Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique well-regarded modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.
I reached out on the Cairn discord to see if there were any up and coming module writers who’d be happy for me to review them, in the knowledge they were hobbyists. I got a good number of recommendations, which I’ll be tackling in upcoming months. One is, Ingrown Hairs. Ingrown Hairs is an 8-page module for Cairn by giantrobottackler. This is the definition of hobbyist: It’s on A4 paper, hand-drawn maps in Microsoft Paint, public domain art. But, one of the most acclaimed modules in recent release, Wolves Upon the Coast, ain’t got much in the way of layout, and relies on its writing to pull it through, so these reviews will be an excuse to focus on what’s important.
In terms of layout, Ingrown Hairs uses the A4 format very well spatially, with 1 location per column for the majority of the text. It uses a bullet-style presentation, which works well in this two-column format, although I think I’d do away with the dot points for the stat blocks and the exit descriptions, and distinguish them better with font choice and simply not being dot points. The paucity of fonts and point sizes in the text does contribute to a challenging read, but it’s functional. I especially like the touch of including sign (or what I tend to refer to as omens) on each of the exit choices.
The author opens with terse humour in a casual voice, and it works well in my opinion, although it probably needed a second person to read over it before going to print for some line-editing. I don’t mind the approach at all of writing an ostensibly horror module in a dry voice, but sadly the voice mainly exists in the introductory sections, where the location descriptions (the majority of the module) are in a drier descriptive style. I would have loved the humour to remain present throughout the module.
On the other hand, I really like the descriptions in the locations for the most part. They’re no more than three sentences per bullet point, and can be quite evocative, for example thorny vines “drawn slithering to blood, and a fresh supply causes them to become engorged and sluggish”, or a horse-sized crow “its skin itches with bark-filled bumps, desperate for growth”. It also has neat world-building clues scattered throughout, like “every good hearth has a small tending spirit, though most stay hidden”.
The authors good writing is held in tension with a lot of functional writing, particularly exit descriptions. My gut feeling is that here is where a better map may have made the module more runnable, because these descriptions could have been on the map rather than tagged onto the end of each location, and I’d spend less time looking forwards and backwards. The map actually shows a lot of information, and for a small number of locations (11 in total), it has some nice loops, including an additional route back to the village. Perhaps another solution that would fit a minimalist approach would be to number the paths.
Ingrown hairs is a damned good free module, all in all. Regardless of flaws, this is a module I could run from the paper without any preparation other than printing the map on a separate piece of paper and maybe labelling the paths on it for ease. It’s written well, and the mysterious author is one to keep an eye on for future modules, if this is anything to go on.
It’s been a big week for releases for me this week!
I mentioned a few days ago that I’d released my Mothership module written in collaboration with Hodag! It’s called HELL ON REV-X, and is a depth crawl through a derelict space hulk with four factions to interact with! I’m really proud of it and it looks hot! Get it here!
And today, I released a new edition of Hiss, this one with full stats for creatures and treasure for Cairn by Yochai Gal! I prefer the agnostic version, mainly because I had to shuffle the layout a little to fit all the extra text into the same amount of pages, but you can run Cairn straight from the zine now! If you bought the agnostic edition of Hiss, this one is free for the next month or so, but after it you’ll have to pay for the new edition. Get it here!
Yesterday, I finally released the first episode of Dungeon Regular, my capsule podcast reviewing the modules in Dungeon Magazine, starting with Issue #1, September 1986. I was inspired to start this because I love the short format of Monster Man, so each episode is less than 10 minutes long, but I’m not sure I can keep up that show’s incredible pace with everything else on my plate. I’ve been planning to start for a year and a half, and it took this long for the same reason! The direct link is here, but just look it up on your favourite podcast directory (I use Pocket Casts!). The production quality needs to be improved, so I’ve started a Ko-fi as well, to help fund hosting and better equipment and production software, and if we achieve those goals, also help me fund modules for Bathtub Reviews. If you want to support me that way, rather than buying HELL ON REV-X or HISS: Cairn Edition, My Ko-Fi is in the sidebar or support me here!
