• Bathtub Review: Neverland

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Neverland is a one hundred and thirty five page hex crawl based on the stories of Peter Pan, written and illustrated by Andrew Kolb. I purchased it about three years ago and ran it in Dungeon World, although it’s written for Fifth Edition. It is the first large module that I ever ran directly from the book without copious preparatory re-writing. I adored it at the time as one of the best modules I’d run, and I decided to bathtub review it because I’m curious to see if I still feel it holds up in my esteem, especially with the recent release of a spiritual sequel, Oz, which I’ll be getting in July.

    When I say one hundred and thirty five pages, really there’s an additional thirty pages on top of that of short stories and concept art, which strikes me strongly as self-indulgent. The book structure itself is (roughly) ten pages of rules, forty pages of NPCs and bestiary, twenty-five pages of hex fills, ten pages of fairy-land, thirty-five pages of location maps and keys relating back to the hex fills, and ten or so pages of random tables. Given the book is large, I’ll break it down by section.

    The rules section seems half superfluous and half Andrew’s House Rules. Fifth edition doesn’t have good travel rules, and I don’t mind these very simple ones. The island changes and morphs over 24 hours, which is a neat way to keep a smallish hexcrawl interesting. Lots of rules like chase sequences and scavenging just seem unnecessary. This section is just overwritten and unnecessary and doesn’t put me in a place where I’m excited to run the expensive book I’ve just purchased.

    The section supposed to summarise the adventure is here too, and the problem here is that there’s a lot going on and it all appears to be happening everywhere at once. This means that you’re given the strong impression immediately that you need to be all over the actions of fifteen separate factions, which is an immediate turn off for me, who has no doubt forgotten the first faction by the time she has read the last one. Such a large book should have a lot of moving parts, the problem here is that they’re all introduced at once, rather than by region or by hex or location.

    This same problem continues with the heavily structured “Cast” section. It’s a combination NPC and bestiary. I like the terseness of the bestiary sections — a beast gets a paragraph of description and a huge fifth edition stat block. NPCs get fifth edition Trauts, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws, a structure I don’t find awfully useful. I dislike how I have to navigate the whole bestiary to get a sense for major characters at play and their drives, but in play it’s a convenient glossary for the most part. I don’t love it but it works, for a module that’s intended to be a lot of combat and shenanigans.

    The hex fill section has a fairly useless quick reference, two versions of the map (one not illustrated and in tiny font), and then single-page hex fills with zoomed in maps, short summaries, special time-related events, random exploration table, and a fairly complex multi-roll encounter table. There’s a tiny useless map that shows (kind of) which hexes are adjacent, but doesn’t tell you more than that hexes number well.

    The meat here is the random encounter table, where between one and four random encounters will occur in each hex, or every four hours. There are something like a hundred possible encounter combinations from the encounter table, which tells us a lot about how this is expected to be played: An encounter-heavy exploration crawl, heavily incentivising avoiding overground travel using shortcuts like flying, magic lost boy trees and mermaid whirlpools. There is a loot table in the appendix, but clearly loot associated with these random encounters is an afterthought.

    Fairyland is a strange, brief, fascinating, plot essential afterthought. The fairies are elevated, they have a bunch of interesting rules and they steal children. Travel is random and kind of weirdly over complicated. You have to do significant preparation, which is contrary to the apparent intent of the rest of the book. I like it but the thirty wasted pages in this book would have been better just giving me more locations so I don’t have to write it myself.

    The maps in resources are incomplete. The advice is to pre-plan where NPCs are, what they’re doing, and why, and in my opinion this is what the book is for. Maps vary a lot — some are minimally keyed (“Tools Storage: Spare equipment and weapons kept here”, all abstract and not particularly useful as visual aids. Some are traditionally keyed (“100’ room, lake of acid of varying levels”). There’s good variety (even one location with randomly generated d100 rooms). And the art is all pretty cute. I like it. It’s just that key and art together don’t add up to locations that feel compelling or consistent.

