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.
The Unquiet Flesh is an 8 page zungeon for Old School essentials, by Katt Kirsch, with art by Brandon Yu. In it, you delve in a tomb filled with undead, hoping to prevent their advance.
Kirsch is making a habit of releasing some gorgeous, thoughtful dungeons every month — this is I think the fourth — and this one in addition contains commentary which I really appreciate. This series of zungeons is a really statement: That it’s possible to throw together some really good looking modules, even with a collaborator for art, in a short period of time. Kirsch picks a colour palette and a free font, commissions an artists for a cover and a few pieces of spot art, and gets these out there quick smart. It’s really remarkable.
It opens with 12 rumours. These are flavourful, but a lot of them — the treasures, deadliness, just the basics of the dungeon — could be in a brief hook. I think in a project of this size, fewer and punchier rumours are better, following the principles laid out here. Most of the content here is good — it just belongs in the dungeon, where the lore is an excellent thing to fill empty rooms with, or it needs to be delivered en mass as a reason to attend the dungeon in the first place. Then, the actual rumours are things about the dungeon, that help our characters or hinder them through their knowledge. This is an efficient way to make small dungeons repeatable — second round you’re looking for different aspects. The random encounter table is short and sweet, and the method you use it changes to preference the deadlier and more floor themes monsters and you go deeper. Nest. It also uses modifications of monsters straight from the book, which is smart for a short module.
The dungeon itself packs a hell of a punch — 30 locations in so few pages. The map is clever and colour codes its entries and exits (this carries over to the key as well), although some looping between floors would make the dungeon more explorable — it’s not linear, but there’s only one way to move between each level. I like the brief descriptions, and the rooms slap, but in order to maximise usefulness, I’d like to see a little more consideration into the ordering of the clauses: “A draft from the northern wall’s hasty brickwork gently stirs dust. Carpet scraps blanket the floor. Along the west wall, a rolled-up rug conceals ...” could better be rendered as “A draft from the northern wall’s hasty brickwork gently stirs dust. Carpet scraps blanket the floor, and along the west wall sits a rolled-up rug. It conceals…”, for example, and those little changes make for a more useable text, where I don’t need to reframe the text I’m reading on the fly.
The strengths of this dungeon make me wonder about easy ways to add depth to a dungeon of this kind. This isn’t a puzzle dungeon, and they’re hard to write with such brief keys — the traps here are 2-sentence affairs. I wonder if one way to bring more puzzle solving and interactivity would be to use Sean McCoy’s writing rooms in pairs to add more keys and locks to the process of delving into the space. It does this a little — you can see it in the room I quoted above — but really the only thing this needs is a bit more complexity at a macro level, and pairing odd rooms more to introduce puzzle like elements would likely help to do so.
Overall, the Unquiet Flesh is a banger high level adventure. It’s high level enough, that you could either leave it floating there as something to loom over your campaign, and slowly seed the Carrathians as villains throughout your slow crawl to level 10, or use the included pregens to use this as a really fun high impact, 2-or-3 shot. As with Kirsch’s previous zungeons, The Unquiet Flesh is worth checking out, and I can’t wait to see what develops over the next 8 months of zungeon writing.
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.
Bitterpeak, written by Stuart Watkinson, with art is by Kiril Tchangov, is the second module in the Abbot Trilogy, a system neutral series of modules. After I reviewed the first module, Abbotsmoore, I expected to review Bitterpeak and the third module, Steelhollow, together, but Bitterpeak stands largely alone. In Bitterpeak, you’re tasked to deliver a single hair from the head of Demonsbane, which is hidden on Bitterpeak — but Demonsbane is a weapon, not a creature or a person. It’s a hexcrawl through a frozen tundra, culminating in a climb up a perilous mountain. I backed this on Kickstarter.
I realise now that I didn’t speak to the layout and art in Abbotsmoore much; to be frank, these three are of a piece and speaking to it thrice would probably be wasting your time. Each of the three has a unique colour palette, but otherwise the layout is the same. It’s spacious, single column, with strong use of size and decoration for smart navigation. It’s only 24 pages long, and I think the layout and organisation would fall apart if they’d packaged these 3 in a single book, because a larger organisational structure isn’t present. That’s not a problem here though. The crisp inks that feature here suit the simple choices in the layout. I’m not familiar with Kiril Tchangov, but his work, especially in the covers, absolutely slaps.
MacReady’s Hut is the base of operation and the “inn” of the module. I picture a kind of “Hateful Eight” situation here with 8 guests each with a secret. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed that these characters don’t play a bigger role in the module as a whole, although they could all act as henchmen or replacement characters. Some show up later, though. MacReady’s Hut is just such a strong location I want it to be more than it is; this honestly reminds me of the entire of Largshire, Stuart Watkinson’s previous town supplement, which left me with a similar feeling: I just want it to be expanded, because the premises are already great.
The Endless Tundra is a hexcrawl, with 3 regions to pass through before reaching Bitterpeak. I quite like these three locations, but each of these consist simply of a random encounter table and a description. The purpose of a hexcrawl is exploration, but there are no secrets in this hex crawl. You might as well as run it as a series of encounters, given 50% of the time it’s likely you’ll just encounter 2 of the first table, and 1 each of the second two. There’s no fun in wondering aimlessly lost through a wilderness, so the “getting lost” rules will get old fast for players, when there’s no chance of finding a pleasant surprise. And given the distribution, I’d run this as a point crawl, I think, or at else assign encounters to specific hexes and give them landmarks to make getting lost or navigating the waste more interesting.
