• Bathtub Review: Manic at the Monastery

    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.

    Manic at the Monastery is a 26 page module for Old School Essentials written, mapped and illustrated by Will Jarvis with additional illustrations by Brandon Yu. In it, you explore an ancient psychadelic monastery. I was provided a complementary digital copy.

    We open with a spread covering the 2 levels of the monastery, and 2 flat distribution random encounter tables, followed by 2 pages of background (only the second is referee’s information, but I don’t think the referee is supposed to provide the players with the first page either), and then a table of rumours and a table of hallucinations. The rumour table isn’t quite meaningful enough for me; if I’m providing the players with a few rumours, I want it to make them all want to do different things in the monastery, and I want them to say different things. Part of the issue here is that it doesn’t differentiate between hooks — these are reasons to venture into the monastery — and rumours — things you might know about what’s going on there. If we split off the 5 that are hooks, and reframe them so they’re reasons to go there, then we have 5 actual rumours, and these 5 won’t change how we interact with the encounters or draw us to interesting places. I want this stuff to be meaningful, and it doesn’t quite do it. We need juicier worms to lure us in, here.

    The hallucination table is a challenge; you want your players to be up for a certain type of play, or anything that causes their characters to act in ways contrary to their choices can be rough. I think there might be more interesting ways to manage hallucinations that wouldn’t risk this — it might have been interesting had the hallucinatory effects had real-world consequences, like sharing universes with certain monks, seeing solutions to clues you can’t see without the drugs on board, etc. I think with some creativity, you could really make the psychadelia of this dungeon shine, but sadly, I don’t think it succeeds in thinking outside the box. In my opinion, if you have a cracker of an idea — and in my esteem, fungal hallucinating monastery is indeed a cracker — you really need to figure out a neat way to make that idea sing. A d6 table doesn’t cut it, in this particular case.

    We then arrive at the key itself. I really like the key. It’s creative. The first ambush — pelted with rotten fruit and confusing insults (I’d have loved a confusing insult or crude lyric table). Hazards include agitated mules you need to calm. The monastery feels lived in by the monks here. The monks have relationships and agendas, but also manifest monsters when they sleep without realising it. It’s cool. But occasionally, things lose their detail: Why does the Abbot’s desk or the writing room not contain any hints? There’s a rivalry between two monks. Why? And why would the player characters care enough to take a side? There are secret doors and traps here that in my opinion need a some kind of parallelism or hint regarding how to open — the monks making the appropriate gesture, perhaps, or other statues that match the desired poses. One monk will have his madness calmed by the voice of his love. Things should mean something; lore should be imparted. There’s a tension here, where the seeds of excellence are planted, but not fully broad to fruition. It feels like the cake here is not fully baked. On the other hand, the writing is funny, and interesting, at a room-to-room level. It’s the overall interactivity and connectivity that is lacking. And there’s potential for connection looming — this clearly links to other modules in a series in an interesting way. This is a cool project, and well written, and easy to run, it just isn’t cohesive and doesn’t quite sing.

    The random encounter tables have a flat distribution on a 1d8, and occur on a 1-in-6; resulting in a likely 8 encounters out of 16 total. If you want your random encounters to tell the players something about the space, you probably want to use a bell curve with those numbers, so you’re more likely to get the snappier ones, or else use a smaller die. However, I’m not sure the intent is for this to communicate much at all: none of the encounters are associated with creatures wondering from specific locations, including the only named encounter, and none of them really communicate much about the monastery except for that many of the denizens are developing hallucinations and hinting towards the source of these hallucinations. They’re one step better than completely random — all of the encounters are customised to the monastery — but they don’t say much about the space at all.

    Layout in Manic at the Monastery is an adaptation of the OSE house style, with clear headings and sections, clear use of highlighting, bullets and colour. It’s not flashy, but it does the job, and plenty of flashier layouts actively impede understanding. The maps are hand-drawn, legible and detailed, and cut-outs recur which helps with understanding the geography of the space. The art is fine, but is relegated to spot art, and again, is functional rather than flashy.

    Manic at the Monastery as it is, is a solid beer and pretzels dungeon, that you’ll get a bunch of sessions on. You’ll be relying heavily on your player buy in unless you re-write half the rumours into hooks, and you’ll have to do some heavy lifting with the characters to make the social play really sing; but the truth is, this is second nature to many referees, and if it is for you, this has some clever ideas, some interesting locations and special rooms, and a bunch of unexpected traps and hazards. It’s cool stuff! But I’d rather that cool stuff be built out a little more, for me to know a little more about these characters and why certain things work in certain ways. I need a wee bit more background than I get on certain things, and a wee bit less background that I get on others. It could use a polish, in my opinion, but it’s solid, and if venturing into a monastery to fight an alien tree while hallucinating from an evil spore attack seems like your jam, I’d look no further than Manic at the Monastery.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    ,

  • Bathtub Review: Empire of Hatred

    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.

    Empire of Hatred is a 47 page module for Mörk Borg by Sam Sorensen (covering graphic design, interior illustration, and translation from Koine Greek), and with the cover by Lee McGirr and Tash Couri. In it, you are part of a caravan carrying resources and the corpse of a saint, to a place called False Antioch, a journey for which there is no map. This is a hex crawl, so it invites comparison with Sorenson’s excellent Seas of Sand. I should note that in addition to Mörk Borg, it requires Feretory and Heretic, the official supplementary zines, for specific areas. I got a complementary digital copy of Empire of Hatred from the author.

    I’ll start with the layout: It’s minimal, but with clear headings, appropriate highlighting, and easy to read. page references are present when necessary, although I’d appreciate them going to external texts as well such as Heretic and Ferretory so I know where to look. The textures and font choices are on theme without detracting from readability. The map in the book is monochrome and not a joy to read — this is a case of too much indentation trying to be communicated with too little bandwidth, and would benefit either from a different use of icons, additional use of colour, or perhaps a different hex numbering system to make it easier to read. There is a larger, printable map that minimises these issues to a degree, but the design here could still be clearer.

