In 2025 I’m reviewing zungeon zines. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques, just like Bathtub Reviews, but they’ll be a little briefer. The goal here is a little different: I want to spotlight what a craft-based, just-do-it approach to module writing can do.
Spell Shrine Pit is a 15 page “spell shrine” by Zak Hamer for Cairn 2e. A spell shrine is the home of 1 of the 100 spells in the Cairn 2e rulebook — Hamer, in a fun gesture, suggests that the community make more of them. You venture into the dungeon in order to claim the spell, Pit.
Starting with a description of spell shrines and how they might fit in your campaign, quickly the equivalent of hooks and rumours are described — these are slight, focusing on “something is amiss”, because the intent is that you’d be heading to the shrine for the purpose of gaining the spell, rather than being drawn there for other reasons. The framing here is explicitly intended to be like shrines from Breath of the Wild: The players seek them out, explicitly to expand their powers. This makes it hard to criticise the lack of juicy hooks or impactful rumours; the context minimises the need for them. In this context, the fact that the presence of the shrine impacts the region around it means that these changes act — along with rumours — as foreshadowing and clues a spell shrine might be present. If 100 spells shrines were present in a campaign, this foreshadowing would be both a puzzle and a lure after the first few. Very satisfying.
Keys are very clear, and most of the rooms have an interactive element t in them. The writing is workmanlike.
Thematically, I feel like a shrine related to a spell would be a little weirder. This one is effectively a tunnel, dug by spell, a context in which I don’t quite understand the presence of wooden doors or mechanisms. Especially, in the context of the unique creature which are pretty weird and flavourful — I feel the dungeon should’ve reflected them a little more. I don’t quite understand the combination of choices, but they’re also muted enough that it seems like it’s supposed to make sense. I think a brief paragraph explaining what’s going on in the shrine would help me.
Layout is solid — clear headings consistent highlighting, a cute hand-drawn map, public domain art. Perfect balance of DIY and legibility in a zungeon.
Overall, though, while Spell Shrine Pit isn’t a really strong dungeon in isolation, the concept here absolutely is a strong one. In the context of 99 other Spell Shrines, the complexity and depth of individual shrines becomes less important, and the context of other shrines, finding them in the campaign, and the fight for their contents becomes far more important. I think that if any other zungeon writers are stuck for a concept, they should as Hamer suggests steal a spell shrine as a concept and add to this. If the community managed to make 100 spell shrines this year, that’s an overworld campaign well worth running. For that reason alone, I think it’s worth checking out Spell Shrine Pit. It’s just one part of a concept that’s more than the sum of its parts, but that concept is a powerful one.
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.
Tiny Fables is a 59 page adventure collection written and illustrated by Josiah Moore for Mausritter. I backed it on Kickstarter for Zinequest. In it you’ll find a sandbox adventure inspired by folk and fairytales, including a village, the haunted forest, and five separate adventuring locations.
I’m going to open with: Moore kicks the graphic design, informational design, and art absolutely out of the park. It’s mostly illustrated in a digital linocut style, but where it deviates from that (for example the maps), it makes up for it with a consistent lovely single colour highlight. This forest green highlight is the only colour used aside from a little pink on the cover, I think. The same colour is used for specific text highlights, but sparingly. I adore this selective use of colour, but because it’s close to perfect, the inconsistencies — maps switching key colours for example — really stand out to me. The layout is a crisp two columns. It’s smartly mainly 1 location to a column, although in a few places this rule is broken, but very clearly signalled by changes in heading and decoration. In text signally is very clear, using bolding primarily to signify interest, and underlining and italics only in small measures. Colour and font are used to distinguish other elements like stat blocks. Bullets are used sparingly and well. Maps are all visually distinct and clear, although a few locations on some aren’t keyed which rubs me the wrong way, This isn’t keyed in the Mausritter house style, and while the influence of Gavin Norman’s layouts are apparent, it’s a much stronger version of that approach. Honestly, I think visually and informationally, this is one of the strongest modules I’ve read.
Does it hold up in terms of content? I think so. It opens with a tight frame, which is my favourite way of opening a module — the mice are in Thimblewood Village and introduced to the major mystery immediately, then left to the sandbox. Hooks are provided for the 5 major locations, in the case that the mice need further prompting, This is all on the first page, along with an (I think unnecessary for someone running Mausritter) intro to the playstyle. Great start, although I’d prefer even tighter framing — here they suggest you pick an NPC rather than give you specifically a mayor; they could suggest one perhaps? There are 4 factions elaborated in the classic Mausritter style, and an events timetable keeps things interesting and dynamic — there’s enough events for this to play out over I’d guess 10 sessions, although depending on the pace your players take, it may stretch further. I love that these culminate in very big climaxes — 2 are large scale battles, putting the warband rules on the cards, the other two are unleashing fearsome creatures, which will further incite adventure rather than end it. I should mention that in here is also a page on recent and distant history. This is fine, I guess. A full page feels too much, and it’s prose largely, although it’s formatted well to find key points, just as the key is.
Then, with little ado, we hit the locations proper. Thimblewood Village is a simple 8 location village, although the map has a few intriguing unkeyed locations — who lives in the shoe, Moore??? — Each location is really concrete in a great way. It focuses on characters, real ways to make the characters unique in play, and things like menus and local quirks. Some of them have a key problem to be solved as well, clearly displayed. There are 5 problems in 8 locations — decent hooks that both give the players something to do and link them to the larger story immediately. And they’re petty creatures — they have gossip and dislike each other for no good reason, or crush. And we have rumours, encounters and a few hirelings, all of which also provide hooks to the mystery. It’s good stuff. Overall, this is one of the better towns I’ve read lately. It puts me in mind of a far more practical and interesting version of the succinct village in A Wizard. I rarely get excited for a town, but boy, this is close to the perfect village for me.