The rules around climbing the Bitterpeak, are similarly a little weak. They’re essentially a skill challenge, but I think it would’ve been more interesting had there been a table of potential challenges here as well. I also don’t understand why the encounter here results in Rickard not caring for his sister’s death, which may or may not have occurred depending on how you rolled. The death itself is simply due to exposure to the elements, which also lacks drama. For me, the final encounter also lacks drama — particularly if Rickard comes and makes the dramatic choice for the player.
Watkinson remains an imaginative and evocative writer; one of the best. Scenes like “Courtship of the dragons. The two white dragons circle high above for quite some time before they descend. Their brilliant white scales glisten over their immense bodies.” just leap off the page. The characters, as I said earlier, are very well realised and briefly enough I can use their descriptions. I have no complaints at all about the writing.
But Bitterpeak fails to be more than the sum of its parts for me. When the two main sections feel underdeveloped, and the final feels anticlimactic, I can’t find myself eager to bring this one to the table. I think, basically, that this idea is more than a 24 page idea — we want to linger, trapped in MacReady’s Hut, and then have the politics between those characters develop and then feature in a journey in the wilderness where you’re searching to unlock the door to the Demonsbane, where finally you’re competing with whoever’s left for that lock of damned hair, whether by violence or by wit or by speed. There’s the seed of something great here, but it doesn’t get enough time to develop in the page count.
Overall, I can’t say that I’d recommend Bitterpeak over Abbotsmoore, which was pretty good, and its structure means it’s not awfully suitable to drop into an existing campaign. Watkinson’s writing is worth luxuriating in, it just doesn’t translate here into a module that I’d enjoy running; you could pillage it for some excellent ideas if your campaign is already in a frozen terrain, though. If you have time or inclination to expand this out, or you’re looking for a frozen tundra themed few sessions, and particularly if you have another source for some wilderness rules that will make it more meaningful, I’d suggest picking Bitterpeak up.
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.
Mother Worm is an 8-page system agnostic zungeon by Robot_Face. In it, you travel into the Mother Worm’s lair, with another party, to assist them resurrecting the worm’s child.
This is slapped together with Microsoft paint and free fonts, and while that doesn’t make it easy to read, it’s short and it vibes, really leaning into the DIY aesthetic that we like to see in our zungeons. You might like to take to it with a few coloured highlighters to make things a little clearer.
This tiny 6-room dungeon is full of banger ideas, with tons of interesting interactions for something of its size. I love the quest giver who is also a rival party, that your goal is to overcome specific obstacles in the dungeon, and that there are many layers of misunderstanding — the quest giver is lying, but also the Mother Worm will not understand if you’re acting in its best interests. It has a few elements that aren’t fully explained, though — particularly the lock in room 2 deserves more description, as does the spell in 3 which from further text appears to affect the hall rather than the room.
Overall, Mother Worm is an excellent tiny dungeon filled with colour and clever ideas, that will easily slot into almost any fantasy campaign.
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.
The kids are home and screaming at each other while they play Mario Kart, so I’m reading Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, a game I’ve been postponing a review for for a while. Why? It’s an almost 500 page game created by Jay Dragon and M Vaseleak, with a huge cast of contributing authors and artists; Jay is a longstanding friend of mine, as are a few of the other contributors. I backed this on Kickstarter, many moons ago, but only received the gorgeous shelf-breaker of a tome recently.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast represents a conundrum to me as a reviewer: I backed this to play, with the anticipated structure of the game being perfect for my life when the children were young and we were close to friends, but the delays in fulfilment mean my lifestyle has changed a lot in the intervening years. I really have trouble reading such a huge book and providing cogent and valuable criticism of it without playing, just because it’s hard to process it all; it’s a text of amazing scope, with 7 starting characters, about 50 unlockable characters, about 50 chapters (each with unique mechanics), plus 50 pages of appendices that you’re not supposed to look at, hidden mechanics, a packet full of stickers and a Forbidden Envelope. I attempted this by reading a few chapters a day for about a week, and scribbling my thoughts down as I went, then assembling them as best I could at the end.
Here’s what’s basically going on in this game: Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is a collection of mini-games (“chapters”) that you proceed through as you choose. Each mini-game has a different cast which you share, and so you might play Sal in one game and Amelie in the next. Characters have strengths and weaknesses (whoopsies and bingoes), and after each chapter a few things happen, which cause a sense of time passing and characters growing, adding to their shelves or journeys. Each chapter is intended to be short — less than 90 minutes — so you might play a few chapters in a single sitting. Each chapter has unique rules, although feature similarities, and might need extra stuff which is usually commonly available like scraps of paper, index cards or playing cards. Each chapter also has a mood, which helps you pick what you’re wanting to play.
Yazeba’s frames itself (although not formally) as the licensed RPG of a children’s cartoon. It does this, however, as a way of framing more adult stories and themes, which cover a gamut of themes that can be challenging if you choose to engage with them — although I think you could choose not to, thanks to the frame and the element of choice around both your actions and the chapters you choose to play through. Certainly, this is, while being a joy-filled and fun-loving text in a lot of ways, a game that engages actively with challenging themes around queerness and self-isolation in a way that can be really confronting and it uses the framing to temper those themes to be more palatable and easily engaged with. This is something many children’s stories do, which may be why it succeeds. The rules text is filled with prose interjections from within the world, often from the perspective of the main cast, and the chapters themselves often involve a lot of read-aloud text to set the scene. In general, these are just lovely to read, but for me the initially made the book easy to read, but the deeper I got into its’ 500 pages I had more difficulty reading them and processing them as they jumped from new mechanic to storybook prose and back again. The writing is gorgeous, though, and given the sheer number of writers involved, I think that it’s a hell of an achievement for it to come across as so cohesive.
