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!

Belle of the Bog is a 79 page module by Tom Lagier for Dragonbane, and OSR system I’m only passingly familiar with. In it, you are aboard a steamboat investigating its shady owner when you are lost in a fairy swamp. Will you return? Will you solve the mystery of the swamp, or the crime on the steamboat?

First up I love this theme. It is bringing Maverick and that episode of Over the Garden Wall with the frogs; it’s a unique setting for an OSR jaunt and it’s one that’s instantly appealing to me. The decorations, illustrations and the back cover mock advertisement all really bring the theme home in a neat way. The layout is uncomplicated, and feels text-heavy, but that’s largely because there are few illustrations for such a long book. That said, the maps, while it’s hard to bring a lot of interest to limited spaces like a paddle-steamer, are absolutely gorgeous. The length isn’t inappropriate, and most relevant information is kept to the page or spread, which I like. There’s smart use of highlighting here, and plenty of page references, and section “headers” that sit consistently in the right page margin, for easy browsing. The information design has a few missteps, though, despite being otherwise excellent; the main one here is that important pieces of reference like the character index and the map really belong in the front or back cover of the book, and you’ll be using them a lot, given the structure of the game. I’d be printing these off to minimise the impact of this misstep.

Ok, so we open with a spread showing the history that lead to the events of the module. Then, we have a few hooks that tie them into specific characters or aspects of the module; each of them has the seed of a juicy worm, but they don’t quite take the extra step to expand on them. I’d give the player’s a payment or additional reason to pursue “Sloppy” Joe Benton’s ruby, rather than simply wanting a gem, for example. Then we have details on how to end the adventure; these I really like, as they all tie into places, items and characters in the module itself. I love having solutions buried in different parts of the module, but only if you pursue certain plot threads.

Then we have the Belle itself; we cover the big twist first; it’s really meaty and I can see both the potential glimpses through the illusion being really intriguing, and the final revelation being incredibly satisfying. The mechanics of the engine are very important to some potential outcomes of the story, and they’re covered here; they cover a whole page, but honestly they are a lot simpler than you’d expect from the amount of description they receive. There are 12 characters that we get an index to; sensibly, given the nature of the map, this is a module that relies on interesting characters. I honestly think the index descriptions could’ve been more consistently thorough, but it’s pretty good. We have a random gambler generator, and crew summary too. Random encounters use a ladder table so that rarer encounters become more likely the longer you’re on the boat, which is a smart mechanic. It also varies based on the damage level of the engine, which is a nice touch, because it gives the players control over which random encounters they meet — I’d be telling the players which table I was rolling on, just to let this influence their decision making. The characters and the random encounters here, in particular, are really neat and I appreciate that they’re connected, and also play a role in progressing the “narrative” and also in introducing the players to various plot threads, but in a randomised manner. Two playthroughs of this will turn out very differently due to this randomisation, in a decent way. The only thing I don’t like is the criteria: “spend a lot of time doing something, the tension is low, or they draw attention“.

Then we get to the actual key. There is a lot going on here, 28 locations in total, most of them complex enough to cover a spread, although that does include the referred to earlier character descriptions. They’re pretty consistently clear and evocative, it’s easy to identify relevant information; they’re solid, interactable locations. Just excellent stuff. The character’s aren’t limited to their primary locations — that’s right there in their description — but have an appearance, goals, manners, likes and dislikes; often they have a little history as well in a separate box for the referee in case that helps them. Overall, the key really slaps. The bestiary and magical items are relegated to the back of the book, along with supplementary rules for gambling and fishing, as well as some pre-generated characters that fit the unique setting.

There’s one major issue with this module, and that’s its’ proximity to the Scintillating Swamps and the importance of the fairy realm to the story. I’m not saying that it’s a requirement for a module to cover everything mentioned in its’ pages, but when there’s a strong possibility that the player characters will end up in either one or the other, the lack of some support for overflowing into those spaces is rather jarring for me. That said, this is the author’s first module — there’s a strong implication that these spaces might feature in future work, and I’d look forward to seeing that; given the uniqueness of this setting it would be hard to shoehorn this into an existing campaign. That said, you could run it as a one-shot, and there’s a suggestion for how to run this as a one-shot in the sidebar.

Gosh, Belle of the Bog is a damned good module. I’m really impressed, given this is the author Tom Lagier’s first major effort. The unique setting is refreshing, it’s well organised, it’s interactive and full of fun and interesting characters, the visual design and especially the maps are excellent. You need to be prepared to improvise or create a fairy realm and a Scintilating Swamp, if you’re not going to place guardrails on the module, though, because any table of mine is going to find themselves lost in one or the other. But I’m pretty certain plenty of you saw “gambling river boat” and decided you were already going to check this out, and that additional work is barely a consideration. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out on Lagier’s future work.

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