    The random tables are great. Interesting where they need to be interesting, functional when they need to be functional. I especially like the rumour table which allows the GM to decide what’s true or not — honestly one of the most promising and interesting pieces of writing in the book.

    Overall, I think this was less compelling on this read through than I found it a few years ago when I ran it. The structure makes a lot of it easy to run, but hard to wrap your head around initially. There’s no on-ramp like starting locations and hooks are delegated to an appendix rather than the front of the book. The writing is workmanlike, and not particularly evocative, although there are a lot of concepts that are evocative and exciting to engage with. I personally would prefer evocative writing, because (for example) I have to wrap my head around Kolbs rules for shooting stars rather than be inspired by his writing about shooting stars — you may well feel that this low-density developed concept approach is better suited to the way you run or enjoy your games.

    More disappointing is the lack of consistency with the low-preparation design. A clear selling point and goal of this book is its capacity to pick up and run, but the location keys and the entire fairyland section runs contrary to this design goal. Given there was a bunch of wasted pages at the end of this book spent on fiction and concept art, I don’t feel like this particular design flaw is justified.

    I really like the design intentions and goals, and there’s a lot to learn from the directed layout choices and structural decisions. I’m excited to get my hands on Oz, to see whether Kolb has learnt from and refined his intentions here. I just wish that those intentions were consistently applied throughout this book.

    It’s a long book to read through with a lot of rules-active moving parts, and you’ll need to do some legwork to get up and running, but if you avoid fairyland or are happy to spend a fair bit of time preparing it in advance, there’s a lot of fun adventuring and faction play in this module. It’s pretty cheap on Amazon right now, if you’re at all interested you should probably check it out.

    29th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Tomb of the Swine Prophet

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Continuing my series of tiny modules, Tomb of the Swine Prophet is a four page generic OSR dungeon module by Nate Treme, where one of those four pages is the title page.

    The title page has a blurb which doubles as a hook, as well as foreshadows your foe in the dungeon. The second page contains the map and key to a ten room dungeon with five empty rooms. The best of the keys are one-sentence wonders, the others are all good and interesting rooms.

    The third page is a twenty item random encounter table you roll any time you enter one of the five empty rooms. These double as randomly populating these rooms with furnishings, reveal the factions movements, and introduce saltwater-themed creatures and traps into the dungeon. The keys aren’t as good as the rooms, but they’re all interesting. The final page is twelve once sentence unique treasures and stats for the three creatures found in the dungeon. Succinct and interesting.

    Overall, Tomb of the Swine Prophet is a fun, characterful dungeon that I’d enjoy throwing into any ocean-faring campaign or near any coastal town for a one-shot detour. In comparison to other small modules I’ve read, it isn’t as dense or exciting as Break Their Pride, but it’s more flavourful and evocative and easier to use than A Simple Dungeon, but perhaps more importantly the flavour is more to my taste.

    23rd April , 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bridewell Gothic: State of Play

    Forgive me for this pointless stream of consciousness, but I’m spending so much time on this project right now and I want to talk about it.

    My all-consuming project right now is Bridewell Gothic (or perhaps just Bridewell, that’s just not a great name for a project). It’s intended to be a system agnostic gothic sandbox mini-setting, inspired by how much of a failure every version of Ravenloft ever was, but especially Curse of Strahd. As a friend of the blog once, it’s “Strahd but good”.

    When I ran Curse of Strahd, I was taken by how bad a vampire story it told. There was no powerful god impossible to kill, but rather an interloper who peers over fences and makes flawed plans executed by incompetent lackeys. It was a Saturday morning cartoon of a module, with a purposeless forty year old dungeon at its center.

    In my esteem, vampire stories are about some pretty uncomfortable subjects — abuse, toxic relationships, the threat of violence. And gothic stories are about inter generational trauma, family conflict, the past returning to haunt you. A gothic horror sandbox has to allow you to be a part of these stories, and most likely not resolve the issues, because both vampire and gothic horror stories are tragedies.

