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.

A Familiar Tower is a 39 page module for Old School Essentials by Directsun, with art by Skullboy and graphic design and development by Sam Sorenson. In it, you’re trapped inside a tower, and you need to get out. I can’t really review this in any meaningful capacity without spoiling the puzzle you’re trying to solve, so fair warning there be spoilers ahead.

Layout and information design here varies between choices that obscure and clarify; the inner cover is two maps, one a not-quite isometric view, showing the rooms and their page numbers; the other showing, in addition, the floor plans of each level in a traditional 5 foot grid. Good, clear. But features that hold true for the whole tower are on the copyright page, which I don’t like as a design decision; honestly I don’t typically read the copyright page and I only noticed this because I was reading in digital. Headings are bold, minimaps are reproduced, read-aloud text is bolded and other locations or features are page referenced. Good, clear. It should be noted, though, that you’re going to do a lot of page-turning given that all stat blocks and items are in an appendix that these references point to. It was very difficult to make heads or tails of this module digitally, although thank goodness the page references have hyperlinks (I did a lot of scrolling back and forth even with that blessing, though). The choice to put Advanced Tower Mechanics — only 2 paragraphs — at the end of the key, instead of at the beginning, honestly makes it a little more difficult to understand, as it describes things that should be other keys, and details a few events that should probably be detailed in the main text, although I don’t disagree that it be duplicated elsewhere. But the result is that it’s unclear. Skullboy’s art and maps both are peerless, and suit the humour of the book in a way that feels like a collaboration rather than simply an illustration. It’s excellent stuff.

Directsun specialises in puzzle dungeons, and the mechanic you’re playing with here is one of size, however, unlike typically, how the mechanic works isn’t crystal clear: “Entering or leaving the tower changes an object’s size by a factor of fifty.“. Enlarges it, or shrinks it? Well, it’s not clear from the explanatory text, which is entirely by reference to the replica tower (well, technically not a replica, through magic): If something enters the replica tower, it appears in “your” tower as fifty times larger, and if something leaves the replica tower, it is retrieved at fifty times larger. The puzzles include a variety of options to use this mechanism, including remaining large and shrinking yourselves down, and changing item sizes in either direction. I recognise that not providing the solutions to the puzzles is an intentional choice; however the fact that I struggled to figure out the mechanisms doesn’t work for me as a referee; this is a book that wants you to read it’s entirety before understanding it. No more is this book’s insistence on your reading it in it’s absolute entirety and understanding it as a whole more frustrating to me that where it reveals how to escape the tower at all: This is first described on page 35 in an appendix, although it’s alluded to on page 13, which I admittedly missed until my second read through. While, after struggling through this challenging information design for this review, I wouldn’t have trouble running this module, I don’t know that I’ll remember in a week, and it took me over an hour to decipher exactly how to approach this fairly short book.

If you power on through that lack of clarity better than I did, though, the rooms themselves are absolutely choc-a-block with interactive content; typically at least 2 or 3 things to interact with. There are 14 locations in all, and at least each of the five floors features a puzzle for the players to figure out, ranging from very simple (the marble puzzle on level 2 feels introductory), to more challenging (the giant switch in the basement will take a lot more planning). This level of complexity does have its’ negatives: There’s a lot of text, and a lot to parse and then communicate back to the players; I think that an alternative approach to the keying would work better for such complexity, as this approach would have me leaping from paragraph to paragraph and then back again as the players ask questions, not to mention to the appendix and back to grasp the NPCs that are described in considerable detail. Frustratingly, these really compelling and funny characters often have their descriptions split across sections — it’s on page 15 you find out that you’re gien a quest to cross items off Carbuncle’s bucket list, but what the bucket list is? Page 28. There’s a bunch of information like this that should have been co-located, in my opinion. But the characters themselves are the kind to sink your teeth into, so long as you don’t mind a module that leans into the lighthearted — most of these are Wonderland-esque speaking animals. I think they’re a pleasure.

A Familiar Tower is an excellent puzzle, but it’s not a module for someone like me who likes to run things blind, because it wants to be the kind of module that doesn’t explain itself ahead of time. For a module whose location content is less than 25 pages, honestly, I don’t see why it doesn’t want to spend more time explaining itself. The puzzle itself, and the humour in the characters within, are excellent and would be a pleasure to run. If you’ve the time and capacity to parse the module, though, A Familiar Tower will be an incredibly memorable few sessions of fun characters to play and meet, and the promise of plenty of shenanigans.

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