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.

Mana Meltdown is a 38 page module for Old School Essentials written, laid out and illustrated by Lazy Litch. In it you battle rivals to escape a collapsing psionic tomb. I backed this on Kickstarter (at first I said the recent Kickstarter, but let’s be honest, I’m playing catch up on modules a year old at this point).

The set up to Mana Meltdown is pleasingly old school. The players are dumped in this dungeon, equiped with their magical uniforms and a healing potion, and told to recover a red coffin and as many of the six living weapons as you can. You’re also told not to return that same coffin, in a nice touch, by an unknown hand, forcing you to struggle with your goals immediately. The set up feels very tournament: You’re immediately in competition with three factions, which are the key “characters” in the module.

These three factions, although you initially meet them at a distance during the dragonfly race (yeah, that’s right, a race between giant mechanical dragonflies across a magical desert), are just exquisite. They need detail to work, and you’re given it. Other authors take note. They have tactics, goals, likely alliances to form if they hit roadblocks, and most importantly 5 or 6 roleplay notes that make them easy to run: “ Occasionally fall out of sync with one another, need to speak out loud to restore psychic synthesis”, or “Upon seeing a construct die, whispers: “They made you wrong. Not enough iterations.”. You can just flip to their page if you encounter them, and it’s not too difficult to adopt the right mannerisms or choices.

Said dragonfly race isn’t as compelling as the one in Song of the Frogacle, but it’s not bad in the framework of Old School Essentials, featuring a series of actions resolved by ability checks, with a score for a success, which is compared to a set score for each of the competing factions. Your position in the race determines when you arrive in the timeline of the titular reactor meltdown — theoretically as late as the 4th item in the 12 item countdown. The reason your compared against a set score is because timeline itself assumes that certain factions are present at certain times — Myrioth for example, will always have been present for 3 “segments” by the time segment 5 activates, which is important because the timeline is how the factions are directed around the map.

My major issue with the writing here early on is the sheer amount of forsaken easter eggs buried here — a page on the hermit queen, a page on the dragonflies, a page on Myrioth, a page and a half on the Artificer — this is all in the front half of the module and I can’t see a clear way for any of this to be discovered by the players. It’s fine for things to be here simply for the referee to make sense of what’s happening, but this is over 10% of the whole page count. I’d prefer for this to be buried in the dungeon itself, and doled out to the players.

The dungeon itself is 4 levels, built in decreasing dimensions — the first 2 being 3-dimensional, the last being 1-dimensional. The special magical uniforms mentioned up top allow the players to traverse these dimensional “crunches” without being annihilated. Each level has its own random events, and its own objectives, as well as a series of if/then triggers when the players do specific things, as well as a risk of the Artificer’s ghost interfering…is this sounding like a lot? It is, especially when actually tracking the timeline. Luckily, there’s a spread of trackers and references that you can print out to attach to your referee screen or put on the tabletop. These are really handy, but the glaring problem for me is that I don’t know when to use them: There’s no indication regarding when to advance the timeline that I could find on a word search of the document. Typical OSE random encounters are replaced with a more complex and interesting random encounter table, but one that is rolled “when there’s a lull in the action”. I’d likely run it on a timer every 2 turns as per the OSE rules, although that may result in a higher incidence of encounters than the rules as written. I’d prefer greater clarity here — I’m happy to roll with my own vibes here, but I’d like to know with more clarity what was intended so I know if I’m making it harder or softer.

The dungeon itself, shows some learnings from Wind Wraith — each area has alternative routes in it, as well as the core puzzle. When Lazy Litch’s writing is on, it’s on, and as usual that’s in character and creature descriptions, filled with gems like “Its illusions are tinged with a complex sorrow.” and “Created to greedily eat the holy scriptures of enemy nations”. I find the keying itself a little hard to wrap my head around, though, partially because of the formatting (“Locked ornate red door [Symbol art on ground in front depicts the sun being cut in two by a sword, bleeding light] Inside [Stairs descend into a dissected shrine: stacks of cross-section cuts of holy marble pillars[…]”), and partially because what it’s describing is extra-dimensional and weird, so that format makes it even harder for me to describe something already very strange. Maybe that’s the point? You’re suppose to have trouble with what’s in these rooms? But as a referee, I would struggle to run these rooms. Add to that that that I’d expect the objectives to be hard to figure out — if they weren’t spelt out for the referee I’d have no clue, and they aren’t spelt out for the players. How are the players supposed to know the blue key is needed to open the Microscopic Museum? It’s not clear to me at all. This is a one-person module, and I think this is where it shows — it needed an editing pass to realise that, while the complexities are all-in-all good, a lot of it’s contained in the author’s head, and making it legible to another referee requires a little extra work that isn’t put in here.

In terms of information design and layout, I struggle a bit too. Each level starts its keying again from A, which means you can get confused if flicking through at speed, and it uses colour coding to tell these sections apart, which while thoughtful I think needs to be bolder to be effective. The page number positioning works just fine on single column pages, but when it switches to double columns it becomes unintuitive, particularly given I’m used to rooms being numbered and not alphabetised — once I realised what was going on it was fine, but I had to figure it out. Coloured highlighting is used for things like stat blocks and uncoloured for other points of interest, which is a clever way to avoid having italics and underlining all in the same text, which can make things harder to read for me. Italics are saved for quotations, which I like as an affect, although it’s overused in the early pages. The art, also as always by Lazy Litch, is exceptional, although sometimes it feels like it wasn’t drawn with the page it’s placed on in mind, feeling crowded out and uncomfortable. It needs more room to breathe, I think, and this module is very densely populated.

There are some things I’d need to do to make this work for me; Transcribe the text fragments to dribble in the interesting world-building, for example, and provide ways to let them know what the changing objectives are on each level. Honestly, this could be as simple as a sci-fantasy telegram when you hit each milestone, or some campfire moments with a different rival, who have little interest in you personally. And I’d need to come up with my own little descriptions for most of the spaces, so I’m not winging it. That’s no little amount of work. But it is the fun kind of prep: Pre-recording messages and burning the edges of calligraphy scrawled paper, daydreaming mind-bending descriptions. Is it worth it? That depends on how much you like the source material.

Mana Meltdown is a module filled with stellar writing, interesting characters and competition, fantastic art, and mind-bending concepts set in an off-kilter, science-fantasy world filled with clone-coffins, mechanical dragonfly races, and living nuclear bombs designed to destroy gods. But, in order to run it, you’ll need to put a bit of effort into annotating it, re-reading it, and adding in vectors for the players to realise important facts and objectives, as I mentioned earlier. I’m seeing huge improvements from one Lazy Litch product to the next, and they are in my opinion a creator that’s quickly developing into a powerhouse, so if you’ve enjoyed their previous stuff, I also wouldn’t hesitate to pick this up. I’ll definitely keep a close eye on what they make next. If the appeal of everything in that first list is strong enough, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the work needed to make it legible is worthwhile, if you have the time to prep it. If you don’t want to do that kind of work, or if mind-bending spaces aren’t what you’re looking for in a dungeon, the concept might still win you over. Mana Meltdown is a flawed but interesting module, but I suspect for most the interesting heavily outweighs the flaws.

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