People wonder why I write modules in the unique style I do, and wonder how the hell I run games the way I do, and I’m always like “well, anticanon and blorb play aren’t mutually exclusive” and then they’re like “please explain” and I’m like “I can’t, read Bridewell or Hiss maybe that will help”.
Lich’s Libram gets it. I have no more to add at this time.
So today, I released HELL ON REV-X, a Mothership module I collaborated with HODAG on. Here’s the pitch:
The Revelation X, a derelict city-sized generation ship, is adrift. Something apocalyptic is amiss. A space cult! An extradimensional god! A resurrected alien civilisation! A malevolent AI! Welcome to HELL ON REV-X, a depthcrawl for Mothership RPG, by HODAG and me! Out now!
I did something unusual with this release. Instead of giving away free community copies, I charged for them. The minimum I could without accruing a cost after store and paypal cuts. But it’s not free. I still won’t make money from them, but they’re not free. With the proviso that if you can’t afford a community copy, I’ll just give you one of you ask me.
Why am I trialling this? Well, because I find it really hard to believe all 90 claimed community copies of my last release, Hiss, are actually getting played. I would love to believe they are or will be, but I doubt it. They’re just sitting in peoples libraries preventing 90 other marginalised person from actually playing it. Assuminggood faith on behalf of those 90 claimants.
But either paying a little, or asking me directly means a buyer is really interested in the module. So my hypothesis is this: I won’t give away as many community copies with a fee, but those that do charge or reach out to me will run the module.
If I’m right, I’m excited to see people playing this more. If I’m wrong, I’ll go back to the way I’ve always done it.
Update! My original arrangement broke itch.io’s systems, so I’ve changed it to having to choose between a discount copy and a full priced copy. Let’s see how successful this, less ideal version is!
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique 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.
Hounds of Hendenburgh is a 20 page module by Liam Pádraig Ó Cuilleanáin, for Cairn. It’s an entry to the A Village, A Forest, A Dungeon Jam that I’ve been looking at select modules from to draw attention to interesting and exciting things up and coming creators are doing. It’s about a village under attack by a pack of spectral hounds.
While the layout choices aren’t the prettiest here, Liam takes excellent advantage of public domain art and chooses an extremely clear layout and formalised structure that makes Hounds very easy to run. It’s broken clearly into sections, often devoting one entire column of its two column layout to a single section. Stat blocks and treasures are separated out and given unique highlighting. It’s a little formal for my aesthetic tastes, but it’s very clear who is who and what must be done.
The writing flits between overly verbose and the colourfully succinct, but needed a second pass. I loved “Shifty and beady-eyed, Elisabeth is avoided by the villagers, who avoid the barn she requisitioned as a makeshift morgue.”, for example, but the entire paragraph on the Crones is full of redundancies. I really like the villagers, who aren’t exactly dense on petty politics, but who often have their own secrets. I think this would be a fun village to run. The formal conceit isn’t too strictly adhered to here, either, to it’s benefit: some characters have the subheading “The Whole Truth” if they’re hiding something, but others do not but rather have “Might ask the party” or “Might offer the party”. This is excellent use of formal structure for usability.
I’m torn about the hooks and the “Defeating the Hounds” sections. The hooks are a little vague, and don’t directly tie into the hounds. One could make the argument the third, a deed worthless until the hounds are gone, is tied in, but it involves a fair bit of fluffing about. I appreciate the clarity the Defeating the Hounds section provides, but it also feels limiting, and I fear the party would become listless if they missed the next step in the algorithm. The adventure relies on the confluence of rumour, hook to make specific plot threads occur, and they feel not quite tight enough. This is actually one reason I pedantically call rumours secrets: The suggestion that this is just stuff people know and will talk about. You’re less generous with rumours. It might also be fun to frame it as gossip in a petty town like this one.
I really like the forest key here; terse punchy and evocative pretty consistently. “The most ancient of the crones. Stands 10 ft tall. Naked apart from the cloud of flies that cling to her old leathery flesh. Speaks in a sonorous and booming voice that shakes the treetops.” It does feel like the Highwaymen’s Tower could have been treated as a dungeon though, given its high importance to a key plot point. I would have preferred the random encounters incorporate a little more world-building, though: The Kryptwood is supposedly an ancient and evil place, so it feels weird that so many of these encounters are relatively mundane.