The chapters aren’t difficult to play (compared to any other individual game), and some of them are clever and most of them are a lot of fun, but you do have to figure them out together whenever you choose not to repeat a chapter. A few highlights from the starter chapters (not the locked ones that come later): Ollie Ollie Oxenfree, where you draw a collaborative map of the Bed & Breakfast and then hide in it, and Gone Fishin’, where you create a custom deck of fish to fish from. I really like some of the locked chapters, and one hidden chapter which involves a treasure hunt feels an absolute joy. There are all kinds of surprises to find. I prefer the chapters where everyone is adventuring, or some variation of that, than the chapters that are explicitly about character development for one of the characters — that said, however, the nice thing about those chapters is that you may pick ice skating without realising that when you pick Parish you’ll be making permanent decisions about who he is, and that shared development is a lot of fun to me. As the game goes on and becomes deeper, the complexity of the chapters match this: While I can see the intent here, chapters like Yazeba Casts a Spell, which benefit from by this point many sessions of build up, become a little unwieldy, and I would have trouble facilitating them as a Concierge without either experience running them before, or a fair bit of prep time — they’re a little anxiety provoking for me in terms of scale. Some of them are very compelling, too, though: One late-game chapter where you explore a ruin is something that many people would release as its’ own game, here just a chapter and the cumulation of a single character’s story. Overall, I think the hardest thing to recommend about Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is the breadth of play possibility here: Many tables might stumble into chapters they don’t know how to play, or don’t feel comfortable in that kind of play, or that involve a physicality or a mood of play that they can’t engage in well, and I think that’s quite unavoidable, even though the game tries to answer this through labelling and indexes and smart incorporated safety tools. Even with these things, the only way to curate for the things that you feel comfortable with is to not play a significant part of the game, and that, for someone like me, I’m not “finishing” the game — and this is a game that can be finished. For example, while Yazeba’s zenith is a fun, if mundane hour of play, it flagged with the pensive tag, Gertrude’s “Home” is intended as a fairly challenging exploration of her past, and it features among others the heavy tag. Aside from “heavy” you have to read it to see if it is too much for you, and if it is — you don’t get to finish Gertrude’s story. In the creation of something of this scale, you have to make some curation decisions, and I don’t think the better decision would have been to leave out the “heavy” chapters because clearly the creators wanted the game to have a breadth from vulnerability to party, but for those who don’t play their roleplaying games for that emotional catharsis or engagement, you’re missing out on a lot of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. For those who want the opportunity to take tours through these characters and explore things in ways they have never explored before, however, chapters like this are the juice of the game, and will make a really effective zenith for those characters. This breadth goes in other directions, as well, though: Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast feels like a game to be played at a coffee table, not at a kitchen table. Some of these games evolve you standing in front of your friends and performing. Some involve literally moving around the space you’re physically in as the players. You can — this is definitely an option, just like using a character voice or not is always an option — just describe what’s going on, but for many of these chapters, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast wants to transcend what we view TTRPGs to be, incorporating physical and ritualistic play, incorporating embodiment of your characters and fourth-wall breaking, in a way that most TTRPGs don’t ask you to. Yazeba’s in a way, feels designed to put everyone out of their comfort zone, somewhere in the book.
The core and developing cast are a huge part of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and I think that it’s really compelling being provided the potential to develop those characters together as a group, and things like the Forbidden Envelope also mean that some of those developments are hidden from view until you play the right chapters in certain ways, or achieve certain milestones. There is a breadth of characters in the book that is large enough that it would be a lie to say that you can’t play as a wide range of experiences, however, it’s also pretty clear that the game is not about all of those characters and their growth, but rather it’s about some specific characters and their coming of age. There’ll be some push back against my use of that word, but I genuinely think that a theme here is even the “older” characters like Parish and Yazeba are frozen in a specific moment, and their stories are about understanding themselves and overcoming those specific moments, to become who they want or are meant to be. I don’t think this is said explicitly in the text — although there’s a lot of text and I might be misremembering — but there it feels implicit in the prologue text — “the world was cruel and there was a witch who knew it well, and so she sold her heart to build a house in teh woods where the world could never find her” — that all of these guests are taking refuge here, are hiding from the world. It is explicit, however, that (spoilers, I suppose, for unlockable rules) when a character grows up, they leave the Bed & Breakfast, and their chapters are locked. Being in this liminal witch-cast Bed & Breakfast, for most of the guests, is a stepping stone to their becoming who they want to be, and most of the chapters, and particularly the locked chapters, involve specific cast members taking steps along that journey, and so it is a game that is unavoidably heartfelt and emotionally resonant for almost anyone who has felt they wanted to hide from the world, but eventually realised that stasis may not be the way forward. These stories of growth and variations on youth and struggling with where you fit in the world and how you make a place for yourself are the stories you’re playing this game for.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast comes with stickers, expects you to mark the book up, and expects you to open the envelope that comes with it. It uses terminology like “scraps of paper” and “doodle” and “paperclip”, because it wants the book to be used and marked and torn and changed. The character sheets are in the book, right in the middle, as are the journeys and book shelves. The intent is for the book to be modified in play: an expensive, beautiful, 500 page work of art of a rulebook is rendered mutable and fluid by play. I’m not sure if it’s the intent, but it feels like as written you may not have the character sheet of your character in front of you the whole game, so much like children’s memory, what you are playing and who you are, and the decisions you make, are as fluid as a child’s memory, and may merge together, like Spidey and the Octonauts becoming part of a single universe in the playground. As well as this interest in memory and what it means to inhabit a place and share characters that are vulnerable to the inconsistency of memory, Yazeba’s is deeply interested in the book itself as a physical artifact of play, in a really interesting way, though. There are chapters that involve searching through the book, chapters are out of order and it expects you to engage with the book itself as players. The book is not just for the Concierge, even if it’s anticipated that the Concierge purchase the book. I think this is really interesting, particularly when taken as a part of Possum Creek’s output as a whole — a few years earlier we have Wanderhome, where a huge amount of the content is in a gazeteer in the forms of tables, and in calendars changing seasons. There are lots of surprises in Wanderhome if you play it deeply and long enough, and you can see Yazeba’s interest in its’ physical, changing tome as an extension of that. But furthermore, if you look at the in-process Seven Part Pact, you can see it extended even further, where the rulebook stands in as a spellbook, one that you need to follow the rules of, and spend time understanding, and one that rewards increasingly more physicality as part of its play: the book (and the physical things the book asks you to bring to it) are the game more literally than in most TTRPGs. This feels to me like a really interesting response to the question of “How can TTRPGS be more like board games?”. Board games in the age of crowdfunding advertise themselves and thrive on premium tokens, on deluxe physicality, even as the basic versions still resemble boardgames of yore. That physicality is really meaningful to your experience of a board game — be it the destructive physicality of Risk Legacy, or the extreme use of miniatures and terrain in wargames, or bespoke carved wooden tokens and dials, and games like this feel like they are a recognition of the fact that while the book is a core part of my understanding of TTRPGs, we can still ask how we can bring that deluxe physicality to TTRPGS if we can make the book respond to our play the same way a board game might, without simply adding extra tchotchkes. It’s interesting stuff, and a compelling direction for TTRPGs to pursue.
