• Bathtub Review: Emergence

    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.

    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.

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  • Bathtub Review: What Ho, Frog Demons

    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.

    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.

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  • I Read Harvest

    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.

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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    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.

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  • 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.

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