    Empire of Hatred doesn’t mess around. It opens with a spread with additional rules covering long-distance travel, and then dives straight into the locations proper. The rules are simple — 24 mile hexes, speed is by terrain, you get weather every watch and 1-in-6 chance of encounters every watch. Settlements have randomly rolled resources, which once determined are simply drawn from the core books. There are guns, which aren’t further explored, and I assume the rules concerning them are in Feretory or Heretic. I think the presence of gunpowder and guns is an interesting, anachronistic choice, because it also presents itself as being translated (this wasn’t written by Sorenson, remember) from the time period between 300 BC and 300AD.

    The hex crawl itself is through 9 regions across an area 850 miles long and 575 miles wide. It’s massive, and the key is here is a brief hexfill rather than a full location description — we’re maxing out at 5 lines of description for a complex location here. This means that the weight of interaction lies in two places — in the random encounters (which you’re likely to be encountering at once per two days of travel), and in the referee’s capacity to improvise. This is a very specific style of refereeing, dependent on emergent interactions, and it is more similar to Wolves Upon the Coast than Seas of Sand. Not every hex has a hex fill, it appears (I could be wrong), so it’s hard to estimate the number of locations covered without individually counting, but there are certainly hundreds of them here. Certainly, the mall could be clearer in how it signifies the regions.

    When you wade into the key, Sorenson’s writing is as its’ best. The broader region descriptions “The lonely and scattered trees shake and twitch in the hissing wind.” are typically picturesque, and the details are typically inviting: “fountain sits amid the rust and dust, spitting filthy ochre water. Beside it stands a heavily-armored berserker, Zimri, panting heavily.” or funny “A rattling box bobs up and down on the surface, kicking off ripples. Muted blasphemies sound from inside.” The clever thing about the best of these brief entries is that they have a hidden structure: The first phrase is an invitation (a fountain? in the burnt wasteland? I’m thirsty, and that man seems fine!), and the second phrase is hint regarding what is wrong (the man attacks, water dripping from his mouth!), and the third the explanation for the referee (gain the Bloodthirsty rage feat if you drink a full goblet). A lot of them are instead intended to be a prompt for the referee to expand on the world herself, which may or may not be your preference. I think these are excellent prompts, but I’m not in the business of buying modules for their prompts — I want to know why the wickhead is ensuring you’re giving chase, and where it is leading. Potentially what I’m lacking here is a close familiarity with Mörk Borg and its expansions; Wickheads (and many of the creatures you’ll encounter) are from the core book, but many of the creatures and terms here aren’t, so a charitable reading will require you to know which of the 3 books referenced contain Voodoo Fire to understand said wickhead. The issue here is I’m not sure what’s intended to be improvised and expanded and what isn’t — unless I go through Empire of Hatred, marking it up with where in the relevant rulebooks things are mentioned and where they’re not and I should improvise. If you’re an afficiondo of Mörk Borg, this won’t be an issue, but I strongly suspect you will be improvising your unique version of these plagued lands irregardless. That was a long digression: The hexfill here is great, Sorenson is firing on all cylinders, but it leaves a lot to improvise or assume.

    The brevity of the key indicates that random encounters are supposed to play a major role. The random encounters here are very brief, and not expanded upon — often 1 word. The issue of being unsure what’s in the books and what’s created recurs here: Is a Ratbit an existing creature, or something for me to improvise? Is it a threat, or incidental? The random encounters are clearly not all intended to be violent — you’re on the side of the empire, so imperial soldiers aren’t intrinsically a threat, nor refugees, nor the recurring character Mikhail the Merchant. Most of the tables (there is one for each region) has a reference to a character within the key for that region, which is something I typically look for. These are good random encounters, that rely heavily on the reaction roll and the referee’s interpretation of it to bring the thunder and surprise. Weather varies between regions, but tends to be mechanical in nature, and isn’t fantastical, compared especially to magical sands of Seas of Sand, especially. It does consistently suggest an inhospitable region, which fits the black metal aesthetic and apocalyptic themes. I think that a wise party could use the weather to their advantage, but it’s not quite predictable enough for this to work — I’d love for the players to lure an enemy into the lightning of the Mother’s Mountains after dumping their armour, but there’s an equal chance they’ll lure them into clear weather or high winds instead. I think that a shorter or more heavily weighted table would make the weather in each region more iconic, and I’d probably do exactly that — make the weather more assuredly windy in the plains or lightningy in the mountains, even if it’s just making the roll a d3 rather than a d6.

    There are a few missteps here, and they all come down to Sorenson’s assumption of intelligence in his audience, which in some cases creeps into inconvenience. For example there are 35 mentions of infection and 16 mentions of plague, but aside from “plague wracks their lands” in the introductory paragraph it isn’t clear what the plague is or what it might mean. This is a great example of where Sorenson expects us to refer back to the rulebook, but the rules for infection are a single line on page 31, and I’d still like the nature of this plague to be detailed for something that is occurring multiple times per page. The big thing that I struggle with, though, is the lack of any attribution of personality to any of the characters. Mikhail the Merchant is the big one — he’s a character you expect to develop a relationship with as he recurs repeatedly, he has a souls-like laugh and a cryptic sentence if you encounter him in Golgotha where his shop is, but he’s someone I’d love to have some damned understanding of. The writing about Mikhail is something I’d probably smile at had I written it myself, but as a referee, I’m groaning that I don’t have more to go on. But you are given very little on any characters here. Nothing on Tome-father Dismas, or Damaris and his dead god, very little on Gestas the Impenitent, no clue why Priestess Tirzah salts her congregation when they die, et cetera — I scrolled through a few pages to find these, there are far more. There is no shortage of characters here, simply a shortage of agendas and of reasons to interact with them or engage with them. It feels like I’m playing Dark Souls, but cannot piece together all of the clues to tell a story.

