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.
Oubliette is a serial megadungeon for B/X, written and with interior illustrations by Casey Garske. As it stands, the 0 and 1st issues have been released, and I’m looking at those 2 releases. In it (so far, at least), you’re trapped in a town on a rock in an endless grey void, and the only way out is by using raven statues to teleport into a deadly, endless dungeon. I bought this one on Drive Thru RPG.
Oubliette (n.) 0 is only 12 pages long, and covers the campaign rules and the village of Oubliville where the party will spend their downtime. The Rules: The Oubliette appears to be some kind of hellish afterlife, where you can collect Obols for more power. Raven statues act as fast-travel points that might reach deeper into the Oubliette or might return you to Oubliville. These two additions (as well as the additions of a supply die and equipment slots), effectively gamify this megadungeon, something I’ve been interested in in the past. There’s not much to it, but what’s there has a purpose. Oubliville is effectively 9 locations, their character, each with a specific purpose. Again, very videogamey, but in a neat way. A bunch of these introduce collectibles that need to be brought back to Oubliville — tomes and ingredients for potions, and the others all serve specific purposes. Obols being expended for all of these things as well as for experience, means that tough choices abound in the Oubliette. Overall, the rules included here are great, and make me excited to dig into Oubliette proper. Oubliette (n.) #0 is free, so if you’re not sure about this project, I’d look at this, and see if it guides your decision either way.
Oubliette (n.) 1 covers the first level of the dungeon, and packs 31 rooms into less than 20 pages. This runs a little differently: There are sewers linking most of the rooms if you choose to venture down there, and you don’t roll regular random encounters, but rather only when you enter an encounter room or “linger too long“. The event roll is loaded, and consists up to 12 unique random encounters, some of which are related to specific locations (as good random encounters should be). There are also environmental encounter tables (“gutteral voices from room 11“) as well as a level lockdown where you can be instantly locked up. Good stuff, pulling from popular OSR blogosphere innovations. The room descriptions also pull from Anne Hunter’s Landmark, Hidden, Secret in their keying, just as many other OSR authors such as Miranda Elkins, Yochai Gal and myself all do. I’d prefer the bestiary at the back have clearer descriptions, and potentially behaviours or goals. There are collectibles here — an ingredient and a tome, although I think the ingredient is unclear enough in the description that you might get players picking random stuff off the shelves — Yex the Apothecary might be a better source for something like the trading sequence in the Ruins of Castle Gygar to help with direction here. The room descriptions are terse, but rely quite heavily on hyperdiegesis. I’m not sure if Garske has deep lore planned for this megadungeon, but certainly I’d like to know as someone running this if there’s going to be, as the implications might grow in the absence of any canon here — I had similar struggles with episodic megadungeon, Through Ultan’s Door.
However, I struggled with some aspects. I cannot grasp the sewer layout at all: “Below the main floor of the dungeon is a sewer […] Dashed lines in the sewer indicate higher dry ground. The tunnels of the sewer pass beneath the upper rooms in straight lines[…]” Looking at the main map, I can see dashed lines, but otherwise I just don’t follow. I think this may be an issue with using Dungeon Scrawl as a mapping tool — maybe some lines are running beneath the main level, but it’s not at all clear. Certainly I could map out the sewer rooms (19 to 21, 25 and 27 at a glance) and figure out what they could connect to. This would be easily fixed though, simply by shading the lower sewer level or hand-drawing this map, which isn’t particularly complex. I recently read Cryo-Siq, which used a method of mapping which allowed for connections like sewers between rooms by using a secondary keying code (i.e. 13A might indicate all the As are connected). Something like this would work far better for me. I want more information for a lot of this stuff.
One interesting little impact of some of the keying choices is that the Oubliette feels like it might be some kind of time loop, with the players continuously turning up in a room with a jailer recently killed in it, for example. The dungeon also has no restocking method — given the author appears to be familiar with the OSR broadly, and given the keying choices, this also feels intentional, perhaps that the recurring monsters are supposed to be reborn each time you re-enter the Oubliette. Is it supposed to be a grim, violent, Groundhog-day like jail? It’s not clear. The mystery in this dungeon is plenty intriguing, but the lack of, for example, any information on what the Ghostly Preacher might preach, and things like it, concern me. It appears the Warden is chaining the Duke, and that the Duke guards the exit from the Oubliette, but that too isn’t clear. It might be that things will be revealed in future issues (certainly, at least, the Eagle Talisman doesn’t appear in issue #1), and I like that the exit is here on the first level, as it creates a pleasing loop, particularly if the Eagle Talisman is far deeper, but it’s disappointing that the tome titled “On the Nature of the Oubliette” gives you special magical powers, but no revelation about the nature of the Oubliette. Now, I am making these judgements based on an incomplete dungeon — more issues I’m assured will follow — but perhaps these zines would benefit from some kind of reassurance regarding what will follow and what the referee is expected to improvise herself, because because as it is it leaves me in a limbo where I’m not sure what’s planned and whether I’m undermining it and hence my players’ decisionmaking.
Oubliette (n.) 0 and 1 are both illustrated by hand, and are laid out in Google Docs. The layout suffers accordingly — I think you could do more with Google Docs, but Garske appears to be more interested in just getting this out there, which is super valid for a megadungeon project. I think the big thing I’d change, though, is some variable spacing, as I struggle to read the individual room entries, in the context of the only paragraph breaks being the ones between rooms.
There are a bunch of criticisms here, but I’d like to point out that many of them are similar to the criticisms I posed towards another incomplete megadungeon, Through Ultan’s Door, over a year ago. This suggests these criticisms are one of experiencing an incomplete part of a whole, and perhaps not a valid criticism of that whole once it exists. But, alas, it does not exist as yet. What Oubliette at this stage is, is a very compelling first floor or so of a megadungeon, filled with mystery, written tersely and with great flavour, with suggested house rules that are reminiscent of videogames. At this stage, it conjures the impression that this megadungeon is a hell of some kind, either a time loop or some kind of purgatory that you’re all trapped in along with these characters that may or may not regenerate each time you enter. But I’m not sure if those impressions are me reading too deeply into what’s here, or intent of the author. Irregardless, while I’d wait to run Oubliette, what is here so far is an incredibly compelling start to megadungeon, that I’ll be keeping a close eye on as future issues release. If you’re looking for a megadungeon that’ll kindle your imagination, Oubliette (n.) is the megadungeon for you.
A few months ago I decided to write a module live on Bluesky, from woe to go, to show my process and why I keep insisting it’s not hard. A few people asked me to immortalise it here, so I’m reproducing the thread with a few small edits so it makes more sense outside of the chronological nature of Bluesky. If you don’t want to read something very long, I’ll pull out major learnings and then put them right at the end. Click here to go straight to the end.
Image from WordPress Open Library
Start with an idea
In this case, I don’t remember why I decided to have a tower full of cats, but I basically was taken by the idea that the cats would be a warning for a monster to be coming. I reached out on Bluesky for ideas as to why a tower would have so many cats, and the conclusion was: Cloned by an evil wizard.
Draft the space
Ok, I’m writing a dungeon about cloned cats. It’s called the Cat Vats of Gatraxas. What’s next? Well, it’s a wizard tower. Let’s use that as a framework. I’ll randomly generate 3 levels. At the bottom is a more concrete layout. I drew these atop each other, cos towers should have a consistent plan. It’s a mess, but you can see the pattern, yeah? Because of this mess, I can quickly convert it to a real map, a circular ish tower. this one doesn’t have balconies. It’s been like half an hour and I have a full map.
Scroll through for the first draft map
Draft biomes
Now, I have to come up with what’s on the three levels. Give each a subtly different theme — a small dungeon, doesn’t need big thematic swings. level 1 is highwaymen in the library. Second floor is the imps that maintain the cat-vats. Third floor is the wizard’s quarters and like, ghosts maybe. Ok, so now I’m out of sketching mode, and I’m into keying mode. I have a framework already! So – this bit is the first boring part – I type it in so that I have something to work off of. I’ll also go back after this and mark interior and exterior rooms, which helps with windows and such.
Note: I don’t yet care what system this is for. That comes later don’t start at the finish line. I aint got no game, yet. Just a wish and a tower.