The forest is a point crawl, with its own travel rules, that changes day to night significantly. It contains 14 locations, 5 of those being the major adventure locations. The first has basic day/night descriptors and a generator for small impressions of sensations which is great, although not too unique, and doesn’t tie into any small subtleties — the smell of campfire smoke here doesn’t tie into a particular place or encounter for example. I feel it would’ve been stronger had this been incorporated into the encounter tables, so that some of these subtle signs could’ve been signs of something in particular. As is, it would help where an incidental, random sensation might derail the players, to point to where in the module it might connect to at a whim. There are 18 random encounters across day and night by — 9 of these are directly tied to locations and encounters in the forest. I’d love for some interconnection with the village as well there directly, but that’s a pretty exceptional density of connection. I really appreciate that the locations are numbered from the outset of the book to the end of the forest, however that breaks down in individual locations and it would keep up that specificity and usability had it continued on throughout the book.
The minor locations aren’t all consistently strong and gameable, although they have great flavour and contribute strongly to the overall aesthetics. I need a reason to break into the crabapple orchard, or to bother Boris the mole, or to assist the lost angry ghost! These all either have nothing to interact with, else there isn’t a good reason to interact with them. This pattern repeats throughout the minor locations. I’m torn with these — a lot of them do have little quests associated with them, but no intrinsic reason to engage with them. But, there’s a social contract where players should be looking for things to engage with. Irregardless of whether or not this is good design — I’m on the fence — I think it would be better design to have solid reasons to engage here — they’re preventing progression, there’s a clear reward or it changes the environment in a positive way.
There are five major locations, each of them being sufficient for a whole zine in itself. Heartache Lake is probably the biggest of the locations — a whole settlement with politics, unique factions, encounter tables and 16 sub-locations. It’s bigger and more engaging a village than the main village. The Tomb of Roses has a neat haunting mechanic, although the spatial design is a little too heavily looped for such a small dungeon in my opinion — jacquaysing too heavily in a small dungeon can render your players choices meaningless. Chulip’s Castle is a wizard trapped by his own magic — this should be a more common trope in my opinion. Wandering Cottage and Maw of Shadows are a little darker in their fairytale inspirations.
There are two things missing from the dungeons here. Firstly, are the lack of hallways and entryway information — for me it makes it much easier to run if I can give players information about exits at the drop of a hat, rather than having to figure out which room it is and intuit a sensation as a hint to make decisions on. Secondly, even in smaller dungeons, having at least characters if not factions with needs and desires that you can play off and make favourites of and interact with in more interesting ways would be valuable. Most of these dungeons are largely designed at a room to room level — well, I think, at that level — but there’s little cross-dungeon design, the most important of which for me is faction play.
Overall, the vibes here are impeccable. This feels fairytale, and everything from the locations and the encounters to the incidental moments to the politics in terms of the writing, the naming of the places and characters, the simple goals, and of course the art and embellishments all bring amazingly fairytale vibes. This is on par with the Valley of Flowers in terms of impeccable aesthetics.
Overall, while I haven’t heard of Josiah Moore before, this puts him solidly on my radar. We have a new triple threat emerging in module writing. There’s something about the united approach someone who is both artist and author can bring to a module, and it’s here in absolute spades. Josiah Moore is someone to keep an eye out for in the future.
As for Tiny Fables — if you’re running Mausritter, this is a no brainer. Buy it. This, in my esteem, the best release I’ve seen for Mausritter — it gives away the weakest aspects of the classic Mausritter formula for the strongest parts of the Old School Essentials formula. While it isn’t perfect, it’s pretty close. The fairytale vibe is not unknown in the large list of Mausritter modules, but this pulls it off impressively. Overall, this is one of those modules I’ll be poring over for ideas in how to make my future projects better. If the physical version had been a hardcover rather than a zine, I’d have upgraded my pledge in a microsecond — and I really hope for a hardcover re-release soon. The risk printed zine is available now in print and in digital.
When I was in middle school, I was really into progressive metal and industrial rock. I considered it “alternative”. It was never in the Billboard Top 50 and only played during special shows on the alternative radio stations! My best friend was into Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple, which also was cool because nobody else I knew listened to them, even though they weren’t cool like my music was cool. But we listened to heartfelt, raw, real music. My other friend choreographed dances in his living room to Destiny’s Child (back when there was a discussion regarding who was the coolest Knowles sister). That wasn’t cool, because pop music was prefabricated and soulless. It wasn’t real music. And I wasn’t shy to tell him so. A quarter century later, I enjoy nostalgia-listening to The Fragile and Lateralus occasionally, but most of the time I’m listening to Sabrina Carpenter and Chappel Roan. Because I was wrong, and I was being a pretentious jackwagon. Of course pop music is real music.
I am not a player of the current, Hasbro-owned edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t enjoy running it; playing it is fine. Hasbro are a dragon sitting on the hoard that is our hobby and we’d be better off without them. But regularly, I hear people saying that Dungeons and Dragons is a bad game, and that people who play Dungeons and Dragons are roleplaying wrong, often with the disclaimer that it’s a tactical combat game, not a roleplaying game. It reminds me of being in middle school again, because it’s just not true: Dungeons and Dragons is real roleplaying, and the people playing it are playing just fine. Pop music is real music.
The thing I think the people who say this are missing, is that in order to play a role, a roleplaying game generally scaffolds you in doing so; it provides you with a supporting framework. There are lots of ways to scaffold roleplaying, and some ways work better for some people. People who don’t think Dungeons and Dragons is “real” roleplaying or that the people playing it are “roleplaying wrong” or are “doing all the heavy lifting” are just people who benefit from scaffolding in a different way.
