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  • I Read Full Send: A Game of Mountaineering

    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’m supposed to be shopping for a present for a kid whose birthday party my kid has been invited to, but instead I am sitting on the grass watching the world cup and reading Full Send: A Game of Mountaineering. I backed this on its crowdfunding campaign, apparently for the print edition, and got some mountaineering themed tarot cards too? A pleasant surprise brought on by backing, I assume, drunk. Full Send is a roleplaying game about mountains and the people who climb them.

    This is the only cover photo I could find.

    Full Send is a 167 page role playing and card game by Laurie O’Connel who I’m familiar with for his lancer modules and his Zinequest a few years ago, Lichcraft. Full Send really feels a cut above in terms of ambition: A thick, full colour book powered by a custom set of tarot cards. The visual design by O’Connell and Kayla Dice screams a love of the sport of mountaineering — the cover is styled as the cover of a climbing magazine, and the art throughout is attributed to various mountaineering photographers — I’m not a particular fan, but I think the crack being climbed on the front cover is one popularised by Alex Honnold in Free Solo. It’s peppered with (again attributed) poetry translated by O’Connell. It’s incredibly apparent that this is a labour of love.

    We start with rules on creating a climber, which impact mechanically your hand size, your luck, and your glory. You get drives, flaws, relationships, lifestyle and equipment, as well as special abilities that help your climbing. Your relationships have a strength in points, your lifestyle gives you the capacity to spend money to solve your problems, I really like the notepad-style example of a character sheet (although the included template is not the same), but I find some of the mechanical conceits a little uncomfortable — yes, gaining glory for climbs makes sense, but calling them Glory Points and using them as currency — why am I buying my electrolyte tabs in GP? It brings me out of the world of the game. In general for me, there’s a tension in the choices to portray glory and luck and relationships in terms of points, because it dehumanises the characters involved and can easily replace their imaginary existence with a number once invoked. On the other hand, there’s a goal to that quantification: All of these scores are used to create tension while climbing the mountain, and that tension and the difficult decision making regarding what to do when you climb, and how you recover when you’re back at home base, is really the core of the game. I think your mileage may vary on this approach, depending on the kind of player you are, and the kind of prompting you benefit most from.

    The second chapter covers phases of play. During the climb, a face down spread of major arcana provides random obstacles, by consulting the prompts that fill the back of the book. Climbers then draw up to their hand size, and play these cards against the obstacles to overcome them, spending equipment and losing luck when you fail until you either turn around, making camp to recover, or reaching the summit, in a trick-taking variation card game. You gain cards for incorporating your drives or flaws in roleplay, and you can bank cards by taking the trick and being the best climber on that obstacle. If you summit with a full hand of cards, you get more Glory Points to get better equipment and better lifestyle, to make your next climb easier. I love this little strategy game, but at least in read, a lot of the “powering up” of cards you can do is a little confusing to track — each card played in the round after camp is worth double, for example, and cards banked by leading the climb are worth 20 x glory at the summit (and I assume can’t be used by everyone else for the remainder of the climb); there are a few rules like this, and on the surface, it feels hard to track. The complexity makes the climbing as well as the roleplaying engaging, but the details could clearer to me. The examples of play do a good job of clarifying, admittedly, but I personally prefer to rely on the rules explanation and not have to then flick to an example of play whenever I’m struggling. I really like the death and retirement that appears part way through this section: Basically, so long as you don’t lose the will to life mid climb, you can retire, and if your glory is high enough, you get interviewed by Full Send Magazine, where you answer questions asked by your fellow players. If you die after a successful career, you get an epilogue narrated by your closest friends detailing their favourite moments of your life. This is lovely stuff and the true incentive for glory and risking yourself for me.

    The prompts are the meat of the book, and the reason it stays open at the table. They are pretty meaty: Effectively you’re given 48 The King is Dead style unique minigames (albeit very basic ones), plus 6 unique mountains with 6-7 unique minigames each. That’s good content, right there: A campaign of 5 climbers who all die in glory is totally within the scope of this book. I love that for Full Send, as one major recurring issue I have with many games of late is the lack of real module content packed into them: I get some rules and am expected to make up the rest. Not so here. This section is what makes me feel like I can actually play this game, despite not being a climber — not to mention the “fact book” aspect of this prompts section, filled with sidebars and additional information about climbing as a culture and its history. Great stuff to facilitate play, and to ease players to bringing this to the table.

    I don’t like the information design philosophy behind Full Send, though. It’s very much designed as a manual — each heading is labeled 1.1, 1.2, etc. It feels sterile and impersonal in a way that feels contrary to the personal nature of the preface to the text (put a pin in that) and the physicality of the primary theme. It should make it easy to navigate from a layout perspective, but sections run on from each other and aren’t separated visually — for example lifestyle tiers and classes — making them difficult to find and to reference. Visual breaks — big, white-on-black pages containing long-form quotes — happen mid-section, breaking things up in ways that don’t make sense and rendering them useless either thematically or as a navigation tool. These visual breaks aren’t used at all in the print copy, I assume because the paper stock couldn’t take the ink density, and there they aren’t visually distinct at all, becoming actively detrimental to navigation and reading the text page-to-page. Colour and art is absent in the rules explanation, where it could be used to break up complexity, aid in navigation, and highlight important text, but is used excessively (and well) in most of the examples of play (although not the last one), to the point where they feel designed by different people. Visual themes like the elevation maps opening section 3 aren’t used well or consistently (at a glance, only in 3.1 and 3.6.11 ), which is a missed opportunity. Poetry quotes, which I love as an alternative to photography in a reality based game, honestly could be used more for navigation and breaking up complexity for easier understanding. Sidebars do appear in the latter half of the book to clarify meanings of mountaineering specific terms, but could’ve been utilised earlier in the book in analogous explanatory roles, even if they weren’t “fun facts” about mountaineering, to improve focus on core concepts. The back half of the book is almost entirely prompts (Full Sends equivalent of random events), and mountains (Full Sends equivalent of modules) and because of the run on layouts, they’re a little hard to navigate. I don’t hate a book that lives on the table and is used intensely the whole game, but that’s precisely the case where you need to put a whole ton of thought into the visual and information design to make running it feel intuitive. Full Send doesn’t succeed at that brief, at least for me.

    Briefly and unimportantly, the tarot deck: I love the imagery in them, which mixes Rider-Waite iconography with public domain mountaineering photography in really expressive collage; I think typography could’ve been better aligned with the main book, and I really wish there had been a full deck here, as I find mixing tarot styles really jarring personally.