Write a bad first draft
Ok now for brainstorming. How do I go from this? Well, I have 3 prompts already – “What does the biome of the level suggest this room should be?”, “What does the content of the room suggest this room should be?”, and “What is stuff in a wizard’s lab tower thingy?” I always also keep in mind a 4th prompt, which is a Sean McCoy joint “What other room interacts with this one”. You don’t need to use all 4 prompts, but that’s a lot of prompts, you should be able to figure something out.
Ok, that’s level 1 outlined. I left out the special because I dunno yet, and that’s ok, because other rooms will relate to it, or give me ideas. You can leave blanks, knowing it’ll grow in the process. I also just put notes in here, like the highlighted one below: This is making the dungeon, not a final product. First drafts are always rubbish, yeah?
Ok, that’s 2 hours on the clock, I’ve gone from concept, to playable. I could run this for my friends right now – I already have a little hook in the robbers. That reminds me, I need to have a hook that leads deeper into the tower at this point, for the people who are just going for the robbers, to draw them in. I’ll put in fixes or notes to perform a fix, straight away when I have a thought, so I don’t forget later:
I’m now expanding the themes on level 2. I do a little more research, of course – what fish goes in the tanks? Sardines or pilchard, because they’re tiny fish that will fit in tanks. I think sardines are funnier, though. Start asking questions about the level, and see what the implications are for the other levels. Right now I’m thinking that the special room on level 1 is probably related to why there’s a monster, why the wizard is frozen, and why he didn’t get cloned. Is the wizard here, on level 2, or on level 3? As I write this, I’m starting to form an opinion of who the is bad guy on level 3.
It’s worth noting that this changed in the writing – initially, the human vats and cat vats were separate, but I decided to foreground the cat vats, to foreshadow the wizard and the discoveries the players might make. Also note I’ve started highlighting stuff, like I did with the notes earlier. I do this when I have an idea that I need to come back to later.
That’s hour 3, I think, but I stopped for lunch. Now to finish the story on level 3 – I’ve left two spare rooms so far, with only inklings of what’s there, and they’re specials, so maybe I want to put a puzzle where the third piece is on the third floor that answers one of our big questions. Puzzles are good for storytelling in dungeons, because they’re optional – you don’t wanna force lore, you want people to be excited to find it out. Oh, and by puzzle, I just mean “oh this doesn’t make sense until you find all 3 pieces” – it could literally be 3 fragments of a phrase or something.
At this point I’ve started realising that random encounters are happening, so I’ve written some of those. It’s an 18 room dungeon, so 6 is probably a generous number of random encounters, keeping in mind a speed run of this dungeon would result in 9 rolls and only 1.5 random encounters occurring. Maybe I’ll make 5-6 something unique to different levels? Or just an environmental effect of some kind.
Note that I’m dragging the map down to each new level. I need to look at the map, to help me like figure out what makes sense. People talk big game about jaquaysing, but the important thing is that the space is a solvable puzzle, not that everything is connected.
So, for this space: secret doors are in 13 and 14 (a loop), 11, and 5 (a loop). You can intuit these secret doors from the layout of the other levels. This is what you want in a map, not something that you can endlessly walk around in circles. Loops are for fun (“I sneak up behind them”), not for their own sake.
Starting level 3 keys, there’s a big question: Why are the secret doors here? That doesn’t really make sense, separating the entry doors in 13 from the final rooms with secret doors. The puzzle I just mentioned isn’t interesting in that context. Looking at the map, I might need to move them.
This is my change: it keeps a loop, gives you a chance to ambush the boss who’s in 17, and you can guess they’re there from the space. See how fluid the process is? Just do what feels good. This is the main problem with randomly generating your layouts: There’s no conversation occurring between the playfulness and the verisimilitude of the space. Back to keying.
So, this is a mundane level, but I know evil stuff has taken over. This means it’s got boring stuff in it. So, I’m now considering rearranging again. Yipes! In mundane spaces, you’ll wonder why there’s a secret door to the bathroom, or why the kitchen exit in the cloakroom, etc.
My solution: I added a crawl space to maintain the loop and add secrets, but connected the bathroom and kitchen more directly and sensibly. Hopefully that’s enough tweaks.
Ok, basic keying is wrapped up. You need to write a bad draft, then you polish it. Note that it got slower to write the further I got in, but also it got more interesting. I’m left with a bunch of questions, and the answers will make everything that’s here better.
Start asking questions
This is a finished first draft, so I start asking questions now. Below is my brainstorm. I ended up with enough hooks for the starter. What’s next?
What’s next? I have a format I’ve written Sharky, Mizzling Grove, Lightfingers and Ratcatchers all in – I’ll convert this draft to that real format. That will leave a bunch of blanks – Oh, I need a stat block here. Oh, is this a secret, or is it hidden? what belongs in a sidebar? Using my known formatting helps me recognise what isn’t here. I’ll re-read it once I’ve taken space (like, a few hours is all i need, but a break). Start writing in the gaps, answering my questions, putting them in. Then I’ll sit down and make it pretty. This is all outline right now. I can run an outline, but I won’t publish one.
What I like in my modules is good writing. The work we’ve done so far is not the sell. The writing will be the sell. I want to get Evelyn to illustrate this, so I’m writing with some whimsy here. Oh, and I probably need to lean into the cats, right. But, that’s our first, primary work on a dungeon module completed in about 4 hours. It’s that easy.
Honing your draft
Now I keep percolating on the space while I do other things. I texted these thoughts to myself while driving, and will update the draft accordingly (also, siri can’t understand me which is why there’s some nonsense here— curse voice recording being designed for specific voices).
My next step was to bring things in line with the rest of my modules, which have a recurring list of characters and themes, so I started re-writing the “What’s going on section”:
The goal with these re-writes is to increase the intertextuality, and hence the complexity of the world building. Names and concepts change to match the implied setting. I’ve written out the hooks early, because they need to be in the text of the module – the highlighted part is “hey don’t forget”.
I’m choosing these specifically to give the players different reasons to be interacting with the tower – maybe they want X, Y, or Z. All of these goals are deep in the tower, but you’ll be bargaining for different things depending on the hook. I wrote about this in Juicy Worms, Local Knowledge and Player Engagement.
This honing process is much slower and more thoughtful, and involves a lot of scrolling back and forth in the document, things are gradually getting more personal, more specific, leaning the ideas from the first draft into actual scenes and concrete interesting stuff. I went back and added, for example, that Raven can’t come in yet.
I continued tweaking, after taking about a week of break:
The incorporation of the romantic sub plot, though, gives me a clue what to put in one of the empty rooms, the one near the vats. This is why your outline and final product often diverge: Your writing benefits from iteration and breathing space, so that you can figure out what the themes are.
I continue to post in dribs and drabs, I wrote this while I was waiting for the trailers to finish on Superman, so I outlined small things on my phone. The work I did earlier enables this bite-sized work. I’m asking questions to make sure I remember to answer them, and just adding an outline for me to easily tap into later. Outlining is for every stage of your writing! Don’t know what it is? Write “write about this” in the space!
When I’m in this phase, I’ll scroll back looking for the first unfinished key or the first highlighted thing to start writing. I found this, and started writing there:
I did a few things here as I went – I scrolled about the rest of the text, and questions that were posed and answered, I stuck in those sections. I added a surgery and some body parts to other sections I’ll write those in a bit. While starting on the next room, I remembered I was supposed to be wiring this place to blow. So I’ve copied the existing “this room is wired to blow” text into the rooms that should have it, so I don’t forget in future. Then I’ll finish writing the room.
This is the finished room. You can see I changed the paste, and I added references to other spaces. I just realised that many of these doors are open, so you can see through them. I had to answer why the party might interfere with the imps at all. Always mention the cats!
Skipped a room, as I’d already written it, and onto the next. I moved the Raven info to the raven section, and then finished up all the details here. It’s important to see how this is, while time consuming, relatively easy work: I know everything I have to write, I just have to write it.
Here, you can see my note-taking. I wrote this room, and started to finish the character of Carlie, but then decided to change the way I’m writing all of my characters in the whole module. Do that now? Nah. I need to finish writing the rooms. Write a note to fix the thing, and highlight it.