The dungeon, the Tyrant’s Tomb, has me feeling mixed. There is a lot to love: There are bored riddling skeletons. There is an evil wraith who’ll grant you your wish for its freedom. There’s a very cool sword that needs to be bathed in brains for a day and a night to be recharged. But then, none of the solutions to the spectral hounds involves not clearing the tomb, which is disappointing. More exciting would be for each of them to be very different. Currently you must escort the Pastor there. Make the other two options equal parts special mission. The problem with that (and with the Pastor approach) is the creeping, unstoppable guardian, a feature I feel might be an irritatingly unsolvable problem killing key NPCs, rather than the ticking xenomorph-like clock it’s intended to be. I think it would’ve been best to include a non-combat solution to it, though, so you can succeed at the tomb through planning, or at least given it some personality to influence or a program to manipulate.
Overall, I really liked what Hounds was going for here. It would require a few tweaks in terms of hooks and in the final tomb to make things a bit more exciting and I’d probably straight up provide the three options for defeating the hounds so they can choose the one they find most interesting. I could see it being fun to find one method, fail, then try again, but it might also just be frustrating depending on the group. But it’s flavourful, fun, and generic enough to drop into your home campaign for a few weeks of digressions.
This is a polish-up of a tweetstorm I wrote a while ago. I keep forgetting that it’s better to write here than on Twitter; force of habit I guess.
I saw someone talking about how “only certain important NPCs really need detail”. I came to thinking of how I applied the concept “all NPCs are major” when writing Hiss and Bridewell.
Obviously this is an impossible aim — after all, there are potentially infinite NPCs — but this was a driving force for incorporating the sly and suggestive approach inspired by Haiku and Sijo I took to describing characters (and everything else) in them.
During writing of Bridewell, I realised that by choosing which NPCs are the main characters of the story, I’m choosing the direction the story may take by limiting the referees choices. If all NPCs are major, then any route the story takes is the right one. I am constantly surprised at the routes players of Hiss and Bridewell have taken, because any route is supported.
The trade off is to fit this amount of opportunity into the module, I can’t fit all these major characters into a book if I give them all one-page character descriptions. So the referee has to take the seeds that my short descriptions provide and let them grow in their own minds.
Practically I’ve found that I have two levels of description. I’ve got multiple sentence descriptions, usually two or three sentences in length, but up to five, used for characters that definitely exist, and I’ve got single sentence descriptions, usually two or three words in length, but up to five, used for characters that exist to be picked out of the crowd. These shorter descriptions usually come in lists — d6 in Hoss and d14 in Bridewell — for when the PCs as to grab someone off the street. A useful technique to make the world seem more real, is to include some of the longer described characters in these lists too. This results in the result of the d14 druid roll potentially being one of the townspeople you met in the pub, an actual campaign–redirecting even that occurred in Bridewell for instance.
I have utter confidence in referees, even less experienced referees, capacity to do this.
So when you’re thinking about writing NPCs, consider that by grouping PCs into major and minor, you’re effectively providing a railroad through characterisation. It’s impossible to remove all guidelines. But what would it look like for all your characters to be major characters and none of them bit players?
I’d love to see what your version of this might look like; no doubt very different from mine. But if you’re curious what gesturing towards this may look like, Hiss is a load of fun to run and it’s the first release where I’ve tried to do this. Bridewell is yet to be released, but it’s the same, but on a far larger scale.
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.
Hull Breach is a 230 page anthology of modules for Mothership, produced and edited by Ian Yusem, but with an ensemble set of authors and a flashy layout by Lone Archivist. It’s a unique and broad product, and one that hopefully will open the floodgates for similar ones that will further it’s innovations.
Hull Breach has multiple levels of organisation. Superficially, we have a series of Intels (advise for running specific challenging aspects of Mothership), then a series of directed Missions, then a series of Locations, and some Entities and Assets, and an Appendix. There are dense front and end papers, the front papers giving instructions on how to read this book. This structure for me, wasn’t successful. It starts very dense, and the front papers did not direct me successfully in how to approach the book. The Intel at the front made me feel as if I needed to wade through the entire chunk of advice before getting to the rest of the book, even though, to be clear, I don’t think this is the intended way to read the book. The front papers just don’t present a more straightforward approach with sufficient clarity, and so I bounced off Hull Breach a few times (hence the delayed review, I think I teased it in August?). For me, different structural approach might have have made this a less intimidating read.
