the OSE wilderness travel rules — and I think the lack of either a map or rules for navigating the mapless jungle makes this module a little incomplete. It wouldn’t take long to throw together a point crawl — honestly Cairn 2e’s forestcrawl would be perfect for this — but I wish it was here to begin with.

The book is finished up with 3 classes, a bestiary, and a list of treasures. The bestiary needs a little more spice — I’d hoped the lack of social support would have been made up for in a dedicated section, but we’re not given much. Even a little mien table as seen in Troika! would be an improvement. Two of these beasts cause mutations, and that’s backed up with a very simple mutations table. The treasures are thematically appropriate, but the two most interactive are the grappling hook and the ooze forge, with the rest being pretty basic and not flexible in their uses like great OSR magical items.

There’s a strange tension here — Titans doesn’t feel suited to OSE in many ways. The terse, uncomplicated keying, the lack of concern about travel specifics, and the one-line mutations seem unsuited to the system. But there’s a lot of attention and care put into the stat blocks and the classes. My overall feeling is that this would be better as a capsule game — something with its rules baked in — rather than as a module for Old School Essentials. I think it doesn’t live up to its potential, as it is, but with tweaking, particularly to the rumours, the map, and the social dynamics, this would be a lot of fun to run. Titans of the Verdant Maw is pretty cool, though, and I’d be excited to see what Gabe L does next. If you’re module where sword and planet meets beer and pretzels, this is a great module for you.

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