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 Valley of Flowers is a 150 page setting and module for Old School Essentials and Cairn by Jedediah Berry & Andrew McAlpine. This is a monster undertaking, and features everything you need to adventure in the Valley of Flowers, an arthurian-inspired setting, including multiple points of interest complete with unique maps, a full area hex map and a city map.
It’s so massive I’m having trouble figuring out where to start. The layout here is impeccable and has great vibes — floral borders, clear, readable headings, ornate initial lettering, clear signalling such as grey boxed text for characters and yellow boxed text for other points of interest, as well as text colour changes. The borders change colour with section, while remaining ornate. Statting a module of this size for two systems is usually a mess, but here it’s completely unobtrusive. It uses every aspect of its typography and layout to strong effect. More colour releases should use their money this well.
It opens with 15 pages of general information and introduction; this was a stumbling block for me I admit, the long prose and unclear applicability really put me off continuing to read for some time. Once we get past that, though, we hit the jackpot with a pointcrawl of back-to-back locations. They reasonably vary significantly in complexity, but the most complex (major population centres, a whole bucketload of dungeons) are up to 8 or 9 pages, with the briefest at 2 pages. A lot of these are neat enough to review on their own — but that’s too huge an undertaking for this particular bath. Suffice to say, they’re all solid, and just with these two thirds of the book, you could certainly run an arthurian-style romantic fantasy campaign that looks to be a hell of a lot of fun, something the last book I reviewed that attempted it — Barrow Keep — failed to do so in comparison.
But that’s only two thirds of the book accounted for. The final third is a city, Cimbrine. It comes mapped, with major points of interest detailed. It falls short compared to a city module like Fever Dreaming Marlinko, but it’s very strong. A major failing is a reliance on character and location generation, intended I think to magnify the scope of the city. Instead it just makes it harder to run. I’m not opposed to generators — they use a similar method for generating merchant encounters which is honestly perfect for a bustling market. But just give me a list of nobles and their relationships, or a list of the towers of the city, please.
Is it without flaws? No. There are locations — the market and bazaar for example — that lack descriptions that I’d have liked to differentiate them from the rest of the nearby locations. This is representative of a lack of attention to detail that prevents the Valley of Flowers from being a five star act.
A major criticism I have of the book in general is a heavy reliance on rumour tables to direct traffic to points of interest. I’d have loved to see this in random encounters as well, but their use to this end is limited. For something of this kind of scope, a little procedure for restocking already seen encounters and rumours would have been beneficial as well; I’m not criticising the choice of 6 encounters and 6 rumours per area, but I could see them drying up quickly without a method to either restock or to add variety to those encounters, perhaps a second d6 roll to diversify the details of the encounter.
Another criticism is the map of the Valley. we have five hexes, with seven or more points of interest in each. Most of them are connected by trails — that’s a nice touch — but you definitely can’t wander through this wilderness. I’d have preferred if this had had a smaller hex key, or had just chosen to be a point crawl instead. Hopefully that hex crawl will become more meaningful with the promised expansion?
It’s heavily illustrated and for the most part the art is just fantastic, but the I find the lack of style matching in the artist selection a little jarring; it swings from inked to painted to sketched and back again very quickly. The maps similarly are of massively varying style. This is a case where I think the scope of the book met with the budget and the presentation has suffered. That said, while some of the maps are flat out ugly in my opinion (the Abbey comes to mind), most of the art individually is a perfect match with the vibes; it just clashes tremendously amongst itself.
Y’know what, I haven’t talked about the writing itself. There’s a lot of it, but in short, terse sentences, just like I like it. What’s the sun doing today? “Sneaking along the horizon like a cat, casting long shadows.” What’s happening tonight? “Settling a dispute between two phantoms possessing the same woman.” Who’s in the inn? “Sir Amis the Indefatigable (haggard, tired, knight).” I didn’t cherry pick those, I opened the book randomly to three pages and picked something compelling. There places, though, where this beautiful writing fills three paragraphs at the top of a new location my players just arrived in, and I don’t really want to pause for a few minutes while I figure out what’s going on. There are some locations that use for points to separate out salient information; this probably is a feature that could have been used less sparingly.
Individually, nothing in Valley of Flowers is a five star effort, but the whole package? Nothing else compares that I’ve seen. This is a success on a scope I see only expansive and expensive products like Dolmenwood attempting, to be frank. You could play in this for a year, and on the cover it says there’s a second volume coming. You could start here and strap yourself in for the long haul. I’m talking 37 locations on the map, and a city to boot. If you’re looking for something to keep you and your table occupied for a while, and you’re looking for a romantic vibe, this right here? Has it in spades. Honestly it’s such a pleasant surprise, if I’d read this in December when I’d planned to, I’d have given it a Novie Award.
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