While this is a compelling and fascinating direction, there is a tension between form and function in TTRPGs as they struggle with increasing production values, but also want to be lived-in artefacts of play. A Thousand Year Old Vampire — a game which I remember creator Jay Dragon playing in serial when it was released, and so I suspect is an influence here if a tangential one — is a beautiful book, that wants to be written in, wants to be scrawled in, and whose form does not match that desire at all. Many people have argued that destroying something of beauty is the point of what Tim Hutchings is going for in A Thousand Year Old Vampire, but I don’t think that’s my objection: It’s the fact that A Thousand Year Old Vampire as a book is not a good vehicle for the game the book is asking me to play in it. Part of this is the paper quality, the binding, the heavily-produced but beautiful pages, but not because they’re beautiful, but rather that ink smudges, that there are no boxes to tick or places to write things, and that it leaves it up to you how to record things and how to understand the game: It’s easy to find people talking about how to play it if you google it, which make me feel I’m not alone in this experience. Yazeba’s, also treads this line, as a gorgeous tome of a book. The child-like nature of the layout, art, and presentation, makes me feel more comfortable to modify, but the size of the book causes a mismatch in function for me: This is a tome, one of the biggest books I have on my shelf. And so, while I love doodling and adding stickers, and while I think the character sheets (shared, of course) are intentionally in the book and not easily found to be printed off, I think the issue with Yazeba’s format is that the book’s size isn’t compatible with easily passing around the table during play, or perhaps isn’t bloating absurdly with paper that has been endlessly stickered upon with new rules. I want Yazeba’s to be a smaller book, but one that is bulging at the seems. I suspect Yazeba’s — although less of an imposing book it may have been — would have worked better as a series of books. Now, I didn’t back for the boxed set (it costs almost $300 right now in my country), and I wonder if the play aids in the boxed set — a “ledger” for example — might have occupied that space for me had I been in a more liquid position back when I’d backed this. About 100 pages of this book by my count is stuff that could be moved into a secondary book specifically for marking up, that would be easier to pass around the table. But that might also steal some of the magic away. And, the presence of the tome is also important to the role I see this game playing in the theoretical home it is played in: This is a game that lives on the coffee table, waiting for people to become curious about, to discover new things about, to be surprised by. Without the thickness and beauty of the tome, and its stickers and changes, it perhaps loses that presence.
I have gotten this deep into a review without mentioning the art, nor the layout: They’re both spectacular. Vibrant, childlike, generous, and bold. A friend of mine is absolutely obsessed with Triangle Agency, and particularly loves its’ locked sections and its’ wall-breaking approach to layout. In my opinion, Ruby Lavin’s layout for Yazeba’s attempts to do what Triangle Agency does in terms of breaking the fourth wall and becoming a play artefact, but in a more accessible, charming, and interesting way. I know that to a degree the inaccessibility of Triangle Agency is the point: I don’t care, though, I bounce off the lack of accessibility in the text. I prefer everything Yazeba’s does to the same ends, in the way it does it. It’s wonderful to have to hold up a chapter you’ve discovered in the mirror to read it; it’s drudgery to to wade through the overwhelming mess that are the latter parts of Triangle Agency’s Manager’s section. It brings a smile to your face to discover that you’re playing D&D all of a sudden for a night instead of Yazebas’s; that trick is repeated many times in Yazena’s, and only once in Triangle Agency. Many of the layout conceits here are secretly covers for later trickery in terms of gameplay. Where Triangle Agency leans so hard into its’ conceit it’s unplayable, Yazeba plays its’ conceit with you, successfully. It’s legible where it needs to be, but where the navigation is a challenge it’s for a purpose — again something Triangle Agency attempts but does not succeed comparatively at. I don’t know that it’s perfect, but it is playful, clever, and creative, and feels almost universally like the children’s TV show that it imagines itself to be, despite the barriers.
