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.

Orestruck is a 36 page module for Cairn written and mapped by Amanda P, with cover art by Roque Romero and otherwise from the public domain. In this sequel to Tannic, you arrive in a village, and become embroiled in a number of local problems. Amanda P is a friend of mine who provided a complementary copy, and I participated in an early playtest of Orestruck, although it appears to have undergone significant revision since that stage.

Orestruck opens with a 2-page summary of the history of the area and characters, followed by a 1-page story concerning the supernatural precursors to the events of the module. My favourite thing about all of this information is that everything here is known by someone: There are no forsaken easter eggs here, left for only the referee to know. There’s a lot to absorb here, but because the information really circles around a pair of lovers, it’s easy to get a handle on who’s acting and why. We follow this up with a spread on all 6 factions, written to the brief of appearance, drive, what they’re really doing, and how the adventurers can get involved. A few feature an extra section, specific to them. These categories are a really neat take on the faction summary, which works really well. Too many modules feature factions without clear motivations or actions, and these descriptions give you something to go on for all of these groups.

The next page is a page of jobs you can gain by asking around. These are effectively hooks, and they’re all juicy. The most important thing about hooks is that they offer a way into the story that offers an interesting perspective, and these all manage to do it. I especially like that there’s two hooks for the Count, one secret until you’ve earnt her trust. This offers a nice way to offer a second tour of Tannic forest (if they players choose), once they’ve went her trust, with more familiarity with all the features in it. We then have a page of rumours in the words of the people who communicate them. I love this approach, but I feel like I’d have trouble naturally working some of them into conversations. “Father’s skull and Mother’s bone are best kept under hearthstone.” for example, is an excellent line (and solves a puzzle later), but only feels appropriate from two particular characters mouths, and that’s not communicated clearly, nor is where to find that knowledge (I’d struggle to figure it out in print at all, and I only figured it out here by word searching the digital document). I think these rumours could use a little more page referencing or be attached to particular characters and locations, for ease of use. Finally, before the key proper begins, we have a list of events as they would occur without interference. In a module about duelling factions, this is helpful to keep things dynamic and feeling like a living space.

The key opens with the village of Pact, and the opening line: “Cold winds blow desiccated cedar fronds down the dirt road toward a humble village.” Evocative, brief, excellent. I love the format of having effectively read-aloud text like this opening each location, but sadly it’s not repeated anywhere else. It’s an excellent place to showcase the excellent writing here, while still maintaining the practical and thorough descriptions, but instead it’s often buried. The forest of Tannic itself portrayed here is a very particular, child-like fairy-tale space, where kind acts are rewarded, and adventure abounds. A forest of horror it is not, albeit filled with danger. My favourites: A troll in need of bridge repairs, and the singing spinarret. Once you enter Capella Cavern, you’re in for a treat; this is a pleasingly looped small dungeon of 18 rooms, with four interacting factions, and a bunch of mysteries to explore. This thing is dense, with a lot of danger, and a lot of opportunities for events to progress in the absence of the adventurers, rendering it very likely your players will be having to make choices on who to side with on the fly. This will make very a very exciting, and action-packed dungeon experience.

The layout here is based on the Explorer’s Template, and this type of work is precisely what it’s designed for. In terms of information design, Orestruck makes some decisions I don’t prefer – the bestiary is relegated to an appendix, rather than occupying the sidebars, and in general page referencing could be improved given the complexity of the relationships in the module, but these are not significant errors, they just might affect how you choose to run the module. The 2 maps are clear, legible and cute, in accordance with the overall fairytale vibe. The public domain art works, but not as well as it did in Tannic – here the world is much more specific and far less liminal in nature. I understand the desire to match the art styles across the two related products, but I think Orestruck deserves its own unique style, and a bunch of these characters and features deserve to be rendered. I hope we see some fan art.

It is fascinating to compare Orestruck to its earlier precursor, Tannic. Here, the forest is filled with more personality, and more concrete characters, with more clear motivations. While it keeps a strong fairytale theme, Orestruck, unlike Tannic, is filled with living, breathing people. And Capella Cavern is a very strong dungeon, unlike Tannic, where the dungeon fell short compared to the overall impact of the module. But also, the poetry that sang clear and bright in Tannic is more spaced out here, sacrificed for clarity and complexity, and that means that the more mysterious fairytale elements don’t hit anywhere near as hard in Orestruck as in Tannic, or rather, they come across as more picaresque, rather than conjuring as thick and pleasurable an atmosphere. They’re a fascinating comparison, and I feel I misunderstood where Dread Hospitality and Resonant stood in the development of Amanda P’s style in retrospect.

Those criticisms aside, Orestruck hits a light, kind-hearted, person-focused tone that’s pretty unique (although, to be honest, part of how I ended up friends with Amanda P is that we share a desire to write these kind of person-focused modules – check out my own work if you like this). I think it is a better introduction to Cairn in terms of tone than any of the three that were released with the game in the Cairn Adventure Anthology Volume 1, as much as I enjoyed all of those, and it’s an excellent example of all the features I really enjoy in a module. If you feel like of late too many modules are focused on horror, Orestruck, like the Valley of Flowers last year, is an excellent antidote to that – a village, forest and dungeon that will give you at least 4 or 5 sessions of fun, sans fear.

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