One way Dungeons and Dragons scaffolds is through character creation. You get to the end of the admittedly tedious process with “I’m an elf warlock who can cast eldritch blast and sleep who was once an acolyte”. Some people would prefer to be told that their character is gregarious, or well-muscled, or has a tenuous relationship with their ex-wife. But for most people, their elf warlock mirrors how they think about themselves: “I’m a nurse from the northern suburbs who drives a Polo and used to work at the Body Shop”. This is a really familiar scaffold for a lot of people. It also doesn’t work for a lot of people. Another way Dungeons and Dragons scaffolds is through alignment, which, stripped in 2024 of any mechanical effects, is now a framework for considering your character’s personal ethics, but along weirdly universal axes, with an emphasis on relative positioning. Most games, in fact, use multiple or secondary scaffolding approaches like this, which help different people roleplay in the game, if they don’t benefit from the primary approaches.
Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.
One way Galactic 2nd Edition scaffolds roleplaying is through shared cultural understanding. It uses the shared cultural knowledge of Star Wars so that players implicitly know what their characters would do, how they would do it, when they need to do it. You know how Han Solo would act in this circumstance; you know what the Empire would do; you know how Yoda would act. Stewpot, a game where you play retired adventurers in a fantasy world, leverages instead the shared cultural knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons to scaffold roleplaying, which limits its appeal compared to Star Wars, but really gets its hooks into the fantasy roleplaying crowd in an unrivalled way.
Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.
One way For the Queen scaffolds roleplaying is through differentiation. All the players begin as effectively the same character, a nameless member of the Queen’s retinue: a knight. But through the prompts, you differentiate yourself from each other, in your relationships with the Queen and in your pasts. It leaves empty space, and invites you to fill it however you want, but you can imagine how this might not work for the very same person who prefers scaffolding through occupational roles, or scaffolding through shared cultural knowledge.
Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.
We can do this for many games: One way Primetime Adventures scaffolds roleplaying is through defining your characters primary issue, like self-respect, arrogance, or desire for vengeance. When you’re in a scene, you can always bring that primary issue to bear. You always know what to do. One way 10 Candles, Dread and Fiasco all scaffold roleplaying is through through story structure: They all use different ways to describe an inevitable unfolding, which assists you in making decisions about roleplaying that suit the story being told, because you know where in the story you are. One way Heart and Spire scaffold roleplaying is through their worldbuilding. They attach huge, notable and unique pieces of mythology to your characters from the first moment, and drive your characters towards a strange and compelling zenith. One way Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast scaffolds roleplaying is through bingos and whoopsies, which describe ways in which your character always fully assets who they are, or ways things always go wrong. Another way it scaffolds roleplaying is through its pre-generated characters, each of which has unique mechanics and stay constant (although they of course evolve) despite being played by different players throughout the game. One way Agon scaffolds roleplaying is through building a mythic hero rather than a character. It does this through choosing epithets — you might be silver-tongued or lion-hearted. You’re a hero, and to the extent you’re a one-note melody. Another way it scaffolds roleplaying though, to bring harmony, is through the nature of your relationship to the divine, and which gods you have relationships with — daughter of Poseidon, for example.
Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.
I stopped playing roleplaying games for about 15 years, and the first game I tried to run as an MC for my friends when I rediscovered them was Apocalypse World in around 2011. Apocalypse World in my opinion remains one of the best roleplaying games written, but it did absolutely nothing to scaffold our roleplaying experience. A primary way Apocalypse World scaffolds your roleplaying is using relationships: Your history with each other, with NPCs, and for some playbooks special moves that give you a biker gang or a holding. And developing these relationships and the world that connects them — done in a special, 0-session — was an absolute failure for our table. We looked at the playbook and thought we were seeing a list of verbs, like Dungeons & Dragons’ proficiencies or the buttons in a videogame, and we had absolutely no fun. We had no idea what to do with ourselves. It was a disaster. Apocalypse World’s scaffolding did not work for us at all, at the time.
When 2014 came around, though, we all had no trouble playing Dungeons & Dragons (then known as 5th edition) for the first time, though, or roleplaying when we did. We understood the characterization scaffolds, we had cultural understanding because of contemporary cultural touchstones like Community, video game RPGs that grew in Dungeons & Dragons’ shadow, and the Adventure Zone. That anecdote is not, from discussions with other people in the hobby, unique, although plenty of people do have different experiences. My point here is not that D&D 2014 is better than Apocalypse World; it’s that every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone. Maybe For The Queen is the right amount and type of scaffolding for you or your table. Maybe what Pathfinder or Ghost Court provides is right for you.
There’s no right or wrong here. There’s no right way to play, or wrong way to play. There’s no wrong game, or right game, except for your individual table. There are no shoulds. There are no vast swathes of the tabletop gaming population playing their game wrong. Pick the game that best helps your table play, and let others pick theirs without judgement. Dungeons and Dragons, and solo RPGs, and OSR games, are all real roleplaying games and the players playing them are doing real roleplaying, even if their preferences are different from yours.
If you think someone else is roleplaying wrong, or their game isn’t providing any roleplaying support, you’re missing the point: Different games support roleplaying in different ways, and even though they don’t scaffold correctly for you, they’re probably scaffolding well for someone else. I’d encourage you to think about how that game you love, or that game you don’t love, or this new game that is surprising you, scaffolds roleplaying. Think about what other games approach it similarly. Think about how this changes how people might interact with the game. Think about why it works, or doesn’t work for you, and why it might work for other people if it doesn’t. And if you’ve got any other interesting approaches to scaffolding to share, please drop it in the comments: I’d love to hear how you think Bluebeards Bride or Cairn 2nd Edition or your new, unique game scaffolds roleplaying.
And I hope we see less judgement for people who need different types of support for roleplaying than we do.