    Full Send assumes a GM, but honestly I don’t know why. I think this is one of a few legacy issues with this games design (I mentioned GP earlier, another one) that aren’t cute but rather feel uninterrogated. I don’t see any need for a GM in this game at all. The main reason I think this glaring unneeded addition remains here is that the information design isn’t great: Someone is needed to navigate the book, and if you’ve got a history with a certain category of games, the person given the thankless jobs is called the GM. The section that addresses “What does the GM do?” is clearly a response to the fact that they don’t have much else to do. There’s a version of Full Send with no thankless jobs, though, so I wouldn’t run this with a GM or with a table who felt they needed it. If I found myself writing a chapter explaining why I included a GM that ends up acknowledging they have very little to do, I’d reconsider that aspect of my design, because that’s my game speaking to me, and it’s my job as a designer to listen.

    Full Send opens with a good chunk — 14 pages — of personal and design reflections. Honestly, this feels a little self-indulgent and gives the impression of a game that’s targeted at game designers rather than players; that said, as a game designer, I enjoyed them. I want to focus on one aspect of the preface, so trigger warning for real life loss of life — skip to the next paragraph. In one of these reflections, O’Connell speaks about how he saw a climber die live, watching a stream, and how his feelings about this this almost prevented Full Send being completed. The reason it was completed, came down to the fact that it had already been promised to backers or the crowdfunding campaign that O’Connell felt a responsibility to fulfil for backers’ sakes. This personal reflection has a lot of value, particularly the consideration of the real life dangers and impacts of climbing, and the consideration of a game designer’s responsibilities when writing “biographical” (I use the term very loosely in the absence of a better one that I’m aware of) games that are birthed out of specific perspectives and subcultures. It places Full Send in conversation directly with the withdrawn from distribution Dogs in the Vineyard, in that both authors appear to feel a very real responsibility to the people portrayed in their games and what their games might be saying about them. It’s also in conversation with a lot of Jason Morningstar’s work, particularly Night Witches and Desperation, which chooses to pursue real life inspiration with a very intentional perspective on the events and characters in the game. I think that a strong perspective as a game designer is what makes a “biographical” roleplaying game work, and hence I feel there’s an unresolved tension between O’Connel’s preface and the game itself, which treats mountaineering with about the same degree of seriousness as D&D treats a dungeon. This tension wouldn’t be present without the preface — it’s totally fine to have a fluffy mountaineering game in my opinion — but the preface feels like it makes a promise of exploring this complexity that isn’t fulfilled. While I like Full Send as it stands, I think that the design would have benefited from reconsideration in the light of the events describes in the preface, and from a more complex or intentional portrayal of mountaineering in a mixed light that reflects the authors mixed feelings.

    But let’s not judge Full Send for what it’s not: This is a clever, semi-cooperative trick taking game, with well incorporated roleplaying overlaid on it, a bucketload of excellent prompts, and a set of systems that provide decision-making a lot of tension in the way that a a game about a dangerous lifestyle like mountaineering really should. These strengths are undercut by poor choices around information and visual design which make it difficult to use the book at the table. The long, considered examples of play go a long way towards tempering these issues, for those who benefit from that approach. What Full Send is not is a complex exploration of the dangers of mountaineering as a practice of the grey areas of the subculture, or of the modern practice of livestreaming such dangerous practices. But if you’re looking for a game for those interested in mountaineering or who are mountaineering-curious, that is truly complete in itself, with content for many seasons, that doesn’t require a lot of prep between our before sessions, and could feasibly be run GMless, I’d check out Full Send.

    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 other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • Bathtub Review: Blackout

    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.

    Blackout is a 15 page module for Mothership by Martin Orchard with art by Zach Hazard. In it you venture deep into an industrial colony to restore its power supply; but you’re not the first team to try, and what secrets did the previous one discover? I was given a complementary copy by the author.

    We open with a timeline — effectively what the crew will know going in — and a “what’s going on” that’s pretty detailed. I usually wouldn’t like such a detailed plot for such a brief module, but here there’s a twist: Basically everything here is based in an environmental or NPC clue, meaning the mystery of what happened down here will be almost certainly able to be discovered by the players in broad strokes, and if they pay attention the specifics of the sort will be uncovered as well. It’s clever stuff. You’re incentivised to uncover these mysteries financially as well, because you’re rewarded for rescuing the previous team.

    The map isn’t linear, and the players are provided their own map, but the changes to the map that have occurred as a result of the previous teams actions are likely to funnel the players in a certain direction. This direction happens to help lay breadcrumbs to the main narrative, but you can still take a non critical path due to simple looping (within reason — it’s a 10 location map). The mystery narrative is gated in multiple ways which will make all members of the crew feel useful and important without preventing them from progressing. Neat work. The keying uses exit lists, which I don’t think are put to good use here — when both referee and players have a map, I want those exits to help me describe them and differentiate them by sensation, so I don’t have to flip ahead. The ventilation shafts on the map are simple, clever, and the way rules affect the creature and the players differently is really neat and fun.

    There are some missteps, though, notably the way information isn’t always predictably located — for example the agenda of “the Creature” is in “What’s really happening” rather than associated with its stat block or location. You can probably overlook these information design oversights, given how short the module is, particularly if you’re likely to read it before the session or you’re happy to mark these pieces of information up in the places you’d expect them to be as you go.

    Layout wise, this is functional, with single columns, clear headings, and appropriate highlighting. The art is good, particularly the cover. As someone reading this in the bath on her phone, I wish the text size was bigger, especially given the fact that the line spacing is very generous so it probably could’ve been with the same page count — it is a little hard to read on a small screen. But there’s nothing meaningful here to complain about if you’re on a larger screen or in print.

    Blackout is a stellar Mothership one-shot, which takes the typical “lone alien stalker” set up and turns it into a murder mystery. If you’re happy to put in a little leg work (or if you’re the kind to do homework before a session anyway), you’ll do just fine here. You might make a few mistakes if you prefer to do this off-the-cuff, so I wouldn’t recommend it for referees who show up 3 minutes before the session (like me). If you’re looking for a one-shot that has multiple tricks up its sleeve to hook new players on Mothership, or if you just want to throw a job into an ongoing Mothership campaign, Blackout is worth checking out.

    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 other work, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.

  • I Read Heroes of the Borderlands

    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.

    Ages ago I picked up Heroes of the Borderlands, the Dungeons and Dragons 2024 Starter Set, an homage, I had assumed from the title, to the classic starter module Keep on the Borderlands (which I reviewed along with two other homages here). It was new when I picked it up, getting closed to a year old now. I was at home tidying, and I found it tucked behind some board games on an upper shelf, and I thought, why don’t I open it, give it a read? So, I did.