But Hull Breach has a second, more innovative level of structure, which is how the articles are woven together, using the front papers, which connect campaign styles to matching articles, missions and locations, maps of systems that represent how the articles are connected spatially, maps of corporate relationships, and events that trigger when other events occur. This is a clever way to tie an anthology together, and I just wish it had been centralised and forefronted, because it’s not given enough breathing space in the front papers (I’d like just a little more guidance there), and a lot of important elements of running the campaign and relegated to appendixes (and hence easy to miss or dismiss). I think this would’ve been better as a first chapter, all put together and presented as campaign tools. This would place everything that came after in clearer context, and would have made for a less overwhelming read, especially for someone like me who isn’t going into this with “I want to run a rim space survival campaign”. It feels to me there was a tension here in the production team, between “these articles should be good enough to stand on their own” and “these articles should be interconnected”, and for me, what makes Hull Breach unique from other Mothership releases would’ve been better off leaning into the latter.
The “intel” section is mixed for me. There are two significant rules forks here: Manhunt and Wardenless. I’m unlikely to use the Manhunt or Wardenless rules, and they take up a considerable chunk of space. Wardenless is a solid referee-less (or referee-ful, as some style it) fork of Mothership using a standard card deck for randomisation; it provides mainly rules to arbitrate the wardens role in their absence. I haven’t playtested it but it reminds me of the best parts of other referee-less games like Ironsworn. I actually think a better approach to referee-less games are sharing roles more consistently (Galactic 2e provides a strong model here in my opinion), but this works, and to a degree fits the more traditional high lethality dungeon-crawl mode better. My main criticism is that I’d love more direct and specific prompts, and more of them, but that’s a personal preference, and the chosen prompt approach would be less likely to end up with strange contradictions; I understand the choice even if I don’t disagree with it. Manhunt on the other hand is plainly not the same game as Mothership; it’s not compatible with other modules, but comes with one of its own. I actually like it a lot on its own merits — it reminds me of the videogame Carrion, which I am a huge fan of — but where the strength of Mothership and of Hull Breach is the breadth of material and the worldbuilding, it feels wholly out of place.
The direct advice, on mysteries, hand-offs and describing terror, are excellent advice and provide concrete actions in the form of procedures, tables and generators. My favourite section though is the water piracy article, which provides a decent pirate crew and which feels modular in a way that I can see actively incorporating into a campaign or a series of encounters. In addition, it’s got some really fun writing: “Beanpole with boxy haircut and silver cybernetic eyes. Irritated by Lu’s constant mess in life support.” Juicy, fun stuff, just it really belongs in the Entities section.
The missions section is even moreso a mixed bag. Bones and Videotape is a pretty cool concept for an inter dimensional alien puzzle dungeon in the vein of Aberrant Reflections, but is hampered from an absolutely incoherent structure and layout. Helium Hysteria is a fun time-limited conspiracy crawl, with solid and clear layout and maps, and some excellent characters (“Apolitical ‘anarchist’ and self-proclaimed ‘rock star.’ Shaggy hair and custom patched uniform. Desperate to impress. Goes along with whatever the majority believes. Foam Gun.”, most of which are held in lists (the best use of a list in my opinion). Residue Processing is an evocative funnel with a dark humour that brings a lot to the horror scenario. Road Work is a fascinating experimental module that is an absolute organisational mess, but has the PCs exploring a small murder dungeon across multiple parallel universes. 1000 Jumps Too Far is a faction crawl upon a generation ship that best reflects the kind of play I’d like to see in a Mothership campaign, although its writing isn’t as punchy as some of the others (there’s still gold in them there hills, though: “Sabres sleep on bedding of crumpled reprimands and mission documentation.”). My favourite in isolation, though, Vibechete, is a slasher film homage with a spectacular point crawl; it winks at the referee flavourfully (“Exsanguinated, well dressed teenage corpses—all missing both hands— impaled upon scaffolding bars driven deep into hardwood. A (working!) bulky Flashlight bulges from one’s distended mouth.”)and leans into its pulpy inspirations, but also stands out considerably in vibe and aesthetic, and I don’t really see it fitting into the Corespace Intrigue campaign vibe it’s plugged into because of this. For all of these, though there are excellent modules in their own ways, but my main concern is that they’re mostly designed as slaughterhouses, which is contrary to the overall campaign goals of Hull Breach. I know absurdly deadly is Mothership’s modus operandi, but I think these missions needed to take an alternative approach to support the Hull Breach campaign.
