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.

Blackapple Brugh is a 47 page module for Basic Fantasy by Kyle Hettinger. For a free module, it’s got a hell of a lot of names on the acknowledgments page; whatever coop works on Basic Fantasy has a hell of a lot of passion. In Blackapple Brugh, the player characters venture into a forest and then underground to rescue children stolen by malevolent fae.

The voice used here reminds me of the bland but clear voice used in the least interesting Dungeon modules. There’s no poetry here, just the dry accountancy of Gygax without his characteristic purpled prose. It’s overwritten for the most part, and because of that, a little difficult to parse.

The layout is a dense, illegible, ugly mess. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for here, unless you know exactly what part of the key you’re looking at. It’s verbose, and the lack of typographical emphasis makes the body text difficult to process for me. It extensively uses boxed text for read alouds, which is useful, as the read aloud substitutes for description in this module. The art is eclectic and inconsistent; recognising this likely had a budget of passionate volunteers, I’d rather it not be there than be either ugly or atonal. There are nice usability touches though: Hit points are checkmarked in stat blocks, for example, and it’s heavily referenced to both pages and keys.

There are some technical mistakes; the rumour table isn’t labelled correctly and places the wrong rumours at the far ends of the probability curve, making it difficult to gain important information. The jobs board doesn’t direct you to the right locations to fulfill those jobs. A bunch of little things make it less useable, sadly.

But the content here is all juice and interconnection. It’s not concept dense but relationship dense. Half the random encounters are directly connected to locations or NPCs. All of the locations have two or more connections. The outskirts of the village are absolutely packed to the gills with fairytale magic, with singing strange and wonderful happening regularly on the key. Everyone has a secret about someone else. My sense about Blackapple and its surrounds is that it would be an absolute pleasure to play in, and full of enjoyable characters to inhabit.

The Brugh — the dungeon — is by necessity complexly keyed and difficult to process, largely as a consequence of there being two descriptions of each room. This conceit brings a pleasantly confusing twist to the dungeon, which is eclectic enough to feel very fairytale, but sadly this double key isn’t taken advantage of for any interesting puzzles, but rather only for an ambush or two. There are so many characters to talk to here, and it’s a compelling social space, very much designed as a dreamlike space rather than as a space to explore in using your spatial reasoning. Not your typical dungeon at all.

My feelings are so complex with regards to Blackapple Brugh, I must say. In so many ways, it’s an absolute mess. Ugly, unreadable, difficult to navigate. But the practicalities of its content are unique and compelling, if you wade through the overwritten accountant’s prose. I’m just not sure I would — I’m not so enamoured of fairy palaces and fae-cursed villages that I’d want to wade through the negatives here for the sake of the positives. But the positives are so very strong and unique, it’s a very close call, and you may not fall on the same side if the line as me, particularly if you and your table are fans of worlds like that of Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, which this is very evocative of. The closest module in theme that comes to mind is Winters Daughter; but this is better, I think, thematically. Irregardless it’s free: If the idea of a creepy elf-world appeals to you and your friends, you should check it out. But be sure to persist before making a judgement, as your initial impressions of Blackapple Brugh are likely to be offputting.

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