    The cover to the Heroes of the Borderlands boxed set

    Let’s unbox this: At a glance, this a chonkier, sturdier starter set than Lost Mine of Phandelver starter set for D&D 2014 was. When you open it, the top sheet is a “read me first” quick-start guide in the form of a bifold a4 booklet, then we have a 30 page “Reference Booklet”, 15 page “Wilderness”, 19 page “Keep on the Borderlands”, and a 27 page “Caves of Chaos” booklets; these are all a4, paperstock, sewn booklets so they will stand up well to use, better than previously used stapled booklets. Then we have 5 player handouts (the first feeling weirdly incomplete given the graphic design of it). Then we have 9 (!) double sided poster-sized maps, all being battle maps except the 3 full sized maps of the Wilderness, the Keep and the Caves. They’re in a little folder thingy to keep them safe. Then we have 8 card-stock character sheets that are designed as board-game style player boards; you place your cards on here — “armour” “background” and “species” are the main ones with slots, and there are 8 because there’s a separate side for 1st level, 2nd level, and 2 different versions of 3rd level for each class (so, 4 players can play at once, at the same level). Then we have 5 pages of cardboard tokens – gold pieces, tokens for monsters and standees for the players, moveable terrain, HP counters and power tokens. Get past that and we have a pad of combat tracking sheets (has to be good for close to 100 combats), a set of polyhedral dice, decks of standard cards covering backgrounds, species, equipment, magic items, spells and NPCs, and decks of tarot-sized cars covering monsters and an “on your turn” action summary. These components, when you examine them more closely, have excellent attention to detail. The NPC cards have rumours on each of them, as well as which monster card is their stat block if that’s needed. Magic spells have an illustration of their area of effect, if necessary, which makes the battle maps easier to use. The web spell has a full sized web template. The monster tokens, for those with more than one of the same art, are alphabeticised to identify differences. This is a killer sales pitch and a half for the combat-focused Wizards of the Coast edition, and one that feels like it looked at Baldur’s Gate 3 and rather than curl into a ball, stepped up to the plate (it that a mixed metaphor? I’m sorry, I don’t do baseball, you get it). Honestly, opening this box made me excited to play D&D 2024, and I haven’t considered that damned game in over half a decade.

    On the other hand, it sets awful expectations: A quick google says 2 anthologies is all the other module content that’s been released since 2024, and without this kind of support — loads of maps and tokens and player boards and spell cards and stuff to match this box — you play through this and then you’re stuck with an entirely different looking game. Lost Mines of Phandelver may not have been as strong a pitch, but it was not at all a bait and switch. Heroes of the Borderlands, sorta kinda is. But, if the pitch for D&D 2024 was a boxed set every year, with these kind of components, I could get behind that business plan. I could run D&D 2024 if all I had to do was buy a boxed set every 12 months and it would look this good. Given I know of at least one other competitor that legitimately runs that model (albeit a bit more complicated), this is probably yet another example in the 2024 release of Wizards of the Coast half-baking their game design plans. You can go back and read my reviews of the Player’s Handbook (spoiler: it slapped) and Dungeon Masters Guide (spoiler: huge bummer) a few years ago, if you care. It looks like I was so bummed that I didn’t get around to reviewing the Monster Manual when it came out.

    What about the contents? The quick-start guide is fine, I guess. It’s basically the first page of the player’s handbook, plus a little picture of how to set up your character sheet playboard thingy. Components list, etc. It’s fine. The reference booklet on the other hand is a wildly different take on “tiny PHB”, starting out with how to read the cards and player board, then getting into the rules themselves. I couldn’t be stuffed, to be honest, checking what was left out here — I think it’s entirely appropriate that rules are left out in a starter kit, and if you’re the kind of person who checks the starter kit for particular rules you probably aren’t the target audience now, are you? I’d go so far as to say that missing rules are the raison d’etre: You want the players to be wishing they had a PHB or DMG. Honestly, Why isn’t there a section that says “You want more on this? Buy our book!”. Anyway, it covers all the major rules (amusingly, Roleplaying gets 3 paragraphs on page 12 and that’s it — fruitful void indeed) with some notable exceptions given I’m familiar with the original Keep on the Borderlands, which is travel rules. From memory these were in the DMG, which might be why they’re skipped, but if you’re skipping travel rules altogether in a Keep on the Borderlands we might be off to a bad start. There’s a fabulous rules glossary at the end, which I think may have been a separate book in Lost Mines of Phandelver, but it’s fine that it’s here. I’m going to take a moment to forefront the credits here: It opens with an acknowledgement of Keep on the Borderlands and the contributors to that book; I appreciate that, I do. The credits for this boxed set itself, are at the back of the reference guide, and I fear, given I am someone who cares so much about module design, about what that means, because there is no acknowledgement of separate designers or authors across the rules, product or module design here.

    First up is the Wilderness booklet. This booklet refers to itself as a tutorial, and in terms of tutorial structure, I like this: Effectively, the left hand column is the module and encounter itself, and the right hand column is advice and “how to run” information, defining how the module is written and how to interpret it. It introduces the basic structure that D&D 2024 uses in its modules, quite well, in a very simple and approachable way, and each subsequent encounter in the booklet increases the complexity slightly in a way that introduces you to the rules gradually. However, it’s not a railroad, it’s a sandbox: This means neither the players or the referee are going to be encountering these in the prescribed order. Furthermore the travel “rules” are “point at the map and say I go here”, which refers you to one of the four regions, or the Keep on the Borderlands. Your players may completely skip the wilderness, and I’m not sure why they’d choose any of them — if I had to choose between “Fens”, “Woods”, “Trail”, “Tamarack Stack”, “Keep on the Borderlands” and “Caves of Chaos” I’m sure as hell not picking the first 3, and I’m probably picking the latter 2. Even if you chose 1 of the first 4, I’m not sure it’s the intention that you play through all four encounters, given that completing 1 of the 4 encounters results in a “level up”, and completing a 2nd, 3rd or 4th does not. [Put a pin in this: it becomes relevant later] All of these choices render the entire approach to tutorialising redundant: The actual, on-rails introduction to Lost Mine of Phandelver was infinitely better, because you could ensure the players and referee would actually experience the tutorial in the right area, or at all. In terms of the design of the regions themselves, it’s absolutely confounding. Four different areas to “wander” about, but without having maps: These are your introduction to random encounters, even though some of these random encounters are locations (“Hermit’s Hut”, “Looted Wagon”). It’s a confusing introduction to the convention, especially considering the back two pages are a list of actual random encounters that fit standard conventions, which honestly are way better than the core set of 16. Only 2 out of the core 16 encounters is a social encounter, that might seed the players with rumours going forward; none of these rumours point the player characters towards anything of note — in fact, it’s impossible to do this, because locations aren’t concrete and can’t be explored towards. I’m not sure why this approach is taken, but it’s giving “never ran D&D before”, which is uncharitable of me I know given the credit list, but it’s genuinely inconceivable that this was the design approach they came to. Finally: These encounters have largely drained the wilderness encounters of Keep on the Borderlands, a pretty lightly seasoned module to begin with, of what little flavour it had — the hermit, for example, is simply grumpy and easy to persuade to be cooperative. I do not like the Wilderness booklet, on weight.

