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.

Outcast Unseelie and the Ooze Between is a 37 page module for Shadowdark by Jesse Winter and Cameron Maas. In it, you venture into a mine flooded with intoxicating slime. I backed it in a crowdfunding campaign.

I like the layout in this module. It’s spacious and clear. Well highlighted and navigable. It uses a simple emerald palette, with a separate high contrast highlight colour — red— for a specific topic (the perish lillies). These highlights allow clever shortcuts — like read aloud text that uses the highlighting to tell the referee information in secret. The grid varies between single, double and sidebar where necessary, and the sidebar used for keying is set out using colour and includes a great minimap. Most of the sidebars are utilised — often with reminders on puzzle mechanics if there are gaps — which I think is smart and minimises page turning and searching, and more important, memorisation. The art is totally unified using the emerald palette and a posterized halftone effect. It’s good stuff.

We open with a 4 point timeline, 4 hooks each of which direct the player characters to different locations in the dungeon (juicy worms!), then a half page describing the weird interactivities of the dungeon. It’s worth noting that half the hooks only refer to the upper level of the dungeon; you’ll need to rely on the players being excited if you choose either of those. I feel like 1 and 3 are the better choices because of this. We have 6 NPCs, main characters, which are each described in half a page, then a timeline telling what happens if the players do not interfere. This is all a good start — if I were to criticise anything, it’s that the 6 characters in this format were a little hard to differentiate simply because they’re all too much — a one sentence summary is supposed to help here, but for me, I’d have to study them.

The first location is the 22 room guardhouse. The random encounters here are fine; 2 of 6 extinguishes a torch, which is a challenging take on the standard Shadowdark advice. The map is initially fairly linear, but filled with loops and secret doors that make it a pleasing spatial puzzle. You’re also introduced to about half of the NPCs. The second is the Villa, which introduces the third aspect of the puzzle and the remaining characters. The villa is smaller, with a less interesting layout, so is a little disappointing as a climax, but I expect players to be backtracking to and fro between the 2 dungeons given the discoveries in the second impact the puzzles in the first; it’s probably better to think of them as a single dungeon than two because of this.

Those weird interactivities I mentioned above are really the juice here. Vertigrint and Perish Lillies are utilised over and over as a way of overcoming obstacles and defeating enemies in a really satisfying way. The dungeon tutorialises their interactions through simple rooms before expecting players to start utilising them, before introducing the seelie flea saliva as a way of interacting further with them. Directsun of Aberrant Reflections and A Familiar Tower consulted on this, and it shows — honestly I like this puzzle more than I like the one in A Familiar Tower. It’s excellent stuff, and I don’t think it’s too hard or prescriptive because of the additional NPCs and spatial loops that open up other avenues.

Honestly, this might be the best Shadowdark module I’ve reviewed. I like the puzzle elements, there are varied characters and interesting, the layout is clean and easy to understand. It uses the Shadowdark system well. I don’t honestly have many criticism to give. If you’re looking for something to run in Shadowdark and your players like feeling smart, Outcast Unseelie and the Ooze Between is a great next 3 or 4 sessions of fun and shenanigans.

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