The next thing (after a nap), is a new level. This is where I made a mistake earlier: This looks intimidating, compared to previously, right? I got cracking on the earlier parts quickly, so there’s heaps of scaffolding for me to write onto when I’m low on creative energy. But this next part is very empty:
How do I scaffold myself past this roadblock? I start off by writing the headings. I have exits, the special, the character. That leaves just the description. I delete the random table, because you don’t need randomness there (although you might have a table of changes in the sidebar – I’ll add that as a note).
Now, I could stop there, having scaffolded myself for room one, but I have momentum. It’ll be more effective to continue scaffolding while I can, and leave more hooks for me to write later. I didn’t have hours to write right at the time, I had to take the kids to the dentist.
Ok, I’m at the end, now. I still have to write write the third level, but it was good to get to the end where I asked the big questions, it was satisfying to see I found most of the answers. the thing I’d not addressed was a second reason to actually free Gatraxas – I want a selfish one too.
While I’m at the end, I’ll add the loose ends section, which I couldn’t think much about until this point. This basically is what will happen if certain consequences occur. I imagine there’ll be at least one more, maybe two, but this is a start, and a reminder to come back to it when I have a firmer grasp on the whole location.
Next: actually write level 3 through those scaffolds. I decided to tidy up while the kids were at sports – basically, saw some odd annoying paragraphing and keys out of order, so I start removing questions I’ve answered, trying to catch questions I’ve missed answering, leaving in highlights like these:
This is all stuff that is important thematically, but that I haven’t quite figured out yet. The process of figuring it out might change the overall module.
This whole process – figuring out themes and making sure they’re completed and feel cohesive, is part of making sure the cake is baked
I continue, just trying to fill in as much as I can. There are no new questions in these two rooms, so no highlights. There WAS a highlight where the compass was – I don’t feel violent traps fit here, so I initially couldn’t figure what to put here. But any alarm will bring the attention of Raven.
I haven’t really talked about research — for small modules, like this, I don’t immerse myself in academic work, but I am constantly googling and using online uni libraries to find out small details that are nice — that’s where these dishes come from. I don’t care about historicity — I’m as happy with a kids show or book as a source as anything more serious — but providing interesting details is important. The area we’re in is in a kind of renaissance verging on industrialisation time period, and it’s very vaguely Spanish in inspiration, so I draw names from those sources where I am (the internet is a boon for lists of names), while acknowledging that I can do what I want.
For Sharky, for example, I grew up in an (ex) whaling town, so I used a lot of what I learnt growing up and then googled lots for appropriate terminology and tried to twist that with fantasy. This requires less, because I’m not in a town. For big works like Bridewell and Ratcatchers (neither of which are yet released), I tend to do lots of research, though – see this, for Bridewell.
Here, I finally bit the bullet and started translating the character texts into quotes, a method which really worked in Sharky, but that I dropped in Lightfingers simply because it wasn’t as character-focused. As you can see, I’m just filling in the gaps. Note the surgery change — which necessitated a change to the earlier boiler room text (which I also made quotes, as now I’ve started doing that proper). The key is: As you write, if you add new pieces, they should impact other pieces.
You may noticed during all this that the room numberings are not in an intuitive order at all. This is a result of the process, sadly, as rooms are added and removed. It’s easy to do on the map, but I need to do that first, and then I’ll track changes that in the text and double check. The changes will end up being such that 10 is 7, 12 is 8, 8 is 9, 7 is 10, 11 remains 11, 9 is 12, 14 is 13, 19 is 14, 13 is 15, 15 is 16, 18 is 17, 16 is 18, and 17 is 19. If you’re interested.
The main difficulty is double checking every instance of the old number – all of the exit lists and references need to be updated. Ugh. Thank goodness you can track changes.
Ok, so now the actual writing is done. Excellent. I need to go back, answer questions, fix up the character text. And then re-number everything. And do stat blocks. Then, take a break, let someone else read it, and then head in again. This phase is at least a week of not touching.
You can see if I didn’t have complex life commitments, or even if I had evenings free, this would all have been done in only a few days. But there are phases where you have to give it time, and come back with fresher eyes.
For me editing never ends. Once this is “finished”, I’ll lay it out (and notice things to edit, particularly order and sidebars), and then I’ll playtest (I always playtest in layout), and then I’ll edit it again. Then I’ll order a proof and edit again in the final proof.
So now I’m dipping my toes back in. This basically involves: Filling in the highlighted gaps, and then adding new highlighted gaps when I find them. This stage of writing is revision, revision, revision. Trying to see the inconsistencies, trying to make the damned thing make the most sense.
Here I have 7 hooks, and I only want 6 hooks, I aim to have the hooks sink into different parts of the plot: I have 1 Thieves, 2 An Imp, 3 Mystical Gem, 4 Princess, 5 Rare Book, 6 White Cats, 7 Missing Person. the least interesting one might be Gem, here: It overlaps with 1 and 4 already, so I’ll scrap that:
While I like having the heroes interact with the evil Sudomino, it’s not that interesting in and of itself. I can perhaps thread the needle by replacing Leocardio with Sudomino or giving the players Sudomino as a shiftier, higher paying option, as I did in The Great Egg Race (these are all recurring characters, as I mentioned earlier).
As I go through, I make lots of small clarity changes, like this, and small “ugh I can’t be bothered thinking this through right now” highlights, like this, as well as epic combinations of them, like the third screen where I cut out a later section (that was just notes) and wrote it into text here.
Also in this pass: write the damned stat blocks. Here, I wrote the first, then wrote the third, then realised I needed some personality in the first, so revised it. Smear it with personality!
You’re also looking for logical inconsistencies: Why is Punkin trapped? Why is the axle here? I need to change this so it makes sense, or the players will never figure out the puzzle. Also: I just listed a bunch of books in two other libraries, why do I need to do it in a third library? Cut it.
It’s important to do this stuff and move on, for me, at least. Like, if I derailed my onward momentum to go and figure out where these pieces were on this pass, I’d get bogged down and lost. So I phrase the questions even though I could theoretically finish this section.
At this point I only have two major jobs – rekeying the map, and adding directions to the exits.
I’ve done one more pass, adding directions and tidying out highlights, and now I have to pick up the kids. I think this is the last thing that is incomplete. This shows the importance of using the same shorthands – if I’d used #### consistently instead of XYZ, I’d be able to search for the term. Somehow I forget every time to do this.
Conclusions
That’s the writing, done, effectively. Now the job is playtesting it, getting an editor to look at it, and laying it out, then getting an artist on the job. I think the important thing with this whole play by play is that it demystifies the process. You can do this. This is the whole thing:
Have an idea
Draft the space
Draft the biomes
Write a bad first draft
Start asking and answering questions
Hone your draft
Creating is for everyone. I hope seeing my process inspires you to write your own module. And, I hope you pick up Cat-Vats of Gatraxas, when I get it out to the public.
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.
Rakehell: The Rift of Mar-milloir is a 96 page module for Knave by Brian Yaksha. I’ve heard grand recommendations for Rakehell before, but I remember bouncing off the generator-heavy Throne of Avarice, despite the stunning prose that Brian filled it with, and I’m hoping for a clearer insight into the creators mind here. This is a map and a setting, ostensibly the first in a series. I bought this myself on itch.io.
I’ll start with layout: It’s fine, and moody, with excellent art. It’s hard to make almost 100 pages of random tables look good, and it doesn’t succeed, but it does succeed in making them readable and easily findable, which is no small feat. The font choices are both legible and suit the aesthetic well. I like this layout and I love this art.
Yaksha’s writing here is as evocative and dripping with sauce as ever: “The Border Warden, his eye of obsidian and his rusted meat-hook of a hand made clear you were to go to the Rift. He told you how he’d peel you apart if you ever came back.” This kind of flavourful writing is consistent for almost 100 pages; it’s a really impressive feat. Even the title, is an evocative name if ever I heard one. Most of this writing is in table format, though. There are no villages, but there is a village generator. I could quite easily read, for example, the “Village in the rift” generator as just a village description, split in six. I’m unlikely to encounter more than six villages in my travels in the Rift of Mar-Milloir, and I tend to reuse places and people in my games anyway — connections build drama — so I’d keep it to six anyway. “A chain of homes, signs of exquisite masonry, built precariously upon a curving ridge. Small gardens are interspersed between the homes, and each chimney bustles with sweet smelling smoke at all hours of the day. The folk here don’t pay much mind to strangers, but keep their eyes on the weapons they carry.” (option 2) is an excellent village, especially when it’s called Slound-et-Muntag (also option 2) and are afraid of the wicked men in the nearby woods (also option 2).