    We then have Keep on the Borderlands. Here, you keep track of characters using their tokens, but they don’t have to travel between areas, and they’re not expected to remain together. The tutorialising continues here, for the first location only, but then backs off. Every location has a quest, and these quests vary considerably in nature, which I like, but they are also uneccessarily complex — the goat-wrangling quest, which literally features on the box cover, requires you to randomly generate where the goats are. Why? Why not have each goat in a fun situation already in certain locations? They are also awfully, for want of a better word nice: Unlike the original, where you’re expected to pilfer everything in sight, here the bank heist is replaced with trying to persuade the thieves not to pilfer the bank. When you get to the Fortress, the final location in the keep, it becomes clear why there are no hooks in this module [this is where you can remind yourself of my concerns earlier in the Wilderness I asked you to put a pin in]: The “keep official quests”, are the ones supposed to incentivise you to interact with these first two booklets: “visit 3 wilderness regions” and “complete 3 keep quests”. No need for anything to actually be interesting or appealing to the players: They simply have to do these to get a reward (you won’t know what until you do them!). If you visit the Castellan, he’ll give the players a quest that isn’t very clear: “investigate the rumours of a cult in the caves” “quash the evil” and something about a “source of power”. This is the only hook to go to the Caves of Chaos. Once again, this design is either making the massive assumption that people who’ve played video games would not consider engaging in an interesting world unless it was structured like a choose your own adventure game from the 90’s, or they haven’t played enough damned D&D to understand how to design a module. I’m not sure which is the more insulting design basis, but it results in a world nobody would want to explore, or be able to explore if they tried. The original Keep on the Borderland is better than this at hooks and rumours, and it was written almost 50 years ago.

    Now, making the assumption we ever go to the Caves of Chaos, here we have are effectively 11 locations, and all of them are designed as combat encounters. 3 of these have been positioned as potentially social encounters: The kobolds, for example, have a scenario where the egg they were going to eat has hatched into a dragon, who they’re trying to appease and make a decision about whether they return it to its’ nest or raise it themselves. But, in the next sentence says “reduce the number of Kobold Warriors to make it easier and shorter”, implying you’re supposed to slaughter the lot of them, irregardless of their niceness. The same thing happens with the Nothic — technically it’s a quest-giver, but practically it advises “add additional Animated Flying Swords”. Every other encounter is combat only, with no potential for negotiation. Every single one of these caves exists as a poster-sized battle-map, and you’re intended to step through them in turns starting in a marked “start area”. In a way that the original Caves of Chaos did not, this feels like an absolute drudge to play through. It feels more like playing Heroquest than D&D. In the original, these were all factions you could engage with and play off each other; trickery was as much a tool as your sword. Not so here. That said, the Caves of Chaos is no longer a large dungeon, and I really like the new design as a mountain with multiple cave entrances as you ascend it. Each cave is independent; some but not all are interconnected in a way that might be considered reminiscent of the interesting looping of early dungeons like the Caves of Chaos. The intent is that you go on, do a combat, and then go back to the wilderness or the keep, and rest and restock, I suspect. And I get that: If you’re not familiar with the megadungeon as a concept (especially when the rules explicitly say you can’t long rest in the Caves of Chaos), the idea of barricading down and then continuing on is a little foreign. But I’d also kind of expect if you were going to use the Caves of Chaos as your starter module, isn’t the point to introduce players to the conceits of a large dungeon?

    In terms of all 3 of the module booklets, there’s a few glaring oversights: Why would the referee start in any of the three areas (despite being told that she can)? Why would the player characters adventure in the wilderness at all? Why would they venture into the Caves of Chaos? There is a severe lack of hooks, even with the rumours included on the character cards, pointing them towards anything of note. The only reason to do anything is to fulfil questgiver’s requests, and hence earn a Gem (literally a token you can get) or a magical item. All of these lapses place the weight squarely on the referee to lead the players around this wilderness by the nose, to choose not using the random tables provided given their mundanity, and to try to come up with some reason to enjoy all of this. This iteration of Wizards of the Coast have, with this release, doubled down on refusing to acknowledge the referee as a player deserving of support and capable of enjoying themselves. A significant amount of the appeal of the chunky, beautiful components is reduced by what you might consider the videogamification of the module, for me. Coming back to the comparison to Baldur’s Gate 3: It’s like they missed what people loved about it. It really is a disappointment.

    Looking at the credits for the PHB and Heroes of the Borderlands, 3 of the designers have changed, all of which were already on the PHB team. No one new has been introduced. Arman has been floating around for a while in both MCDM and Wizards of the Coast, working on the more recent much less traditional module design, while Renie and Lundeen the two other new names (who did playtesting on the PHB) cut their teeth on Pathfinder adventure paths. To me, these choices reflect a decision about what this starter set is supposed to be — rigid, combat focused — and also to me reveals a lack of insight into what made the original module Keep on the Borderlands great. Honestly, given their pedigree, I don’t think no thought was given the module design here: Simply that despite the superficial branding, Wizards of the Coast is uninterested in classic play, and wants a return to combat focused play of the 2000s. For me, this is a step down from D&D 2014, where the credits showed an interest in the OSR as an inspiration. I don’t think this actually reflects where the hobby is going, which is sad to me: The popularity of D&D is being buoyed by romance and character-centric APs and romance and character-centric videogames, and nostalgia for the 2000s does not to me feel like a direction that’s likely to end in success.

    Credits for the 2024 PHB (Thanks Zak H for the photo)
    Credits for the Heroes of the Borderlands

    There’s a lot to love here: The chunky, thoughtful components. Splitting the areas of the module into 3 making it easier to reference and hence to run. A sandbox that players can approach it in any order. Rules being directed at players and referees differently, to lean way from overwhelming the players, and separate out the player-facing and referee-facing rules clearly, which does help to onboard players at least, although it continues the theme of not seeming to care about the load the referee takes on that D&D 2024 has folded embraced. But it all falls apart, truly, for a number of reasons: The lack of a product design direction that supports a transition from this “version” of the game to the one in the books. The absolutely abysmal module design, that feels like it was designed by people completely unfamiliar with the historical or contemporary hobby. The lack of insight into what the fans brought to the game by video games like Baldurs Gate 3 actually loved that game, or at least the abysmal failure to facilitate that kind of play. I think it really comes down to the same problems I had with the main books back in 2024, sadly: When let my partner unbox Heroes of the Borderland, she was incredibly excited by all the player-facing paraphernalia. When I read the referee-facing content, it was absolutely awful and unsupportive. At this point, poor prospective product design, a lack of regard for the load placed on referees, and a lack of vision for how D&D 2024 is different from the videogame RPGs that are so popular right now, is not inadvertent, but rather a recurrent and conscious choice by Wizards of the Coast.