    So the challenge I’ve set myself is to write this haunted valley full of broken people and with a monster emblematic of that time-haunted brokenness at its heart. I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge, but bad art is the side-effect of good art, so I think it’s worth my attempt.

    As I’ve written, I’ve realised things I’ve lacked and had to rewrite — too much, to be honest. I definitely departed on the journey without goals, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re trying to produce something compelling and unique.

    The rules I’m currently following are:

    • Individuals are members of families
    • A family’s story features a visual motif
    • A family’s store features a perspective on a theme
    • Every place and person is active in the world.

    And I’m finding interesting exceptions that are required by these rules I’ve set myself. I’m creating new motifs, or new versions of the motifs I named initially. I’m incorporating broken families in various ways everywhere — but because of this characters are proliferating, and hence as are connections between locations and stories, which is proving unwieldy. I’m finding that active can have many meanings — they can be isolated, with the stories resolving in situ rather than having wider consequences or even consequences for the party at all. And all of these discoveries I think are giving the mini-setting more depth and interest and tragedy.

    The fascinating thing here, is that in developing a tragic, gothic setting for OSR, and having to playtest it soon, I’m interested in what fun will be found in a broken, haunted, tragic setting such as this. It’s not grimdark at all, and it has its humour, but it’s overarching ambience is one of melancholy. This is very much the vibe of most of my RPG writing, but a whole setting will be an interesting sell, and I can’t wait to see how people respond to it.

    20th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: A Spy in the House of Eth

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    A Spy in the House of Eth is a sixty page module by Zedeck Siew for Best Left Buried. Full disclosure: Zedeck and I were talking on discord, and this module came up, so he comped me a copy.

    I’ll come right out and say the layout and typography doesn’t do this module any favours, for me at least. Formatting varies a lot within the text, intended to make things easier to read, but is a bit much and results in a less legible text. Certainly, the Best Left Buried boxed stat blocks could be a quarter of the size or even just bracketed, and it would make for easier reading. In this module, it feels like combat will play a relatively lower role in the proceedings and it gets more attention than it deserves. The bigger problem is the heading size and typeface choices, which make it genuinely difficult to identify and read subject changes. I struggled moving through the text in a way that I didn’t need to, especially as there is a lack of front-ended structural guidance aside from the map and the identification of the four major points of interest at the top of the table of contents.

    The writing itself, however is firing on all cylinders with regards to imagination, evocativeness and terseness. There’s very little here that I’d come up with myself (Dugong-folk with Man ‘o War slaves), and they are brief and specific enough that my imagination immediately snowballs into asking “What’s next?”. This level of imagination continues throughout the book; the value of sixty pages of surprises can’t be overstated. This is the kind of writing where I want to keep quoting the best bits. Especially appreciated are the many, “oh, and —” surprises, where an already interesting idea is given depth and life in a later table or entry (kingfishers laying eggs, for those in the know).

    Document structure is an ongoing challenge I think when writing sandboxes and hexcrawls. There’s a threefold difficulty here: This is a play-space intended to thrive when play is undirected, so there is no true beginning, no true ending, and must be left open for various approaches. So, where do you start?

    Zedeck’s answer here is to detail the various factions that inhabit the world, and then follow up with the locations. I think this is a reasonable approach. Most authors would decide to place NPCs in an appendix, but these are interesting and exciting foundations for a campaign and fronting them is a great idea to hook you. I’d be interested to know his reasoning behind the order of the locations displayed in the book, because to me this is where the scaffolding falls down. As a GM wanting to run this sandbox, the most logical place to start it isn’t in the northeastern wilderness of the map where the fourth point of interest is, but rather at the major port in the southwest which is proximate to two points of interest. What is happening with Weiren Oils is interesting, but it’s not the first interesting thing the PCs are likely to encounter. Encounters and connections are well indicated with page references, however, which makes it much easier to navigate.