    Sorenson does a lot of work in the community, but one significant contribution that will live well beyond him I suspect, is In Praise of Legwork, an essay about the City State of the Invisible Overlord and what is great about it. What I find surprising about Empire of Hatred, though, is that it doesn’t do the legwork the Sorenson praises — or at least in some ways. In that essay, Sorenson does say that “depthcrawls and other generators provide shortcuts to making huge spaces (megadungeons, labyrinths, etc) without needing to do all the legwork in between“, and here there are hundreds of hexes, thousands of square miles of area, and many, many hexfills. But he also rails against “just make the players (or GM) come up with everything themselves.“, which is precisely how I feel Empire of Hatred is asking me to do. What I want out of Empire of Hatred then, that it’s lacking, is for Sorenson to “take the time and effort to come up with better content than somebody improvising it live at the table“; but I suspect this clash finds its source at a disagreement on what a referee is improvising live at the table — because, let’s be honest, that’s a core part of not just the referee’s job, but all the player’s jobs. Sorenson wants me to improvise characters and factions and political and religious clashes, and perhaps even a grand backstory to this decaying empire. For me that’s the legwork.

    That all said, if you’re looking for a black metal hex crawl, where you’re exploring a bleak and plague-ridden empire that feels like you’re peasant rather than a hero in Dark Souls or Elden Ring, that’s Empire of Hatred, right here. Sorenson’s writing absolutely slaps in this, you can smell the rotting corpses through the page and it leaves a huge amount of questions that, if you’re interested in answering them, will result in a fascinating and deep history. What you are doing, as a referee, though, is committing to answering them, I suspect. There will be so many questions raised by this module, you won’t be able not to. The alternative approach is that you enter into this campaign as an anti-canon one: You discuss with your players that what Sorenson has provided is the surface, and that the depths you’ll discover together. Your goal is to write the psalms, the secret histories. You improvise them together. You’re not simply on a caravan, you’re scholars there, scribing history. That might be a compelling take, to a table full of storytellers. Regardless, while I think Empire of Hatred is a fascinating piece of work, you need to be into black metal, be very familiar with Mörk Borg, and be willing to either do or share a lot of legwork, to get the most out of it. But I suspect if you do, you’ll be in for a memorable time.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    ,

  • What do critics owe us?

    A few things recently happened in the discourse that raised the question, “what do critics owe us?”, in various forums across the TTRPG space. I have a response, but to understand it we must meander through a few other points first. Please, bear with me.

    From WordPress Stock Library

    I started reviewing modules and games largely selfishly, for two reasons: I wanted to understand what made modules in particular and occasionally games tick, and I struggle to read long books without a goal, so I had trouble reading the modules and games I had in my library. Writing a review was a goal for me to read towards. But at the same time, I was encouraged to do so by friends in the community who felt there was a dearth of criticism in the TTRPG community. Over time my goals, the role I feel reviews and criticism has in the hobby, and what I feel I owe the hobby as a critic, has evolved, and what I talk about in reviews reflects that.

    Firstly, I’m talking about the structure and composition of the product. I think it’s my job as a critic to provide honest feedback on the work of creation, at least as it pertains to the goals of the product. Is the art, the writing, the information design, graphic design, potentially editing all up to snuff? If it’s not, what could’ve been improved or done differently? This is important because we have very few avenues for creators to grow in our space. There are no schools where you’re taught to do this right.

    Secondly, I’m talking about the product as a potential purchase. Is the product to my taste? Why? If it’s not, who might it appeal to? How might I be able to adapt this to make it to my taste, and is it a bridge too far? I might consider value for money, how practical it is to run, whether I can pitch it to my table, those kinds of things. Here, my identity as a working mother of 2 becomes important because it impacts my capacity to adapt games and modules, and affects the availability of my friends for certain types of games or modules. This is important because we exist in a capitalist hell where a certain of eggs costs an hours’ wage and in the embrace of a meaningful apparatus for discovery in our hobby, it’s good to help players find the right games and modules for them, and good to help creators get their games and modules to the right people.

    Thirdly, I’m talking about the product as art. It’s a no brainer to me that TTRPGs can be art, and can be designed to make commentary and elicit feelings beyond simply being “fun” (although fun is a loaded term I’m not really interested in exploring right now). Nevertheless, you can recognise something as art and either be uninterested in that art or think it fails to meaningfully communicate its’ goals. This is important because, where there’s interesting or challenging engagement to be had, we want to support the community to recognise this and engage in the art we create in a healthy way, as well as invite discussion around what the game is saying about the world. To put it another way: Until we start putting TTRPGs in art galleries, someone has to write the plaque.

    Finally, I’m developing a body of work. My reviews (be they Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews or Critique Navidad) don’t exist, to me, as individual articles so much as parts of a greater body of work. Reviews are often pretty useless in isolation, because we’re flawed humans with unique preferences writing about their subjective opinions. You don’t know if my opinion is worth anything to you, until I’ve reviewed so many things and explained myself clearly enough in them that you understand both why I like things and where we disagree or our opinions and preferences diverge. My opinion therefore needs to have integrity: I have to call a spade a spade, and publish reviews of products I don’t feel hit the mark or that I don’t really like personally, else it erodes the meaning of the body of work as a whole. This also means, by necessity, a critics’ opinions should develop both in clarity and change as their life experience changes. This is important, because both creators and players need to understand the greater context of my work over the years for the individual review to have meaning.

    Now, all of these goals are subjective. I’m allowed to simply not like something; it’s my job to explain why as best I can, but “this isn’t to my taste” is often sufficient explanation, because taste is subjective. As a critic I am capable of missing any of these aspects in a given review. I may forget to talk about layout or art in a module; sometimes it feels pale in the face of what else there is to discuss. I may overlook or completely miss the themes in another; sometimes themes are subtle or I lack the further education to recognise them. I can miss critical information or important cues that the game provides. I am fallible and ever-growing as a critic. Each review is a critic presenting their wrist for you to cane; recognising the vulnerability that it takes to be critical in a public forum means in turn treating a critics’ imperfections with grace, particularly in the context of the larger body of work.