So, is Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast for you? I don’t know. It’s beautiful, both as an artifact and a work of writing. It is filled with joy and love and warmth. I imagine Yazeba’s being a formative part of growing up, for some young adults: I’m living in a sharehouse, and a big ol’ coffee-stained copy of Yazeba’s sits on the table, along with a mason jar filled with tokens and stickers and a pair of scissors, and every night we play through one or two chapters. We run around the house playing games with Hey Kid and Sal. People flick through and either surreptitiously read locked chapters and realise — how can I play this? Or find hidden chapters that aren’t in the index. When I was younger, I did this! But in my current life, does Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast fit into my life as well as I hoped it would? No. Maybe I could adapt it: An online free-for all, where the number of players showing up dictates the chapter played. Or, if I lived next door to my bestie, she could come over and play on odd nights where the kids were busy watching a movie. More realistically, I might play this with my children, when they’re old enough to understand the game, in five years time. This game and its messages would mean the world to a kid the age of its protagonists. The main barrier is the scope of the work: The index helps, but it doesn’t actually list all the moods, for big groups or for small ones, for example. Yazeba’s rewards it being the main game you play, for a time, where everyone gets familiar with the rules, and it’s easier. As is, even though the individual games are straightforward, there’s a learning curve there that can be tricky. There are barriers to this being the game I wanted it to be, in the life I’m living at the moment.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, to be honest, is far more compelling, meaningful and interesting that I expected, but for me, that success limits how I can fit it into my life — for now, at least. It would have been easier had I not read the damned book — the first few chapters fit my preconceptions far better without the knowledge of what is to come. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is, however, unequivocally a masterpiece, in terms of being one of few games that captures not just a type of story or mood within its pages, but the sense of being a certain age with all of its ups and downs. The ideal audience for it is one has the energy for its’ most energetic chapters, sometimes. That feels excited to step out of their comfort zone and play tag or perform a song in front of their peers as if they were a cartoon frog. That want to learn new mechanics always, but are quick to forget and care about youth and memory. That want to engage in vulnerable and emotional story arcs, but not all the time. If your table is the kind to be excited and engaged new opportunities to roleplay in different modes, and to expand and contract their level of vulnerability readily, then Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is absolutely going to work for you. I have one proviso, though, and it will be of no surprise if you actually read the review: This game is so interested in physicality that you really, really should get a physical copy: The problem is, it’s no longer in print. But, there are a few places you can still buy the book and the boxed set if you do some diligent searching. If you read this and thought: “Oh yeah, I want to play that”, I’d probably track down one of those last few remaining copies, rather than buy the digital version, or grab a Print on Demand copy.
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.
Chateau Amongst the Stars is a 32 page module for Shadowdark by Anthony J. Zinni. In it, you explore chateau that has magically been transported into the sky above a village, raining massive items down upon it. If you can’t reverse the spell, the chateau will destroy the village on impact. I backed this as part of Zinequest
Structurally, Chateau Amongst the Stars has 3 pages of introduction, an 8 location chateau grounds, then the 49 location chateau itself. The layout is very good, particularly in the key — an attractive 2 column layout, utilising decoration and textual highlighting, bullets and excellent key art that looks good and aids navigation. The exceptional art and maps appears to be by William McAusland and Felipe da Silva Faria, although its hard to tell. Sidebars are inverted, and bring a gothic feel through decoration rather than hard to read type. There is some art on most spreads, and the maps are good looking but functional. This is solid stuff.
Three of the hooks out of six, are solidly juicy. Honestly, it’s a rare thing I get excited by hooks lately, and it was great to see how these have the players focusing on different aspects of the Chateau — I just wish they’d all passed the bar. You start the module with these, technically, but the module proper starts with some admittedly pretty boxed text, and the combination of the two is clumsy. I’d rather a briefer boxed text, or just the hooks, than the combination — this is a bit too much narration up front for me.
The writing is, for me, workmanlike, but pleasingly terse, after the style of Necrotic Gnome. Read aloud text in the bulk of the module is brief and useful. The NPC descriptions, however, are immensely interactive, and there are 3 in the grounds. They use a structure of situation / what they’re like / what they want, which is a good take on NPCs. These are the kinds of touches that make modules like this memorable. Random encounters, however, are a little too random for my taste, with only 1 of 12 being tied to any specific event or location; there are also 6 for the grounds and 6 for all 49 rooms — we need unique biome random encounters for something this big, or at least more variation. This generic, random selection, along with the lack of string theming in the light of “chaos” effects, means that the chateau comes across as more generic than Shadowdark typically pitches itself. There is also a complete lack of page referencing, which makes me suspect that referrers other than the author have not read or attempted to run this — how am I supposed to describe “description of the kytherian mechanism” without a page reference, unless I’ve memorised the whole module?
Puzzles and interactive points of interest aren’t consistently OSR-style challenges, although there is space for them to be treated as such. There are puzzles without clues — perhaps it’s obvious to some that you press the button with the statue’s finger, but I think there should be a clue deeper into the dungeon for those who didn’t get it. I’m playing Blue Prince, and the best thing about it is hearing people talk about the different ways they figured out the solutions. If you’re including puzzles, make sure there are multiple solutions. But make them hard puzzles to balance this out! At least one here is a riddle so easy that it isn’t even a challenge (“Surround me, with a substance from the sea. A ring of crystal, that remains when you distill”) — I’m not sure why this is even a riddle?
Sadly, in terms of spatial design, the chateau falls into the mansion problem: Houses make boring dungeon shapes. They have too many exits, and loop so much as to make exploration trite. The chaos theme could’ve been used to justify some weirder spaces (as could the collapsing from above and dropping chunks to the ground below), but sadly advantage wasn’t taken.
The events table acts as a timer to provide a deadline, but there are a few odd aspects to it. It’s not clear why the environment becomes more deadly over time — it feels like random encounters would decrease as doom approaches given they’re largely creatures. The events themselves — likely because there are 21 of them — don’t really bring an aggressive sense of time proceeding, and the fact that you’re counting rounds seems fiddly and too granular to me. That’s not to say it wouldn’t work — just potentially there are ways of making the same progress more elegant.