    What would I change? Firstly, while I appreciate the subtlety of the gradually unraveling mysteries, a summary page would be appreciated, given you need to get a decent chunk of the way into the book before even meeting a spy. Secondly, more direction for where and when to start or hook the party would be beneficial, given the structure implies a northeastern route, but the southwestern one makes more sense but also puts you in the path of greater danger. In every new location, there’s a list of “What is here?”. If these lists were cherry-picked out and placed next to or on the map, I think the connections and goals of the locations be easier to run.

    An example of the document structure betraying its own intentions is the placement of a key, ever-evolving hell-pollutant on page fifty-five. A very brief rule is here that describes how the greed-driven colonisation of hell has caused hell to seep into our reality, destroying and replacing what is there. This is one of two major storylines reflecting the overall themes of the piece, but I’ve already read much of the book without consideration of it. Better placed forward, or summarised early.

    The spiel on the back of the book doesn’t do a great job of selling what’s in the book in my opinion; it’s a bit vague regarding the specifics of what you’re exploring the hexcrawl for; these specifics are interesting though, but they’re really well buried in implication within the module. I think that the fact that this is set in a colonised land, features hellish pollutions destroying the environment caused by the invaders, features slaves in an uprising against their owners, and that the players are asked to pick sides, places this module in a unique position that isn’t well stated outside the text itself. It’s a message that took 60 pages to communicate and would take many sessions to play through, but probably needs to be summarised for the sake of selling to the table and for ease of play.

    Overall, Spy in the House of Eth is a powerhouse of evocative writing and conceptual density, hamstrung by a lack of scaffolding to step into the world and to navigate it. If you’re happy to expect to read sixty pages closely and take notes to run it (let’s face it, plenty of modules ask more, I’m a harsh critic), this is one of the better longer modules I’ve read, and I’d recommend it.

    16th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Module Design and Scaffolding

    I read Throne of Avarice this morning on its release, which brands itself a “setting book and procedural generation toolbox.”. I considered writing a review of it, but I’ve been avoiding reviewing new releases as my Bathtub Reviews can be quite critical. But I found myself encountering a very specific problem.

    Front cover, by Ben Brown

    This book is jam packed with lists, most of them unique, interesting and well-written, and almost none of them well-tethered. I don’t think every list needs to be tethered to a concept! But the problem is that it’s never clear to me which list I should consult in a given moment. There are groups of lists, sure: to generate a location roll on these three lists. But I need to get to that section of the book to find out that that group of lists exists. There’s no sign pointing me there.

    This is easily solved: Individual items are as good in this book as something like Fever Dreaming Marlinko and if the author (Brian Yaksha) had chosen to, they could easily have formatted it as a more concrete world to great success. I think this would have worked better than what I read, but it’s clearly not the design intention. I’m not sure it’s a real solution if it runs contrary to the design intent.

    I think the problem is a lack of what I’m going to term scaffolding: An overarching structural framework that allows the reader to organically explore the world in a way that invites delving further with intention. I can think of a few scaffolding types off the top of my head.

    A narrative scaffold is presenting a core story and allowing the larger setting to be footnotes to that story. A mechanical scaffold is presenting a core mechanic which points to various sections of the larger setting in its outputs (an overland travel system for example). A structural scaffold is designing the module such that as you read it you are pointed deeper (or back further) into the module.

    I’m certain there are other scaffolding types that I haven’t thought of, but I think that in writing a sandbox or tool-based module, it’s important to consider that navigation can be the most significant barrier to accessing the creativity you’re putting on display, and placing an appropriate scaffold in place to allow your readers to navigate your material is just as important as putting good material down on paper.

    15th April 2023,

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: You Got A Job On The Garbage Barge

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    You Got A Job On The Garbage Barge (hereon simply Garbage Barge) is a 64 page module by Amanda Lee Franck. I call it a module, but it’s kind of a setting masquerading as a module? I might have backed it on Kickstarter, I can’t remember. I’m a big fan of some of the luminaries involved, I’m in a discord and have played games with some of them. It’s fully illustrated with generic OSR stats.