    So, what do critics owe us? It depends on their goals: Therefore, critics owe us transparency regarding what those goals are. Maybe I suffer for attempting to tick all the boxes I mention above. I certainly get enough criticism for not focusing on potential purchasers — but this is kind of the reason I’m writing this: If what you’re trying to get out of my reviews doesn’t match my goals in writing them, we’re maybe not a good match (and so too it goes for any other critic). But I don’t owe you a review focused on value for money, just as I don’t owe you a score out of 10. There are enough possible goals and subjective opinions in our hobby that we can afford a few that disagree with us or that don’t target our specific needs. In a hobby with so few critics, I don’t think we can afford to alienate anyone who’s presenting thoughtful criticism, even if their goals diverge from our own.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    ,
    , ,

  • Bathtub Review: Orestruck

    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.

    Orestruck is a 36 page module for Cairn written and mapped by Amanda P, with cover art by Roque Romero and otherwise from the public domain. In this sequel to Tannic, you arrive in a village, and become embroiled in a number of local problems. Amanda P is a friend of mine who provided a complementary copy, and I participated in an early playtest of Orestruck, although it appears to have undergone significant revision since that stage.

    Orestruck opens with a 2-page summary of the history of the area and characters, followed by a 1-page story concerning the supernatural precursors to the events of the module. My favourite thing about all of this information is that everything here is known by someone: There are no forsaken easter eggs here, left for only the referee to know. There’s a lot to absorb here, but because the information really circles around a pair of lovers, it’s easy to get a handle on who’s acting and why. We follow this up with a spread on all 6 factions, written to the brief of appearance, drive, what they’re really doing, and how the adventurers can get involved. A few feature an extra section, specific to them. These categories are a really neat take on the faction summary, which works really well. Too many modules feature factions without clear motivations or actions, and these descriptions give you something to go on for all of these groups.

    The next page is a page of jobs you can gain by asking around. These are effectively hooks, and they’re all juicy. The most important thing about hooks is that they offer a way into the story that offers an interesting perspective, and these all manage to do it. I especially like that there’s two hooks for the Count, one secret until you’ve earnt her trust. This offers a nice way to offer a second tour of Tannic forest (if they players choose), once they’ve went her trust, with more familiarity with all the features in it. We then have a page of rumours in the words of the people who communicate them. I love this approach, but I feel like I’d have trouble naturally working some of them into conversations. “Father’s skull and Mother’s bone are best kept under hearthstone.” for example, is an excellent line (and solves a puzzle later), but only feels appropriate from two particular characters mouths, and that’s not communicated clearly, nor is where to find that knowledge (I’d struggle to figure it out in print at all, and I only figured it out here by word searching the digital document). I think these rumours could use a little more page referencing or be attached to particular characters and locations, for ease of use. Finally, before the key proper begins, we have a list of events as they would occur without interference. In a module about duelling factions, this is helpful to keep things dynamic and feeling like a living space.

    The key opens with the village of Pact, and the opening line: “Cold winds blow desiccated cedar fronds down the dirt road toward a humble village.” Evocative, brief, excellent. I love the format of having effectively read-aloud text like this opening each location, but sadly it’s not repeated anywhere else. It’s an excellent place to showcase the excellent writing here, while still maintaining the practical and thorough descriptions, but instead it’s often buried. The forest of Tannic itself portrayed here is a very particular, child-like fairy-tale space, where kind acts are rewarded, and adventure abounds. A forest of horror it is not, albeit filled with danger. My favourites: A troll in need of bridge repairs, and the singing spinarret. Once you enter Capella Cavern, you’re in for a treat; this is a pleasingly looped small dungeon of 18 rooms, with four interacting factions, and a bunch of mysteries to explore. This thing is dense, with a lot of danger, and a lot of opportunities for events to progress in the absence of the adventurers, rendering it very likely your players will be having to make choices on who to side with on the fly. This will make very a very exciting, and action-packed dungeon experience.

    The layout here is based on the Explorer’s Template, and this type of work is precisely what it’s designed for. In terms of information design, Orestruck makes some decisions I don’t prefer – the bestiary is relegated to an appendix, rather than occupying the sidebars, and in general page referencing could be improved given the complexity of the relationships in the module, but these are not significant errors, they just might affect how you choose to run the module. The 2 maps are clear, legible and cute, in accordance with the overall fairytale vibe. The public domain art works, but not as well as it did in Tannic – here the world is much more specific and far less liminal in nature. I understand the desire to match the art styles across the two related products, but I think Orestruck deserves its own unique style, and a bunch of these characters and features deserve to be rendered. I hope we see some fan art.

    It is fascinating to compare Orestruck to its earlier precursor, Tannic. Here, the forest is filled with more personality, and more concrete characters, with more clear motivations. While it keeps a strong fairytale theme, Orestruck, unlike Tannic, is filled with living, breathing people. And Capella Cavern is a very strong dungeon, unlike Tannic, where the dungeon fell short compared to the overall impact of the module. But also, the poetry that sang clear and bright in Tannic is more spaced out here, sacrificed for clarity and complexity, and that means that the more mysterious fairytale elements don’t hit anywhere near as hard in Orestruck as in Tannic, or rather, they come across as more picaresque, rather than conjuring as thick and pleasurable an atmosphere. They’re a fascinating comparison, and I feel I misunderstood where Dread Hospitality and Resonant stood in the development of Amanda P’s style in retrospect.

    Those criticisms aside, Orestruck hits a light, kind-hearted, person-focused tone that’s pretty unique (although, to be honest, part of how I ended up friends with Amanda P is that we share a desire to write these kind of person-focused modules – check out my own work if you like this). I think it is a better introduction to Cairn in terms of tone than any of the three that were released with the game in the Cairn Adventure Anthology Volume 1, as much as I enjoyed all of those, and it’s an excellent example of all the features I really enjoy in a module. If you feel like of late too many modules are focused on horror, Orestruck, like the Valley of Flowers last year, is an excellent antidote to that – a village, forest and dungeon that will give you at least 4 or 5 sessions of fun, sans fear.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    , ,

  • Bathtub Review: Straight Arrows

    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.

