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.

Oni is an 8 page module for Mothership by Jamie Heitler with art by Thomas Heitler. In it you sneak onto a mob boss’s ship, while avoiding a hallucinating AI. I think I was given a comp copy by the author, maybe?

Basically, this a 16 room heist, with 4 wild NPCs with different agendas, and 12 or so monsters patrolling the halls at night. These NPCs are great, and they interact in interesting ways with each other, the world at large, and with your time and location. The module operates on a 20 minute timer, which impacts the behaviour of the androids on the ship. During the day, they’re friendly and do maintenance, so long as you do nothing to attract attention. At night, lights turn off, and they turn into floating lightsaber wielding murderers visible only by that glow and their glowing screens, unless you find a pre-determined safe zone first. There is a lot of focus as well on appearing polite, which adds to the social puzzle — when is the AI watching and judging you? How should you behave? This builds a ton of tension in a small space, and limits the crews capacity to storm the place. The module would benefit from being generous with information to navigate safe and unsafe spaces.

The cover and character art for Oni slaps, and the colour choices pop although some folk struggle with white on black writing, and it will not home print well. Layout is a dense two column affair, which is fine, but does itself no favours. It’s dense enough that, lacking extra flagging or highlighting, I might flounder when running it, which could easily be fixed by taking better advantage of the graphic design choices that have already been made, adding art for navigation and breathing room, and being happy with a longer page count for the sake of legibility. Because, while this module is genuinely excellent — one of the better Mothership modules I’ve seen this year, with great characters, a load of tension, in a small package — the presentation undercuts it significantly. It wasn’t clear it was this good at a glance, and it wouldn’t be easy to run without studying and taking notes, which kind of sucks for an 8 page module.

If you want to run something at a glance, you might expect you can from such a small module, but if that’s what you want, I’d look elsewhere. If you’re happy to do a little homework in the name of a tense, violent, social affair, though, likely to last 1-2 sessions, Oni is a module I’d check out.

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