    Garbage Barge’s setting is pretty unique; it is kind of inconsistently maybe early 20th century technology? It certainly is a setting for a micro-campaign I suspect, as chances are it wouldn’t fit very well into many existing campaigns unless the garbage barge itself was re-framed as some kind of interdimensional entity that didn’t belong there, and appears in cities at random, as it traverses the grand totality of rivers trawling for garbage. But, from the tangent I just went on, it’s definitely an evocative unique setting, and because it’s vague and wide-spread, it isn’t too challenging to add to or incorporate more into. It mightn’t be perfect for every campaign, but it probably is an excellent launching pad for a campaign.

    It opens with an excellent map of the Garbage Barge, and I suspect this map inspired the contents rather than the other way around. Travel is primarily by magical pneumatic tube, effectively rendering it a point crawl. It’s not outright stated, but I think that it’d be best run as if it were a subway, i.e. with signage or by using a subway map maker. This is all very neat. I suspect the map inspired the contents because the keyed locations range from a number of pages to a single sentence.

    These keyed locations have some pretty gutsy sentences though, they’re very concept dense although they are not very encounter dense. It feels like I’d spend most of my time just hanging out with the people I bump into randomly, even the ones that are interesting, weird or magical. The first true hostile encounter doesn’t give much in the way of characterisation, which is disappointing. Further in, there are a few given more interesting levers to pull: Clams who want dental work, for example, or a snake needing friendship but somewhat toxic in its methods. The locations take up the first twenty or so pages (or so? I haven’t located the last two yet). The non-combat, non-specific encounters, however, are just gold, and it’s gold overall.

    The next fifteen pages are people and creatures that inhabit the garbage barge. Lots of stat blocks, these people are meant to be fought it seems. These are all weird and dirty people and I like them all, but there’s little reference to them in the locations, and little reason to incorporate them with a few specific exceptions; I like the content but I want more support in using them. There is a random encounter table in an appendix, which has page references and incorporates all of these (but not, it seems, the appendix creatures), but it’s kind of hidden and I feel should be a little more front-loaded.

    There are a few short modules now, the first a small dungeon. The rooms in this dungeons each get three or four times as much space as the garbage barge locations itself, which honestly makes me reel with uncertainty regarding what the hell this actually is. The maps are excellent, though, clarifying the space very well while keeping the sketchy aesthetic of the art. The second is a character heavy dive into the depths of the garbage, which is weird and excellent, but very dense and wordy and I would have to copy and paste it and make it into bullet points and break it up for more space and relevance in order to run it.

    There is an appendix on garbage smells and an appendix on trash searching, which includes what appears to be a 5e bard subclass and a bunch of smell-related people and creatures. These are nice additions. I probably won’t use any of the smell stuff, because it isn’t referenced by the random encounter table or any of the rest of the book and also I wouldn’t run this (well, anything given the choice) in 5e.

    Overall, this is weird and flawed but very engaging. As a module or setting, it feels a little directionless. Perhaps this is a symptom of Kickstarter stretch goals resulting in a number of long digressions by guest creators, all of which are pretty great individually but all of which stand out from the ‘natural’ text. But there are also some design issues, like, this could do with a ‘Mothership’ pass in terms of putting the random encounter table at the front, talking about what happens when travelling the subway, things like that. There’s nothing wrong with a product that is simply there to kindle your imagination, but I distinctly do not feel like that is what this module is trying to be, and it needs a little more structure and infill to do what it wants.

    And then, to contradict myself, would I want to sully a product that’s evocative as this with rules? Like, probably not. I’m currently very intentionally writing a socio-gothic micro-setting, and I really hate putting rules in it. But some of the things Garbage Barge needs isn’t just rules (although subway guidance would help), but also filling in gaps in the world that are necessary, such as the subway, or putting the evocative and interesting people and creatures into places in the world rather than just saying they exist. I like this a lot, and I think I couldn’t run it even if I tried. I guess my takeaway learning from reading this, is that even if I choose to write system-agnostic and evocatively, I still need to consider scaffolding the writing more than I’d like from a purely creative perspective.

