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.

Grackles’ Vale is a 20 page module for a custom OSR system, by Randy Musseau with illustration, maps, layout and design by Roan Studio. In it, you seek bounty on a Boar-man that has been terrorising the village or Grackle’s Vale. I purchased this myself.

I’m a little mixed on the layout. It’s in A4 format, but only available in digital, and at the size choices, I can’t easily read it on either my phone or tablet. That’s a hell of a drag as that’s how I tend to run things, but if you run on a full sized monitor or are likely to print it out, it won’t be a problem. Within that format choice, it looks good — clear headings, use of bullets for tables, lovely art and clear and gorgeous maps. If you’re happy to wade through paragraph text in a double column A4 like the good old days, this will work well for you.

We open with a list of rumours and a brief high level description of the town. The rumours aren’t terribly juicy and often are things the players will already know if they’re not new to the genre. The 3 NPCs in this section could be communicated more clearly — none of them have clear agendas, and are pretty light on personality traits. This particular flaw rolls on throughout the module — even where there are characterised NPCs, they don’t tend to be characterised in a way that’s awfully useful to me as a referee. We then have a list of about 16 locations, which are intentionally written as independent from the adventure portion, and hence don’t give you much to dig your claws into. The second half of the module is the adventure itself. This consists a fairly linear trek up a valley, with a potential detour into a 20-odd room goblin catacomb, before encountering the boar-man, at which point you have achieved the objective. The writing here is purple, but effective, and if your preference is longer form prose, you’ll probably enjoy this.

Honestly, this feels like a module written by someone who’s only read Gygax and decided to write a module (the description of the innkeeper as “an attractive woman in her mid-thirties” clinched that for me, but the owl who pickpockets the PCs to “lighten the load of overburdened adventurers” is such a gygaxian impulse). The only point in the linear crawl up the valley where you’re making a decision is when you go into the unconnected dungeon; this could’ve been the point of the whole module, but instead that’s slaying a boss in another keep, a boss who to be honest it’s not clear you need to kill to claim the bounty, as there are plenty of boar-men about, and the torc that is the actual cause of the curse is a forsaken easter egg — I don’t actually see how it can be identified as the root cause in-world. It would be far better if the hooks provided rhyme or reason to enter to goblin dungeon, or if that dungeon gave you clues to the final battle, or if you were told that the torc not the boar-man was your target. If you need a village this one’s fine, but it’s not full enough of petty intrigues or holds into the boarmen or goblins to make me want to use it; the adventure part could be used with any village, with minimal modification.

And that’s my issue here in a nutshell: I don’t hate the gygaxian bent here — honestly it’s lovely the author has a distinct voice — I like the layout and like the art a lot, but no single part of this is magnetic or interconnected enough for me to feel a need to run it. Could I have run a fun few sessions with any of these changes? Yes, I could. And, there are some nice touches here. If you’re willing to put in the effort to make those changes, or you’re pretty happy to have something to cover your next few weeks of planned sessions without putting in too much thought, you could do worse than Grackles’ Vale.

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