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

Chariot of the Gods is a 52 page module for Alien RPG by Andrew E.C. Gaska. It was recommended to me after my disappointed read through of Alien RPG a while back, as a fun player versus player module that benefited from the quirks of the system. Ever bound by the conflict-averse desire to be even-handed, I added it to my review queue. It’s sold as a pretty typical “there’s a distress call and there are horrifying monsters there” module (I don’t hate it, excellent trope), as an introductory module, and as something playable in one session despite the page count.

Let’s start with the obvious: The graphic design is the same illegible, sparse Prometheus-lite of the core book. I really don’t like it, and it tires my eyes both digitally (as I’m reading this) or in print format (how I read the core book). It also explains the page count; a Mothership module could have fit this into a zine half the size, I suspect. I won’t go into detail here, as I already did that for the core book and you can refer to that for my concerns.

The module has pregenerated characters with secret agendas that change for each “act”. I quite like pregenerated characters, particularly when they create interpersonal conflict if the players are keen for that (I’ve written about this before). My initial response to changing with the “act” of the module you’re in was hackles up, but it is actually analogous to an event table: When certain events occur, a bunch of possible new events open up, and new agendas relate to these events. As with everything in this module, this is presented in the most clumsy way possible, but you could present it as a neat three-part table and it would be right at home in a Mothership module. Structurally it’s a bit weird, because those agendas and the acts are described at the end of the module, which feels contrary to how central they are to the changing character dynamics which are pretty neat and honestly the selling point of the module.

The keying of the ship itself are exactly what I expected: Overly wordy, difficult to navigate, inconsistently laid out. There are only 28 rooms in this dungeon, but they would get a lot of use over the three developing acts, and I expect the plan is for the players to gain familiarity with the space in act 1, and then use it against each other and their enemies on act 2 and 3. Clever, then, to keep it relatively compact. Its undermined, somewhat, by spreading the maps over 4 pages and not signally clearly different rooms (some are boxed separately, some aren’t? not sure why?). The descriptions are functional and uninteresting, and given how cliched the location is (not a bad thing for an introductory module), largely redundant. It’s not a dungeon to crawl through, though, it’s an arena to fight in. It is an interesting, manipulatable environment to that end.

To some degree, colour me impressed. This is a fun, surprisingly complex and compelling module. I’d definitely run this, if it was vaguely legible. I literally couldn’t wayfind in this module without a huge amount of work. It would be the same amount of work if I were just to adapt the whole thing for Mothership, a system I prefer, with a cohesive and legible graphic design direction that I don’t have trouble reading, and I could easily do it in a third of the space. But, it’s a compelling enough module that I’m tempted to do that (if nobody already has). If you actually do run Alien RPG (if so, sorry about how much I dislike it), this is a hell of a fun thing to run for it, excellent first movie vibes, with a lot of backstabbing and body horror.

Idle Cartulary