    Honestly before considering this, check out one of the many alternatives as a first choice: If you want big box starter sets, cool components, and a prospective product design strategy, check out Pathfinder 2e. If you want the drama of Baldur’s Gate 3 and also uses card decks, check out Daggerheart. If you want freedom to be and do whatever you want, and unlimited choice of modules that are actually well designed, check out Cairn (this also comes in a fancy boxed set!). If you want wilderness exploration and quests that don’t feel like they’re presented by a robot, check out Mythic Bastionland (Quinn’s reviewed this and he’s more famous than me anyway). If you’re partial to sci-fi, Mothership has an excellent boxed set. If you’re looking to get a friend into specifically D&D 2024 (I can’t imagine anyone looking to play it the first time would be reading my review of it), a second hand copy of Lost Mine of Phandelver would be a better choice than this — the rules there are not that different to 2024’s rules. If what you’re after is none of those things — but rather a box full of chunky tokens that board-gamifies the first few levels of D&D — then you are a mystery to me, but you should consider checking out Heroes of the Borderlands.

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  • A Wee Mechanic: Levelling up by alignment

    I like little bespoke mechanics. Here’s one:

    Levelling up by alignment

    If you’re good, you get XP for giving gold to benefit the poor or needy. For example, starting a soup kitchen, tithing to a church, donating to an orphanage.

    If you’re neutral, you get XP for spending gold to benefit the betterment of your body or mind. For example, researching a spell, buying a horse, or training a new skill.

    If you’re evil, you get XP for spending gold on your own comfort or pleasure. For example, eating an expensive meal, indulging in narcotics, or paying for a personal valet.

    Note: I’m not here to argue about the meaning of alignment in elfgames. if you’re concerned about words like “good” and “evil”, change them. Make suggestions in the comments. The point is, if alignment exists, I want it to mean something, and introducing a rule like this gives them a meaning in a way I like. This isn’t a particularly novel take — XP variants for different classes are common — but it’s fun to make different parts of the design bear weight, instead of everything belonging to class.

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  • Bathtub Review: Vileplume Mountain

    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.

    Vileplume Mountain is a 34 page module for Into the Oddish, written Warren F Smith and illustrated by Hodag. In this Pokopia-esque postapocalyptic Kanto, you venture into the complex beneath Vileplume mountain, to rescue kidnapped pokémon from a Mewtwo that exists only in legend. Both Warren and Hodag are friends of mine, but I ordered this for its preorder campaign.

    This module is a a self-described parody of White Plume Mountain, the classic module by Lawrence Schick. I’m not as familiar with or feel as much affection towards this module as the author clearly is and does, and I suspect that tempers my experience of this module. Everything in this down to the layout is inspired by that original, and I’m sure there a plenty of very clever jokes and allusions that I missed. It features a bunch of commentary that speaks to the connections between the two, which I enjoy from both a design perspective and from the perspective of a referee, but about which your mileage may vary.

    The module itself is 18 pages long, with the tail end of the book being stat blocks for new pokémon, and new moves (this systems equivalent of spells). It’s a 27 room, single level dungeon, with 3 separate wings, each between 5 and 9 rooms, exactly as the module upon which it is based. This gives the approach a lot of agency, although the north wing can only be easily accessed from the north. These rooms are, to a degree, a direct translation of the original rooms to ones with pokémon theming and slightly better game design, which sounds like more of a criticism than it is: They’re fun and they present this postapocalyptic world of only pokémon in a way that renders it concrete. What else is the “starter” module of a new game supposed to achieve? My main objection is the ending: Unlike most of the other game design “fixes”, the unsatisfying ending of White Plume Mountain remains. In that era, the expectation that referees supplement and expand written modules was baked in, but not adjusting the ending (and which is to be clear adapted with a huge degree of affection for the source material) was a little bit of a disappointment to me.

    The layout is a fond homage to both its inspirations, which means it’s not especially easy to run or legible to read, but the simplicity of the dungeon cuts through that easily. Hodag’s artwork (as will surprise no one who follows his blog, which has featured multiple pokémon months) is full of love for the subject matter and in addition feels appropriate to the era and graphic design. It’s a nostalgic design, for those who have nostalgia for the subjects.

    If you’re looking for a module to run a one-shot of Into the Oddish in, Vileplume Mountain is the module for you. If your group has been gasping for an OSR pokémon campaign, however, and you’re looking to kick off said campaign, this module ends in disaster for your team of pokémon. Irregardless, this is a charming little homage to White Plume Mountain, filled with advice on how to run it, and gorgeous art. If you’re a fan of Pokopia and the OSR, I’d probably check Vileplume Mountain out. Limited stocks last.

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  • I Read Fatherfog

    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’m feeling a little overwhelmed after going shopping for work outfits, so rather than go home, I’m going to sit in my favourite cafe, eat a hash brown sandwich, and read Fatherfog. Fatherfog is a 64 page roleplaying game by Alan Gerding, and it’s the first new roleplaying game from Tuesday Knight Games since Mothership in 2018. Like Mothership, it’s styled as 0E. In it, you’re trying to survive in a world where the fairytales you know and love exist in their original, horrifying forms, while you try to recover the dying resource “hope” for your village, the only place of safety you’ve ever known. I was sent a copy of Fatherfog by Tuesday Knight Games.