    Straight Arrows is a 64 page campaign setting and module for Mothership by R. A. Creedon, with additional art by Bee. In it, you tread a tightrope between competing factions while kidnapping rich addicts for the benefit of the shady Arrow Biomed as the titular Straight Arrows, and you spend your time on the once beautiful world of Ithaca, now in its’ dying days.

    The module opens covering the 7 major factions, as well as a few smaller gangs, that populate the once-beautiful city of Hewitt Springs and plunder the planet of Ithaca. For each faction are listed a bunch of “Deeds“, things that the player characters might do that get the faction’s attention, which indicate how the member of the faction knows them (if indeed they do). It’s an elegant little reputation system. My major issue with the factions themselves, is that they aren’t actually described in a way that makes them playable in and of themselves. While more information is presented in the module itself, they don’t have clear agendas; they’re presented as difficult to parse paragraphs. You can tease this out (and admittedly for one of them, it is very clear), but it could’ve been more compelling presented as a set of competing interests. I do like that the Spring Street Gang is presents as a subculture and they are far more interesting than the other factions for that fact.

    The Straight Arrows themselves are paid well, encouraged to turn on each other, and gain a bunch of character-driven questions at character creation. I quite like these “Job Interview” questions as a concept, although they might bounce off some less story inclined groups. The good ones inform your character’s perspective on addiction, with the idea that all the characters are in some kind of conversation about what the right thing to do is. “Is the war on drugs a real war? Why do you say that?“, “How do you feel about how the unions are addressing the drug crisis?“, but the less interesting ones have not much to say about the world, particularly the Android and Scientist questions. More iteration and perhaps reaching wider in editorial would have made these more meaningful, but this is an excellent conceptual addition here and to any module with a cohesive theme.

    There’s a whole section on drugs, because addiction drives the world and drives the story. These are fine; my personal experience is that nothing I’ve seen has made addiction interesting in a TTRPG, because it’s pretty damned difficult to persuade someone to risk an addiction with all the information truly on the table. This one takes some swings: It makes most of the drugs here useful, and some of them are interesting — clearly the authors thought so too, with the “endies” getting 3 pages of coverage. But nothing here is grabbing me; I don’t see why I would choose to use any of these as a character, and getting many of them would be an adventure in and of themselves. Straight Arrows does present itself as a campaign setting as well as a module, so that isn’t a stretch, but I don’t think even the expanded detail on endies is worth the trip, unless you were going to generate an entire tangent based on the results of your vision.

    Archer Farm is largely uninspired, to be honest. I was hoping for some kind of secret dungeon crawl here, for when inevitably the player characters turn against their evil pharma overlords. But it’s just a resort in space. I do like a few of the characters who dwell on it — but the fact that Mandy, who takes kidnapped rich kids on bush walks and looks after the deer, will die if she leaves the farm will never come up that I can envisage: It’s a forsaken easter egg, with no meaning to anyone except the referee. Looping these individually interesting facts into accessible and useful positions would make it absolutely sing.

    Next up is the city of Hewitt Springs — finally we get some way to interact with the factions that opened the module. Here, we have the 10 districts, with nice iconic descriptions. The random events that are described here are rarely clear enough for my liking — “the resident is negotiating a business deal with Null Soul” requires me as a referee to intuit a business deal, which is too big an improvisational task for something that will likely result in a tangent if the players develop any interest about the resident. This is a habit: “middle managers carouse with women much younger than them. The women are tastefully dressed but wear subtle gang colours“, is clever, but which colours? Oh, actually, once I look it up (which I shouldn’t have to), I find out that many of the gangs don’t have colours. The city is deeply concerned with bars and clubs, in a similar way to the recently reviewed Arkos, however unlike Arkos, I don’t feel engaged in these bars and clubs, because these are attempting to be working-class sci-fi bars and clubs which aren’t much different than the real world, where Arkos were fantastical places I’d want to visit.

    The module ends with a list of patient retrieval missions: Rich people you’re kidnapping for your corporation. There are three of these, plus a patient generator. These are of varying complexity; by the time I get to the third, it feels like the author has run out of ideas; the first is a few pages, the last is half a page. There are no locations associated with these — they often move around the already covered locations, but aren’t there in the location text, and don’t interact otherwise with the world. There are also a bunch of patients that are on the farm already — I think this is interesting, but underdeveloped. I’d love for these characters to be hooks into the outside world, but those connections just aren’t developed. The patient generator just isn’t thorough enough; basically, you’re choosing from 5 target types, with their own complications and routines, or what happens when they flee, but the truth is that once you’ve gotten through these 5 types you’re probably going to be disinterested in re-visting them. This space would’ve been better off spent with 5 more entire patients, in my opinion.

    Straight Arrows has a collage layout and art style; it’s gorgeous overall, bringing a unique to Mothership DIY glitz that I adore (honestly, some of them feel like actual photographs of a collage, rather than what I assume it is, which is a cleverly laid out digital facsimile) but it is not always easily navigable. For example, Archer Farm doesn’t get a header at all, or at least it doesn’t until 3 pages after the section on Archer Farm starts. But those mis-steps are few and far between; mostly, this is very pretty, and easy to read, with a stand out collage style. Love to see this more popularly utilised, instead of the typical Mothership style which is continuously aped.