Locations are consistently excellent, and use other risks than death as leverage: Escape Clause threatens servitude (and features some evocative word choice , “A lime green antiseptic pit. A jaundiced but energetic Prosecutor, Jaimye Novak sits behind a desk cluttered with pneumatic canisters and paperwork.”), for example. The Interstellar Mega Mart leaves interesting questions (like is it alive?). Procession is a procedurally generated megadungeon, built by repair robots gone awry, that falls flat due to the focus on procedure, and I really like the framing of the dungeon as completely unplanned. Terrifying Terraforms is a horrible planet generator that falls a little flat to me (I’d always prefer a module to give me a list of bespoke planets than a way to generate them). Wonderland is a resort cruise come living nightmare, which comes inadequately mapped in my opinion, and would be difficult to run even though it’s full of flavour. My favourite is a pirate station, Siesta-3, which is packed with hooks and interesting, self-interested factions, and well written descriptions (“Melancholic offworld musician. All-black fashion. Seeks spiritual experiences. Cannot keep a secret.”). I could base a campaign out of this location, it’s basically a lite version of A Pound of Flesh (which makes it doubly disappointing that the mystery Intel refers to A Pound of Flesh rather than this).
It’s fascinating reading an anthology of Mothership horror. It’s five times the Mothership content I’d usually read in a sitting, and it reveals that the number of angles taken on horror scenarios here are far broader than those taken in fantasy horror scenarios. Recently, on Between Two Cairns, Yochai Gal raised the idea that science fiction modules requires more thorough detail than fantasy modules, because we don’t have as clear a genre framework for sci-fi to improvise on. I wonder if this works the other way, here: The lack of a clear genre framework makes for more potential scenarios to envision, because the conventions are less restrictive. Certainly, everything here is horrifying in a different way, humorous in another, in a way that I suspect wouldn’t come across as compelling in a fantasy version of this anthology. If you’re looking for imagination, here is a good place to find it.
The Entities and Assets sections truly feel like accessories, but they’re excellent, especially the NPC lists. They probably deserve more pride of place, because some (advice on dealing with explosives, and teleportation rules, for example) feel like they belong in Intel. Appendices similarly are excellent, but I’ve discussed most of them already; they deserved more centrality as well.
Hull Breach comes in a beautiful A5 hardcover, fully illustrated and in colour, with a bookmark. If I were going to run a campaign, I’d want it in hand. The layout is not as flashy as Lone Archivist’ work on Another Bug Hunt, but is less consistent, with some sections needing a lot more coordination between writer and layout. Maps range from exceptional to empty connected boxes, which leaves me disappointed in the weaker links. I recognise the desire to make everything visually unique, but I don’t think it helps keep everything usable in an already complex piece of writing. [Edit: It’s been drawn to my attention that I misunderstood the credits, Lone Archivist didn’t do all the layout, just some of it. Potentially this is contributing to the variety of approaches I clashed with here].
Overall, there’s a whole lot of excellent words and modules in Hull Breach. Taken individually, there isn’t anything here that isn’t worth reading, and little I wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend to bring to table. Taken as a campaign, I think many of the modules miss the mark with regards to lethality and a lack of imagination regarding consequences of failure. On the other hand, if I wanted to run Mothership regularly, I could build a world out of Hull Breach, and that brings something to Mothership we haven’t really seen before: a campaign setting. And when taken as the Forgotten Realms of Mothership, while I’d have made some different decisions had that been my goal, this is an excellent resource. I also think that, while there’s a lot to be learnt from the flaws in Hull Breach, there’s much more to learn from its structural successes and how it ties disparate articles together into a cohesive working class horror setting. A volume 2 of Hull Breach that leant harder into interconnectivity and collaboration would be a must buy for me.