    Fatherfog is, at a glance, an adaptation of the panic system (Mothership’s SRD), but while it keeps the d100 checks and saves and the skill trees, it makes meaningful changes: Skill points are now a resource used across multiple systems, you can give up entire skill trees for unnatural abilities, resting is an important and potentially engaging subsystem, you can freeze in combat, “bits” add more meaning to dice rolls (I’ll explain that a little more in a moment), and there are now significant travel and death rules. Lots of these rules feel specific to the world of Fatherfog in a really pleasing way that is very different from the more broadly applicable rules choices that Mothership has made with very good reason. There are a lot of things that have changed less, that I feel work well nevertheless: I was doubtful to see skill trees effectively applied to fairytale horror, but it feels good; the lateral translation of fear and panic to hope and despair is thematically sound and gives mechanical weight to a lot of choices across play; the clarity over the fact that enemies don’t roll to attack, but rather player characters roll to save. Some of these new rules are really elegant, in particular, the system called “bits”. The “ones” die of a d100 is called a “bit”; if you roll a mind save and succeed, you still lose a “bit of hope”; providing successful medical care heals a “bit of health”, if a failed save might cause damage, it causes a “bit of damage”. They’re a little underutilised — these bits could also refer out to subtables for unique checks or attacks against specific monsters, but this either hasn’t been conceptualised yet or is going to appear in a future module. I also like the very specific combat rules of the referee passing you if you don’t have an idea, until you have a second chance, but that if you still don’t know how to act, you “freeze” and do nothing this round. Instead of tracking all of your equipment, you must describe everything you’re carrying and how; an “equipment check”, failure of which causes a penalty; this rule is a little vague and referee-specific, and I think it needs a little workshopping, but I like where it’s at. It’s worth mentioning that although it’s not mentioned, the character sheet design here really limits your equipment carrying capacity, although that would bear mentioning in the text if it’s an intended part of the design. Overall, I really like the adaptations given to the Panic system here, and I think it’s significantly more thematic and interesting in terms of rules design than the only other Panic system game I’m familiar with, Cloud Empress.

    The thing I always have the most trouble reviewing in fantasy roleplaying games is the content, because it tends to blur together. Our stats here are strength, intellect and will; our saves are body, mind and spirit. There are four classes: Workers, Philosophers, Hunters and Strangers. These each have a unique trait that usually occurs when you roll a critical success and sometimes on a critical failure. You choose a “subclass” by choosing a set of equipment (a “rucksack”), and further develop your character by choosing (or rolling) a colour for your cloak, the broach the holds it in place, a personal trinket, and how you gained what coin you have. Equipment here is unremarkable, although your player (not the character) receives a legacy artifact that is passed from character to character, which is encouraged to be kept secret, which is a lovely touch (and a mystery associated with the world that you’re encouraged to hash out amongst yourselves). You earn skill points for a variety of things, most interestingly for keeping watch; you can spend these on new skills, or can scrap your capacity to gain new skills in a certain tree to take an unnatural ability — a highly specific power that doesn’t provide a bonus, and is designed in collaboration with the referee. Only a few foes are listed in this core book, although little guidance is given to create more, although it must be said that I really like the foe structure — with every foe given not just a motive but a trick associated with how to defeat it that the player characters will have to discover. It’s worth noting, to me, that there’s an implication in the introduction (which I mentioned in my introduction as well), that you’re going to be dealing with hope as a resource at a level beyond simply the character sheet, but rather at the level of your home village. I do think that this game would benefit from some kind of additional system or referral back to this; the structure and implied narrative is begging for more focus on the village and what it might mean to save it, and it’s a disappointment this is missing, although I wonder if it once existed and was lost to page count. My overall impression of Father Fog as a statement, is that it’s the equivalent of a “Player’s Guide”, with no known “Referee’s Guide” planned. This is a similar approach to the original Mothership, but it should be noted it leaves a lot to the referee’s imagination and planning and this stage in the release schedule.

    I’m a little mixed on the writing and content of Fatherfog. On one hand, the worldbuilding is compelling and raises some big questions that your campaign is likely to revolve around, particularly around the fog and the Fogtower keepers, and it plants seeds that are very easy for most referees to work from in terms of inspiration for adventures — after all, everyone knows a few fairytales, don’t they? If you’re a skilled referee, just buy Grimm’s Fairy Tales and have at it. Setting elements are alluded to throughout the book which are very intriguing in the best possible way — I imagine player characters finding foglines and following them to who knows where. I imagine what the consequence might be if you break the law of the foghouses. Why do legacy artifacts mysteriously appear in the possession when one dies? Where do the strangers come from? These are all compelling questions. On the other hand, it’s a little workmanlike, where I’d love it to feel a little more, well, folk-tale-like and florid; the phrase “Trained in combat and/or survival” shouldn’t be in a fairy tale themed book; I love the clarity, but it sacrifices atmosphere and relegates it to clever ideas; I think with the right team, one wouldn’t need to be sacrificed for the other. That said, it’s still evocative at times, particularly in the character-building coin and trinkets tables (“Your attempt to sell flowers, while appreciated by some, has left you with little.”, “Wonderfully crafted shoes appeared in your home overnight; their sale earned you a hefty sum.”, or “Thing sealed in a murky jar“, and often funny (in the death table — “Your right hand can’t help but feel your left hand is mocking it.”). One thing that is featured heavily is the character of Death — there’s a whole section devoted to Death, and how characters might interact with Death when you die, and Death is featured in the logo, which makes me suspect it’s supposed to be a core mystery as well. This is an interesting direction, although it’s not explored thoroughly. One thing that there is not in Fatherfog is any beginner’s module — and for good reason, it’s maxing out the potential size of a zine at 64 pages. This means, if you pick this up immediately, you’re going to be designing your own adventures — that said, I think that once again, Tuesday Knight Games has chosen a core theme here that is likely to invite a lot of creativity from the community, given the huge number of potential fairytales and interpretations of them that could be adapted into modules for Fatherfog.

    Fatherfog is the first thing I’ve seen that brings the full weight of the Tuesday Knight Games visual and game design team to an aesthetic that isn’t the hyper-dense Mothership visual signature, and they manage to make it work, feel fairy-tale, while keeping the clever design that made Mothership so easy to pick up in the first place. Smart typeface choices, a cohesive colour palette, and It reproduces the intuitive “play straight from” character sheet without sacrificing that identity, and I especially like the implications of colouring and drawing on that character sheet. Layout conventions are appropriately broken to describe things like the character sheet and classes. Art is used to break up dense areas like d100 tables, while those tables all scream colour in the same way Mothership’s patches do. Iconography is used for game phases and for skill levels in a pretty intuitive way (although I think whether or not they’re a stroke of genius or simply flash probably won’t become evident until we start seeing modules and expansions to Fatherfog and see how they’re incorporated there). A suite of excellent artists including Conner Fawcett and Ryan Lynch, all create a distinct visual identity for Fatherfog. Colour is used to differentiate sections so that those playing party members don’t stumble into the referees section. The back cover is a summary of how to play that covers all the major mechanics, elegantly and clearly. The biggest miss in terms of layout and design is the lack of page references; 64 pages is enough to get lost in for me. That said, the table of contents is clear and thorough. The physical product itself is exactly what I’ve come to expect from Tuesday Knight Games: This may be a zine, but the cardstock is thick, well textured, and will stand up to a bunch of use.