Idle Cartulary
P.S. Thanks to Jay Dragon, Amanda P., Dwiz and Sam Dunnewold for their assistance with clarifying my thesis and identifying or describing some of the scaffolds more clearly.
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.
The Stragglers is an 8 page module for Mausritter by Norgad. In it, a mine is abandoned after a sentient geode begins to devour its resources, and is infested with evil spiders.
The Stragglers is dense. In its 8 pages are 20 keyed locations, hooks, 2 random encounter tables, 3 treasure tables, 5 star blocks and 3 maps. It’s honestly remarkable that Norgad fit this much into so little space. So, what suffered for this density?
Not much. It’s admirably brief: Locations have 1 sentence descriptions, with any further description being bulleted to points of interest. Exits are described in a way that makes for pleasing choice-making. This self-imposed limitation means we have nocomplex rooms, but Mausritter doesn’t thrive in complexity of this kind in my experience. Because of the brevity, I think it would benefit from the kind of keying used in my Curse of Mizzling Grove or Beyond the Pale (I first saw it in Nightwick Abbey); it’s easy to lose track of why a part of a key is important.
Some of the descriptions are so succinct and usable I’m jealous I didn’t write them: “Opportunistic hunter. Completely blind.”; “Facsimile of a mouse. Can’t quite get the eyes right.”, but sadly much of the time they’re just succinct, and the description doesn’t give me the same degree of implicit play. I think this module — and other modules like it that lean hard into brevity, would benefit from an editing pass that looks at how their descriptions are immediately useful to the players: “Bowing floor” and “fragments of metal embedded in the walls” find immediate use and impact, as well as being memorable descriptions, but they are not common enough here.
The layout is simple and clear. There are creative flourishes like the placement of the encounter tables. Headings are clear; colour gets simple and powerful use. Art and maps are simple but striking; the dungeon map is cute, clear and has just enough detail to be charming and usable. Simple but good. It couldn’t be much better in a 4 page zine, to be honest, given the density.
Overall, the Stragglers is a worthy addition to the queue of Mausritter modules to play with my kids. The reason for the kids proviso, is that the issue with the Mausritter house style (which, while this doesn’t adhere to, it adapts closely) is that it limits the complexity and interest available, as I recently discussed in my review of Whiskers in the Wind. This makes it perfect for low impact one-shots and games for kids, but less ideal for larger scale campaigns or more puzzle oriented players, in my experience. It’s a limitation of the format, but within those limitations, the Stragglers excels. I’ll print off the Stragglers and add it to the box containing the Estate and Honey in the Rafters.
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.
Abbotsmoore is a 25 page system agnostic hexcrawl by Stuart Watkinson, creator of the exceptional but flawed Largshire. Art is by Kiril Tchangov. If you want to see what Largshire looks like when focused in on specific adventuring locations, Abbotsmoore is what you’re in the market for. In it, you search a bog for hidden treasures from the distant past; over it all, a cathedral looms, in which lives an Abbot you have a special interest in. It’s the first part of the Abbot Trilogy, linking to two other modules that crowdfunded simultaneously — Steelhollow and Bitterpeak, by the same team. I will get to reviewing these as well, in time.
The hooks here in the opening all tie directly into the Abbot, limiting the scope of the module to a degree. I like a tight frame, but my primary issue here is that if each player were to roll on this table, they’d all just want something different from the Abbot. What would be more interesting is to put them in conflict with each other: Why not have a player working for the church that want the Abbot removed; or have these requests be at odds with each other. Conflict, ethical or otherwise, is fuel for interesting play.
Watkinson continues to write with a cozy flair: “A pair of compasses that point towards each other.”, “The silence is painful.”, “A terrible wailing can be heard echoing through the passageways. The Abbot is crying.” The writing is just all round lovely, and interesting and for the most part gameable, just like Largshire.
The bulk of Abbotsmoore are 7 small ruins, that litter the bog. These are filled with small puzzles, with clues and many other small relationships interlinking them. These are pretty cool, although I wonder if the linkages will be obvious enough to players. The Cathedral itself focuses on the Abbot as a core character not just in Abbotsmoore but in the trilogy — but here, he largely serves as a quest giver, despite his goals being to do something unclear to an ancient and seemingly evil god. I suspect there is something being held back for the other two modules in the trilogy, but here it’s unclear why exactly the players would ally themselves with someone who seems so suspicious, particularly when he’s very vague about what his gifts will be (they’re all nasty-themed magical items, but for the final gift, a tattoo that allows the Abbot to call for them).
I think to make the Abbot work, you’d either have to prepare your party for working with a villain in your preamble to offering this up, or you’d have to prepare to lay it on thick with his being good — make it saccharine, recast the rat-folk as clearly happy rather than cowed creatures, and make it all round more of a case of deception than the party working for someone who appears soundly evil. As is, without preamble, I think you’d short change the module because they’re going to assume he’s a villain and either scheme against him or outright refuse to interact with him. I think recognising this potentiality in the text would make it stronger, particularly by planting other seeds for the two sister modules and for reasons to seek those items in Abbotsmoore in the case the party are opposed or have killed the Abbot. This could actually be a far more interesting option — the Abbot’s library, or perhaps even communion with the unnamed god itself, could be as compelling as the Abbot himself.
In retrospect, it feels remiss to review this separately from its’ sister modules, as some of my complaints here will likely be satisfied in one or the other of them, and in the context of the larger picture, gaps are a blessing rather than a curse. Abbotsmoore is, however, a lovely module in and of itself — beautifully written, with a fun multiple microdungeon structure, and a striking main character. Watkinson’s writing is a pleasure, and any table would enjoy a few sessions of this.