For you, there are a lot of reasons you might find this worth looking at: You want a Mothership setting? This is excellent fodder. Want advice on being a better referee? There’s some great advice here that supplements the new Warden’s guide. Want more Mothership modules, but sick of your zine pile always falling down? Consider Hull Breach, this will give you a years worth of content if not more. Hull Breach is a hell of an anthology, and only flawed in that it doesn’t lean harder into its conceits and innovations.
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.
I was going to playtest my new module Hiss today, but I couldn’t get numbers, so instead I’m going to read Heart: The City Beneath. Heart is a large format hardcover game by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor, that uses the Resistance system popularised by Spire and is set in the same world, but this isn’t a game about rebellion, it’s a game about dungeon delving. I heard great things about Heart, and I’ve been excited to sink my teeth into it. My first exposure to it was the heavily modified version played by Friends at the Table for their Sangfielle campaign, which was exceptional, but which I admittedly burnt out on after a dozen episodes as I do with most FATT seasons.
Heart, like Trophy Gold, believes that dungeon delving is inherently an existential horror fantasy: “Each player character is fundamentally doomed, as most of the high-level abilities kill the user when triggered. This isn’t a game about long-term exploration and growth. It’s about flawed, obsessive people making bad decisions.” I love horror dungeon crawls, but my concern with the storytelling about the inevitable doom of your characters approach is that it removes the kindness and optimism from the game that usually exists in the form of your characters actions: They are brave, they think they’ll be ok, and in traditional dungeon crawling, the game is born of those who survive, not those who are doomed. Here instead of retirement, they always die.
Heart is wordy as all get out, from the get go. The writing isn’t punchy, but it’s good. It’s written for people new to the hobby, so a page on “what does a player do” numbs me a little, especially as, and I’m sorry about this Grant, I find it hard to believe any new players are picking up the horror dungeon crawl spin off of the dark elf rebellion game as their first roleplaying game.
It’s also pretty. Striking colours, well set out for a dense multicolumn layout. It could use space, but the claustrophobic choices, if perhaps not intentionally, are evocative of the theme. The art is consistently excellent by Felix Miall. There’s something exciting that occurs whenever a single illustrator does a whole book.
The basic rules to the resistance system are six pages in the book, and are summarised in 1 page at the end of the book. It’s a resource management game at its core, with five resistances, which are basically hit point pools, and a some skills, and areas of knowledge. You make a pool of dice, roll it, and act accordingly. The interpretation of the dice roll is a little fiddly, but nothing if compared to, say, the Genesys system which I’ve had successful games in, so I dare say you’d get used to it quickly.
Most of the rules are character creation, and most of that are classes, which are not even slightly generic and are flavourful in a way that isn’t to my taste: “the Vermissian Knights do their level best to understand the parasite reality and protect others they find there” is a great class, but both the knights and the Vermissian itself get a decent amount of exposition. I’d honestly rather this be a “Psychic maelstrom” of Apocalypse World type of vague amorphous concept, which is something this book does with the Heart itself. The class powers are interesting and flavourful, stuff like “You get everyone out alive, if not intact” and “Incarne’s presence thrums through you; you are resplendent, terrible, and hard to look at directly.” with mechanics attached to these excellent descriptions that are admittedly, far less exciting although useful (“Once per situation, if you are wearing your Debtor’s Reds and incur stress, you can mark stress to Supplies instead of another resistance.”).
The Rules in Detail section takes a relatively elegant ruleset and completely murders it. Suddenly the tier of challenge relates to different dice sizes of stress, there are two ways to determine the results of actions depending on how many dice you roll, healing stress occurs in different ways, combat has actions, fallout is in a huge multi page list of specific types that you’ll have to remember eventually. It’s a mess. I don’t mind a complex game, but the complexity here feels like flaw and not something that will contribute to strategic decision making. There are a few positives, though, like the structure for “delves” (off-road travel) which are neat and well structured, akin to a GM driven variation on skill challenges which make them very easy to run.
