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.

Tomb of Tog is a 24 page module by Arman Bohn, with additional illustrations by Nate Ashley, Shane Talbott and Avery Willmann. In it you explore the dungeon of an inept mage, who attempted to dominated his “mastery” of the 8 schools of magic in the design of his opus. I was provided a complementary copy by the author.

What we have here is a puzzle-focused dungeon, with 10 individual puzzles, 1 for each room, with unrelated approaches — unlike, the two recent puzzle dungeons A Familiar Tower and Outcast Unseelie which iterate on a familiar conceit throughout the same dungeon. The theme, instead, is what ties the puzzles and rooms together. My inclination is that using the 8 schools of magic as the basis for a dungeon is not going to put any designer off to a good start, but the twist that the titular Tog is incompetent (a fact that needs to be discovered) is a necessary twist to make this work, and provides additional clues regarding how to solve the puzzles that will be encountered. The other nice addition here is that while there are ways to solve these puzzles within the logic of the puzzle (for these “solves” you obtain a special token), you also recieve a “Tome of Tog” which provides a neat mechanic that alleviates the frustration of having to solve the puzzle if you’re stuck: If you can find the missing page in each room, you can “break” the room, and don’t have to solve the puzzle. All of this comes together to a set of interesting rooms, with a wide variety of fallbacks and potential solutions.

This solution variety is actually pretty important, because this room is pretty linear in its’ progression: Each room gives you access to the adjacent rooms, but there’s no back doors, so you could easily be stuck in a room and trapped unable to progress, and you cannot exit the dungeon without accessing the final room. And you cannot access the “end room” without either solving or breaking all the 8 puzzles. I think that this potential frustration could’ve easily been avoided, simply with a redesign of the space; there are allusions to pipes connecting rooms, for example, which might have been used to avoid rooms, or ways might have been used to skip, break, or backtrack the space in alternative ways. But, the puzzles are anything but repetitive, which is honestly an impressive feat when you’re writing 10 of them in total. This may not be an issue at all if you prepare your table for it before bringing them into the dungeon. The puzzles themselves: For me, personally, they’re a little hit-and-miss, but they’re largely either simple-but-complex enough to check the important “make the players feel good” box, or else they’re OSR style challenges that should be able to be figured out with a little creativity. And, you can always break them.

I do struggle, however, with the fact that aside from specific “boss monsters” in some of the rooms, there is one creature you may be fighting repeatedly — the Ravenous Cleansers. They’re not inherently aggressive towards the party, but they’re the “main character” of the dungeon apart from Tog, the inept mage, himself, and while I may be getting an exaggerated sense of how often they will occur in comparison to in play, I don’t think they’re exciting enough to play such a significant role. That said, I like that they’ve got a clear “order of operations”, which intimates that they won’t involve themselves with the players at all in the first few rooms.

Tog, as a personality, is very present in the dungeon, and if the referee leans into his little performance at the beginning of each area, I could see this buffoon being a beloved character. I like the developing story as you explore the dungeon of Tog, while being inept, also being unintentionally a scourge on all of those around him — this is interesting, but by room 10, Tog is revealed to be an utter villain. You’re given no way to correct his evils, and this being his titular tomb, he’s not alive to be slain. The primary hook, one of the local area being overrun by rabbits, seems a petty one in the context of the evils Tog is eventually revealed to have unleashed on many people. This leaves the dungeon narratively unsatisfying, given you’re conditioned to like the mage.

From a layout and art perspective, I find it visually challenging to read in a lot of ways — I’m a bit overwhelmed by the inconsistent formatting and about 5 different types of highlighting used for different purposes. As someone who reads these in the bath on her phone, this doesn’t work at all, but if you were reading on a screen or had printed this out these complex puzzle rooms being presented over spreads consistently, and all necessary information being held at a glance, and there are lots of maps and diagrams to help you comprehend what’s going on. The art is all pretty compelling and I’d use some of it to show players as well, even though it’s all spot art.

Tomb of Tog is a fun, silly little dungeon, that will likely last you 1 to 3 sessions, depending on the makeup of the table. There are some tables that will struggle with the limiting nature of the dungeon, and if your table is one who really wants sandbox play, or to talk their way out of things or crawl through the crawlspaces rather than take the doors, this isn’t for you. If your table is fine with a puzzle dungeon that there’s only one way out of, and they enjoy solving (or breaking) said puzzles, Tomb of Tog is something I’d encourage you to check out.

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