    11th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: A Simple Dungeon

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    After reading the stellar trifold pamphlet adventure Break Their Pride by A Woman’s Hand a few weeks ago, I wanted to look at a few other short adventures to compare it to. A Simple Dungeon is 6 page module by Micah Anderson, which is laid out in the Bastards house minimalist style.

    The first page is an abstract dungeon map (effectively a point crawl, using colours to differentiate secret or special passages), and it has a random d6 loot and omens, which are generic and not tied to specific encounters or treasure items (“Chittering”, “Spell”). I don’t see the point of these two tables in the slightest. The four hooks on the second page have some neat worldbuilding and are quite generic in a way that you could drop this into almost any campaign.

    A small hex map with eight locations that are keyed in one to two sentences come up next. A few of these are excellent for one to two sentence prompts, the implied encounter just jumps off the page. Most of them don’t bring much to the table for me.

    The rest of the module is the dungeon. These keys are two to four paragraphs. Compared to the rest of the module, these could probably be edited, although the layout makes them eminently readable. The location of the map on the inner cover makes it easy to find your way around. The minimal text successfully places tensions in the dungeon, between the troll, the goblins and the secret halfling, which is impressive given how few words are used and how small this module is.

    I’d be remiss to not comment on the public domain art and the layout and typography, which is for the most part beautiful and very much my jam. I think the extra space helps the dungeon rooms be more digestible, and I don’t mind the minimalist mapping. I don’t think the hex map art really matches the hex descriptions, which would make it more helpful. Some of the typography choices don’t match with the others in my opinion. But it’s a good looking module overall.

    I have mixed feelings about this module. It is nowhere near as exciting or evocative a module as Break Their Pride By A Woman’s Hand on the one hand, but as something to stick in a hex somewhere for a company to stumble upon it’s fine. Because of that, I can’t It’s probably a one-shot dungeon, so the mini-hex crawl seems like wasted space, especially given the dungeon key is much better than the hex key.

    It reminds me, in a way, of the earliest TSR modules that I’ve read, things like B2. They are not very well written, but the minimalism becomes a canvas that all players can paint on with abandon. A Simple Dungeons style of minimalism is more flavourful than most of the early TSR modules, but it’s similarly just fine by its nature. There is much to be considered with regards to what it means to write a module well, because I don’t quite have a grasp at why A Simple Dungeon feels well-designed, well written (for the most part) and boring all at the same time, but it kind of does feel that way.

    One criteria that has come up a few times in these bathtub reviews is concept density. This is not concept-dense: I could run the dungeon from memory right now, and I can remember the five or so cool ideas pretty easily to work into any location. Five or so cool idea isn’t that bad for a short module, but it’s also not that great. Break Their Pride By A Woman’s Hand also leaves a lot to the imagination of the GM, but contributes a lot of ideas that I couldn’t easily reproduce independently.

    I think that the best of the writing in A Simple Dungeon is about as good as it gets: Flavourful, exciting encounters in two sentences is something to aspire to. I think Ram of Save vs TPK said once that a good location key should fit into a tweet and that’s A Simple Dungeon at it’s best. That’s my major takeaway: You can always afford to be more concise. Edit your descriptions down until you could spit them out when you’re chewing stones.

    7th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: Break Their Pride By A Woman’s Hand

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Break Their Pride By A Woman’s Hand is a free trifold pamphlet module by Dan D. It is a point crawl through a city recently sacked by an invading army, who brings their god with them to desecrate enemy temples.

    This module is rad, although I’m not sure the trifold format behooves it. A number of mechanisms are at play that didn’t become clear to me immediately, but it’s short and concise enough that reading the whole module isn’t a chore at all.

    There are a few mechanics here, and a detailed final reckoning that to a degree makes the module goal-oriented. The subtitle, “Attack and Dethrone God”, is probably a better name than the apocryphal reference of the actual title, with regards to clearly identifying the goal of the module. The actual title implies a lot of unstated intent — namely that the PCs are likely citizens of the city, that the two titular women are likely to redeem the city.