    We have no shortage of high-lethality horror fantasy games in the hobby — there are at least two heavy-hitters in Trophy Gold and Cairn 2e that feature a fairy tale aesthetic. Trophy Gold released with a cornucopia of incursions (although a quick search on itch.io gives me the impression ongoing development of more incursions by the community may be dead in the water); Cairn’s own print store lists around 60 modules. The cumulative weight of the communities of these competitors is hard to compete against, but Tuesday Knight Games has in Mothership a very strong track record of support. What Fatherfog offers is a strong aesthetic, some clever mechanical twists, a familiar overall system with some welcome clarifications, and a unique and more specific setting than either Trophy Gold or Cairn have to offer (sorry, Vald). I obviously can’t recommend Fatherfog as an exosystem right now, but I think it’s really promising as a system to develop for, and I suspect people will be excited to develop for it given it has a far more specific angle than anything else out there right now, and that angle allows creators to demonstrate how unique their own upbringings are in a way that’s pretty unique. That’s an exciting future, if it eventuates.

    I like Fatherfog, a lot. As someone without a lot of time to design my own adventures on a weekly basis, its’ specific theming is a detriment to me bringing it to the table. It won’t be, however, for people who get excited at the idea of rifling through a book of fairy tales as their weekly prep, and if the community gets as excited for Fatherfog as I feel after reading it, it won’t be long before I won’t have to design my own adventures. It’s a take on the Panic system with a bunch of unique and clever mechanical innovations that I’m excited to see expanded upon and implemented, while remaining familiar enough to be easy to put into play without a fuss. It’s also full of a bunch of really interesting seeds and evocative concepts that are really compelling in terms of world-building. If you love fairy tales, and have yearned for an on-ramp into running them in an OSR style, if you’ve bounced off Cairn and Trophy Dark as fantasy horror games but are familiar with Mothership, or, if you’re excited by the baked in mysteries that Fatherfog is offering, Fatherfog is probably for you.

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  • Bathtub Review: Rare Bird

    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.

    Rare Bird is a 39 page module for Swyvers by Owen Braekke-Carroll with art and cartography by Alice Carroll. In it, you steal a rare and massive bird from a well-protected mansion. It’s pay what you want.

    I love a module with a solid moral dilemma at its’ heart, and while in Swyvers you’re generally not good guys, and here you know you’re working for the bad guys, the moral dilemma that can ensue if you succeed in stealing the bird is a very, very juicy one. The added complication of the rival crew of Swyvers with a similar but not identical goal, makes things even juicier. This is clever set-up, and adds a sense of tension to the module. I often look to be excited by the first few pages of summary, and Rare Bird got me excited in the first few pages.

    We open with about 10 pages of personalities and their stat blocks. Your mileage may vary, but it uses its words to imply a lot in a way that I like: “Foolishly invested in one gold tooth after a night of successful gambling, now spends his days talking with his lips held low in a very strange manner to avoid anyone seeing it.” Then we have our random encounters, which advance on a pair of parallel timelines that interact with each other. This seems neat, with the math propelling things forward every three rooms or so. There are 12 events and 21 rooms, which means we can expect most of these events to crop up across the totality of the module. The final events are pretty grim and end the module themselves, so if you want the swyvers to have a chance of getting out with their quarry, you might want to soften this to only on a roll of 1, or make one event table 1 and the other 2, as really you’re expecting to finish this module in about 36 turns as is, which feels like it might be tight. The key makes up most of the book, and has a tight, clear layout with some nice internal paragraphs decisions that make for good informational design without being overly structured, which will appeal to the “I like paragraphs” crowd. In a sidebar, there’s always loot and exits listed, a habit I appreciate generally but not here specifically. Why? There’s no additional information attached to these exits — smells or noises or the like — so an inset map would be a more beneficial use of the space. These rooms, aside from the loot in them, are not incredibly interactive — they’re intended as backgrounds for the characters and swyvers to interact around. The writing here isn’t as good as Swyvers itself, but it’s still good, consistently funny, and it suits the world perfectly.

    There are a few little disappointments around the book, though. The major villain isn’t defined in a way that feels dismissive “what does it look like? What does it do? Ultimately this is up to you and your Smoke.”. There’s a weirdly placed list of rumours — don’t know why they’re situated between the events and the explanation of the events. One repeating issue throughout Rare Bird is referencing forward. It would benefit from hyperlinks or page references, because the placement is reasonable, for the most part — this is a big book, and co-locating things is not the wrong choice. It’s workable if you’re in digital — you can word search for specifics, but if you had the printed version you’d need to spend some solid time annotating what’s going on. This is an easily fixed problem, but it makes running a little more challenging.

    If there has been a large community of Swyvers developers pumping out modules, I’ve missed it. On my first impressions, it is a solid game, and while Rare Bird isn’t perfect, this is a module I’d really enjoy running. I think I’d need a little more than just this to persuade me to start a Swyvers campaign — but I remember when Mothership just had the one module. If you’re looking to run Swyvers, or you’re looking for a fun heist to run and don’t mind converting, Rare Bird is a fun heist with a lot of potential conflict and drama.

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  • A Wee Mechanic: Stabilising the dying

    I like little bespoke mechanics. Here’s one.

    How to stabilise a dying person

    If you have a medical kit, it contains five tools a tincture (d4), a tourniquet (d6), a lancet (d8), a trephine (d10), and a bonesaw (d12). When you’ve used one to stabilise someone, cross it out.

    When you go to stabilise someone, secretly choose a tool. The person being stabilised secretly chooses a number of HP between 1 and 12. You can tell the referee if either of you aren’t trustworthy.

    Roll your tool die. If you roll over the number of HP the dying person chose, they are healed to that number of HP. If you do not, they bleed out.

    You must repair your tools if you use it. They cost that dice size to repair.

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  • Bathtub Review: A Familiar Tower

    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.

    A Familiar Tower is a 39 page module for Old School Essentials by Directsun, with art by Skullboy and graphic design and development by Sam Sorenson. In it, you’re trapped inside a tower, and you need to get out. I can’t really review this in any meaningful capacity without spoiling the puzzle you’re trying to solve, so fair warning there be spoilers ahead.

    Layout and information design here varies between choices that obscure and clarify; the inner cover is two maps, one a not-quite isometric view, showing the rooms and their page numbers; the other showing, in addition, the floor plans of each level in a traditional 5 foot grid. Good, clear. But features that hold true for the whole tower are on the copyright page, which I don’t like as a design decision; honestly I don’t typically read the copyright page and I only noticed this because I was reading in digital. Headings are bold, minimaps are reproduced, read-aloud text is bolded and other locations or features are page referenced. Good, clear. It should be noted, though, that you’re going to do a lot of page-turning given that all stat blocks and items are in an appendix that these references point to. It was very difficult to make heads or tails of this module digitally, although thank goodness the page references have hyperlinks (I did a lot of scrolling back and forth even with that blessing, though). The choice to put Advanced Tower Mechanics — only 2 paragraphs — at the end of the key, instead of at the beginning, honestly makes it a little more difficult to understand, as it describes things that should be other keys, and details a few events that should probably be detailed in the main text, although I don’t disagree that it be duplicated elsewhere. But the result is that it’s unclear. Skullboy’s art and maps both are peerless, and suit the humour of the book in a way that feels like a collaboration rather than simply an illustration. It’s excellent stuff.

