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.

Mouth Brood is a 35 page system agnostic hex crawl by written and illustrated by Amanda Lee Franck. It’s an ecological horror scenario, that feels clearly inspired by Annihilation to me, although perhaps there are other things in its Appendix N. System agnostic is code here for “for B/X”, which is fine in my opinion, but its interesting to me how much Amanda Lee Franck clearly subverts basically every system she runs in — this is a clearly modern-set module, but the monsters are still described “as chainmail”, for example. I purchased this myself.

Hex crawl is a misnomer, kind of: This hex crawl is unique in a bunch of ways. Hexes have vertical space (you can climb the jungle!), 60 feet (just 10 meter) hexes, and you can travel across the entire map in 3 minutes if nothing goes wrong, although if you’re careful it’ll take 15 minutes. You head into the “dome”, this 3 hex wide and 3 hexes high biosphere with a goal to recover 5 live specimens, and to that end it really revolves around the density of these hexes. The hex descriptions max out at about 6 lines, and the entire location description section takes 3 pages including the random encounter tables. What, how the hell am I supposed to run this?

21 pages of Mouth Brood is the Bestiary. This is the juice, and it’s upfront about this, to the point where it advises the referee to print off the hexes so you can focus on the bestiary during play. Most of the hexes are basically lists of entries in the bestiary with a few words of flavour; there’s really only one encounter in the whole dome. Random encounters are usually roaming predators, with some exceptions. The bestiary consist of a description, some exceptional art, a d4 list of what it might be doing, and a description one or more of what it will do if observed, if disturbed or threatened (and on one occasion, if eaten).

So basically our gameplay loop is: stumble through the wilderness, looking for live specimens to bring back, without them killing you, taking notes to safely retrieve specimens. Luckily, there are tools at your disposal: Each of the four team members have special equipment or knowledge that helps them trap, track, or predict the creature’s behaviours. Without this addition, I’d feel like this isn’t a strong enough framework for play, and there do seem to be a few flaws here.

For example, it appears that the most dangerous creature in the dome has escaped at the beginning of the module. Is not clear whether this only occurs after you’ve entered and opened the dome, but someone is already in the dome when you arrive. The blurb implies that you’ll have to make a decision about whether or not to release them, but if they can already leave, what does this mean? Poring through the bestiary, I hoped I’d get some clarity, but I never found it.

As with everything Amanda Lee Franck writes, it’s gorgeous and idiosyncratic. The bestiary particularly feels written by someone with an interest in zoology. It feels like an ecosystem. The problem is, it advises the referee to memorise as much as possible and the names — all scientific, and about 18 of them — are not really easy for me to remember. I’m not sure I understand all the implications and relationships in this ecosystem at all. Usually, I’d view this as a great jumping off point for improvisation, but here it feels like I’m missing something — what are the transparent yet otherwise identical beetles for example? For me, the very sense this module generates of a complex ecosystem makes me a little more hesitant to improvise.

And further, while there’s plenty of creepy monsters and a dose of body horror, for the most part it’s a murder simulator. If it was your jam, I could see multiple missions with different characters, recovering the last doomed mission’s logs. But what we don’t get is the weird existential horror that accompanies the ecological horror in books like Annihilation. That feels essential to me, to making this feel like something other than what it is: Because at it’s heart Mouth Brood is a dungeon crawl where you collect specimens rather than treasure, that has 21 rooms and 3 levels; and it’s really a version of a dungeon crawl where there are 2 or 3 big roaming monsters you’ll be fleeing, and most other encounters are traps you’re trying to puzzle out before you’re killed.

Overall then for me, Mouth Brood is a module with impeccable vibes and beautiful art, that isn’t afraid to innovate on form. But that form is challenging for me to run, and the lack of a certain existential je ne sais quoi means it doesn’t rise above its thinly disguised Tomb of Horror dungeon roots. That said, is it a module worth reading? Almost certainly. It’s a dungeon that does away with the colonialist trappings of dungeon crawling and replaces it with a Pokémon Snap meets alien Jurassic Park theme, which is an innovative approach. And it innovates on the hex crawl in an interesting way, which I adore, making it claustrophobic and three dimensional. Is it something I’ll bring to the table? Probably not, though.

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