    Most of the fourteen points of interest are one paragraph plus a number of bullet points, where bullet points specifically refer to dynamic aspects such as NPCs or clarifying options. Two NPCs are their own “points of interest”, and the invading God’s rules are split across sections which I don’t adore. There is a map with multiple options for entry and exit from all points of interest, and which you can use to track the invading gods movement.

    The naming conventions have old-testament bronze-aged vibes, and honestly I think the module should’ve leant into that more by naming more of the NPCs, or away from that (“The God”, “The City”, “The Invading Forces”) instead of going half way there.

    Overall, I think this is one of the strongest short adventures I’ve read. It’s concept dense, memorable, easy to run and interesting, with clear vectors for the PCs affecting the outcomes both at a micro and a macro level. Great if you want to write a dense pamphlet module and need to see what it looks like as a one-shot or to kick off a sandbox bronze age campaign.

    4th April, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: What We Give To Alien Gods

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    I have backed a lot of Mothership modules on Kickstarter. The system is neat, easy to learn and to play, and attracts a lot of talent. I wish I played more Mothership, and I’m excited to see a lot of the various expansions to it into campaign play. Lone Archivist wrote What We Give To Alien Gods, a 72 page module, with additional art by Chris Cold and Vil, which I have to say I was attracted to by it’s strong cosmic horror vibes, something somewhat unique among takes on Mothership horror.

    Cover art for What We Give For Alien Gods

    Main negative out of the way out the gate: the information design leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t open with a summary or where to start, but rather opens with a safety, loot, special rules and xenolinguistics, a lot of which might be best in an appendix. On the first page of the adventure itself, it centres a derelict ship, which is plot-central but whose story is located in an appendix. I found it hard to intuit what would be where, I found myself expending energy on unimportant information before important information, and in a 72 page document this all could have been a lot more usable and digestible for me.

    The “How to use this module” section is, I think, a bit excessive, but the safety section is fantastic, as is the section entitled lore as loot. Then we have another section on rules regarding relating to gods and xenolinguistics, which provides two frameworks for interesting, unique puzzles. For me, I prefer modules having a bit more of a kick off the bat, and I don’t love spending fifteen pages before it’s clear what the module is about. The “At A Glance” section should have been up front for me.

    Act 1 is an unnecessary and incomplete two page hex crawl; this references the derelict ship that is featured throughout the module, but has no page reference and whose information is all the way on page 52 (there’s a page reference in Act 2 though).

    Act 2 through 4 are the temple itself, an encounter with a trapped god, and the escape from the aftermath. Major character Dr Grahm is introduced through a random location generator with no page reference. The keyed locations are unmapped. The doors are mainly teleportation portals, but the lack of maps becomes a usability problem for me when hallways appear between rooms, or they start floating in relation to each other but it isn’t marked out in the text. The use of codes for me is a solution to a usability problem that isn’t there: I’d forget them during play and I wouldn’t were it spelled out. The entries are quite long, consistently longer than I’d prefer – two thirds of an A5 page for the most part. I can’t say having an extra sentence or two would effect the amount of text on the page by much. The final twenty or so pages of the module are what I’ll call appendixes – major NPCs, items, randomisers and some lore handouts.

    Most of the content here though, is eerie, weird, puzzling and eventually very unsettling or outright horrifying, as you progress through the four “levels” available (sequence breaking is possible, particularly if the players solve the linguistics puzzles quickly). The linguistic puzzles and the gradual and directed exposition makes for a very slow and deliberate kind of play which is very unique. Good horror content here, and successful at a kind of cosmic horror that Mothership doesn’t usually excel at. Really, really good stuff, and I’d love to run this adventure.