    As a social module, dependent on characterisation and interaction, there just aren’t enough connections between disparate places and people here for it to really gel in play for me. The “d100 randos” table, for example, are precisely that: They have no connections, they have no place in the world. Characters float in their locations; NIMBY’s protest specific locations eternally, nobody lives anywhere or cares about other people, except theoretically. In a module that “caters to character-driven horror”, it has shockingly little interest in any of the characters themselves or their connections to the world of Ithaca. But, the writing here is largely interesting and evocative, I enjoyed many of the characters who were there (even without connections), and the authors clearly had something to say with the world of Ithaca and the locations and factions in it. That’s a really strong start, but the cake just isn’t fully baked in my opinion. More questions needed to be answered about this world and these people, before it’s completed, and I don’t want to answer those questions myself.

    Because of that, Straight Arrows never truly lands for me: I don’t want to run this, despite some interesting choices and some clever characterisations. The issue for me, is that I don’t want to play Mothership in this world, and spending a lot of time on or based around Ithaca is how this socially-focused module will thrive. There is so little joy in this world outside of the escapism of drug addiction, that I simply cannot gather enough interest to play here. The world is tough already; good horror is a reflection of the world and the fears we face, and magnify it. The other week I reviewed A Perfect Wife, which is an excellent example of a module doing this kind of horror well. This, however, is basically the real world with space ships. The people in this module are people I meet all the time. It’s not weird or fantastic enough for me to want to play here. It doesn’t allow me to express anything, except to be a pawn of capitalism with no recourse and no hope: That’s my real life, ya’ll, I don’t want to play here.

    That said, if you’re looking for a gritty world to base your Mothership campaign in, are interested in shopping out some kidnapping missions and developing out your own list of agendas and roles for these factions in the larger world, and have fun exploring themes of addiction and poverty, then Straight Arrows is a pretty exceptional place to start. It really nails it’s world-building, I just want a little more of everything that’s here, and would want to expand it a lot. If that’s your jam, and if this is the perfect starting point for what you’re after, Straight Arrows is the module for you.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Bathtub Review: Tannic

    Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

    Tannic is a 24 page forest point crawl for Cairn by Amanda P. In it, you explore a fairytale forest. Amanda is a friend of mine, but I bought this myself well before we met, although I’m reviewing this in anticipation of the upcoming sequel module Orestruck. Art is either by Amanda P or from the public domain.

    First thing to note about Tannic is that it packs a punch. While it’s technically 24 pages, only 14 of them are actually the adventure, the rest being associated bits and bobs. Unlike module is laid out in a clear, simple style with subtle flourishes like forest green headings and highlights, and it’s not at all afraid of white spaces. It’s a leisurely, fairytale stroll through the forest, and feels that way as well.

    When I say fairytale, it’s by vibe rather than by thematic elements. It feels like a fairytale imagined by someone who ventured into their local forest with their niece and told them a story about its quirks and secret places. There are no fairies here, or secret gardens, but it captures that feeling exceptionally well, through simple words that want to be whispered rather than orated: “The fallen prince strains to see clearly through memory, his sorrowful song charming all who hear him, filling their hearts with devotion.” At times Tannic’s locations feel like they have too many words to use easily at the table, but after reading the entire thing — only a few pages! — I captured the soft rhythm of the forest and although it can be a bit much to process in the moment, what I ad lib matches the forest as written well. This writing is a step above the writing in Resonance in my opinion, and as I said in that review, I suspect I’m seeing evidence of a sacrifice made to the gods of Sci-fi.

    The character descriptions, too, are succinct, clear and enjoyable to play and read. Some descriptions are even buried in stat blocks “Stat as Wraith, but heʼs a business ghost.”, and they all provide insight into the character’s goals. But they’re also quite similar, with two villagers driven by a variation on curiosity and three by a variation on love. More differentiation would be appreciated; that said it communicates clearly that this is a low-key, lighthearted romantic fairytale of a module and not a horror or high adventure module. I find it better to spend time on an NPCs perspective than their looks and sounds, personally, though, and we see that here.

    The keying of the Bog Tomb, is less successful in my opinion. The bullet pointed layout clashes with the rhythm of the prose, the leading here (as in the distance between lines of text) feels more than in the rest of the text and is less comfortable to read. These changes should make the dungeon easier to run than the rest of the module, but the truth is it ceases to lean into the strengths of the writing and atmosphere, and ends up less than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, the rooms themselves are often lovely, particularly the ossuary full of skulls with assorted complaints, and the final room is a beautiful and poetic situation (although rendered less potent through the use of bullet points).

    There’s not a lot more to say: This is beautifully written, a pleasure to play, but not without its flaws. I prefer it to Resonant, even though I think Resonant is technically better on almost every level. Tannic’s brevity elides its missteps; while I’d love to see these things fixed, it’s perfectly playable without them. And most every choice furthers the themes. You could power through it in a single session, but it’s a lovely way to spend two or three.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    , , ,

  • Bathtub Review: Cryo-Siq

    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.

    Cryo-Siq is a 6 page module for Mothership by Waco, where you are awakened from cryo-sleep and hunted by an assassin that has snuck onto the ship. I backed this on Kickstarter.

    This tiny module slaps. The player characters are awakening from Cryo-sleep, so you have an immediate goal (get a stim-pack) and a mystery (who took the stim-packs?). The rooms are lettered, but additional numbering indicates vents and the presence of a lock (clever!). Your enemy is a mastermind, so he’s out-thought the player characters already by one step, so it’s the players job to out-think them. The referee doesn’t have to figure out how to be smart — just follow the module — there are 6 creative ways the assassin does this, in a random table, which is really fun and deadly, as well as a bunch of things baked into the module. There’s a small but solvable mystery to discover who the assassin is masquerading as on the crew, as well. All of these add up to a toy box feeling akin to the recent Hitman videogames.

    Added to that is a small but meaningful map. Each room has 1-2 points of interaction, that make them worth interacting with and seeking out. I really like how they are linked, drawing you deeper in. They could use additional clarity, though — there’s a little too much implication — “If the core remains exposed for 30 minutes, lethal dose radiation will bombard the room.” is the first mention of the exposed warp core for example. Similarly, it’s implied the assassin was always on the ship, but not clearly stated. This happens a lot — the little bit of extra exposition would make this easier to run blind, something which a module of this size is perfect for.

