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 Howling Tomb is an 8 page module for OSE by Medora Games. In it, you delve into the tomb of a fallen knight. I backed this one on Kickstarter for Zinequest.

The Howling Tomb doesn’t beat around the bush: No preamble to speak of, no surrounds, and even the backstory is kept mythic rather than specific. There is no timeline or such, just 4 rumours and some encounters on the steppe surrounding the tomb. The rumours don’t have much content to them — a rumour needs to be more than just facts about your location to be worth wasting your time with, as I’ve discussed in Juicy Worms previously. The encounters on the way, given the otherwise lack of information on the world around the tomb, are completely unnecessary and don’t provide anything that the AD&D DMG doesn’t provide in terms of “steppe encounters”. If there were some deeper encounters here that connected to the tomb, it may have been worthwhile. This shallow content also lies at the back of the book — a bunch of steppe mini-tables are here, again, none of them containing much of anything. I don’t see much point in any of this: Either you should build these steppe nomads out properly, or you should just leave the surrounds entirely to the referee and focus on your dungeon. At the back there is also an explanation of the Wayward Knight — but the truth is this longer, page-length version has no more detail – it’s just more florid. Excellent detail is evocative; this is gygaxian.

That said, the Howling Tomb’s key is filled with excellent detail. Layout is very good; each page has a minimap and pictures of NPCs. Read-aloud text is minimal but useful. Dot points use highlighting for important phrases. Puzzles are really well spelt out in minimal words. Because the text uses the keying, I think the minimap would benefit from having the keying numbers as well, though. Honestly, the Howling Tomb as a tiny dungeon location slaps, although I think the excellent layout is wasted on such a small dungeon — you just don’t need all this utility for just a few pages. Good practice for a more complex text though.

Overall, I’d recommend the Howling Tomb for the kind of encounters that zungeons often occupy — it’s something for you to encounter along the way, to throw into your hex map as a point of interest. I don’t think the author recognised its place in the ecosystem, though, and hence the tone and energy spent on the steppe. I’d love to see this verve and layout brought to a bigger project, because if you’re adding factions, juicier hooks, and increased interactivity into this dungeon style, you’re going to have something really memorable. As is, the Howling Tomb is a fun little dungeon to add into your fantasy campaign, with a little tweaking.

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