    Ok, there was a lot of criticism there, and I need to be up front, What We Give To Alien Gods is in an unenviable position: It’s much better designed than a lot of published modules, especially much better than most anything by the bigger publishers. But it’s also a Mothership module, and Mothership and it’s core modules have set very high standards for information design and usability. Some lessons here on information design could have been learnt from some of the better Mothership modules, in my opinion, but the content is exceptional if you’re looking for what’s on the box: Cosmic horror.

    My main design takeaways from all the criticism is that a module needs to display information in the order it is read and used at the table, excepting only when it’s clearly referenced. You need to leverage your random tables so that they do double or triple duty of reducing the size of your keys. And most importantly here, the inclusion of a lot of very interesting puzzle content served to stodge the text up. Perhaps the puzzles could have been relegated to an appendix altogether, making them more optional (they’re a huge part of this adventure if you’re not good at or interested in linguistics) and also pulling them out of the main text.

    An excellent, unique adventure, marred by poor information design and excessive keying. If you’re happy to put a bit of work into preparing it, I’d recommend it if you want slow-paced cosmic horror in your Mothership game.

    29th March, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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  • Bathtub Review: The Thawing Kingdom

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely, but I’m doing this as a critique from the perspective of me, playing, and designing modules myself. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques on usually excellent modules. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    The Thawing Kingdom is a setting zine by Rowan Algoet (aka Bottomless Sarcophagus) I think I backed it for a zinequest one year? I have quite specific desires in something that calls itself a setting: It needs enough dynamite that if I drop PCs into it, things will start happening immediately. I’m not really someone who cares to read a lot of lore or background history unless it impacts the actions of the PCs and the world in the here-and-now.

    The first page of this, the introduction, is a short story. It’s good, I just really don’t think stories have a place in settings. I think the important parts of this story could have been encapsulated in a sentence or three, or perhaps even in description elsewhere. I can see some very cool stuff here, if they were to appear as entries in tables later: A maze made of the bodies of frozen queens; A shrivelled heart that traps a monster from outside of time.

    The next section covers folk who live here. There’s a good table of 20 backgrounds, and a lot of interesting world building buried in prose. After that, a section on the nature of the ice that is thawing and beasts and places associated with it; again, excellent world-building buried in prose. Another section on the very cool, god-slaying tech-bro kingdom to the south (more on this place than on the titular kingdom, actually). This whole section – the first 16 pages of the zine.

    Then it gets good, dense with ideas: Lists. The major locations really deserves to be detailed further; the minor locations all have probabilities associated with them and I wish these had been substantiated a bit. Mysterious treasures couldn’t be more perfect.

    I have very mixed feelings on Thawing Kingdoms, because it is very idea-dense, but half of it is presented in a way that makes it very challenging for me to use without a lot of work converting half of it to something more practicable. There are three main things I’m taking away from it: Firstly, the history and world-building is best buried in tables and lists. Putting it in prose encourages wordiness, but most of this cool stuff could be reduced to a d10 list and that could be distributed throughout the setting so that things could be gradually learnt through play. Secondly, it’s pretty important for me to have some more detailed locations, because while the paragraph-long locations are excellent, I’d prefer those, and a few page-long ones, instead of those, plus sentence-long ones. Finally, I can’t process longer prose well in the context of role-playing games. Shorter prose, broken up, works well. Page-long isn’t processable – I’d have to write a lot of notes, or more likely, I’d have to rewrite the first half of this to make it work for me, and that would be better some by the author and worked into the rest of the book.

    The concept here: Of a kingdom recovering from a cursed sleep, full of the evil and dangerous remnants of that curse, is so incredibly good, and the content here is so incredibly good, but for me it’s marred by format, and diluted by the very cool adjacent kingdom, which detracted from the focus on the primary subject (although it deserves its own zine, in my opinion).

    Anyway, this setting zine is full of amazing ideas and you could do far worse than using the content in your campaign. The formatting doesn’t work for me, but I couldn’t rate the content highly enough.

    27th March, 2023

    Idle Cartulary

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

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.
  1. Threshold of Evil
  2. Secrets of the Towers
  3. Monsterquest
  4. They Also Serve
  5. The Artisan’s Tomb

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