Overall, the bulk of Chateau Amongst the Stars is a really solid dungeon. The chaos theme makes for a less cohesive space than I’d prefer, and it begins to feel quite generic D&D — something Shadowdark feels like it’s trying to avoid. I like a few proper biome changes when a dungeon is touching half a century’s worth of rooms, and this doesn’t offer that. It’s also a very high level dungeon — it’s good to see them existing, but it feels like you’re putting a team together especially to play this. If you do, though, there’re probably 5 or 6 sessions in this 32 page book. This is a solid beer and pretzels dungeon, but with some tweaks — improvements on the puzzles and interactions, and the NPCs being more prominent inside the dungeon and not just on the grounds — this could have been a classic. I’ll certainly keep an eye out for Zini in the future, as if the game design can develop to match the visual design, future modules are going to be a treat. But if you’re looking for a higher level, beer and pretzels dungeon for Shadowdark, I’d look no further than Chateau Amongst the Stars.
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.
Standoff at Rotten Springs is a 1-page zungeon for Frontier Scum by Brendan Albano, written as an expansion to Gertie’s Guide to Rotten Springs. In it you rescue a team of archeologists who plan to excavate the heat engine powering rotten springs, who the local hermit has taken hostage.
This is hand-written in a single page, and I love the DIY attitude this brings. The map is a node-based thing, which, uses some neat annotation to communicate information.
There is some really neat interactivity here, for a one-pager: There are conflicts between the hermit and the archaeologists, at least one moral dilemma and a logistical one, which may potentially make for some really fun stories evolving out of this. I love that the titular stand off is almost entirely social rather than one of violence — my favourite kind of stand off.
Overall, you’re running Frontier Scum, or a system that matches the vibe (Eco-mofos or Vaults of Vaarn would fit fine I think), Stand-off at Rotten Springs is a no-brainer — and it comes with a guide to the hot springs in general, which is a broader setting to incorporate. Very cool.
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.
This House Hungers is a 41 page survival horror module for Knave by Richard Gottlieb. In it, you explore a death-trap mansion abandoned by their noble owners, but with the words “Riches untold for whoever can claim them” on the door. I received a complimentary copy from the author.
I said 41 pages, but it might be 67 pages? It’s split up between a few different books, rather than in one. This makes it a little challenging to read, although I can see the appeal of having the key in one pile of papers, the general content in another, and the maps and handouts separate. It’s an example of what a module might look like if not tied to the concept of a published book — which it isn’t anymore, when published digitally. This is a largely art-free effort (aside from maps and the player handouts), and layout is basic, but very clear, and benefits from its use of the full A4 page, which is a good choice given its clearly intended to be printed at home for play. It would benefit from some additional navigation aids, though — something as simple as having the room numbers in the header would make it a little easier to navigate in a pinch. There are negatives, though, to this table-focused layout. the lack of art breaking up the text makes it more challenging to read, and it really doesn’t work reading digitally at all, as there are too many documents to flick through. Because it’s challenging to pre-read, it means you’re not prepared for gaps on the map or unclear keying when it does occur. Even if it might be easier to use at the table, I don’t think the multi-pamphlet layout is necessarily a home run.
The module opens with an explanation of what is actually going on, then a core timer mechanic that is tied to deaths that occur in the dungeon. This mechanic is very neat, although it requires at least 6 deaths to “end” the counter, which means you’re expecting a lot of character death. There are hooks assigned per character class (a perplexing choice for a classless system like Knave) — but I don’t think these hooks work at all. They don’t provide juicy worms at all, and the ones that almost do ask the referee to supplement the module with their own additions. It’s a minor matter to provide characters or at least corpses in the dungeon or specifics for each of these hooks — there are only 6 here — and doing so would add character as well. Use the character for one hook to be a backup henchmen found holed up somewhere, or to warn of the nature of a trap after they triggered it — it would really add a lot.
There are a bunch of NPCs and a few factions that are detailed here — basically the core family and 2 invading factions. The individual characters are largely compelling, and there are some very fun little possibilities that they instigate — they’ll cause issues and for your players in interesting ways — but I want factions to have conflicting motives that are very clear — both to me as the referee and to the players. Spelling it out more would be better, in my opinion, especially given the choices in breaking this up from the main key — it’s absolutely not clear how these will interact. When I read a module, I want to be excited when I read a bunch of factions — the potential in these is not communicated well at all. In addition, a lot of these characters and factions instigate quests — these aren’t here, but rather in the key where you meet them. For me, keeping all this information in one place really aids in running things.
This is a 60 room, 6 level dungeon — there’s an awful lot going on. The maps are separated out along with their associated random encounters, which provide each floor with a unique flavour, which I like in theory, but with only 10 to 15 rooms on each floor, and 12 items on each table, the flavour is heavily diluted — I would cut these in half at most, as on most levels you’ll only meet 2 or 3 encounters, and I want the story of the level to be clear. These separated out maps will be helpful at the table, but reading digitally it’s a challenge to draw lines between map content and key content, which, like with the factions, makes it harder to get excited — within a few rooms, you’re not clear what magical items your players have stumbled upon, and have to refer to another document in an appendix to find the, which dampens that building excitement you get when finding fun connections in a module. The puzzles are pretty consistent and fun, although with the intent that you don’t read through the key, I think that referencing the locations for the solutions would help a lot in understanding the space. I also think that more generally, there aren’t a lot of flags for the meanings behind things — for example, I didn’t find a place that told the players what the grandfather clock indicated, and I feel like most players would miss the main clue given that the chimes will only occur a maximum of 5 times before they occur. Puzzles like that, and the musical puzzle, would benefit from having audio “handouts” in the same way there are physical handouts for other puzzles — but I really appreciate the range of different puzzle types that occur here. All said, room-by-room and floor-by-floor, this is a really competently put together dungeon, with solvable puzzles, clear mechanisms, that really rewards approaching challenges in creative ways, and telescopes danger effectively most of the time even while keeping danger levels high. It might all come together in play, but it doesn’t really come together on a read through, due primarily I think to the structural choices.