The problem with this randomised table based approach — is that for me it’s hard to use. To find out about Slound-et-Muntag, I have to choose where it is on the map, flick through five pages of tables to generate it and then remember or write it all down. All this is a significant cognitive load in addition to the usual load of refereeing. Which is really disappointing, because for me the only approach I can imagine to prepare for that campaign is to copy the entire document into google docs and rewrite it myself. And I kind of want to: Like I said it’s absolutely dripping with sauce.
The crypts and caves generated here are one room affairs. They would’ve benefited from a page of wee random maps (just like MERP’s Barrow Downs, which I’m reminded of) to supplement them. It strongly suggests an intention for this to be centered around not dungeon play. And that implication made me realise I’m not sure exactly what play Rakehell actually leans towards: Wilderness travel, sure, but with a quantum map? That feels to me like it’s not the heart of it. Maybe, just maybe, the presence of random encounters and weird weathers indicate a survival game, but it doesn’t lean hard into that concept either.
To complicate matters, Rakehell finishes with the Brigand’s Manse and the Maw of the Mountain, and this is where my thesis is challenged: These two later additions to the module are traditional crawls, well designed and flavourful, but small enough to fit into a trifold pamphlet. I’d run either of these in a moment: They blend specificity where it’s needed with randomness in the right places. Because of the unique linguistic world building (it reminds me of Warhammer Fantasy a little, something I’m only fleetingly familiar with), I’d have appreciated names for the brigands, but their drives and what they’re doing, the dragon’s randomised horde, these are a perfect use of randomisers that are used less effectively elsewhere in Rakehell.
These aren’t the only places where Rakehell brakes free of the shackles of randomness, though. The ten factions are concrete and fascinating concepts in broad strokes; not specific but evocative: “You made a pact with the Rat-King and the Corvid Queen, to forgive old debts and to assign new secrets. They slither towards the Rift now, seeking to collect both.” Antevol, the gateway to the rift, has a concrete list of townsfolk and a black market both of which shine and take strong advantage of the sumptuous writing. But they still lack the concreteness of the two revised locations. It’s possible that — being a volume 1 — the second volume’s goal was to add more of these more concrete locations to Rakehell, or to fill out the map in a way that makes proceedings clearer. This seems like a great direction to take it in, and would likely ameliorate many of my concerns here in issue 1.
I realise that I’m both praising and criticising random tables here, and it makes me consider what I consider a strong or a weaker choice of randomisation in a module. There is a knife’s edge to walk, where too much randomness is a chore and a challenge to usability, and too little provides not enough surprise. Where you apply this randomness has a huge impact on the feeling (and ease) of refereeing the game, but also on the sense of risk and reward of playing in it. Villages and brigands and monsters are places where less randomness behooves them: You want to encounter these things and find something concrete, a window into a real place or a mirror upon something in the real world you can mimic or be inspired by. Treasure, encounters on the road, and incidental findings absolutely benefit from high randomness; you want these to feel serendipitous as a chance encounter does in our actual lives.
My struggle with Rakehell is that it does not differentiate the serendipitous and the concrete, and consequently requires me as a referee to do too much. It succeeds as a work of prose: Sumptuous and dripping with flavour. It succeeds as an aesthetic exercise: I understand the Rift of Mar-Milloir. Could I run it? It would take a lot of time that I don’t have. I don’t referee to sit at a table rolling dice while my friends share memes; nor prepare in advance for hours prior to my friends arriving at the table. How would I run it? I’d copy it out into a word document and pre-generate everything that wasn’t serendipitous. I’d use a Warhammer Fantasy name generator to name all the unnamed characters. I’d pre-populate the map with places and things. I’d pull a few gothic locations like Hound of Hendenberg or Beast of Borgenwold and drop them in as well. I think that would be a banging campaign.
If that sounds like a good time to you, then it’s worth doing the work to run Rakehell: The Rift of Mar-Milloir for your friends and your table. It’s gorgeous. For me, though, I want that all to have been done for me fromthe start, so I’ll have to wait for the sequel.
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.
Feast for a Sphinx is a 30 page module for Mörk Borg by Sofia Ramos and Evlyn Moreau, with layout by Luna P, the same team behind Goblin Mail which I thought was one of the best releases of last year. In it, you brave an ancient temple filled with the spawn of the Golden One, in order to win the favour of the wish-granting Sphinx. I backed this for its’ crowdfunding campaign.
We open with a page of in-world verse, likely the kind of information you’d hand to the adventurers. Then, we have a page of purple prose, describing the past and present of Kalldalen and the temple that stands above it. These are a little much for me, as a referee, but Ramos does some good writing here (where that almost makes up for it), and throughout this module (where it absolutely slaps). The village of Kalldalen is breezed over, consisting simply 4 reasons you might visit, and a page describing the inn and the 6 people frequenting it. I don’t love these hooks and rumours — I constantly harp on about my post on the matter and feel like a broken record — but 1 of them at least gives you an alternate reason to delve into the dungeon. If I were to run this, I’d just stick to that one rumour, offer a reward as honey, and give the players a dream to enter the dungeon as a stick. There’s a nice decription of the entrance, as well as a few things that might encounter you on the way. I’d love a little more there — perhaps just a little more from the characters of Syrus or Old Grin, or whose hair you find. These are nice hyperdiegetic additions, but this module is already feeling sparse enough that I want to know what the authors are thinking. Once we’re in the key proper, mini-maps accompany the descriptions (although not on every page), and most relevant information is contained on the page or rarely the spread. The key is perhaps too wordy for my liking, but comparing it to Goblin Mail I think that’s a stylistic choice, and one that plenty of people will appreciate. For me, I feel like I’ll be reading a page of text to the players in many instances, which isn’t my preference. The contents, though, are solid and interesting. I think the text could have been reduced easily, by adopting a process for particularly the exits, which are just tagged onto the end of the paragraphs, making things harder to read, but which contain important information about what lies through them. I like exit information, this just isn’t the ideal information design for it. The dungeon itself is filled with good rooms, and interesting hazards and monsters. It’s horrifying, as a Mork Borg module should be. It contains a bait and switch where you reach the goal and realise there’s another, deeper goal if you wish, that made me grin when I discovered it. There’s a secret history to learn. The only thing I struggle with is that it’s a dungeon with few interesting connections, and is fairly linear, and doesn’t take advantage of the geography of a dungeon to facilitate interesting play.
I really love Luna P’s layout here — the damaged, discoloured, textures, pages, the use of font in unexpected ways to highlight, mixing serif, sans serif and blackletter, the use of decorations, the creative use of colour both in the art and by contrast with the layouts, the gold and crimson palette. This is a step above the layout in Goblin Mail and it’s usable to boot. It’s a layout with humour, which is rare. It takes Moreau’s exceptional art and unique style, and manages to bring Nohr’s aesthetic together with it in a way that compromises neither. Some of the best work I’ve seen lately, hands down. I have no complaints. It was a mistake not to buy a print copy of this.
A Feast for a Sphinx is in many ways, stronger than Goblin Mail — the graphic design is top tier, much of the writing is florid and beautiful and feels mired in centuries of history, and the themes and concepts are much easier to understand and to engage players in. But the flaws, for me, mean that despite these strengths Goblin Mail is still the much stronger and more interesting module by this exceptional team. I’d need to work on the introduction village to draw my players into the dungeon, and I’d prefer a few more secret entrances and loops, rather than the linear dungeon we’ve got. That all said, the rooms are fun, and it’s a small dungeon — only 12 rooms — that will last only a session or two. If you’re looking for something to drop into a frozen hinterland, or your players are looking for someone to grant them a wish, this is for you.
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.
