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.

Atop the Wailing Dunes is a sandbox by Sofinho for the exceptional stone age roleplaying game, Pariah. It’s a 70 page illustrated zine (primarily by Edd0) that is solidly focused on being a complete resource for running a Pariah campaign. As a sales pitch, this appeals to me greatly, because as much as I enjoyed Pariah as a read through, I struggled to conceptualise how to actually play it until I read Luke Gearing’s session reports.

Layout is functional, but never pretty. The use of colours is quite jarring to me, although I like the colour palette chosen; 12, 13 and 67 are full colour pages, and they stand out in a way that they just shouldn’t. The bulk of the zine consists of the hex descriptions, which are consistently laid out so that you could effectively spend a session just attending to one spread and then flicking back to the procedures in the beginning of the book at the tables at beginning and end; this is a supremely usable tool for the people it’s aimed at, but it also expects the referee running this to be a competent and experienced one. The full page art pieces are absolutely gorgeous, but the spot art looks squeezed into the space in a way that isn’t pleasing to me at all, despite generally being of good quality.

I’m inclined to treat Atop the Wailing Dunes as simply the second half of Pariah, because it opens with a bunch of procedures that honestly feel like they should have been in that book. They bring a structure and consistency that really helps ground the game in a routine that helps me understand what it means to play as stone-aged nomads, and brings the challenges they’re likely to encounter to the forefront, with a detailed hex-flower weather procedure, a procedure for local spirits and how they interact with the player characters, and procedures for setting camp and travelling by night. I’m not necessarily a procedure-heavy referee, but procedures help to support certain styles of play, so what I think isn’t necessary in all elfgames is very welcome in a game like Pariah where the playstyle isn’t as intuitive, at least for me.

This is a sandbox in the purest sense, and it’s delivered through two-page spreads that consist mostly of random tables. Each location has a genius-locii or local spirit, and a sub-hex map with a few locations (these appear to follow the landmark/hidden/secret designations, although not overtly, which is an excellent system for an exploration-heavy game like Pariah). The random tables are tied to specific sub-hex types, so you basically look at the hex on the mini-map for the spread, and match it to the icon to know which tables to roll on.

This is an elegant system that falls down for me on the specifics: Many of the icons are very similarly coloured, which makes it challenging to tell apart, and icons on them aren’t always unique making it sometimes difficult to identify which tables to roll on. The tables are unique to the location (although obviously many themes recur), and aren’t alphabetised, and so it’s often a little frustrating to locate the “small game” table, even though it’s on the same page. Sometimes the table you’re looking for is on the designated random table page (the odd page), but occasionally it isn’t (for example, the rumours table might be on the even page in some cases), and I suspect this is just because of layout issues, but it makes it less usable practically.

That said, while I can pick on specific problems, this is a powerful technique to iterate on. The negative, for me, is that being such a procedural approach, it leaves little room for Sofinho’s poetry to shine. There is only one “ ancient titan enduring an aeons-long malaise“; “slumbering elephant god around whom a great stone village has been constructed” or “small shrine to the Lord of Sun and Heavens, nestled in a lightning-struck tree” for every twenty “Rainbow arcs across the sky”, or “vultures circling”, or “sudden shear drop, narrowly avoided”. While in those random tables there are some very terse nuggets of gold: “Monkey says hello“, “Dead deer with a pariah’s face“, these concepts are often repeated (there’s a “Dead monkey with a pariah’s face“, too). There are swings and roundabouts to this powerful technique, and I think I’d prefer more of Sofinho’s writing than what I actually got. That said, the sheer amount of writing in this is impressive.

One elegant addition is that for each terrain type (hills, mountains, or volcano for example) there is a travel speed and a list of common features and themes that you can incorporate into your descriptions easily so that the terrain is unique. Like the dead monkey/dead deer situation mentioned earlier, initially I got very excited, but the further I read, I saw that these descriptions not as unique to a hex, as I expected them to be. I think making them more unique would make the experience of differentiating the hills here from the hills there a little more organic and interesting. But these and the layout of these heavily randomised hexes make the minute to minute gameplay of wandering through an unknown wilderness populated with strange people, awesome creatures and ineffable spirits as intended by the Pariah ruleset, very clear in a way that it hasn’t been for me before.

All together, Atop The Wailing Dunes is a groundbreaking sandbox, albeit that with extra polish and attention could have been one of my all-time favourite approaches to sandbox modules. As it is, despite the repetition and the concept density being softer than I hoped, it’s an excellent module. If you haven’t brought Pariah to the table, but wish you had, this will give you and your players the support you need. If you’ve only ever vibed with point-crawl exploration, and are curious how to play a campaign which gets into the nitty gritty of travelling mile-by-mile, this is a masterclass in how to make every mile compelling, without keying every mile in advance.

Idle Cartulary