This House Hungers pitches itself as horror, but what it looks like in practice is a a darkly humorous meat grinder with gothic trappings. I like this theme, a lot, to be honest. The ticking clock elements won’t work if characters aren’t dying regularly. This feels like a major aspect to frontline if you’re pitching it to your players, and it should probably be a little more obvious on storefronts as well.
Overall, this is a pretty great module for Knave, if you’re interested in a haunted mansion with a lot of player death and dark humour. I think it would benefit from a re-organisation, and I’d prefer it in a different format, but your mileage may vary on that count — this is a pretty significant sized dungeon that you can print at home with ease. For the right table, this is pretty fantastic, it just might not be right for me. But, maybe that’s my desire for a bit more flash talking; Illustrated in a style aping Edward Gorey or something similar, and given a solid developmental edit, this would be a beautiful module dripping aesthetics, that I’d probably buy in print based on vibes matching the content so well. As is, in a Knave ecosystem desperate for content, This House Hungers is the best and largest module I’m aware of, and it’s probably effective as a centrepiece of a campaign given the likelihood of player death.
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.
Crypt of the Void Singer is a 12 page zungeon for Shadowdark, by Ghostwood Hotel. In it, you travel into a cave system beneath a collapsed shrine, to rescue a lost novice.
We start with a page of NPCs — this is a cool way to incorporate rumours, make them personal, and get across the back lore in a few different perspectives to the players. Each of these 4 characters give me strong vibes, and if you’re a character actor of a referee you’ll have a ball with them. This is a 9 room dungeon, with the keys being on the longer side — half a page or so on average. These rooms lean heavily on the music theme, which I adore, and the monsters are all bespoke and weird. There are empty rooms here, but nothing is boring at all, and it’s all pretty compelling in a wide variety of different ways.
There is a list of factions later in the module — I think this could’ve been briefer, as I don’t think everyone here is really a faction that interacts meaningfully with each other. But for a small dungeon, there are still 6 or 7 characters with agendas that conflict — and that’s absolute fire — but I also like how they incorporate Shadowdark’s alignments into these agendas.
Layout for Crypt of the Void Singer is pretty appealing to me — it’s a monotype font, used textures, subtle shadows and public domain art — so it feels super ziney, particularly the exceptional cover. It’s a 2 column layout, using clear highlights. It would need a tweak were it any longer, but for a module this size, I dig it a lot.
Overall, there’s a lot to like about Crypt of the Void Singer. I think more thought could be put into exactly how the factions interact, because there’s a lot going on here, but what you’re going to get is some weird and compelling rooms, and a lot of NPC chaos, and if that’s what you’re after, I’d drop this into your campaign, especially if you’re going to run Western Reaches, which Crypt of the Void Singer really matches in terms of vibes.
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 White Horse of Lowvale is a 53 page system agnostic module with art, layout and writing by Tania Herrero. In it, the beast Nykur plagues the village of Lowvale, and you are hired to put an end to the menace. Where Crown of Salt was Herrero tackling a dungeon, the White Horse of Lowvale tackles a village and wilderness in her characteristic style. I backed this during Zinequest, for a print copy (I picked up Crown of Salt by the same author in print as well).
As with Crown of Salt, it’s difficult to break the White Horse of Lowvale down, because it doesn’t follow any traditional structure. Of the overall text, about 8 are in a picture book format, featuring folk tales. As my friend Derek astutely noted, these pages you could spin around and read out to your players, effectively. Most of the book is key, though. The writing is creative and works synchronously with the art in a unique way — for example, the hook is presented as a wanted poster. The printed book itself is gorgeous, solid and with premium paper, and I’d recommend the print copy over digital, as I found it very easy to let my glaze over when reading the digital version, where it wasn’t easy to comprehend in print. The art is astoundingly good, and many individual spreads are a work of art in and of themselves. I think there are a few small missteps — the keys have an opening paragraph that didn’t follow my eye’s natural draw, which meant I kept starting in the middle of the entry — but for the most part the layout is peerless. And the writing here is incredibly evocative, especially where it breaks into the “picture book” sections; it is, however, not brief, and meanders a lot, and with the lack of highlighting, I lose a lot of the content to memory. Some people prefer this though, and it’s an elegant take on a traditional longer form text — your mileage may vary. A smart addition here is the highlighted sections that help guide the referee to basic needs — meals, markets, henchmen and healers, and later system agnostic “stat blocks”; these make picking out the parts you need mechanically or regularly, a little easier. More attention to this in paragraph would have helped me.
Structurally, it expects the referee to intuit how to run it, and I don’t think it succeeds — we’ll get back to that. The aforementioned wanted poster is a tight frame, which allows the text, which is meandering and generous, to be approached with some direction. The layout, art, and writing working together are top notch, but there is little page-to-page consistency which limits navigability, except if you’re looking for specific art, which here serves as the most important navigation beacon. There are a number of structural issues, though, that would have benefited from a developmental edit. For example, the mill is the last item in the village key, but it should be the first thing to be visited: The information here is delivered as the answer to the “question” of the village, but I don’t think that this improves the experience of the read in the context of it being a module. Starting here would help the referee see what’s coming and what they’re looking for, and make the trail of breadcrumbs clearer. I think the assumption is that, because you’ve read the whole module, you’ll be able to incorporate a lot of information, but I’d appreciate more guidance here, as I struggled to see how the players wouldn’t be quickly slaughtered by literal invincible foes, despite those breadcrumbs being there. There’s a clear trajectory through the module that’s expected here — from the children to Goodfellow, to Nana Taga, to the beast, encountering the Green Knight on the way, collecting these fairy’s true names and runes as you go. But there’s a chance you’ll never encounter the Green Knight — this is an essential encounter that’s gated behind randomness, and also not all players would loot this body for the essential item he carries. Restructuring this would help a lot — as is, if the referee is not taking notes you’ll struggle to communicate it to your players. I didn’t get it until my second read, and due to the lack of highlighting, you can’t skim for any information.
