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.

Steelhollow, written by Stuart Watkinson, with art is by Kiril Tchangov, is the third module in the Abbot Trilogy, a system neutral series of modules. Steelhollow stands alone, and in its own words, “uses a roleplaying staple for its framework; a town, a wilderness, and a dungeon”. In Steelhollow, you’re tasked to find a shard of a god’s eye — and this shard is allegedly in the fortress Steelhollow, in the midst of the Harenja desert. I backed this on Kickstarter.

Mapsedge, the town, consists an inn, a trading post, and one house that you’re likely to get a private invitation to. Mapsedge is largely a tourist destination, either for its hallucinogenic wine, or as the last stop on the way to Steelhollow, a regular adventuring location. There are 10 regulars, which as per Watkinson’s typical approach, are very well realised, although not all of them really play an interesting role in proceedings or direct you anywhere, or do other than making things feel like they’re populated. The rumours aren’t particularly incisive — particularly if a rumour is false, it needs to have a meaningful impact on an event or location later, in my opinion (see Juicy Worms). Undermining these rumours and the Inn as a location is the character of Duncan, who will give the characters a bunch of useful information about Steelhollow, with no drawbacks. Pleasingly, there’s also a team of rival adventurers, who also work for the Abbot, and are competing for the same prize. These three are again, well described, but I’d have preferred in the context of the broader module for there to be a list of deceits that Brashen might tell, or more of note that Brent’s would do. As rivals, this is a major faction, and you want them to have their own personal agendas and ways to achieve them, for some interesting intrigue. There being only 3 of them would be clever if the intent was that they’re all compelling and you don’t want them to die, but if they’re not, one use for rival adventurers is revealing traps and other hazards, which this party is too small to use for.

The desert, as with Bitterpeak, is characterised by its’ random encounters rather than any map. This makes it, for me, a kind of non-entity. In this case, it’s suggested that the desert is filled with shifting dunes and that Duncan’s starmap is the only way to navigate it — but of course plenty of other adventurers including your rivals find their way there without it; it even without the starmap (if they don’t meet Duncan, or are persuaded not to trust him) they’ll experience the same travel. There are ways to describe a sea of shifting dunes without undermining the characters agency, even if you don’t want to detail a map, but I maintain that if you’re running a wilderness, the wilderness needs to exist, else skip it altogether. The two other locations largely exist as wider world building; if you were spending more time on this desert than the brief part of a session it feels it expects, they’d be compelling elements of a larger tableaux; here, I don’t quite see the point, as the outcome is fixed.

I quite like the set-piece encounter at the door to Steelhollow, but “mindful of how the party have treated both zealots and the rival party in the past” rings hollow when the zealots are only available to be met prior to this 30% of the time, and you only have the opportunity to meet the rivals back in town where they’re not likely to have played a huge part, as yet. If you’re wanting to load meaning into social encounters, you really need to spend the time laying the groundwork for these encounters first.

There is no dungeon to speak of in Steelhollow, however. There are two rooms here, held by the zealots you may have already angered, and who will respond with violence if you retrieve the eye of the god. There is no god, either — the zealots are the entirety of the battle. Unlike Bitterpeak, there is no real dilemma here — no reason to not take the shard or to question your quest, nor any difficult decision to weigh. Like Bitterpeak, it’s a little anticlimactic.

In an effort to render this more climactic, you are encouraged to pause, and have a moment with your player characters prior to entering the room that holds the “god”. You are asked as a referee to pose questions such as “How have you grown and changed since meeting the Abbot? or “How have your relationships with the others in your group changed?” It feels ham-handed and forced to me, and as a whole is a little reflective of the Abbot Trilogy’s main failing as a whole: Each of these modules should have been three times as big, expanded and built in such a way that their relationships and themes were naturally expressed by the play that occurred in them. Because each of them is given no room to breathe, none of them feel like their climaxes are earnt; neither do the feelings or growth of the characters. These three are the seed of something remarkable, but the story that grows out of them feels stunted and incomplete.

You’re going to have to bring a lot to the Abbot Trilogy and to Steelhollow in order for it to sing the way the author wants it to sing, but I think if you bought all three of these with the aim to expand them, and a willingness to build a world, and perhaps to add in Largshire as well, you’d have something really fascinating and remarkable. I could see a future project where these are explored more thoroughly, and published together with Largshire as a more complete setting, filled with small adventures — a larger version of Abbotsmoore, to whit. And that would be stellar. Watkinson’s writing continues to be exceptional, and his ideas are worth pillaging even if you’re not planning to play it directly.

That said, for me Steelhollow isn’t a success, either as a town, wilderness or dungeon, and I wouldn’t bring it to my table, largely because I wouldn’t want to put that effort into expanding it. I’m a little disappointed: I felt largely the same about Largshire, and I was hoping that these three would be precisely what I was looking for as a way forward, because the core of this remains very, very good, and the elements are all very strong. If you’re interested in strongly written modules, or something filled with ideas and turns of phrase to pilfer, or if you’re already running a desert wilderness — this would fit right in on Sea of Sand for example — this is excellent. And if you’re willing to take the time expanding it, or if that’s your usual practice, it’s a great foundation for interesting world and relationships. But as someone who largely brings modules to the table because she doesn’t want to do that legwork, Steelhollow doesn’t work for me, and neither does the Abbot Trilogy as a whole.

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