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.

Blackout is a 15 page module for Mothership by Martin Orchard with art by Zach Hazard. In it you venture deep into an industrial colony to restore its power supply; but you’re not the first team to try, and what secrets did the previous one discover? I was given a complementary copy by the author.

We open with a timeline — effectively what the crew will know going in — and a “what’s going on” that’s pretty detailed. I usually wouldn’t like such a detailed plot for such a brief module, but here there’s a twist: Basically everything here is based in an environmental or NPC clue, meaning the mystery of what happened down here will be almost certainly able to be discovered by the players in broad strokes, and if they pay attention the specifics of the sort will be uncovered as well. It’s clever stuff. You’re incentivised to uncover these mysteries financially as well, because you’re rewarded for rescuing the previous team.

The map isn’t linear, and the players are provided their own map, but the changes to the map that have occurred as a result of the previous teams actions are likely to funnel the players in a certain direction. This direction happens to help lay breadcrumbs to the main narrative, but you can still take a non critical path due to simple looping (within reason — it’s a 10 location map). The mystery narrative is gated in multiple ways which will make all members of the crew feel useful and important without preventing them from progressing. Neat work. The keying uses exit lists, which I don’t think are put to good use here — when both referee and players have a map, I want those exits to help me describe them and differentiate them by sensation, so I don’t have to flip ahead. The ventilation shafts on the map are simple, clever, and the way rules affect the creature and the players differently is really neat and fun.

There are some missteps, though, notably the way information isn’t always predictably located — for example the agenda of “the Creature” is in “What’s really happening” rather than associated with its stat block or location. You can probably overlook these information design oversights, given how short the module is, particularly if you’re likely to read it before the session or you’re happy to mark these pieces of information up in the places you’d expect them to be as you go.

Layout wise, this is functional, with single columns, clear headings, and appropriate highlighting. The art is good, particularly the cover. As someone reading this in the bath on her phone, I wish the text size was bigger, especially given the fact that the line spacing is very generous so it probably could’ve been with the same page count — it is a little hard to read on a small screen. But there’s nothing meaningful here to complain about if you’re on a larger screen or in print.

Blackout is a stellar Mothership one-shot, which takes the typical “lone alien stalker” set up and turns it into a murder mystery. If you’re happy to put in a little leg work (or if you’re the kind to do homework before a session anyway), you’ll do just fine here. You might make a few mistakes if you prefer to do this off-the-cuff, so I wouldn’t recommend it for referees who show up 3 minutes before the session (like me). If you’re looking for a one-shot that has multiple tricks up its sleeve to hook new players on Mothership, or if you just want to throw a job into an ongoing Mothership campaign, Blackout is worth checking out.

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