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.

The Moss Mother’s Maze is a 31 page module for A Dungeon Game by Chris Bissette. In it, you delve through a beautifully described landscape and encounter horrible creatures.

We open with an introduction to the landscape and the village itself. Bissette writes floridly and beautifully here, in their meandering style, and it works. I don’t love the intentionally vague village — I can sub in my own village without permission, but half-describing a village is in the middle ground where it’s hard to fold into an existing village , but also I can’t just drop it in whole. The notable residents are well-described and each have a hook leading deeper into the titular maze, however the combination of Bissette’s meandering style and lack of highlighting means I’ll have to come at this with a pen to make it easy to run.

The maze itself is a maze. In terms of design wisdom, it breaks a lot of rules. It’s endlessly looped and filled with dead ends, it’s not uncommon to have 3-5 entrances which is usually not the done thing. It is numbered top right to bottom left despite your starting in the center (likely a reason the hyperlinked map exists). The “boss” is only 4 rooms from the entrance, and the odds of the party stumbling straight there are actually pretty high — about 10% by available choices, which feels like a mistake, but could be intentional as finding that early will drive players towards the vault. Accessing the vault is difficult, though. It’s supposed to be like this, because it’s a maze, but mapping for the party would be very challenging (and this is explicitly what it recommends you let the party do), and it I think designing a maze that is enjoyable to actually play in is a hell of a task.

I love the random encounters here, which are split into 2 columns — you always encounter the first column first, and then the second is the real encounter, in the next room. Very nice work, for a maze, which will fill the players with appropriate paranoia and mess with their mapping. The Moss Mother here is presented to me as a slasher, hunting the players throughout the maze, which is a dynamic I really, really like in modules, rather than leaving her in aforementioned room waiting.

The keying itself is gorgeous, as usual, and I like that the exits typically have sensory descriptions to aid in decision-making. It’s all compelling, but often contextless and filled with forsaken easter eggs — for example, the Nightdarts are a monster you might encounter, with a tragic backstory that the players will never find out, and it’s not clear what in the maze actually caused the horror to occur. What caused the infection driving the nameless man in 18 to fight the Moss Mother? Is it the “fungal spores”? If so why do they not affect the player characters in the same way? Why is there a bed in 22? These questions don’t need to be answered, but having an answer rather than a random assortment of rooms to tour would make the maze more compelling as a whole. Rooms are mostly isolated with few connections, although some of the traps can be repurposed against your foes, most notably the titular Moss Mother. Some of the traps aren’t clear, though: Where do you end up if you’re trapped in Passage 1? And some questions are raised by the text itself: For example, where is the spear in 21 from if the vault is empty except for a certain substance? Overall, the maze itself presents as not fully thought through, or at least a more florid version of the classic “throw a bunch of unrelated rooms in order” dungeon.

In terms of art and layout, Bissette has been vocal regarding the high cost of art and how it impacts the price of modules and games. Accordingly, The Moss Mother’s Maze contains a total of 3 pieces of art (plus the cover) and 3 maps. These art pieces are pretty striking feature pieces, but the maps are workmanlike. The layout is simple; rooms are always kept to a single page, headings are clear but highlighting is non-existent, even the tables lack zebra striping for ease of scanning. One benefit is that time not spent on layout or art was spent on hyperlinking — everything is linked here, which is a huge boon to someone running digitally, although it’s far less accessible in print. I am not opposed to minimal art products, at all, but I feel like resigning modules to a visual design that feels like it was put together using Microsoft Word templates is a mistake. We can have beautiful, art free, and easy to read modules — it’s not a zero sum game.

The Moss Mothers Maze, then, is a gorgeously describe but perhaps not fully thought full dungeon. I think it serves best as a funnel, to be honest — you’ll die a lot getting to the vault, and then you’re likely to die retreating from the vault. If you or your players want cohesiveness — if you want to solve puzzles or think about why things are happening or expect to learn lore — this is not going to be at all satisfying. If you’re looking for a beer and pretzels type dungeon, one to occupy your players for a few weeks, kill a bunch of characters, and shock with a bunch of horrible, well described situations, the Moss Mother’s Maze will be an absolute pleasure.

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