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.

Resonant is a 46 page module for Mothership from Amanda P of Tannic fame with art by Tony Tran. I’m going to add a credit there for Dai Shugars, because the layout on this is absolute fire, and while I’m not always on board with Dai’s choices, here they’re at the absolute top of their game and they contribute a LOT. In it, the party are hired to assist with dam repairs and investigate the dam’s collapse on a far-off planet, and face an alien presence and the poorly advised science of a private military force. This is an unabashed horror scenario, but if you’re looking at Mothership modules, I reckon you’re anticipating that. Cards on the table, Amanda P’s a friend of mine, and we share some preferences, so I went into this anticipating Resonant would be good.

I’m going to start with layout and art else I’ll keep coming back to it: Shugar’s layout and Tran’s art perfectly complement each other and the writing. They’re grimy, messy without being illegible or unintelligible, portray the disguised corporate horrors with a cheerful guise and perfectly embody the working class science fiction horror typical of Mothership. I say without being illegible — the texture on the pages occasionally obscures text, but not often; it could’ve used a closer eye for this. Shugar’s maps are clear and iconic, and work really well for Mothership-style crawling, and are each rendered uniquely which helps with navigation. I’d like to call out the very cool in-world advertisements as something that could’ve come across as weak, but instead the writing and layout rendered them excellent. Headings are clear and feel bold and thematically sci-fi corporate, and (hyperlinked in digital!) page references help with movement around the document. This is an easy to read module, and easy to navigate. This is close to the best work on art, layout and information design I’ve seen in a mid-size module, and while its cohesive with the wider Mothership line, it adopts many of the strengths of that approach and few of the weaknesses.

It opens with a very brief timeline of recent events, which I appreciate a lot, having both written and read a lot of very comprehensive complex timelines that are sometimes challenging to internalise, and then a the mission description with the very elegant twist of having 5 secret side-missions you’re concealing from your bosses. Some of these secret objectives are spicier than others, and I’d choose one according to the preferences of my table instead of randomly choosing them as suggested. There are three factions detailed, and again there’s an elegant twist to their descriptions, in addition to the kind of thing you’d usually see in a faction description: A “how the PCs can get involved with them” section. I’m going to add this section to every faction going forward, and y’all should too, even if it’s pencilled into the margins.

Amanda P’s writing here is a little jarring, because they alternate between poetic and terse (“A home for some, a goldmine for others. A waking dread.” is so far up my alley as a description that you couldn’t have written it better if you had me in mind) and more traditional expositional prose (the description of how the Resonance works, which is on the same page as the previous quote). This makes for a very clear adventure at the expense of the poetry they’re capable of writing, and to some degree I think this is a sacrifice to the gods of science-fiction: Unlike in their module Tannic, this exposition feels more necessary because what’s going on in Tannic is magic. The trade off between science fiction clarity and pretty, terse, punchy writing is one where different people will land differently, but I personally don’t need the additional exposition at the expense of a briefer more beautiful word choice. That said, Mothership house style is one of wordfullness and clarity, and a high-white space terse Mothership text would be a little off-brand. For me, at least, while the clarity of the rules text makes the text more gameable, it doesn’t make it more compelling. I just…guess I don’t like rules text. That said, the encounter mechanic here is gorgeous, although I feel with a little finesse it could have been overloaded into fewer rolls. What’s nice is that in addition to the reaction roll being incorporated (not in Mothership core rules), it incorporates encounter positioning as well, which is neat tech that I’m going to have to steal.

Ok, now we’re into the location text itself, and it is glorious, and takes advantage of the brevity of Amanda P’s writing style. Individual keyed locations are a maximum of a paragraph long (in some cases broken up for clarity), and full of terse and evocative description: “Previously barred from inside, the cracked steel security bar lies in pieces. A yawning hallway extends east into the dark.” Chef’s kiss. There is more description of overarching locations — Forward Base and its Crashed Supply Shuttle are close to a page, which is too much for me to process, and would have benefited from a breakdown in my opinion — but overall this is exactly what I want the bulk of a module to look like. “Looks and smells like he’s been here for weeks.”, “She stands tall but twirls a wrench in her hands nervously. Drive: To live a quiet life, leaving her past behind.” I could just keep listing descriptions I adore in this.

The humans in Resonant feel real, which is something I crave in modules and rarely get. I wrote Hiss basically as an extreme example of dense, real-feeling relational connection because I value that in modules. The interconnection here is more subtle, but it’s plainly there, and easy to understand, and compelling in a way that I often term petty, but by petty I mean mundane and relatable. It’s something that really makes the module stand out, because you’re likely to immediately develop care for Gaspar and Lucy, or the aforementioned dam mechanic, or heroic android Ziggy. And this makes the horror ring far truer. My main complaint, to be entirely honest, is that the investigation ends up being quite straightforward, and the villain straightforwardly evil — the only stereotype in the story, in what will most likely be the final scene in the module, leaves me feeling a little hollow.

When Resonant’s writing is at its best — and that’s more often than most books — it’s succinct, concept-dense, and highly evocative. In rare character, it’s not dense in a high concept, gonzo way, but in a way that conjures character and relationships: The woman I quoted above, for example, in just two sentences, I can picture her and all of her behaviours from that brief glimpse. There are many things that make a good module, many of them purely technical in nature. But truthfully, the particular quality of the writing in Resonant is a perfect example one of the things that I treasure the most in a good module.

Combine that particular element of writing with the excellently coordinated layout and art, and thoughtful construction and informational design, and Resonant more than overcomes its few flaws. If you’re looking for a great Mothership module, with a straightforward investigatory crawl structure, that’s easy to run, and feels populated with real people, than to be honest this is the only thing out there, so we’re lucky it’s good. It immediately slots up there as one of the best Mothership modules I’ve read, but it does appeal to my specific predilections in a way most do not. It certainly doesn’t replace Gradient Descent or a Pound of Flesh for what they specifically try to be — it’s not a megadungeon or a city module. But of all those more typical, “crew venturing into horrors unknown” stories that typify the Mothership module, I was right to anticipate this release: If I had to choose one dungeon crawl to run for a new Mothership group from hereon in, I’d choose Resonant, not Dead Planet or Another Bug Hunt.

Idle Cartulary