I despise the Running the Game section in Heart. It needs to read and learn from Apocalypse World 2e, because it’s a solid 20 pages of tips, that probably should have been reduced to half of that more more likely a quarter of the length. If it’s all truly that important (it’s not) it needs structure instead of paragraph after paragraph of conversational text. Technically, it appears there are large swathes that you can ignore, but I still have to scan it all and it’s a huge incomprensible drag. It even ends the advice with “you’ll never stop being nervous”, which is supposed to be reassuring, but honestly fails to be after twenty pages of things to remember while you run a massive complex book, and it’s not true at all,at least for games that aren’t Heart.
I rail against gazetteers on this blog all the time, and the World of Heart section here is no different. I was first exposed to Heart in Sangfielle, an actual play where the players all designed the world together and hacked Heart to fit it. That world had absurd amounts of lore and depth, but they made it themselves. It had power. The best thing in this section is the summary, because I’d actually use it, but it’s also the driest piece of writing here. I want it to be like this but dripping with flavour! That said, I do like the general usability of the individual landmarks, and if I limited myself to preparing to run 1 tier (equivalent to levels) and the delves between them, maybe it would be manageable.
The bestiary is five-star, honestly. Buy the pdf just for the bestiary ideas. There’s a hive of flightless owls, and burning pitch people. It’s good stuff. The legendary creatures — bosses — have generic names but fascinating descriptions and power sets, which is a weird choice I usually associate with science fiction, and I think undermines the world building elsewhere in the book.
The problem with Heart is that by reading the rules, I can’t see what the complexity adds, given at it’s heart (no pun intended) it’s no different to the skills system of, say, Trophy. Complexity is necessary and beneficial when it adds strategy and tactics to the game. Blades in the Dark and Lancer do this in different ways, but the complexity very clearly behooves them. I cannot see, nor get excited, about the implications of the complexity here.
Back when I read Spire, my impression was “this is cool, but it’d be better if it were Blades in the Dark”. The forged in the dark system just would have worked better for the story it was trying to tell, which was aptly demonstrated by Brinkwood using forged in the dark to tell a story of rebellion. As I read Heart, and am increasingly bewildered by its slow-drip rules that keep appearing the further into the book I read, I think something similar: Why don’t I adapt the good bits to some other elfgame with better rules?
Because there are good bits. The locations are good, and the spontaneous pointcrawl is a good idea that feels the mutant offspring of Nick L.S. Whelan’s flux space and Emmy Allen’s Gardens of Ynn depthcrawl. The vibe is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer meets megadungeon. I like that encumbrance and equipment is all folded into a resistance, it’s an elegant solution. But I don’t want to play these rules. They’re cumbersome eggs to begin with, and then they start to scramble them.
If you’re willing to put up with a wretched ruleset, or you’re already familiar with and enjoy the resistance system, and you like the idea of Annihilation meets megadungeon, the vibes here are impeccable. If not, I wouldn’t rush to buy this, although it’s a beautiful product. Listen to Sangfielle, which nails the vibe, read Annihilation. Buy Wet Grandpa or another module with annihilation vibes. Or if you’re really keen, and you loved the world of Spire, maybe buy this with the aim to adapt the contents to your game.
Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique 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 Rumbling Forest is a 32 page module for Cairn and Mangayaw, by Benj “Goobernuts”. It explores a Philippine fantasy setting, in a manner seemingly inspired by the work of Zedeck Siew and Cockamania.
Design here is amateur but clean. It uses public domain art, uses hexkit and dungeon crawl for its maps, and uses Clayton Noteskine’s classic explorer template to good effect. It uses a good but not jarring variety of spreads, and reserves sidebars sensibly for single column pages. This is exactly the type of module it was designed for, and I’m not sure any benefit would’ve been had in modifying it, except to assuage my unnecessary fears of homogenisation.
It opens with a flavourful timeline of events, placing us in a folkloric colonial Phillipines, facing off against cruel conquistadors and a horde of angry boars. I really like the smooth transition from the timeline to hooks used here. The writing is evocative, and alternates between poetic and functional in an appealing way. “A rumbling wave of boars, gracefully weaving in between trees.” I especially like how alien the conquistadors architecture is made to feel.