    Cryo-Siq is a compact little module. It’s fully illustrated — Waco does an amazing job with the art — and gorgeously coloured, but the text could use some space to breathe, in my opinion. I’m not sure the logic behind the 6 page count — the majority of the module is across 2 spreads, which seems intentional, but the map is on the back of that spread, despite being both gorgeous and center-stage. I think this is a module that wants to be printed, but the layout needs more foresight for it to be more functional. Add 2 pages, flesh out some of the items that are missing, and put the map and random tables are on one sheet, with key and introduction are on the other — this would remove a bunch of these flaws.

    If you’re looking for a one-shot Mothership module, and enjoy the kind of module where players are being hunted, or they’re solving a mystery, Cryo-siq is for you. I think it would benefit from a scenery-chewing referee, because it has a main character in the assassin, but it really fits a fun niche in the Mothership ecosystem. Cryo-Siq is perfect for any con or introduction to Mothership, particularly when you don’t have much time.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

    ,

  • Bathtub Review: Tales From the Road

    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.

    Tales from the Road is a set of 3 pamphlet dungeons for Old School Essentials by Eon Fontes-May. Each pamphlet is a postcard-sized bifold, and it comes in an envelope that itself contains 2 dungeon maps. I was sent a complementary copy by the author.

    The three dungeons are “Something Sinister at Candlewax Cabin”, “Well Past Midnight in the Moonlight Kitchen”, and “Just Another Goblin Cave”, and they follow similar structures. They have a gorgeous cover and title page on the same fold as the “how to use this module” section. This section has a single, juicy hook, plus any specific rules for running the dungeon (“The moonlight kitchen is abandoned during the day”). The inside fold contains a gorgeous map, a brief bestiary, some treasures and a fairly comprehensive key given how short the modules are.

    I really, like the art and graphic design here. It’s really cohesive and characterful, and the maps are clear and easy to use. The format makes a little art go a long way, too. The layout is crowded but legible, and makes good use of highlighting, background shading and headings to render itself legible. Some might find the minuscule point size a challenge, though.

    While locations do sensibly limit their complexity to 1 juicy rule (“Swarm Countdown”, they still manage to have 15 or so locations each, and there are still at least some fairly complex trap rooms and battle set ups. The main thing it’s missing for me is a little more personality and agenda to the NPCs — we get concrete action suggestions, but much in the way of motivation or quirks. In some places this is cleverly implied — I think Dimkettle is likely unhappy with his lot in life — but it’s never said. I like this to be explicit; it’s definitely a valid choice to leave that entirely up to the referee’s improvisation and the reaction roll.

    The density of the locations are but their greatest strength and weakness: It’s hard to understand the module unless you’ve read every word, but every word really counts. I like this. It’s a packed pamphlet, it uses every word for maximum effect, it doesn’t waste time with unnecessary randomness when we’re squeezing it all into so few pages. The writing is not at all dull despite the gestures towards familiarity with modules of the 70s and 80s, and while it’s not super evocative, it’s very funny: I laughed aloud, a few times, which is better than you can say about most modules.

    Overall, if you’re looking for something to skip into the cover of your copy of your favourite dungeon game, so you’ve always got something to run, you’ll get better bag for your buck and better art than most here. It fits the same niche as Ruins of Castle Gygar: Perfect for a pick up and play that you can run anywhere and keep in your purse. If you’re looking for something compact of that nature, and you’re a sucker for good art and pithy text, I’d pick Tales from the Road up, particularly in the printed form factor if you’re given the opportunity (here is where you can get them in print, and nowhere else), because they’re gorgeous. They’re available individually in digital format for less than the price of a coffee.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Bathtub Review: Wind Wraith

    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.

    Wind Wraith is an 179 page setting toolbox by Lazy Litch, for Old School Essentials. In it, you travel around a post-apocalyptic ocean-covered land, filled with mysterious islands and powerful creatures. I picked this one up myself, although I missed the crowdfunding campaign.

    Wind Wraith is a monster of a book, and it cleverly recognises that fact, opening with a starter island, setting a deadly survival tone to the world. I really like the 6 locations on the island, and the authors writing really shines here. It follows this up with a character creation section — 2 unique classes, a bunch of backgrounds, boons and curses to add some flavour to your characters, and an allusion to the fact that the crew of the ship as a unit are likely to go on even in the event of character death. My main issue with this opening is that the goal of the starter island is to build a raft to escape the island, but the items needed aren’t clear to the players — I’d like to see the players realise they’re looking to hunt snow bees and raid the vampire’s lair for furniture, but I’m not sure it’ll be as intuitive as it’s assumed, and the island is explicitly stated as having no other resources, which goes against basic principles of OSR challenges having multiple potential answers. If I were to run this island, I’d throw in some other ways to access them, using my simple approach to OSR challenges.

    The next 60 or so pages are spent on world generation, covering the broader principles of the world, seas and islands, the factions that occupy them, and NPCs the players may meet. Now, this is all really, really juicy stuff — the author shows some exceptional writing here, and if you’re looking for a generator for a world drowned in a cataclysm, you’re in for a treat. But I can’t help but notice the best parts: The details of the Wind Wraith and the 3 other tyrants where the author gets to be very specific about what’s going on. The writing shines the more specific they get, but most of the writing in Wind Wraith lies in the more generic tables. I’m doing this an injustice by calling them generic though, particularly in areas like Sea Archetypes and in the NPC descriptions. There is no imagination lacking at any point in these descriptions. You’ll be generating with a grin on your face at the horrors your players are going to be meeting.

