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.

Fever Swamp is a 70-odd page module by Luke Gearing and Andrew Walters for OD&D. I’m reading the re-release, rather than the earlier 2017 version. It’s a location-based module, describing the fetid and inhospitable Fever Swamp and the people and creatures inside it. I think I got this through the Kickstarter.

The book proper begins with a rumours table that is profoundly uninteresting and provokes no interaction, and “Impressions of the Swamp” which consists of a list of hooks, cunningly disguised as a paragraph. We then have a repeat of the random encounter table —it seriously occurs twice in 4 pages — and a pleasingly brief list of the mechanisms that help the referee run the swamp. These instructions refer to the random encounter table — hence its repetition — but given a book filled with hyperlinked page references, I think one of the repetitions could have been avoided. Four pages are then spent on the local tribes — the People — although for the last two pages, due to layout choices, it wasn’t immediately apparent that they were actually related. While it stated that they’re all unique, they’re painted with a very broad brush in a way that’s definitely uninteresting, and not detailed enough for them to be compelling. There are no individual characters and this contrast with the colonisers who get 3 pages of characters and quest hooks, feels uncomfortable to me. It’s followed up by a list of Swamp Witches —these are the most common occurrence on the random encounter table at a little less than 2% chance per witch, and I think they’re supposed to be the crux around which the module turns. They’re certainly the only characters with interesting and wide-reaching goals in the module. However, they’re squarely situated as primarily combat encounters, tactics and all, and only one has something to offer the player characters, which renders bargaining with them or being given quests by them tricky. There’s also very little information about them elsewhere, which means identifying one to seek out is not really a feasible approach by the book.

The keying itself — 15 locations, with 3 being larger locations with their own keys — is presented in paragraphs rather than for points. For the most part, these paragraphs are limited to less than half a page, but I’ll admit that I struggle with the longer keys here in terms of structure and scanning. The locations themselves are interesting, for the most part, but almost nothing stands out as a location I’d be excited to pull out of this swamp and put into my home campaign, and similarly the connections between the locations aren’t compelling enough for me to use Fever Swamp whole cloth. The exception (note I said almost nothing) is the House of Banish, which features the best map and also is a fairly compelling 17 page dungeon. It’s cohesive in a way the rest of Fever Swamp isn’t, with secret doors, loops and characters to interact with. It’s a decent little dungeon.

Luke Gearing’s writing, as always, can witty and evocative, but oftentimes here it is a little too bloated. The character descriptions in Clink, for example, are meandering and difficult to use. There are examples of course of excellent prose: “This tight warren is the next of the mink, where stolen friends are eaten.” or “A corpse of something never living and terribly ancient, it sits poised, long head angled downwards, six insectile limbs ready to power it forwards.” But just as often it’s difficult to parse, surprisingly so for Gearing. In the entrance of the second location, for example, the ordering of information is incoherent, meandering into the history of the space in the third paragraph, mentioning 10 stilt walkers in the fifth, and finally describing the tomb in the last. While there are issues with the “micro” structure of individual keys such as this, the macro structure — something Gearing has shown that he can masterfully orchestrate in modules like the Isle — here is equally incoherent. I was, for example, waiting for a fun reveal regarding who Grandfather Rotte was, but there was none. There is a swamp-witch in hex 10, but it appears to be unrelated to the allegedly unique swamp-witches mentioned earlier. And there’s a great deal of inactionable information: “Destroying the stones frees her, but she cannot tell anyone.”, and “If this excavation was continued for a mile, a buried city of insectile sorcerers could be found. There is no indication of this.” for two examples. As a poetic turn, I love the first of these at least, but it’s more interesting rather than less to simply make a rumour that points to this, or a carving, or anything to make this gameable.

Before moving on from the writing, it should be noted that this is a module with a puerile sensibility in a similar style to the Isle, and is unashamedly horror, full of images of rot and bloat, with a set of rules especially for visually confronting diseases, and one encounter with a creature who sprays its anal glands at the player characters. It’s full of body horror and twisted creatures filled with misery, and a touch of gross-out humour. If that’s not your cup of tea, maybe sit this one out.

Fever Swamp’s layout apes recent Melisonian Arts Council books like Hand of God, and for me it’s neither pretty nor easy to read. Stat blocks, for example, are still semi-indented into their descriptions. The outer sidebar is saved exclusively for location numbering, which for my eye isn’t intuitive, although I recognise the advantage of it making the book more flippable. The choice to distinguish higher to lower level headings based on what appears at first glance to be colour alone isn’t intuitive to me at all; numbering is repeated, across tribes, swamp witches, locations and sublocations and more — which is startlingly unclear. Given it’s printed in full colour, I feel like it would’ve benefited from more colours to differentiate these different lists, which are otherwise undifferentiated visually. Upon examination I realise there’s also a font size and numbering style difference, but it’s small enough to not be readily apparent. There also are what appear to be inconsistencies — paragraphs changing column width, for example. I can see the logic behind some of the layout decisions, but to me they seem poorly thought out, with some pages causing what I think is an unintentional sense of unease in terms of legibility. See the example below, but example.

On the other hand, the book opens with a map and a random encounter table. In print, these each come with page references, meaning I can go straight from the location on the map to the right page in the book, or straight to where the creature is introduced. In digital, it’s hyperlinked! It’s the little things that add a lot to usability. I was a little disappointed, though, that it uses a bestiary for the creatures — I prefer where possible creatures be tied to locations in the swamp, even random encounters. I also love that the back of the book is full of player facing maps — easy to find and show the players at the table. These are some smart decisions, and I wish the eye for usability had extended a little further. Layout and information design, as I keep harping on about, is important.

I forgot to talk about Andrew Walter’s art, which goes to show how much a flawed layout compromises your experience of the art in a book. Most full page artworks are inconsistently centered, although there is one spread that is edge to edge. There are a few monochrome line art pieces jarringly thrown in with the gorgeous paintings, which are still beautiful but just feel jarring by contrast. The two dungeon maps are stylised but only one of them is clear enough in its stylisations that they yield an easier rather than harder to use map. But, that full spread is an amazing art piece, as are most of the paintings in the book. While the art is gorgeous, the layout places it in poor light, and leaves me with the impression that the the art budget ran out and they had to make do with what was done when they did so.

I’d heard such positive things about Fever Swamp — it’s popular enough for a remaster, after all — but overall this didn’t work for me at all. It was let down by its lack of connectivity, its incredibly flawed layout, its’ internal prose structure and its larger information design choices. And I was put off by the strange hesitation in terms of hooks — it’s a book full of them, but it’s so very hesitant to hand them to the players. I want a module, though, as I’ve mentioned a few times here, that I can play by the book. I don’t think, that was Gearing’s intention, though, with Fever Swamp. I think he intends for what I’m seeing as flaws, to be assets. That they’re opportunities to “make Fever Swamp” my own. I suspect this based on, for example, this series of play reports on Gearing’s running of Pariah — there’s a lot of improvisation there. But if I were deeply invested in writing my own material, I wouldn’t be buying a module. I don’t need your help to make it my own, I can do that myself. I want you to draw connections and create surprises that I wouldn’t be able to draw or create myself.

That said, if you’re interested in running a gross out, vaguely body horror swamp crawl — in the vein of, for example, Wet Grandpa — this is exactly that. I think it’s incomplete, but completeness isn’t wholly necessary for the kind of game where you’re wandering from place to place, just to see what happens. And while it requires the referee to do a lot of gap-filling and legwork, you could make it work. I think there’s a lot of play in Fever Swamp, if that fits your particular remit.

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