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.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a 15 page module for Mothership by Marcus M. In it, you investigate a research vessel that has been trying to re-ignite a dying star. I was provided a complementary copy by the author.

Layout is minimalist and elegant; chunky text which is easy to read, clear headings, minimal and consistent use of highlighting. It’s simple, elegant. This is a zero-budget affair, so there’s minimal art here. Art always brings something extra, and it is missed here, but everything works in its’ absence. Certainly, familiarity with the genre that inspired the module — to me movies like Sunshine and Solaris and their very existential, character-driven horror are what it puts me in mind of — would give me images to work with to begin with, but also question precisely what kind of art would work best in the first place.

The key is a little confusing, and modifying it or providing additional instructions on start of play would make it easier for me to intuit how things will play out. How is the party docking with the ship? It’s implied you’re docking at the bridge from the order; if this is the case, a lot of the twists will be ruined through the approach through (2) very early in the session. I think the intent, though, is to enter through the airlock in (8), which is off to the side, and roughly in the middle of the ship. In a 10-room space, with almost no locked doors, it will be easy for the clues scattered across the ship to be short-circuited by access to the observation room with these spatial choices. You don’t need a linear spaceship for this to work, but simply placing the airlock at one end of the ship and the big reveal roughly at the other end, means the exploration is more likely going to encompass most of the space.

There are a bunch of missteps here that suggest to me that this was playtested by the author rather than by someone else; the ordering of the information is all over the place, to the point where it was hard to review because I kept taking notes that were then rendered inaccurate in retrospect. What that tells me, is that the information design here hasn’t been thought through: I kept having questions with no idea what the answer was. This is only 16 pages, but I would’ve given up on this myself largely because it would’ve been easy to answer those questions when they come up. There’s a corpse in (3) that isn’t mentioned in the key, just the crew descriptions. There are forsaken easter eggs in the crew descriptions. The main antagonist has no concrete location, and there is a random encounter table buried at the back. Advice for running the module is at the back, but honestly it should be at the front — the implication is that you’re likely to encounter the escape pods first, but this is buried at the end, and when you get the escape pod information, you aren’t sure why it’s there. Also hidden at the back is the fact that there’s a countdown until the star explodes (this feels essential), as well as hooks and incentives. There are more issues here, but it’s all out of order, and so it makes it very hard to follow.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star appears inspired by a very different of space horror than what is most commonly written into Mothership, and I think that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star could have far more interestingly leant into that harder. I want a little more psychology in there. I want the antagonist and the crew to be untrustworthy narrators. I want the PCs, if they are infected, to be unsure whether or not what they’re experiencing is real, at least for a while. Of late, I’ve seen more Mothership modules exploring a wider variety of themes — I think there is an opportunity missed by making this effectively another monster-on-a-spaceship Mothership module, given the more introspective horror in the apparent inspirations.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is neat little module, with a unique antagonist, and it takes some directions that most Mothership modules don’t take. 16 pages isn’t very many pages to read through to figure out what’s going on. It’s just a little disappointing, because this could’ve been a great module, had more thought gone into the information design and perhaps more into playtesting or developmental editing. Just give yourself some time and have more patience with it than I had, and if you’re one of the many people who enjoy incorporating small one-shot or two-shot Mothership modules into an ongoing campaign Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is honestly a no-brainer to incorporate.

Idle Cartulary

Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.