Mechanically, there are a few misses for me. The Woods themselves use a mix of “fixed” and “unfixed” hexes, with random encounters layered on top. I’m not a fan of randomised locations in general, but here there are 6 unfixed hexes and 9 empty hexes to fill them with. This means you’re getting repetition, but also that a lot of them could have just been fixed. The goal, I think, was a sense of being lost in a fairy realm here, but I think that removing the capacity to get a sense of where you are really clashes with the necessity of this being a hex crawl at all. If you are able to explore the hexes in a systematic way, hexcrawls make sense. If you can’t — should they just be random encounters? Or should this be a point crawl? Certainly, the random encounters tie into the hexes in a pleasant way, and make for interactions that are pleasing when combined with both fixed and unfixed hexes. A larger issue is the fact that a few of these unfixed hexes are essential — if you luck out and don’t find them, you can’t slay the beast. I think what this is saying is that in play, Hererro is expecting the referee to make sure this hex is encountered — there are more elegant ways to do this, though, and I think they should be implemented in terms of travel structure, rather than hoping the referee will realise and fudge the roll. Exploring this won’t be uninteresting, but it might feel pointless, particularly if you stumble across the same unfixed hexes repeatedly. Complicating matters is the fact that there is a rigid timer — 4 days, and after the first, 1 source of important information is killed. I love a module on a timer, but I am genuinely worried that with all the combat, there’s a decent chance that the party will die or have to retreat a number of times, and by the time they make it, it might be too late — and then, your employer is killed, so the party just…leaves Lowvale? This feels unsatisfying to me. Either I’d soften the timer, or strengthen the faction play so you might play them off each other a bit more, because it feels like it might be too dangerous a module to complete in the time.
The sense of fairytale or folk horror in this module is exactly what I wanted. The encounters are equal parts creepy and eerie, and you fully buy between Lowvale and the Woods that you are participating in a fairytale, especially the unfixed locations. Every encounter is iconic. But it might be too much. With 13 locations, all packed with unique and individually compelling fairytale encounters, the density feels a little much for me? There are no breathers, and you need to travel through 5 hexes minimum to find the beast that is your goal; and it’s unlikely that you’ll travel there via a direct route. To me, this places it solidly in the adventure tour category of module — you’re here for the vibes and to inhabit these encounters, not for exploration or problem-solving; but there are some solid combat encounters here, meaning the party are going to face serious danger.
For me, more referee advice would be helpful. Hererro does include referee advice, and referee-facing information, so I think that choosing not to include it is more of a mistake than if she had decided to omit any at all. You’ll need to read through this once or maybe twice, and take notes, and make references, if you want to run this. Whether this works for you or not is probably something to consider — I typically don’t want to do this work, and I wish Herrera could find an approach to bridge the gap, but the strength of Herrero’s writing and art combine to outweigh the negatives for me here. Similarly, the complete system-agnosticism — which wasn’t present in Crown of Salt — feels like Herrero doubling down on her immersion conceit, and I think it works really well, but it compounds the issue of requiring additional work on behalf of the referee to get to the table.
I’ve read White Horse of Lowvale 3 times now, once in digital and twice in print, and the module it reminds me most of is the Isle — the first module since the Isle I’ve read that mimics the sense that it was written as much as an experience for the reader and referee as it was as something to be run. Whenever Herrero is given the choice of how to structure, she chooses to ask questions and then drip-feed you the answers later, making for a fun mystery of a read. Characters are developed, I think, in service of the narrative — for example the players don’t care that Tarna wants to move to the city to escape this all, except in that it’s sad when she’s taken by the beast — repeatedly I wondered why things were relevant, and I don’t think they were to the game at play, but rather to the experience of the reader. This is as much a story told through the format of a module as it is a module itself. The seams here — where Hererro rubs up on the borders between these two formats — are abrasive, though. The traditional module structure clashes with the needs of the fairy tale. That said, I think this is exceeds the Isle as an experiment of trying to make the twain meet. It’s a progression in many ways away from what we liked about the Isle and towards a better version of that category of modules. Hererro brings characterization and a density of concept here that she did not bring in the already compelling Crown of Salt, and I can’t wait to see where she goes next. I hope she finds a way to make those seams less abrasive without making it less playable, rather than moving in a direction more similar to the Isle.
If you’re looking for something that will provide you with a lot of support in running, or your table likes spatial puzzles and methodical crawling, the White Horse of Lowvale is not for you. If you’re looking for a dark tour through a village inhabited by people haunted by the Wood that surrounds them, and then a carnival ride of dark fairy encounters in the Wood itself, however, I’d check it out. It will require a bit of work on your behalf, I suspect, however, unless you’re very good at reading things closely and remembering things clearly. If you’re a sucker for high quality print editions and out-of-this world art, I’d also give it a look. In general, it makes for an amazing read, in terms of writing and conceptual density: This is wall to wall powerful writing and compelling encounters. I’m certainly very happy to have it on my shelf, and if you have friends who’re into dark fairy tales, the White Horse of Lowvale is an excellent pitch.
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Playful Void 