Rolling Coast is a 60 page module for Mausritter by Matthew Morris and Hugh Lashbrooke. In it you’ll explore a sprawling world of loud noises and bright lights as a young adventurous little mouse. I was provided a complementary copy by the authors; Rolling Coast is crowdfunding as part of Mausritter Month launching November 4th.
What we have here is a 19 part hex crawl, with 3 settlements, 9 locations, 11 factions, and a bunch of custom creatures and NPCs. The layout and formatting is very close to the Mausritter house style throughout. The art, mostly by Matthew Morris but with pieces by Piotr Kuberkiewicz, Fernando Salvaterra, Jon Morris, Rachel Lashbrooke, Penflower Ink, and Lux Taggart, is lovely monochrome line art, and plentiful. Headings are clear, and highlighting is kept simple, although as this is a longer book I’d prefer some section headers to help with navigation. Morris and Lashbrooke are big names in the Mausritter community, and I’ve reviewed a number of modules by both of them before – Stalls of the Blood Queen, Kiwi Acres, The Micery Keep, Whisker in the Wind, and What Lies Within The Pools. Kiwi Acres and What Lies Within The Pools are the largest of those modules, and neither them have the scope of Rolling Coast.
We open with the hex map and key, which relies on our familiarity as humans with the setting — an amusement park — to do the heavy lifting with regards to descriptions. You won’t be surprised if you’ve read other reviews of modules by Lashbrooke and Morris that the descriptions are excellent. “Large metal beasts coming through the day and night, only the bravest of mice venture into the blacktop sea.” is just one example how, even in these 1 sentence descriptions, this pair manage to bring a lot of implication into their descriptions, making the absolute most out of the familiar setting. In general, we get descriptions that are brief, rely on the referee for interpretation through their own understanding of an existing space, and minimise redundancy such that almost nothing is repeated. There are 11 factions in Rolling Coast, and they’re interesting, and feature additional stat blocks, special spells, or unique items that they might have. The hooks in the settlements and those in the adventuring locations are almost universally excellent. And in the Packratz Hideout, information is all packed together, so that you know the characters and their locations, and they’re related together. The adventuring locations almost universally slap for micro modules (which is what they are — each fitting into a set format of 3 spreads). The wishing well has an interactive, pleasingly looped semi-aquatic dungeon. The ambulance is a hallucinogenic nightmare (although I have trouble running these large rooms with many points of interest that often crop up in Mausritter more than I do with smaller dungeon-like spaces – the witch’s garden is another). The waste-dump is a combat arena you can compete in or bet on. Old Pantryville is a mini depthcrawl. Quillbane’s lair and the Sewer are traditional dungeons, and to top it off, there’s a mech-building building competition. There are 9 in all, all featuring the same excellent description, all with unique mechanics, twists and interactivities. It’s really good stuff and I’m excited to run many of them the same way I was with the Estate.
While I admire the craft here, I struggle a little with the information design consequences of the insistence on brevity and lack of redundancy. “Ferris wheel and park medic van – Home to an affluent settlement of 78 ice situated in the highest bucket of a derelict ferris wheel.”, for example, clearly refers to Wheeltop, whose description is on page 39, but it’s neither named nor referenced here on the map or its key. Similarly, the adventure location Perilous Excursion into Old Pantryville is clearly set in The Pavillion, but this isn’t mentioned in the key or map. When I’m exploring the factions, I find what I need spread between the Bestiary section, the Faction section, and the Adventure Location section for that faction. The characters in the Bestiary also suffer a little for the Mausritter style — because they’re all villains fighting for power, they come across very similarly. An excellent shortcut to avoid this is simply to add in a short quotation in their voice, and I wish that had been done here, simply so I could adopt their personas at a drop, or a list of relationships — this is done in a later settlement, The Packratz Hideout, but not in any of the other sections. Wheeltop is a major location, and hence has more spelt-out NPCs; this is great, and I wish it had been like this throughout the book. I do note, however, that while the hooks here, again, are excellent, they don’t belong in a random table, given they’re clearly connected to specific locations and characters in the space. The Adventuring Locations have floral names rather than descriptive ones, so I can’t see at a glance where they belong on the map.
I have found this incredibly brief Mausritter house style to be problematic in the past, and I’m seeing it again here, but it’s disappointing to continue seeing it after we’ve seen authors such as Josiah Moore going against this trend with significant success. This is the kind of module I want to pick up and play – I tend to play Mausritter a lot, because I have more time with my kids than I have with adult friends, but I don’t have any time for prep. I would struggle to run this in my typical format, because of this lack of internal referencing. This problem is clearly a decision of the authors that isn’t to my taste, because it echoes out into other areas – rumours for example, don’t provide any context or any idea where to find the context. They want the referee to absorb this module so they understand everything. But to run something like this the way I want to run it, I need a little more redundancy, or page referencing, or better organisation. I suspect 1 of those 3 would do the job, but without any of them, it’s hard to make sense of without reading it over thoroughly. It would be easy for this to have been arranged in such a way that things made more sense – the adventuring locations and factions being front-loaded so you understood the context of the broader map when it arrived, for example, rather than putting them at the back, and naming things for their locations rather than with floral names. If I run it — the kids will have to be old enough to appreciate the story from session to session — I’ll have to mark up page references at the least. The information design reflects in other ways, too. I don’t want to say the cake isn’t baked here — I think this is what the authors meant to put out, and it feels like a natural development of their past works. But I think that as their ambition grows, the consequences of that ambition require a rethinking of the information design because a 3 page or 20 page module is a different beast design wise than a 60 page one.
The most interesting thing about the Rolling Coast is the meta plot, something I don’t think I’ve seen in other large-scale Mausritter modules. There’s a cult here – the Fellowship of the Everlasting Wheel – who plan to restart the ferris wheel, which will bring disastrous consequences. As you play, the chances of progression on the clock increase (as the die gets smaller), until finally a major settlement is destroyed and the government with it. The tension of this major villain being initially and publicly friendly and supportive of the adventurers is a really fantastic addition to the module. To trigger these events, though, you have to roll the maximum on every size die to culminate, which is a fun way to increase the tension as the campaign goes on. But! I don’t think the math on the countdown to disaster works for this, and I suspect there isn’t enough content here — we’re talking a range of between 6 and 60 sessions, with an average of 33 sessions before the countdown finishes. I just don’t think there are 33 sessions here, let alone 60, unless you lean heavily into customising the campaign. The math problems also occur with random encounters. Mausritter doesn’t have rules for random encounters whole hexcrawling, but the 11 wonders encounters, will be exhausted quickly over 19 hexes and 33 sessions, whatever rule you use. The encounters don’t appear to be for use within the adventuring locations (as the official rules state) — they have their own. This suggests you’re not really supposed to be encountering them a lot, which in turn suggests the resource game in Mausritter (rations, foraging and the like), isn’t of great import to the authors. That’s fine – it’s not important to me, either. But, I think potentially these two birds could be killed with one stone, simply by incorporating the countdown into the seldomly used random encounter table.
There are a few odd things in this module that don’t really fit into the review neatly. There are a bunch of full page d66 tables, some of them containing interesting things. These are community developed tables, which is very cool, but they raise implications that aren’t really explained in the module itself. Are there a lot of taverns and villages in Snackburg? Is it the NPCs or PCs that have secrets? I think these should’ve been customised more for this particular location, as they raise questions and don’t bring answers. That said, the village traditions in particular are very cute. There’s also a very cute narrative short story that’s written out between the sections, illustrating the adventures of a party of mice in the Rolling Coast. I’m not a fan of authors writing their prose into their TTRPGs typically, but this comes across as very childlike and wondrous (it should be illustrated like a children’s book), and it brings a lot to the module to help newer referees get a sense of what the atmosphere is supposed to be.
Overall, the meat and potatoes of the Rolling Coast is really good mouse adventuring, in the lineage of the Estate. Those 9 adventuring locations are a lot of fun, and you could drop them into any Mausritter campaign. I like the meta-plot, too, although I’d speed it along a fair bit. I don’t think the tools are here to run the 11 factions and 2 of the 3 settlements, though, in a way that would be intuitive and easy, especially for someone new to running Mausritter, and they’re precisely the kind of people I feel would get excited about playing in an amusement park. There’s a decent amount of work to do to link it all together and I’d be doing a lot of marking up. I feel like the narrative frame is great for onboarding new referees, but the rest of the module doesn’t spend time coddling new referees at all. I’ll definitely be running those adventuring locations with my kids, even if I may not end up running the entire Rolling Coast despite the fun faction play it gestures towards. That said, if you’re looking for the backbone of a political intrigue-filled Mausritter campaign, with a location that’s filled with potential for expansion, and you’re willing to put in a little work (or are a master improviser), Rolling Coast is the mousy module for you.