    Directsun specialises in puzzle dungeons, and the mechanic you’re playing with here is one of size, however, unlike typically, how the mechanic works isn’t crystal clear: “Entering or leaving the tower changes an object’s size by a factor of fifty.“. Enlarges it, or shrinks it? Well, it’s not clear from the explanatory text, which is entirely by reference to the replica tower (well, technically not a replica, through magic): If something enters the replica tower, it appears in “your” tower as fifty times larger, and if something leaves the replica tower, it is retrieved at fifty times larger. The puzzles include a variety of options to use this mechanism, including remaining large and shrinking yourselves down, and changing item sizes in either direction. I recognise that not providing the solutions to the puzzles is an intentional choice; however the fact that I struggled to figure out the mechanisms doesn’t work for me as a referee; this is a book that wants you to read it’s entirety before understanding it. No more is this book’s insistence on your reading it in it’s absolute entirety and understanding it as a whole more frustrating to me that where it reveals how to escape the tower at all: This is first described on page 35 in an appendix, although it’s alluded to on page 13, which I admittedly missed until my second read through. While, after struggling through this challenging information design for this review, I wouldn’t have trouble running this module, I don’t know that I’ll remember in a week, and it took me over an hour to decipher exactly how to approach this fairly short book.

    If you power on through that lack of clarity better than I did, though, the rooms themselves are absolutely choc-a-block with interactive content; typically at least 2 or 3 things to interact with. There are 14 locations in all, and at least each of the five floors features a puzzle for the players to figure out, ranging from very simple (the marble puzzle on level 2 feels introductory), to more challenging (the giant switch in the basement will take a lot more planning). This level of complexity does have its’ negatives: There’s a lot of text, and a lot to parse and then communicate back to the players; I think that an alternative approach to the keying would work better for such complexity, as this approach would have me leaping from paragraph to paragraph and then back again as the players ask questions, not to mention to the appendix and back to grasp the NPCs that are described in considerable detail. Frustratingly, these really compelling and funny characters often have their descriptions split across sections — it’s on page 15 you find out that you’re gien a quest to cross items off Carbuncle’s bucket list, but what the bucket list is? Page 28. There’s a bunch of information like this that should have been co-located, in my opinion. But the characters themselves are the kind to sink your teeth into, so long as you don’t mind a module that leans into the lighthearted — most of these are Wonderland-esque speaking animals. I think they’re a pleasure.

    A Familiar Tower is an excellent puzzle, but it’s not a module for someone like me who likes to run things blind, because it wants to be the kind of module that doesn’t explain itself ahead of time. For a module whose location content is less than 25 pages, honestly, I don’t see why it doesn’t want to spend more time explaining itself. The puzzle itself, and the humour in the characters within, are excellent and would be a pleasure to run. If you’ve the time and capacity to parse the module, though, A Familiar Tower will be an incredibly memorable few sessions of fun characters to play and meet, and the promise of plenty of shenanigans.

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  • Bathtub Review: Hot Property

    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.

    Hot Property is a 3 page module by Norgad for Mausritter, released for Mausritter month in 2025. It details the vault of a mysterious company, which you’re likely to be breaking into to steal everything you can hold. I was provided a community copy by the author.

    The map of the surrounds of the Iron Fortress take about half a page, in typical Mausritter (and let’s be frank, Norgad), terseness. Here, the terseness causes some glitches, for example, a timer triggers when the party enters the inspection area, but the inspection area isn’t actually mentioned (although you can assume it’s the access dock where “No weapons [are] allowed.“). You’ve got to be willing to improvise to run a Mausritter module. The other half of the page covers encounters — all of which feature one of the 2 factions interacting — and how to escalate them in line with the timer, a few odd treasures, and stats for the two factions. The second page covers the key for the 16 room Iron Fortress. The map has a lot of character, and honestly we don’t see enough side-view maps of dungeons, and it has some interesting loops, interactive elements and potential secret doors to hidden treasures to keep it interesting. It’s clever with folding a little depth into its’ rooms with few words — “suspiciously muddy prisoners” are a hint for an escape tunnel, for example, but a lot of these are blink and you’ll miss it, and I suspect under the pressure of the timer, and the fact that you’ve only got 20 turns to get in and out of a 16 room dungeon, means that the players will likely be rushing.

    Or at least, I think they should be. The timer aspect of this module elevates it, although I wish there were a more concrete way of indicating to the players included exactly how long they have to achieve their goals. As it is, there’s a chance that they might realise they need to flee 3 turns before the entire fortress collapses and they have to find a way to escape the eels that occupy the lake that serves as its’ moat. There’s a bit of unused space on the third page of this module, and I think it would be better to spend that space to provide a little in-world illustration of the risks of being in the vault in the form of little notes between the managers. You could include these in certain rooms and refer out to the back page to preserve the tight layout, or you could indicate that the workers have an idea of what’s in the bottom of the fortress, and then it wouldn’t be a surprise, but rather the resolution to a developing dread. As written, the climax is likely to be a fight for the few seats on the barge between the party, the workers who are explicitly not bad people, and the group of revolutionaries who are at least against the masterminds of the scheme. I think if I ran it, I’d need to tweak something to prevent that grim ending.

    The layout here is tight and usable, and comes in 2 versions. I’m not sure exactly what the format of the primary layout actually is (it’s called “A5 wide pamphlet”), but from the itch.io page it looks like a trifold. The 3-page makes more sense to me, although in neither of the versions is the space fully utilised, and in a way that feels a little unintentional. That said, in a 3 page version, I’d run it off just the middle 2 pages, and I’d have everything I need so long as I was able to improvise, so this would be my preference given the content on the other pages. And the art — primarily maps aside from the cover which is excellent and evocative of the timer-oriented heist that is intended — is clear, cute and useful. Precisely what you need to run the module. I feel obligated to add that while I don’t have the physical version of this, every physical Norgad product I’ve own is absurdly high quality in physical, and if you like a hefty pamphlet, it might be worth looking into the physical version if there are any available.

    Overall, I like Hot Property a lot, and I like it’s themes and the lack of a clear villain, as well as the timer elements. It stands out from the crowd of short pamphlet adventures because of these additions. I’m always on the look out for yet another Mausritter one-shot to run, and if you’re looking for a little, one-shot heist, I’d check it out, so long as you’re happy for that little bit of tweaking.

    Idle Cartulary

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