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.

Providers is a 38 page module for Mothership by Joshua Kramer, with portrait art by Sean McCoy. It describes the Shaletown colony and the galactic cult that controls it. I backed this when it crowdfunded, I think.

The first 26 pages cover the colony itself. The Church of the Providers and the law they lay down open the book, with 5 pages of mechanics on them. The Church here doesn’t appear to have any beliefs, but rather it is a scheme where the more you pay in donations the more privileges you’re afforded in the colony. It’s quite transparently capitalist; a fact pleasingly confused by the fact that the Invisible Hand appears (and is treated by the game) to be a supernatural force. The heat and retaliation mechanics mirror stress and panic, but instead relate to illegal activities. I quite enjoy the retaliation table: “Pacification trawler.W:3(60) AP:10. Wide, unwieldy, hovers at 10m up. Drifts slowly, floods the street with tear gas.” I imagine these will result in some really fun situations. I also love that this is, despite the despotic justice system, in many ways a utopia: Healthcare here is free, for example. Special skills bring a degree of interactivity to otherwise uninteresting locations, which is a clever choice. A rare misstep is the placement of the random encounter tables: Awkwardly located together after the locations. I’m reading in digital, so I hope these are cleverly placed in the middle of the zine, but I don’t think the page numbers quite add up. The random encounters themselves are really fun, and feature a lot of interesting but mundane encounters as well as more intense hooks, and being the chaos of a big colony well. Then we have 4 characters that I think will serve as points of disruption to the typical goings on of the colony, effectively the factions here. They are super compelling, easy to run, I love them. Other authors take note: This is how it’s done. And here, where most Mothership modules fall short on evocative writing, this one brings the thunder, with stuff like “What does he fear? As simple as it gets — death. There’s nothing after this for an android and he doesn’t intend to face it.” and “If you’ve caught heat, she can make it go away. If you need money, she can pay you. All she asks in return is some help.” I’m excited to bring these characters to life as a referee. What’s missing? Any other NPCs — I counted only 2, although I could’ve missed some, but I want far more to help me populate a city. The module comes with an additional bonus 10 peacekeepers, but I’m more looking for the people who simply live here. There is also a bonus set of cards for PCs that tie them into the world a little more — I really wish these bonus stretch goals had been incorporated into the core book better, though, as they gesture towards gaps I’d like filled.

The final 8 pages cover 2 scenarios, The Sale and The Tower. The Sale is just that: Smuggle something to a buyer in the Scrapyard for sale. It’s an introduction to the colony, very brief, and while it introduces themes and the atmosphere that the author expects, it’s a bit fluffy for me; an encounter more than anything else. It might not even take some tables an entire session, which could leave you scrambling. That said, it introduces you to the Peacekeepers straight off the bat, and you’re likely to get some heat, and also likely to get the attention of at least one of the core NPCs, which is a fun way to kick off your time in Shaletown. The Tower, on the other hand, is a heist on the most powerful organisation on the planet, to do damage to the Providers. This is a late-campaign type scenario, but it’s well set out, a really fun micro-heist. That said, by contrast with the core setting, both of these scenarios are slight and a little anti-climactic. I wish we had more here.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but Providers leaves a lot of questions unanswered, that I’d like to see answered. Why do the Peacekeepers have divine powers? What do the Church of Providers actually believe? Why are there criminals in this abundant, utopian version of capitalism? These are all worth exploring, and make it a unique take on Mothership, but they are answers you’re left to ponder yourself. I think whether or not Providers is for you comes down to whether or not you think those questions are worth exploring and whether you want to answer them them yourself, or be provided with a canonical answer (you aren’t).

I love some of the layout choices here. Black highlighting is used for special skill related knowledge. The maps underlie the key, subtly reinforcing your navigation without you having to page back and forth or rely on section headers. Keying is highlighted and very clear. Page references are throughout, and underlining is used for all other highlights, much as bolding is used in the OSE house style. This isn’t a crowded layout; plenty of white space brings the aesthetic of the Church’s utopia to the page. The art works excellently for the page, despite being very abstract in nature, because of clever layout choices, and the maps being colour coordination to the pages, bringing a huge amount of visual interest without a huge amount of art (I count only 11 pieces of non-map art). This is smart visual design.

Providers is an excellent setting and colony, with a notable lack of NPCs filling it, and some lightweight scenarios attached. For me, while Providers has me excited for Joshua Kramer’s future work, the content here is not for me: I want more compelling scenarios to give me a reason to be in Shaletown; at the moment, its inspiration for me to write my own scenarios. I’m not looking for that, but if you are, and the concepts left hanging here are ones you want to explore, this is compelling: The nature of religion and the supernatural, the insidiousness of capitalism in a utopian society, what drives people to crime when healthcare and food are cheap, and how people respond when gods are real, are all pretty compelling questions posed and not answered here. You could make a campaign out of this backbone, if you were sufficiently compelled, and the characters that are here are ones you want to spend time with. If that is something that sounds like your jam, and you want to explore this twist on Mothership with your own expansions, I’d check Providers out.

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