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.
To review Spine, I’m going to have to break format. I was sent a complementary digital copy of Spine by the author, Asa Donald, and I tried to read it, and it turns out I can’t judge this game on the merits of the read, despite the fact that on the scale of book to game, it’s majority book. And I think Spine is impossible to play in digital. It is, by design, a book designed to be printed. So, I contacted the author, and asked for a pre-release printed copy, and I played Spine. Spine itself is a giant argument that reading and play could be considered analogous, and Donald has written a series of essays and interviews in support of its upcoming release, so I’m going to keep it in my I Read series.
Spine, or “Siderius Plug’s Spine: Immortality in 99 Endnotes”, is a solo horror TTRPG by Asa Donald. It is very difficult to review Spine without spoiling it, so I’m going to describe the mechanics of the book, and from there, I’m going to spoil it. The book is a series of texts — 5 in total. You read the excerpt, and when you get to an endnote, you can choose to flick to the back and read it if you’re curious (which, if you’re me, you generally are). When you find an endnote, you’ll find more text, and a prompt. If you see a symbol in the prompt, you must stop reading at the symbol, or else you must answer the prompt, and if there is no symbol, you can choose to follow the prompt or not. The prompts vary wildly, but most often you’re asked to add marginalia to the book.
This is the best solo game I’ve ever played. I couldn’t put it down. After I played Spine I felt shaken and emotional. It felt like the book was actively responding to my actions at times. To feel a game with horror themes this deeply is, perhaps, a deal breaker for some players. While I’m not deeply engaged in the solo TTRPG scene, of those that I’ve looked at it’s absolutely unique. It is a game that will benefit from going into with little knowledge regarding what is to come, so if my recommendation or a description of the rules are enough, I would encourage you to simply order it and play it, keeping in mind the content warnings of possession, loss of bodily control, and verbal and manipulative child abuse. You can get the print at home version here, and the print on demand version here. That’s the review for you. Go forth and play.
From here on, it will be all spoilers all the way in.
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 Witch of Drithwyn Weald is a 70 page module by Chris Bissette for their A Dungeon Game. Art-free, it’s one of a regular yearly series where they release an “advent module”, in 25 parts over the advent period, and a gradually increasing price. In it, you explore an endless forest in which, since time immemorial, a powerful witch has dwelt. I purchased this myself, in the first week or so of its release.
The module opens with weather and random encounters. Both of these are pretty run of the mill, although there are a few interesting random encounters that tie in with ongoing stories in the larger forest. The issue with most of the weather and the encounters here are that they simply happen, and aren’t particularly interactive. It ends with a bunch of appendices, some of which are pretty important and really should be at the front of the module. The cults of the forest, for example, are the 6 factions that drive a lot of what is happening; they’re given brief descriptions, but nothing on specifics (leaders or likely contacts) or specific agendas that might guide them any more than a specific madness that afflicts each of them. Other appendices cover how to make more forest, essays on disability and horror, a few short stories and poems set in-world, and how to travel the hidden paths of the forest known as the ways. All up, this is almost 20 pages of what isn’t particularly gameable content — almost 30% of the whole module. I just feel like this would have been better spent actually expanding on the content and making it more interesting and useful, rather than all being ancillary content.
Most of the module, though, are the hex keys — 25 of them. Most of these have 2-4 paragraphs of text describing them, with a few exceptions covering characters, a mid-sized dungeon (which unfortunately has the same number of rooms as the forest had had hexes up to that points by, rendering the key a little confusing), a small tower, and a walled off area with its own hexes (19 of them). That’s a decent amount of content, in my opinion — about 60 keyed locations.
Bisette’s writing is, as always, evocative and atmospheric, but here is often lacking in detail. The village, for example, has no named villagers; neither does the exorcist or their band. No motives, no personalities. It’s all very abstract. What does Fionnan want? I don’t know. What will Brynn do for food? Apparently anything, but no specifics. Stavforth wants nothing but to be left alone? What a fascinating potential encounter. Who is Agna? No way to find out. There are other big missed opportunities, like the circus — which is one major place where disability is foregrounded in this module, and despite the essay at the back, I don’t think it’s justified in the text, with the characters undeveloped beyond their disability; I think disability has a place in our fantasy worlds, but here it isn’t given the space to breathe or have a human face.
The dungeon here is a clever one that deserves a little more attention than the gimmick is given: The Ways, a secret way of travelling, connect many rooms, meaning there are areas with no doors you can access, or ways between rooms that aren’t spatial. This is very neat and fun; sadly there is no reason to venture into it, as nobody knows what’s inside.
The key is where the lack of layout and art really does this module a significant disservice. The text uses centered vs. left justified numbering to differentiate primary vs. secondary keying, but it’s not obvious that this is the case and it’s not super clear once you do. Art and a more thoughtful layout would remedy this, and the truth is, a more thoughtful layout would not actually have been more challenging to produce — just using headings, sections and pagination would have made it far easier to follow, and this stuff is very easy to set up in basic word processors. As it is, it’s not illegible, but it doesn’t do you any favours, and given the final product isn’t cheap, that’s a significant strike against it.
The Witch of Drithwyn Weald is missing so many things that it needs to be interesting or functional for me. I don’t know why you’d go there, and there are no rumours or reasons to visit, let alone juicy ones. The characters have no personality and often no agenda. It’s completely unclear why they are in this hellscape or, for that matter, why the player characters are. There are no reasons to interact with anyone, in a place explicitly filled with horrible encounters. There are no famed treasures. There is no reason to persist. I know there’s a social contract by which the players are obliged to adventure, but what’s the point of a module if not to throw them a bone? Despite this being a bunch of interesting hexes, all together they do not add up to more than the sum of their parts. Honestly, after Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss, a very compelling module that resulted from the same advent process a few years ago, I had high hopes, but this was entirely a disappointment for me.
The Witch of Drithwyn Weald is a forest hexcrawl filled with horrors, and if you are happy to fill in a ton of blanks with regards to characterisation, motivation, and agendas, and do the same with factions and monsters, and to come up with interesting reasons to be there, then this comes with Bissettes typical flair for evocative writing. But, it’s a lot of work, and I’d reach for Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss first, if you’re looking for art-free, or something like the White Horse of Lowvale if you’re looking for similar folk horror, but with a stronger aesthetic and more consistent drive to play.
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.
Emergence is a 32 page module for Mothership by Carson Brown with illustrations by Brandon Yu. Emergence is a 32 page funnel for Mothership — the only other one of which comes to mind is the Drain, which I reviewed here — but Emergence, despite being a funnel, occupies a very different thematic space than the Drain. In it, you play inmates of a correctional facility, after a cataclysmic event (of which you have no information) gives you the opportunity to escape. I backed this on their recent crowdfunding campaign.
We start with a 2-page explanation of how the Correctional Complex normally works, what its’ history is, and what is happening right now. This is functional, but as a huge wall of text, I think it could’ve been judiciously edited down to a much more digestable chunk of information — probably just 4 points, I think. We then have the rules describing power and flooding (which are about 75% repetition from the inside front cover reference), and rules regarding finding evidence of what’s really going on, as well as how to actually escape the planet the Correctional Complex is on. Then, we cover an alien fungus, which has significant impact on the progress of the module. There are six factions then covered — these would benefit from better organisation. It’s not clear what each of these factions agendas or goals are, I can’t intuit how individuals or groups will interact with the players or the other factions from the write up, so this 2-page write up is essentially a waste of time. A recent example of someone nailing this write up is in Orestruck by Amanda P — I feel like the wisdom of “dungeons need factions” gets bandied about, but a faction needs to be interacting meaningfully with the players and characters around them in order to contribute to play meaningfully.