In 2025 I’m reviewing zungeon zines. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques, just like Bathtub Reviews, but they’ll be a little briefer. The goal here is a little different: I want to spotlight what a craft-based, just-do-it approach to module writing can do.
I’m starting with layout, because like a few weeks ago’s Tavurchower, this feels like a lovingly slapped together zine, collaged out of public domain art, pasted-in text, hand-drawn details, and I think illustrations by Mrs Platypus. It’s gorgeous, if accordingly busy, but cleverly structured are kept consistent between contributors and spaces, so it’s still pretty easy to navigate despite being so eclectic, as each room is unique in its aesthetics, while remaining monochrome xerox collage in theme. Each room, is even signed. Lovely work, filled with love.
It’s a small dungeon, but consists two loops which is a nice structure for such a small space. Random encounters are keyed to specific locations, which makes for my favourite type of random encounters, and makes the space feel lived in and dynamic. The rumours are used mainly as window-dressing — they’re all very cryptic, and hence while it suits the space, they aren’t likely to impact play a lot. The hooks are juicier, making your delve into the hall really specific, and they’ll change your focus in the space really pleasingly. I really like the random detritus and graffiti, although some of it is pretty essential to future problem-solving (for example, help solve the puzzles in The Great Hall), so it would’ve been better had it been proscribed in rooms or something.
The creativity in these rooms is exceptional: People are turned inside out, flatworms dance, and more. It shows that every contributor was bringing their A-game, and despite that it’s surprisingly thematically consistent. And it doesn’t overdo it, either: While most of the rooms are interesting, actually puzzles and hostile encounters are appropriately spread out. It’s wall-to-wall bangers. Keep that in mind, though: It could be a lot, if you were running it all at once. Information overload! The main negative I see is that it tends towards the adventure tourism or scene-based design, which means the NPCs are cooked up with ways to interact with each other across rooms, or make demands or negotiations with you, right off the bat. I could see the Shifting Knight, Lady Moon, or the Mole Man all becoming really compelling characters throughout this dungeon, or even beyond, though, so if you’re willing to prepare or improv, this is a hell of a diving board to leap off.
I’m super impressed by the cohesiveness of this collaborative effort. I’ve spoken before about how it’s challenging to bring a collaborative dungeon together in a cohesive whole, and while this is a fairly small dungeon example, it’s exciting to see that it’s possible. This is an incredibly dense dungeon, that will likely take 2-3 sessions to get through. It’s got some borderline uncomfortable, twisted otherworldly vibes, but it’s free, so you can have a read to see if your table would vibe it. More importantly these rooms are really something a good improvising referee can luxuriate in, particularly if you’re into scene-based play. If that all sounds like something that suits your style or table, Court of the Shivering Moon is worth a look see, in my opinion.
I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.
My kids are playing at an adventure playground at the beach, and I came prepared with my new copy of Stewpot, so I decided to read it, finally, underneath this macadamia tree. Stewpot is a 146 page game by Takuma Okada, based on the framework of Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands. In it, you and your friends create retired adventurers, and together settle down as the co-owners of a fantasy tavern in a fantasy town. The edition I’m reviewing is the new, definitive Evil Hat version,
Today up, we have tavern creation, as simple as name, environment (city or wilderness), look and a few ratings which affect the upcoming minigames. Character creation is also a straightforward affair: A name and a look, an adventurer job (i.e. class), and three associated experiences, and a job around town. The meatiest of these are the adventure experiences, such as “Taunt: Draw enemies towards you” or “Adder’s Fangs Deadly poisons and their antidotes”. My problem here, is that these don’t really result in a character or a setting with a lot of hooks. The character you get is the most rudimentary description a new 5th edition player gives: “oh I’m Kash the Tiefling Warlock, my patron is Bhaal and I have Eldritch Blast”. For the setting, it relies entirely on the table spontaneously coming up with something together, either now, or more likely during play. For me, that’s simply not enough. Here, Stewpot is trying too hard, I think, to rely on and embody the generic Faerunian fantasy that has been so popular since 2014, and in its reluctance to be weird and specific, loses some of its’ edge. The goals, though, are admirable: It’s trying to leave space for these characters to be developed retroactively.
The structure here is simple: Play a “starter” minigame, followed by as many minigames as you wish (taking turns), followed by a “finisher” minigame. The only restriction is that you must choose a specific minigame, accompanied by a break to stretch and eat, every three other minigames. These minigames range from mechanically unique and with a degree of complexity, to completely freeform with few prompts. There are 20 games, although 3 of them have roles prescribed by the rules. Otherwise — in a nice touch — you simply choose what you want to play on your turn, guided by the icons which tell you if a game is freeform, if it’s mechanical, if it upgrades your tavern, or if it’s a good game to start with. Those icons are a clever piece of work in my opinion because they both capture the needs of types of players interested in playing the game, but also make choosint a game — out of 18, remember — much easier, particularly when you’re not (yet) familiar with them. That said, I really wish there were other ways of choosing — as simple as numbering them 1 to 20 and allowing people to choose them randomly if they’re stumped or either don’t have a sense for their developing narrative, or are uninterested in directing their own story. It would be more in the spirit of the game that inspired it, to be honest.
The bulk of the book is, of course, the descriptions and rules for this massive number of minigames. I love these — they are thoughtful, plentiful, and run the gamut of potential ideas for the kind of story you’d expect to tell for a story of this type, as well as catering for a range of different player types at the table. Without going into depth, it’s hard to describe them briefly, suffice it to say that here Okada really nails the brief. The primary criticism, if you could call it that, is that while there’s an icon for “freeform roleplay”, that icon appears on 17 of the 20 minigames — so for people who are reluctant to freeform roleplay, there’s not a lot of room for easing them into this Stewpot. The first minigame, “The First Step”, is entirely freeform — you just describe a scene — with nothing but your character sheet and discussions regarding the nature of your tavern and town to guide you. This could be a deep dive for a lot of people, and I’d have loved more consideration for those people here in getting their toes wet. There’s something to be said here as well, about the quality of the prompts, something I spoke about at length in multiple reviews over the month of December last year. This reminds me a lot of Expect Three Visitors — it depends heavily on the players’ existing knowledge of D&D and other roleplaying tropes, and relies heavily on examples, rather than investing as heavily as it could in clearer or more complex prompts. I think more complexity in the prompts would be very, very welcome, over and above the lists of examples.
