Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

The Model Minster is a 5 page mission for Spire by Sebastian Yūe. In it you are tasked with assassinating a compromised agent embedded in a fashion house.

First up, the cover by Adrian Stone slaps. Just excellent. It communicates the content of the mission extremely well. The layout is a simple, two-column one, very reminiscent of Spire itself, and at 5 pages it’s navigable and readable. The only criticism I have is that potentially if I printed it at home, the textured background might render it more difficult to read in greyscale.

The themes and a characterisation here are exceptional: The aesir are twisted and evil in an unselfconscious way, the drow are desperate. The disguising of abuse as fashion and of experimentation and infection as healthcare is compelling, and scary given the real world parallels. It’s a hell of a basis for a module. I want to run this; it’s rare that a non-horror module explores horrific themes in such a compelling way.

As a mission, I find the tension here fascinating. I really want this to be a typical, location-based module. But that’s not what Spire wants it to be! So, what we have, is a set up that drops you straight into the action without preamble, 4 NPCs that have 2-3 paragraphs of description for them and how to run them, 4 suggested scenes that might occur somewhere in the running of the module, and a twist, which reinterprets the other information. Let’s call these the base of the module. You don’t need anything else, is the impression I get. Then you get 4 single paragraph descriptions of locations, 6 props, a potential reward for completing the mission, and then some ideas for continuing the story.

I haven’t read or played enough Spire to know if this is a typical structure for Spire or Heart modules – I’ve written about how I clash with the system before – but I can see this working quite well. I could make this work quite well, myself, if I had the memory – but that’s the thing, I don’t, and with this many variables and suggestions, I think I’d have to study these 5 pages pretty hard to use it as an improvisation base. For example, the character of Alix has about 8 different pieces of information that are true about her. These are 8 interesting pieces of information – I genuinely think that the concoction brewed by Yue here across the 4 main characters in particular is a potent one – but that’s 24 pieces of information across the main characters, plus the suggested interactions. I’m going to lose track. And neither characters nor props are tied to any locations – this is clearly intended to be for ease, in the way that some modules give generic clues to hand out to ensure they always feel appropriate and help the players progress – but in this case it means the added cognitive load of deciding where to encounter these people, where they are going to be, and more. Adding in the fact that I don’t have a sense for the broader estate we are supposed to be infiltrating, and I don’t think I’d be able to run this, for the same reason that I could run Blades in the Dark without Tim’s maps, but it’s much, much easier with them. It’s not the detail of every room, but the support that having the visualisation would provide me.

For me, then, I’d have to put a fair bit of effort into running this: I’d need to provide myself with the support. I’d find an estate map, I’d decide where the people are hanging out, and I’d mark up where the key 4 rooms are on the map, and where the suggested scenes are likely to occur. I’d come up with a few extra characters that live in the estate, so it doesn’t feel like a dead space. And then, it’d be an excellent module: It has everything you need for interesting intrigue, but without the extra information that make the estate feel like a real place, it feels like it would be walking the players through scenes of my own devising, in the worst possible way.

If you’re better at improvising than I, or better at memorising, then I think the Model Minister is an excellent little infiltration and intrigue module. The concepts and characters are creepy and have the exact amount of honesty that they’re compelling. But for me, then brevity sacrifices a sense of reality that I want to be seeing in my modules, that helps me run them. If you’re after a neat little intrigue mission, you’re running spire, or you’re compelled by the very cool twisted concepts in the characters, check out the Model Minister.

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