We then dig into generating the funnel characters by serial number — I like the touch that they don’t have names, as their memories have been wiped for the time they are inmates — and this number provides information about what happened to land them there, as well as their found item and trained skill, which is about all they get to go on from a character creation perspective. It also introduces information on a new rule, called Cohesion, which measures how well the players work as a team (although this, in a fun twist, is revealed to have a very different meaning, that they players can find out if they search deeply enough). Players can have a roster of four characters, and select an active one at any time. This whole section, to me, needed to be directed at the players rather than the referee — I’d want the players to be independently generating their rosters, and leaving me more or less out of it. There’s a lot going on in this module — all good, in my opinion, but deloading this and handing it off would have suited me better, and made the rest of the module easier to run.
Now, finally, we get to the key itself. The descriptions here are solid, but the location itself is not something that lends itself to evoking a sense of wonder, so I suspect it could be much terser and have the same impact. I really, really like the character descriptions “New hire, yet to fit in with the Screws, terrified of being outnumbered. Scrawny and nervous, Larry is no physical match for an inmate.“, and unlike the factions, these characters get clear objectives. There are highlighting issues here, though: Sub-rooms exist, and these aren’t always clearly flagged either in the main text or in their descriptive subsections, which makes for a bunch of double-takes. It makes for confusing moments, that recur throughout the module — easily fixed by highlighting the sub-room in the initial descriptive text, or setting the sub-description (which looks like a standard description, aside from the title font) aside with background highlighting or decoration. Many rooms have specific results that occur when flooding increases or power level (although power level is not consistently flagged, which makes me concerned I may have missed places where flood level is not flagged). It’s overall a really fun little dungeon, that is a little too wordy for my liking, and would’ve benefited from a more aggressive edit.
Emergence’ inside cover features the most common stat blocks you’ll encounter, an instruction to make a flood roll, and a legend for the iconography that helps the referee determine how flooded a room is and how impacted the room is to power outage. This is really cool! Except the iconography isn’t used in the map on page 14 (despite the information being present) and only the flood iconography is used in the key. They could’ve been made blank on the map, and the referee could have filled them in as things changes, or just been broadly used — lots of missed opportunities here. The back page features a 50 or so item search the room table — the page 14 map (which communicates the flood levels and power levels) would have been better on that back page or on the other side of the inside spread, and I think that the connections table on page 26 similarly is of sufficient importance to feature in an easier to access position. If there wasn’t enough space, these would have been smarter to be positioned on pages 16 and 17, also for easy access. The layout choices — Emergence features a whole lot more white space than most Mothership, usually to its’ benefit — hamstrings Emergence’ usability in these cases. Otherwise, simple highlighting is used, headings are clear (although the module is complex enough section headers would be beneficial), but given the strong use of colour elsewhere, I wonder if more information could have been communicated by taking advantage of that: The palette chosen is a striking, watercolour-esque, pink, yellow, green and navy, which is really well utilised and is very striking by comparison with most Mothership modules. This palette is intermittently used to help with navigation — it features on the backgrounds of important pages, such as the map on page 14, but as you dig deeper into the layout, this isn’t consistent. It looks great, irregardless, I just think more thoughtful use of the coloured backgrounds and the expanded art backgrounds could have held meaning and improved navigation. Coming back to the unique art style, though — with the colouring choices, it really slaps, and stands out from the other Brandon Yu work I’ve seen, and more Mothership modules could use this kind of art approach.
Emergence is a good funnel module, that would be excellent if it had had a more aggressive edit, a developmental pass to make sure the information design was better, and a more thoughtful approach to layout. The problem is simply that the cake isn’t fully baked here. There are likely worse modules you’ve had to work hard to run, this one I suspect will have a strong pay-off, and can serve as an interesting set up for future adventures, particularly if you’re looking for loose strings to tie your player characters into a broader universe. It’s very cool, very dangerous, and has an interesting mystery and some compelling characters hidden in here. The big caveat for a funnel, is that there’s a decent chance that this one might feels like it’s more suited to a 2-shot or 3-shot than a 1-shot. If that’s what you’re looking for, though, then Emergence is an excellent addition to the Mothership ecosystem, and I’ll be interested in seeing what Carson Brown works on next.
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.
What Ho! Frog Demons is a spectacularly named module set in the Hill Cantons, a series with the previously reviewed Slumbering Ursine Dunes and the perennial favourite Fever Dreaming Marlinko. It’s written for Labyrinth Lords by Chris Kutalik and Luka Rejec, and illustrated by Luka Rejec. This is a big ‘un at 110 pages. Let’s sink our teeth into it. I received a complimentary copy.
The first thirty pages or so are the hex-crawl, which takes a unique approach, the about half of this being a brief hex-fill for a large number of hexes, some being keyed in regions rather than individually. The hex map is keyed in coordinate fashion, which isn’t a preference of mine, and I find quite challenging to read. The descriptions are a maximum of half a page each, and often only a paragraph, and they feature the same florid tone as the previous outings in the series, which somehow manages to feel luxurious, conversational and terse all at once. The second half of the hex crawl is a table of 36 randomised encounters that, once rolled, are now permanently co-located in the hex. These are effectively random encounters with spice, and up to a page of detail making them capable of a lot more complexity than your average random encounter table. The advantage of this approach is that you can make some of these random encounters places, which supports having a larger number of random encounters, and additionally it increases replayability. Initially I was sour on this method, because it leans towards a quantum approach that isn’t what I’m looking for in a module of this size and detail. But when it became more clear this was replacing the typical encounter tables, I warmed to it a little more.
The next sixty pages are two major points of interest: The titular frog-demon temple and Ctyri Ctvrt Manor at its surrounds. Interestingly, the manor gets the majority of the word count here, and not the frog-demons, although a frog demon does guest star in the Manor adventure. Frog Demon Temple is wordy as, with three pages spent on introductions before we get to any juice. The wandering monster table here is a multi-layer monstrosity whose contents I quite enjoy, although I feel like it belongs in an expanded d100 table rather than with so many dice rolls. There are only 12 rooms, and I’m really interested in playing out this interaction between dense keying (no empty rooms) and 1-in-6 turns having a wandering monster. This is a cute, characterful and funny dungeon (successfully funny, in my opinion), but really a diversion, which is a surprise given it got the spotlight.
Beets for the Beet God is a bigger, more complex beast, though. An infectious beet-zombie virus is spreading fast, and if not contained will envelope the entire canton! There’s a point crawl around the surrounds, and the manor itself. The point crawl overstays its welcome, largely due to the necessity of there being three levels of escalation per point of interest; it also feels like it should be a hex map, given it takes a turn to travel between any two places on it. The manor is a 20-odd room location, with entries ranging between paragraph and page. This manor has a lot more meat on its bones, and it feels like it would be a pleasure to run.
It finishes with a frog demon generator and a village generator, both of which are serviceable, especially the village generator. These provide the referee with a way to facilitate player interaction.
With layout, I’m seeing some similar challenges to those that I faced in Slumbering Ursine Dunes. While the same single-page, wall of text approach is there in Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, it doesn’t strike me as hard there, and I’m not entirely sure why. Delving a little deeper, I think we’re tipping 100 characters per line here, which could be making it feel more impenetrable? This is already a massive book, though, so increasing point size to decrease the number of characters per line probably wasn’t an option. Perhaps a double column layout would have rendered more processable; as is, my eyes drag reading this. I had to spread this read through out over a few because it was challenging on my eyes. That said, the heading choices are bold, clear and simple, and I really appreciate the layout choices in terms of information design. Emphasis is far more judiciously used here than in many modules, which does improve wayfinding considerably. Luka’s art is lovely and full of character, and jankier than usual, in a way that screams classic module in a really appealing way. Used to his more polished recent work, I honestly adore this side of him.