The book is gorgeous, though. The art, featuring a plethora of artists, has an imagination that the text often lacks, and as such supplements the vanilla fantasy of the text with much-needed weirdness: Inns on turtle-back, or undersea mermaid inns, Bear-adventurers, Mouse-wizards, blademasters slicing kraken sushi, and lots and lots of delicious meals. The art couldn’t really be better — it brings cosy, and brings it hard. The layout is gorgeous, ornate, and fully decorated, and has lots of space, rendering it very legible. To be honest, the amount of white space is too generous for me, often splitting up lists and concepts across spreads and page-turns, which would be more legible given less space. The leading here is generous at the body text level, but in headings and lists it is often 200% or more, which, in a book presented in single column, makes me wonder if it was intentionally padded out to make the page count more book-worthy (this impression is worsened by the 20 pages of recipes in the back of the book, although they claim to be a stretch goal). I’m sure Evil Hat knows publishing better than me, but I’d have preferred a slimmer book if bulking it up comes at the deficit of legibility.
The core conceit — a fantasy tavern — is a gorgeous, immediately evocative one to those of us with a long history with Dungeons and Dragons and its related literature, immediately evoking to me the Inn of the Last Home, and many other such tropes. There are, too, so few opportunities to play characters with experience and the maturity that comes age, with these characters generally being relegated to mentor and quest-giver roles in fantasy stories. Giving these characters centre stage, and the associated freedom of improvisation that a lifetime of remembrances brings, is just so compelling as a baseline for a game. I’m sold instantly.
But my feelings are complicated. Stewpot was one of the first indie games I ever played, using it as an epilogue to a 5th edition campaign back when I played that weekly, well before the release of this new Evil Hat edition. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this edition to come out for maybe 5 years? There’s a world of differences between my perspectives then and now, though. We came to the game with a bunch of strongly differentiated characters, each with an existing history, although many of it unexplored, and an existing world. Stewpot, in that context, was an expansion of and a loving dedication to the characters we’d spent 18 months with (perhaps more? it’s been a while), completed not long after the pandemic began. But now, with two kids and most of my friends in the same life phase, a regular game is no longer a part of my life. I play pick-up, with short term, disposable player characters, a range of players coming and going, and little long-term development of them. The character creation provided here is intentionally sparse — it’s designed to leave open spaces to fill in through games like Sidequest, AFleeting Moment, or A Bard’s Tale — but I fear for many people it requires too great a leap, to get to the character from the creation process, which effectively amounts to “I’m a wizard with fireball”. You can consider Stewpot a game of character creation, and from that perspective, I think it leaves all the right gaps. But right now in my life — and noting that 5 or more years ago I felt differently, so you may feel differently now — I’d like more support, of the kind that was provided to me through the play of an additional campaign, to provide background.
My complaint here, in a way, could be considered a complaint about Firebrands-framework games. Both the King is Dead and Firebrands expect a similar amount of improvisation; you build the world, and your character, simultaneously. I can’t imagine too many players of Firebrands actually played Mobile Frame Zero for the worldbuilding, before they picked up Firebrands. If you consider the support around those two games, Stewpot is a far more supportive game: twice as many minigames as either of those, with a premise that banks on lifetimes of shared experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons or thousands of hours of watching Critical Role. The menu-of-minigames structure is a clever one, and fruitful I think, but I wonder what it would look like if it leant more into the specificity of setting than it already does.
Overall, Stewpot is a masterpiece, but only for the right table: One comfortable with freeform roleplaying, easy improvisers — a table full of referees or theatre kids. For most players, though, it doesn’t scaffold enough to make play easy — these are the players for whom using this game as an epilogue for existing characters is ideal, as the previous campaign would provide that scaffolding. What it is not, is a way to ease players uncomfortable with silence and a blank slate into free-form roleplay. But if, like me, you’re hooked by the conceit immediately: Just buy Stewpot already, and figure out how to make it work for your table, because it’s one of the cosiest fantasy games I’ve played.
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.
Sooty Beards is a 46 page setting module from Furtive Goblin and John Gregory, with Charlie Ferguson-Avery on art and on layout. It details a town framed as “Khazad-dum meets dying coal town”, and the people and potential for adventure therein. While it’s system agnostic, it’s compatible with Troika! and B/X, but feels intended to be played with Troika! in ways I’ll detail later. It’s available now, with digital sales being used to fund a print run; I was provided a complementary copy by the author.
The writing here is luscious and conversational, with a dry humour, but in unashamedly meandering style. The goal here is to immerse the reader in the world deeply enough that they remember and regurgitate the atmosphere more than the details — or at least that’s the effect. It’s a pleasure to read, but using Vesallberg at the table means for me a lot of sticky notes and highlighting. I’m reading in digital, and I’d recommend the print version, when it’s available, for that reason. In digital, it’s a pleasure to read and a struggle to use. These sections of prose are interspersed with more clearly gameable content, in the form of random tables, stat blocks and items. These are regularly repeated throughout the districts covered by the module that consist the majority of the book.
