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.

These Bloody Sails is a 50-odd page module for Pirate Borg, by John Christoffersen and William Tramp. In it, you have been hired to steal back a ship that was lost in a wager, and to do so you must sail deep into the dark caribbean. I backed this on Kickstarter.

These Bloody Sails doesn’t start well. It opens with 7 pages (not including the inside cover tables) of rules content before it ever actually starts to tell you what the module is about. It makes my first impression that the design process started at “can we make a depth-crawl for a nautical adventure?” and that the content itself is an afterthought. It was really disconcerting having to search for the actual story being told here — it’s not even on the back cover blurb. Those rules themselves don’t really work for me. I’ve said before, in my review of The Undying Sea by Joseph R Lewis, that depthcrawl as a procedure doesn’t work in my opinion for sailing modules. At least the Undying Sea has a conceit that made the depthcrawl more relevant: Here, it’s just the sea (unless maybe the “dark” caribbean is in fact dark, but that’s not clearly communicated if that’s the case). The procedure isn’t clearly communicated (I assume the “part” is the part of the book, but that terminology is very unclear to me). A lot of the procedure refers out to the core Pirate Borg book, which might work for people who keep a stack of books on the table to run with, but it also consists so much of this ruleset that it makes the content feel awfully generic. The forefronting of these rules rather than relegating them as secondary to the module itself, really leaves me underwhelmed moving forward through the text. Frustratingly, there are also four pages of rules at the end of the book, some of which are genuinely confusing to me, most of which are simply bonus content. The confusing part to me, is where it decides to re-describe each “part” as a journey of about 15 hexes, and then goes on to complicate things with additional locations and events that aren’t the ones referred to in the earlier section. These are perplexing choices to me.

I think those “journeys” are there, because the truth is the “parts” appear to simply be locations. The Part 1 is the ship you’re pursuing, the Gilded Swine, and details the battle for it. There’s an unkeyed map of the ship, but no characters or details about the crew. The Part 2 is your escape into the open sea, where you are inevitably going to encounter an island with 3 locations, “filled” with evil, bloodthirsty flamingos. The last of those is a 4 room dungeon, with little purpose to it. Part 3 is the port of Tortuga, where you must careen your ship (ah! this is why those rules are there — but put them here!), and nameless pirate crew members (again, no named characters) pick a fight with your crew, accusing them of cheating. In part 4, you face off against the Captain you stole the Gilded Swine from, in a climactic naval battle. We then have a few pages of stat blocks, and 3 apparently unrelated locations that might exist on your journeys. The entire series is only cursorily a depth-crawl, given it’s filled with statements such as “Once this encounter has completed, move on to Part III of the journey.” I don’t object to a railroad, but These Bloody Sails claims to be something else entirely. The content, however, might be compelling to you and worth poaching for your own sea-faring campaign.

In terms of graphic design and layout, I find this challenging in a number of ways. The big formatting drag for me is that the digital version is only available in spreads — no pages. You can’t read this on your ipad or your phone, and that limits your capacity to print from certain home printers. The graphic design choices are clearly inspired by Pirate Borg, so you know what to expect in terms of text placement and bold choices, however while I don’t have the background in visual design to clearly articulate what doesn’t work here, I really struggle with the choices of highlighting, typeface choices that seem random rather than on theme (I count 8 on the page 14 spread alone, for example), broken words, and low-contrast place-setting ( page 16 has white text on white art, and then black text on black art, rendering it challenging to read despite giving that text an outline — not a solution I prefer for body text). The art fluctuates tonally from wood cuts that seem public domain, really lovely line art that seems perfectly in theme for a dark pirate book, and character art that wouldn’t feel out of place in a comic book. Definitely not bad art, but jarring in terms of art direction. Overall, the layout doesn’t doom the book because the text it’s managing is brief and terse, but it doesn’t make running the book easy, at all, and reveals how clever Nohr’s stellar Mork Borg layout is, because this one superficially mimics a lot of its traits, without maintaining it’s legibility.

Overall, These Bloody Sails is a module that screams “I wrote down my home game”, even though the crowdfunding campaign and the credits suggest it’s been edited and well play-tested. What you’re getting is 4 locations, 4 scenes, and a few bonus rules that you can apply to your Pirate Borg game. If you’re looking for additional locations to add to your pirate ocean, these 4 will do well, and the 4 scenes and overall module wouldn’t go out of place if it were interspersed amongst other modules and a broader campaign, if you put some effort in. The idea of Captain Malchaneux as a foe hunting your crew over many months is a compelling one, but the content of These Bloody Sails simply doesn’t have the content to fulfil that building tension. What you could do, is use the first encounter of this module as an explosive opening to your campaign, use Malchaneux as a recurring villain, driving your crew from adventure to adventure out of revenge, and you’ve got a fun premise and plot for your campaign. If you’re looking for something like that These Bloody Sails will satisfy your needs. If you’re looking for something to run for a few sessions and then move on, or are looking for something that is truly an ocean world that you can explore, there are other pirate themed modules that will support you better.

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