Overall, What ho! Frog Demons is a flawed but fascinating module, that innovates on a few interesting things that clearly haven’t caught the popular imagination. It contains two fun, weird locations that are well keyed, a hex crawl that I find less compelling (but a huge improvement on Slumbering Ursine Dunes’ point crawl) but hugely usable and very unique. I have yet to read Misty Isles of the Eld, but combine this and the rest of the series I’ve read so far and you have a really unique setting, light hearted, in a system widely compatible, and inspired by eastern European architecture (and perhaps cultures, too? I can’t speak to that with any authority). The series as a whole is probably one of the consistently strongest I’ve read, despite my criticisms. You can get all four books for $40, as well as a ton of free content on the Hill Cantons blog: Enough for a lot of play with very little work. And why else do we buy modules, but for creative people to lend us their ideas in the smoothest manner possible? What Ho! Frog Demons, like the rest of the series, is well worth picking up.
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 took the kids to the beach, and they’re entertaining themselves now that they can swim, so instead of worrying they’ll drown I’m reading Harvest. Harvest is a 95 page game by Luke Jordan, where you and the other players explore their home, and Island, when it demands one of you sacrifice their life — and one of you to wield the knife. It’s a horror game, but one of lingering and existential fears, not of jump scares. The obvious touchstone is The Wicker Man, but I’m less familiar with the other touchstones mentioned.
Harvest is a referee-less game, where each of the players takes a particular character that lives on the island. Jordan is one of the best writers in the hobby, and Harvest is therefore filled with luscious prose and plentiful reasons to read it. You open your game of Harvest with an invocation: A one page read-aloud text that sets the scene. Everyone is on the same page, and the themes are immediately clear: This is a game that is about taking refuge from Empire, and the price that must be paid for such privilege. You then cover some sections of the note on themes that follows it — effectively a safety discussion. I think this could be more neatly done, but it covers the bases, and I feel that in a horror game being clear that if you don’t want gruesome depictions, the game might not be for you, is the right approach. Then, you together create your island, using the “broadside” (Harvest’s term for playbook) that’s provided. You together choose which of the six roles you’ll occupy, and create a character for yours, building ties together which imply things about your character’s histories. You then take your two piles of cards, shuffle them and place them on the table, and begin your play.
One way that Harvest sets itself aside from the games that inspired it, such as Dream Askew and Dream Apart, is that it’s generous in what it provides. The “As Taught To A New Player” includes a bunch of steps after “begin your play”, as I stopped above, talking about learning the method, taking intermissions, and more. There are two pages on creating your island, something that — to me, at least — is implicit in the broadsheet itself. The effect is the opposite of anachronistic — it feels like a game written in the 1800s, when it is set. But it strangely draws attention to the otherwise obscured role of facilitator (it is mentioned in the “As Taught To A New Player” briefly), as for who else is this gorgeous prose intended? And some of this prose betrays gaps in the design of the game; for example “The final mark is the most fearsome. They will not speak of it” is indicated in prose that the players at large aren’t asked to read and is not mentioned on the broadsheet. Is all of this intended to be read aloud? I would be inclined to; it’s a pleasure to read out loud. But that’s not dictated by the rules, that I can find, and the length of these sections would make some tables’ eyes glaze over. The text fails itself here, sadly.
Mechanically, there are a few things going on. There’s a simple token economy, where you give and take from the community depending on the moves you use; tokens escape the economy through powers’ unique rules and are replenished as acts progress. There are two oracles — one of cards, and one of a die — to assist in characterising secondary characters (the first their personality, the second their role in the island’s community) — these are a little complex, but it’s a nice support framework for a referee-less game. An omen deck which governs the progress of time and hence the narrative as the night of the sacrifice approaches — these cards are drawn whenever a broadsheet tells you to, generally as a result of a players actions. This characterises the act (act here meaning the section of the game) and propels the events of the narrative forward. All of these mechanics have a meaningful part to play in the game; everything clicks together neatly, and like clockwork, to tell a story that is far more limited in scope than other Belonging Outside Belonging games I’ve played. It’s very clever; I’m reminded about how impressed I was by the elegance of Fiasco’s mechanics when I first played them, in the way they favilitate a more structured narrative without the iron fist of an overlord.
I had no idea what a broadsheet was in the context of this book when I first read it — I thought I’d missed a special big printout, perhaps with a map of the island? The only context I’d head the term in was a really big newspaper — I literally had to google the definition of the word. This feels like another case of the text failing itself, or at least the editors and readers having too much familiarity with the work to catch the things that make no sense to outsiders. That said once you figure out what they are, Jordan is one of the best writers of prompts out there, and when you get to the broadsheets — the bulk of the game — you see this very clearly. You might have “Countless tiny freckles”, be under the thumb of “A coven of sirens from the dark waters off the Island—grasping, hungry, and owed a debt inherited from an ancestor.”, or want to stamp out “Giving infants false names to confuse fairies.” or be unable to get rid of “A rattling cough you can’t shake.” It’s all like this. It’s all vibrant, useful, inspiring stuff. This is the meat of a Belonging Outside Belonging game, and it’s very, very well done in Harvest. I’d have no trouble occupying these roles. My main issue with the broadsides comes with how to use them in conjunction with the powers. You pick a power — basically, you can think of these as subclasses to the roles classes — but they instruct you to add their contents to your broadside. But where is the space for this assumption in the broadsides? There is none. Otherwise, they come across as a typical case of circle or highlight the prompt you’re using, until you’re asked to add to them. I think I’d just address this by attaching the power broadside to the role broadside, and doing more circling, etc. But it is another case where it feels like the text fails itself. This is a problem, because the powers are one of the two ways Harvest guides narrative progression — in this case the particular arc of your character, and the movement of tokens. Obscuring that is an issue that really should’ve and could’ve been addressed easily through better information and visual design.
The other key method Harvest uses to guide narrative progression is the Ritual Almanac. Each act of the almanac —there are 3 — has its own character (in my opinion, a flavourful, appropriate and misleading choice of words — I thought you had to pick a main character for the act initially), and the oracle deck gets refreshed with tokens to work their way across the broadsheets. The omens are randomised — you won’t get the same omens twice, and each time one occurs, the tokens head to the characters present to witness it. When the tokens are exhausted (7 tokens for the first and last act; 14 for the second), the act ends with a unique prompt. I don’t have a good sense for how quickly these tokens will get used up, and I suspect it will move differently as the player count goes up, but I’m guessing from their natures — stuff like “The morning tide runs red. All water on the Island—well water, spring water, rainwater—takes on the cloying salt-and-copper tang of blood.” — at least 2 players will encounter each, which means we’re going to burn through the first and last acts in as few as 3 scenes, and finish the game in potentially 12 scenes. This puts it in the ballpark of a Fiasco game, and hence I’d expect to mark the game length at 2 to 3 hours, depending on how tightly your table frames scenes.
Layout in Harvest is mixed for me. It oozes 1800s horror. Blackletter headings, illuminated drop caps, decorative elements, bespoke interior art that feels woodcut by Doomed Sarcoma, and ligatures out the wazoo. It works, just fine. I find the ligatures, though, incredibly distracting despite it screaming Victoriana. There is definitely an overuse of very floral italics in the latter two thirds of the book — very challenging text blocks to read at times. But it’s fine. The table of contents is excellent and makes navigating the book far easier. I think perhaps a larger issue with buying the print book (I did not; I have a pdf) is that I’d feel the need to print the entire back two thirds as necessary play aids: Page 24 to 94 all belongs with you at the table, particularly if you’re playing with the full set of roles. This betrays the print book in a lot of ways: Belonging Outside Belonging has a history of feeling out of place in anything other than a zine because of the deep dependence on play aids as the bulk of the text, and with Harvest I strongly feel like the best structure isn’t the one the publishing industry wants, but rather a 20 page zine and a digital package of broadsheets. As much as the print book is likely to be beautiful based on these files, I don’t think I need it on my shelf for this reason.
I managed to get a lot of criticism into this review, but the truth is, the core of Harvest is absolutely an excellent folk horror game. Jordan’s writing remains without peer where it counts. It’s atmospheric, and leaves so much room for your table to bring their own flavour of slow, creeping horror. Having worked my way through the book in detail, it’s going to be easy for me to run, mechanically it’s elegant and supportive, and the prompts are so juicy and flavourful. But I had to wade through a challenging text to get there; the Victorian affect does it no favours, and the decision to stand by that in terms of product design does it few favours either. But, as I mentioned, you’ll be playing largely off the printed broadsheets anyway. Once you’re playing, and have a grasp, Harvest is smooth as butter.
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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 