We open with a general overview of the city, including the major factions, and reasons to be in the city in the form of 20 backgrounds. These backgrounds are lovely for giving characters unique goals, and really impact the direction and interactions you might take for the city, fulfilling everything you want, really, from them, except that they don’t provide specific names or places or locations in any instance — you have to provide those yourself, either improvised or from your memory of the book. That little extra detail would have gone a long way, in my opinion. The factions here are framed as a kind of classic era gazetteer covering local politics, and hence doesn’t provide the kind of clear list of projects or goals that would make this kind of failing city really pop. This is disappointing, because I feel like it could and should be a veritable powder keg ready to blow. You could, with some effort, top these political factions up with characters and clocks detailing their immediate goals, but it’s disappointing that legwork wasn’t actually done for us, because I would’ve launched into the primary body of work on fire with ideas if it had been.
For each of the districts — there are 8 — there’s an introductory paragraph, 3 or so quotes from NPCs about the location, a table telling us what used to be there and what has replaced it as it fell into disuse, a creature and its’ stat block unique to that location, and a list of 3 or so items that people there may carry. Oh, and a three word summary right at the top, which serves as a kind of mood board for those of us easily overwhelmed — a nice touch for people like me. Overall, these pages are a framework from which to improvise action within these districts. To use this well, you’ll either have to rely on an anti-canon approach — sharing filing the gaps with the other players — or be a very confident improviser, because either you are searching the pdf for references to Pewter Boys and Hog Dogs or you’re winging it as you go and creating continuity flaws that you’re going to have to contend with. This might have been managed with referencing, as was used in Reach of the Roach God, but as is, given the structural and prosody choices, you’re going to have to have an excellent memory or risk creating continuity errors whenever you introduce a new term. The referee advice supports the loose canon approach: When things get aimless have something from a table in the district happen. I think there needs to be more explicit advice, though, because enough of the features are misleadingly named or do double duty, that it might not be immediately apparent how to use them on the fly. But their utility could be more clearly communicated: for example, groups and factions are introduced in “what’s here now” sections such as the aforementioned Pewter Boys, and many of the quotes are actually from NPCs that’ll likely become favourites, and that can point clearly to goals and points of interest.
A point of interest is the bonus content, 36 backgrounds for Troika! This set of backgrounds continues the theme of information being disguised in the form of other information throughout this module. As characters, you explicitly aren’t from Vesallberg: “You’re not a local. You can’t be, if your instinct is to move toward Vesallberg instead of away from it. No, you’ve come from somewhere else with a reason to visit the mountain.”, so these backgrounds are effectively useless to players unless you break a core tenet of the text. But they’re very good backgrounds, coming each with an in-character quotation, a solid Troika-esque description, and a special that’s flavourful (“a photographic memory of every dead face you’ve seen” — yes please!), as well as useful unique advanced skills (Drakk Wrasslin’ and Aquire Grant Money). The equipment —“leaden eartrumpet” — is even fun! These backgrounds, by implication, are another way to build the world, and they’re more likely to be used by the referee in improvising characters than by the players, as no fool from within Vasellberg would ever stay there.
The layout and art here is gorgeous and complementary, with maps and sketches filling in the margins, clear headings and consistent repeating structures making it a very legible text. In print, this is going to gorgeous, messy and legible, but in pdf it takes time to load as you flick through it quickly, because it’s structured in multiple layers that always load sequentially. This is a little frustrating, because finding specific information here without any index or referencing system requires the use of search, and on Acrobat in my current gen iPhone, when searching for “rusted”, it takes 5 seconds for the next search term to load.
Where I was expecting something akin to Stuart Watkinson’s Largshire, Vesallberg in Sooty Beards is closer to what I’d imagine you’d get if Daniel Sell decided to write a guide to the city of Troika — it’s compelling, filled with weird little guys with unclear goals, but is impressionistic and hyperdiegetic to a fault, and very reliant on improvisation. In fact, to be honest, this is a perfect guide to a possible city of Troika, something that has been thus not forthcoming. It doesn’t attempt to be a definitive guide, and so if you’re looking for that in a city supplement, this is absolutely perfect. It’s just that that isn’t what I personally look for in a city supplement.
What this isn’t is a source for definitive adventure hooks — “Startlingly wide and deep, its bottom covered in shadow. Something is down there.” is typical of the hooks here. We don’t have definitive factions with definitive goals. We don’t have definitive buildings, but randomly generated. Honestly, that’s what I want in a city supplement. I recognise that the scope and scale of a city — Vesallberg is the size of a mountain, after all — makes it both challenging to fill practically and that in a city of significant size, many of your encounters are random and impressionistic. But the problem is that you travel through cities between landmarks, and Vesallberg doesn’t have any of these, either in its descriptions or on its’ map. So if you’ve the engineer background and you’re searching for wondrous schematics, there’s nowhere to look. And if you do ask, there’s no way to find out what they’d say, easily. So, as a referee, and a player rolls that, I have to pdf search for “steam” or “rusty parts”, and Ido find things, but the text does nothing to help me to find those things.
Overall, I have heavily mixed feelings on Sooty Beards, because I prefer something that offers immediately gameable situations — if I’m going to buy this kind of setting at this size, Largshire is more my cup of tea. But knowing the popularity of modules that are entirely world-building, and the popularity of settings that are entirely Troika! backgrounds, I think there will be a large audience of people for whom this is exactly what they’re after, they just never knew it until now. Sooty Beards’ writing is excellent and characterful. It’s a pleasure to read. The districts themselves are compelling and personal. It takes Troika’s hyperdiegetic backgrounds and expands them the scale of a city, and a dying dwarven mining city, at that. Similar to Goblin Mail, Sooty Beards is a welcome next step in the development of creative responses to Troika. If impressionistic and fun-to-read are high on your list of desired qualities, and you take pleasure in improvising your city around those impressions and quote-length character snapshots, Sooty Beards is for you.
