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.

Rare Bird is a 39 page module for Swyvers by Owen Braekke-Carroll with art and cartography by Alice Carroll. In it, you steal a rare and massive bird from a well-protected mansion. It’s pay what you want.

I love a module with a solid moral dilemma at its’ heart, and while in Swyvers you’re generally not good guys, and here you know you’re working for the bad guys, the moral dilemma that can ensue if you succeed in stealing the bird is a very, very juicy one. The added complication of the rival crew of Swyvers with a similar but not identical goal, makes things even juicier. This is clever set-up, and adds a sense of tension to the module. I often look to be excited by the first few pages of summary, and Rare Bird got me excited in the first few pages.

We open with about 10 pages of personalities and their stat blocks. Your mileage may vary, but it uses its words to imply a lot in a way that I like: “Foolishly invested in one gold tooth after a night of successful gambling, now spends his days talking with his lips held low in a very strange manner to avoid anyone seeing it.” Then we have our random encounters, which advance on a pair of parallel timelines that interact with each other. This seems neat, with the math propelling things forward every three rooms or so. There are 12 events and 21 rooms, which means we can expect most of these events to crop up across the totality of the module. The final events are pretty grim and end the module themselves, so if you want the swyvers to have a chance of getting out with their quarry, you might want to soften this to only on a roll of 1, or make one event table 1 and the other 2, as really you’re expecting to finish this module in about 36 turns as is, which feels like it might be tight. The key makes up most of the book, and has a tight, clear layout with some nice internal paragraphs decisions that make for good informational design without being overly structured, which will appeal to the “I like paragraphs” crowd. In a sidebar, there’s always loot and exits listed, a habit I appreciate generally but not here specifically. Why? There’s no additional information attached to these exits — smells or noises or the like — so an inset map would be a more beneficial use of the space. These rooms, aside from the loot in them, are not incredibly interactive — they’re intended as backgrounds for the characters and swyvers to interact around. The writing here isn’t as good as Swyvers itself, but it’s still good, consistently funny, and it suits the world perfectly.

There are a few little disappointments around the book, though. The major villain isn’t defined in a way that feels dismissive “what does it look like? What does it do? Ultimately this is up to you and your Smoke.”. There’s a weirdly placed list of rumours — don’t know why they’re situated between the events and the explanation of the events. One repeating issue throughout Rare Bird is referencing forward. It would benefit from hyperlinks or page references, because the placement is reasonable, for the most part — this is a big book, and co-locating things is not the wrong choice. It’s workable if you’re in digital — you can word search for specifics, but if you had the printed version you’d need to spend some solid time annotating what’s going on. This is an easily fixed problem, but it makes running a little more challenging.

If there has been a large community of Swyvers developers pumping out modules, I’ve missed it. On my first impressions, it is a solid game, and while Rare Bird isn’t perfect, this is a module I’d really enjoy running. I think I’d need a little more than just this to persuade me to start a Swyvers campaign — but I remember when Mothership just had the one module. If you’re looking to run Swyvers, or you’re looking for a fun heist to run and don’t mind converting, Rare Bird is a fun heist with a lot of potential conflict and drama.

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