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.

Sailors on the Starless Sea is a 15 page module for Dungeon Crawl Classics by Harley Stroh. It’s a funnel, designed to cull a score of level-zero characters to a party of level-1 ones. I’ve run a few funnels before, and a few in the rules-adjacent Mutant Crawl Classic, a game I should probably review by itself. I haven’t delved into the deep archives that are the DCC line of modules, but I find this being recommended repeatedly.

A chaos god is returning to life, and the characters must prevent them and brace an underground sea to save the people of their village. The backstory is wordy and flavour fully pulpy, but is really an excuse to flavour the adventure with chaos, and from then it jumps straight to rumours and an encounter table, which initially I thought was random but actually it’s just a list of encounters categorised by type — trap, creature, or puzzle. I’m really not sure the utility of this, and while I know this is a funnel, I’d appreciate a random encounter table given the homage to classic play suggested by…well, everything.

In the text we have 17 locations. Those locations are good, interesting almost without fail, and despite this written with all the flaws of a module in dungeon magazine: Block text, long-form undifferentiated text, with no highlights to help find relevant information. It’s not completely without finesse, but it’s minimalist to the point of challenging to scan. Certainly an example like Tomb of the Fallen, an entire A4 page, has differentiated text totally six bullet points and four read-aloud text blocks, is an interesting puzzle room, but challenging to parse. It’s a short adventure, and I suspect if you ran it a few times at a con you’d have it by heart quickly (which is how this was playtested, from the acknowledgments), but to run straight from the page I’d be thumbing through trying to work these puzzles out, while my players sat in doldrums.

With the obvious homage to classic modules from cover to cover, it’s worth delving into the layout I think first. It’s sparsely but excellently illustrated with beautifully detailed, bold and janky art in perfect homage to the days of the Fiend Folio. Block, A4 walls of text are presented directly to you sometimes for 2 or 3 pages at a go. This approach means it packs a lot of content into 15 pages. I’m reading this digitally, and it’s hell on my phone; after I finished my bath I pulled it up on my big screen at 100%, and it’s equally difficult to read; perhaps it is better on the page. Hopefully the content is designed around these barriers.

I like this module, to be honest. We’ve got some stellar encounters, a cool puzzle and some interesting traps and it’s deadly as hell in a pleasurable way. The vibes are immaculate. But the layout and approach is profoundly flawed, if intentionally or perhaps dogmatically so. I know that I can run an adventure like this — I’m a fan of Dungeon Magazine enough to make a podcast out of it — but why, with so many innovations in how to make these more playable, is dogmaticism and homage limiting the usability of modules? It’s disappointing to me. Harley Stroh, given a different approach and an inventive layout artist rather than being trapped in homage, would be sweet as pie. This is frozen lemon: If you squeeze it hard enough, and add some extra love and attention, you’ll get lemonade. But I can buy lemonade. So why would I turn first to Sailors on the Sunless Sea?

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