    We get into more concrete stuff from that point on. Crew and ship rules are solid and weird (clamshell ship rigged on spiderwebs? I’m in). The rules and lore around the arcane contracts are weird and benefit from Lazy Litch’s art significantly (unique sigils? that the players need to decipher? lovely!). The random monster generator comes up with some weird results in terms of stats, but a plasma-breathing oarfish seeking love and collecting niche items is a pretty great monster prompt, and the seaweed dragons and parasites are really fun flavourful encounters. The book ends in a bunch of tools, treasure, potions, spells, and a set of quick reference rules, and sheets for printing. This all really works for at the table, or for the kind of lonely fun you’ll spend generating and fleshing out the world.

    Lazy Litch is an absolutely stellar artist, and brings the thunder here, with the entire book being illustrated aside from the full-page tables. The illustrations are super evocative, and used in creative ways, and the character sheets, crew sheets and other play aids are all fully illustrated too. The layout, while bold and well suited to the art style and content, sometimes loses its way, though — there are no section headers, and in a book I’m flicking around in a lot, this makes it tricky to identify what you’re looking for at times. The pdf does have links, though, which adds a lot of access which is otherwise lacking.

    Overall, this is a setting generator and set of sailing rules that feel on par to Seas of Sand, although very different and far less gamified. I like the different types of sand in Seas of Sand, I think it adds a lot — the sea depths here just aren’t quite as flavourful to me. But, this is an excellent setting toolkit, and the art is spectacular. I can’t help but wish, though, that I could see the actual setting that the author played in, rather than this tool kit: The specifics here are just so much cooler than the randomness, and, unlike the weirdness that is Seas of Sands setting, an ocean setting has been done before — my generated setting is likely to end up generic here, but I bet the authors, cherry-picked from the best of this book, would not be. The main negative here compared to Seas of Sands setting toolbox, is that there’s nothing built in to drive the players onto the next island. Seas of Sand added a deep trade layer to incentivise exploration and faction interaction. It feels like a post-apocalyptic scenario — and the starter island supports this — wants a survival layer rather than a trade layer — but as is, this is simply a setting you can play in if you choose. Social contract or no, I think this would benefit from a core hook like trade or survival so I have a clearer sense of what we’re doing here.

    That said though: You want seafaring? You want a crew to serve as a source for your player characters? You enjoy a dark, dangerous, post-apocalyptic world filled with abyssal beasts you’ve never seen before? If you’re willing or enjoy spending time building a world, these guidelines are tables are absolutely flavour-filled and will get you what you need. As a seafaring, dark fantasy setting toolbox, Wind Wraith succeeds on all counts.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Bathtub Review: Isle of Hex

    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.

    Isle of Hex is a 64 page module for Dungeon Crawl Classics, written and illustrated by Diogo Barros. In it, you explore an island full of terror and comedy, featuring a semi-modern setting filled with cults and class politics. I was provided a digital complementary copy; this one would be best in print, though.

    My first impression of Isle of Hex is fun, and that’s driven by the art and layout, so I’ll start there. Its key and tables are sprinkled with diegetic content: letters, postcards, tourist maps and advertising. It doesn’t lean so heavily into it that it overwhelms the playability of the text though. The art outside of this conceit is of a pleasant, leisurely doodle style that feels scrawled in a notebook on a train. My main issue is that there are no section headers and very little in-text highlighting to help guide you through the paragraphs of text. This would help me with running things: Most locations on the island (there are 11 of them) are a page or over of paragraph text, which means unless I’m memorising things I’m marking it up with my own highlighting or lingering at the table while I figure out what comes next. It would be a better book in print than it was in digital because of this.

    It’s good paragraph text though: It’s funny, “Séverin Crickard is nominally the law around here, but Hexians are beholden to an older, deeper power.”, its evocative, “A child lies on the middle of the cave floor, elbows and knees bloodied, whimpering softly. The body is lit by a single shaft of natural light” and it is also hyperdiegetic in a really compelling way: “The War left in its wake a long trail of orphaned children, left to fend for themselves in a cruel and unforgiving world. The community decided that this would not do, and promptly came together to dump them somewhere…”. It manages to communicate history and story without a lot of front loading, which makes the Isle of Hex is an absolute pleasure to read, but for someone like me, it’s a challenge to run. I’d have to take notes or else read it a bunch of times. Luckily, it tends to throw in page references for NPCs.

    It has a fully illustrated bestiary, with a bunch of fun unique creatures in it. The random encounter table is excellent, almost universally featuring hooks to plots that are occurring in the background. There is a timer ticking along in the background, with festivals that tie into plots or trigger them, as well as impact the main enemy, the great Worm. This is all really cool stuff, with the main barrier to entry is that there aren’t any reasons to go anywhere: no hooks or rumours except those you extract from the paragraph text. There is an elegance to burying things in the text for the sake of a surprising and compelling read, but some front loading or other explanation of how things are likely to proceed in the absence of the players interference, and some ways to get them interested in the locations aside from wondering about, would be appreciated.

    If you run paragraph text well, and you’re looking for an island adventure, most of what you need is here, although you’ll have to read it closely to extract it. It will be a pleasure to extract — imagine if the Isle was less dry and had more interesting secrets and characters. If this sounds like what you’re after, pick up the Isle of Hex. I can’t understate how excellent the writing and worldbuilding is in this. It feels like Wes Anderson shot the Wicker Man and turned it into a meat grinder for my DCC table, which is a vibe we don’t often get for DCC, but retains the necessary humour. For me, though, I’d prefer it feature hooks, rumours, and more internal flagging or summarising so that I don’t have to parse a fairly long text in order to put it into play. Irregardless, Barros’ writing and worldbuilding is compelling as, and I can’t wait to see what else he comes up with.

    Idle Cartulary

    Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

Want to support Playful Void or Bathtub Reviews? Donate to or join my Ko-fi!

I use affiliate links where I can, to keep reviewing sustainable! Please click them if you’re considering buying something I’ve reviewed! Want to know more?

Have a module, adventure or supplement you’d like me to review? Read my review policy here, and then email me at idle dot cartulary at gmail dot com, or direct message me on Discord!

Recent Posts

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

Categories

Archives

January 2026
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

Recent Posts