In 2025 I’m reviewing zungeon zines. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques, just like Bathtub Reviews, but they’ll be a little briefer. The goal here is a little different: I want to spotlight what a craft-based, just-do-it approach to module writing can do.
Taken By The Blood Men is a 1 page zungeon for B/X-like games (with versions for Into the Odd, 5e, and Tunnels and Trolls) by Andreas Folkesten. In it, you venture in to a dungeon populated by the titular Blood Men, perhaps to prevent the ritual to return them to a waiting prisoner’s body.
I say perhaps, because the first striking thing about this tiny module is that the framing changes drastically depending on the hook you choose — You might be Lennart’s lover, prisoner, or simply stumble upon the dungeon unawares. These hooks are stellar, changing the experience of the module from one where you’re assisting the villain, to an escape room, to a survival horror module. It pretty seamlessly absorbs these different approaches. It’s pretty cool.
These hooks, and the timed ritual, together are what really make the module tick. You have 7 turns before the ritual is performed, unless it’s interrupted. I love these as a core drive for a small module, rather than a random encounter table Very cool. Because of this, a lot of the rooms are waiting in stasis — for example, the ritual assumes that the Amalia is ready to be sacrificed, unless you first find her in room 6, in which case she has to escaped. A lot of people hate a dungeon where everyone is in stasis until someone walks into the room, but I think this is forgivable in a dungeon only 8 rooms and 1 page long.
I adore the literal blood-men — not what I expected, and the logical extensions that they bring — can’t talk so they write in blood, vulnerable to vampire bats so half the dungeon is barred to them. This is a cool centrepiece to the modules, for me, but I’d love for the characters here to be given a little more meat — I don’t really know how the mute Lennart-clones interact or what they might communicate, nor do I Amalia, the only other character. But, another sentence or two on those two subjects and I wouldn’t have any concerns.
Overall, Taken By the Blood Men is a neat little dungeon to drop onto your campaign map. It’s a night of play, it’s fun, and it has a variety of options for how to incorporate it into your game. If you want a small module, are happy to improvise and rely heavily on your reaction rolls, then this is a fun inclusion.
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.
Titans of the Verdant Maw is a 26 page module for Old School Essentials by Gabe L, with art by Carlos Castilho. In it, you are hired to destroy a behemoth built by a mad cyborg goblin, and must venture into a deadly dungeon populated by savage machines to find it.
Titans opens with 4 pages of random tables. The rumours sadly don’t really contribute much to play. We need them to have juicier worms, else they’re set dressing. I would rewrite all of these so they change how you interact with the encounters. Random anomalies and nighttime events are interesting and evocative, although I don’t know why they’re always happening. I’d love for them to be tied into lore, for more impact. They’re lovely though: “Spectral figures from a long-lost era sweep through the area” or “Mirage cats stalk the adventurers, testing their defences.”. I’d rather a little more from fourth, notable NPCs table, though: Striking as figures, none of these have any goals or relationships to tie them to the world. Interestingly the random encounter table does not get a whole page, although it would benefit from the space, as they’re all just “1d4 goblin” encounters with stat blocks rather than creatures with goals or needs. It’s a fairly small space, this jungle, and I’m assuming they follow the OSE rules, so I suspect that the ten random encounters occurring 1-in-6, plus the 3-in-6 chance of night time events, plus the 1-in-6 chance of an anomaly…if they’re exclusive, you’ll have a lot of encounters, and if they’re not, that’s a lot of dice rolls. I think we’d benefit from an overloaded table, anomalies being folded into the random encounter table, or another alternative. Even folding all of these into a single, 3-tier table would be better, and more space efficient, to boot.
The locations are impressionistic, very evocative, each with a few points of interest. They aren’t very interactive, though — no puzzles, lots of potential combat encounters, not a lot of support for social play. If you want something other than a fight, you’re relying heavily on the referee to do the heavy lifting. In a lot of ways, this feels like best possible version of a key from ‘80s Dungeon Magazine, brief, simple; but without supporting a lot of complexity or broader play options even though the potential is present.
Interestingly, there’s no map of this jungle — no hex map, no point crawl, and no random table of locations, and guidance regarding how to navigate. I was surprised — I even checked if there was an extra file I’d missed. No map makes it hard to follow the OSE wilderness travel rules — and I think the lack of either a map or rules for navigating the mapless jungle makes this module a little incomplete. It wouldn’t take long to throw together a point crawl — honestly Cairn 2e’s forestcrawl would be perfect for this — but I wish it was here to begin with.
The book is finished up with 3 classes, a bestiary, and a list of treasures. The bestiary needs a little more spice — I’d hoped the lack of social support would have been made up for in a dedicated section, but we’re not given much. Even a little mien table as seen in Troika! would be an improvement. Two of these beasts cause mutations, and that’s backed up with a very simple mutations table. The treasures are thematically appropriate, but the two most interactive are the grappling hook and the ooze forge, with the rest being pretty basic and not flexible in their uses like great OSR magical items.
There’s a strange tension here — Titans doesn’t feel suited to OSE in many ways. The terse, uncomplicated keying, the lack of concern about travel specifics, and the one-line mutations seem unsuited to the system. But there’s a lot of attention and care put into the stat blocks and the classes. My overall feeling is that this would be better as a capsule game — something with its rules baked in — rather than as a module for Old School Essentials. I think it doesn’t live up to its potential, as it is, but with tweaking, particularly to the rumours, the map, and the social dynamics, this would be a lot of fun to run. Titans of the Verdant Maw is pretty cool, though, and I’d be excited to see what Gabe L does next. If you’re module where sword and planet meets beer and pretzels, this is a great module for you.
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Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Threshold of Evil, in Issue #10, March 1988! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.
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