Information is very succinct, with structural sections serving multiple purposes: The timeline also provides factions with aims, for example, and sets them against each other. I admire this brevity, although I could use a little more formatting for it to stand out if I need to flip back through the zine. It’s brief enough that it may n out be necessary; Benj regularly posts session reports so I suspect this has been playtested at least with one group.
The hex map is a little unwieldy, though functional. It would benefit from having full location names on the spread, or having the empty hex landmarks and the random encounter table condensed. As is, it’s spread out over three and a half pages and I’d probably resent flicking to and fro here.
The keys however, are terse, brief. Absolute fire. Easy to run. I’d rather a denser layout here so that one location is fit to a spread, but it’s a nitpick, I could make this work without any prep at all. I’d like less tables in the village of Barangay Tindigan, mainly because you could have fit a whole cast in the space it took for the generators, and it would’ve been more useful at the table. This village is the least useful section of the book; I’d have trouble running it and making it a bustling village without adding a fair bit of prep. But it’s still flavourful as all get out. The forest and the dungeons in it keep up the quality and the pace. The hooks involve hunting, but I’d prefer clearer hooks to specific hexes when it’s so exploration driven.
A brief aside: I’m not a fan of false rumours, although I like partial truths. I don’t think there’s ever enough player good faith or time to waste on aimless lies. One false rumour here points you to a key location, Sunken River, but deters you from visiting, if you’re playing either major faction as the superstitious folk they are suggested to be. Not a great choice in my opinion.
The Fates of the Forest and Folk section comes towards the end comes with a huge amount of ammunition for the ongoing campaign and the finale, as well as the flow on effects. It’s beautiful and flavourful, but I’d have loved to have this all happening so simultaneously with the rest of the module. I see where you’d want to have a leisurely exploration here, there’s so much to explore. But I think more pressure would only be a positive thing when the outcomes are only apocalyptic. I also don’t think these co sequences are clearly laid out in the text; for example, the Kamagong Diwata is must be killed to game the forest, but this isn’t signalled anywhere else in the text. Some more clarity around these would be better folded into the main text or the character descriptions.
Overall, this is a fantastic effort. It’s mostly playable straight from the zine, you get at least two or three sessions out of the box, and it definitely has room to expand into a larger campaign. It’s got a unique flavour, as well, as most of the south-east asian stuff I’ve read is folkloric rather than leaning on colonial times for its inspiration. Cool stuff. I would definitely make time to run this. It’s affordable and there community copies for the marginalised, I don’t see any reason not to pick this up if you like the idea of playing an apocalyptic dungeon crawl on an island being invaded by Spanish colonisers.
This post is cool, and communicates three principles:
Trick Monsters are easy to defeat if you know the trick
Trick Monsters are arduous to defeat if you don’t know the trick
Vary the trick so that it makes other, harder monsters easier to beat later.
This is fun and cool. Think about video game bosses. Pikmin 4 does this well. You could build this into anything:
The Wizards of Millinery wear pointed hats from which they gain their powers. They are stunned for a moment when they are knocked off, and cannot cast spells until they regain it. They are lead by a two-headed giant who wears a hat on each head, and also wields a club.
Dragon-tortoises are iron shelled and breath interdimensional warp. They are invulnerable to all damage, unless they are knocked on their back by a charge, grapple, or similar. Their belly is highly vulnerable to damage. The father-tortoise exists in five dimensions; he must be knocked onto his belly twice in a row, and hence onto his fifth dimensional belly, to be damaged.
Cookie Monsters are devouring monstrous giant cookies. Remove their choc chips to weaken them. The Titan Cookie has raisins, indistinguishable from choc chips. Which ones do you attack?
Bombardier Worms are burrowing brutes that blow boulders out their maws after sucking a spectacular vacuum through a blowhole. Blocking their blowhole renders them impotent until they clear it. The Bombardier Queen has three blowholes, each on a different side of her body. Only one must be blocked, but you must position yourself to be able to see it.
Serpent guards have snakes attached to their necks. Remove their snake, and they are rendered inert robots. The Serpent Queen appears a titan in golden armour, with thirteen giant snakes for hair. Kill the snakes, not the giant.
I’m sure you can do better and be more creative, but this is cool and fun. More trick monsters!
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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.
Playful Void 