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.

Editorial. Today, both creators of a Thousand Thousand Islands (Zedeck Siew and Munkao) made announcements regarding an end to their professional relationship. This is sad news, and it appears that anyone purchasing A Thousand Thousand Islands in the future will only be renumerating one of the creators financially for their work. In a complex situation such as this, I’d encourage you to read these statements before you consider buying Reach of the Roach God or any other parts of A Thousand Thousand Islands. – Idle Cartulary, 11th July 2023

Reach of the Roach God is the first long-form of A Thousand Thousand Islands, previously a series of zines (Mr-Kr-Gr, Kraching, Upper Heleng, Andjang, Stray Virassa, Korvu and Hundred Red Scales, plus appendixes). Written by Zedeck Siew and illustrated by Munk Kao, with layout for the first time outsourced to hrftype. It is a setting with a strongly implied narrative, one of independent villages, encroaching cities, and a developing doom creeping up from below, driven by spite. This is a long book spanning multiple concepts and approaches, and so my usual chronological approach won’t really hack it for this bathtub review.

Zedeck’s writing here is slyly funny and unsettling when necessary, but mostly hypnotising and tactile. It fills the page more here than in previous iterations, largely because of hrftype’s layout choices which I’ll go into later on, and it pulls you forward into the text like an undertow. Reach is bookended by short story openings, and while a pet peeve of mine is when authors sneak their uninteresting fiction into my modules, Zedeck’s writing feels like an ancient fable your grandmother memorised and recited to you, and fills you with empathy and loathing for the foes featured in each section.

Mun Kao’s illustrations are as subtle and erudite as anything he has drawn before. The soft linework complements Zedeck’s writing in a higher density than in any previous iteration. This higher density is a mixed blessing, however, causing the groupings to be less contained and intuitive; characters are scattered from their inciting incidents and locations, reducing the usability of the text. This problem was clearly recognised, as superscript page references are incorporated to help facilitate interactivity between increasingly broad swathes of text, however it feels a little like the pressure of Maximum Illustration in a “professional RPG product” in this case is at odds with usability. To a degree, the amount of art often mutes the effect of the forthcoming art; the proximity of the map on the left page on page 88 lessening the effectiveness of the introductory viewpoint on page 89 for example.

Many of Mun Kao’s maps are beautiful but not awfully clear and perhaps not more useful than a chart would be. This is placed in stark relief when you encounter his more abstract maps of the City of Peace, which are really useable and remain artistically en pointe.

I can’t say the same about the layout consistently complementing the writing as well as the illustrations, although I have a complex response to the book as an artifact. There are so many touches to the final book that literally gave me goosebumps or caused me to sigh at the luxury. The embossed cover, bound book mark. the thicker yellow stock of the chapter titles, are just beautiful touches that feel like the style of the series of zines applied to a stronger budget in the best possible way. The custom font designed by hrftype is creepy, beautiful and legible, however feels overused in the book where perhaps it would have been best left to headings and titles. There are dozens of small icons, custom separators and flourishes throughout the book that speak to attention to detail and love of the product being made. Page references are very complex to apply and are utilised very well in the first third of the book. I haven’t measured the book, but it looks to be US Trade or Royal format, so it’s quite the imposing hardcover; the large choice of typography therefore isn’t entirely inappropriate, but in combination with the density of Mun Kao’s art here, it loses the sparse yet considerate sense of form that previous iterations of A Thousand Thousand Islands had. I prefer the previous approach, although I suspect that this book would double in size if it were taken.

The book is broken up into four sections, where the fourth is not included in the book in probably my favourite invitation to play in recent memory: “QUOTE IT HERE”. The impression here is one of symmetry, three locations, each with three stories, in each of three parts. This gave me a strong sense that I understood what was coming, which sadly wasn’t true. The three parts in Reach of the Roach God are, in my opinion out of order. I attribute this a little to the nature of Kickstarter-funded projects, and a little to the fact that any author wants to front-load with their strongest writing, but I reached the end of chapter four feeling like it was content I wouldn’t use, which coloured my approach to chapter five and six. The eighth chapter however, a Kickstarter stretch goal, is key to your recognition of the entire second part’s place in the story. I read the first 100 pages and was leaping out of my seat with excitement; the second 100 pages and felt disappointed; the final third and I realised that there was a secret key to it all that I had never understood, and that I’d have to put more preparation than I’d expected from my experience with the previous iterations of A Thousand Thousand Islands.

Ok, those are my overall impressions, and I think I’m coming across as very critical of the book at this point, so I’m going to get a bit more specific for a while and call out some aspects that are just absolute genius to balance it out.

In Reach, Zedeck implements a five-sentence stat block that is highly reflective of what I think should be the standard for stat blocks in all system-agnostic modules. I (and most people I know) rarely run a module in its intended system, and this approach means that I don’t have to put as much work into translating stat blocks or learning systems I’m not interested in. I’ve been on this bandwagon for a while (I wrote a series of bestiaries based on this approach a number of years ago), but this is the first time the approach has appeared in a mainstream product that I’m aware of, although Luke Gearing’s Volume 2: Monsters& approaches the concept. I hope it spreads further.

Zedeck’s writing tows a narrow line between facilitating humour (in my opinion, the natural end-point of elf-game play) and maintaining a south-east asian fairy-tale tone. An excellent example of this is a cushion which, once your feet touch it, you cannot leave for an hour, intended to encourage meditation. I immediately pictured an absurd pillow fight against the roaming roach-boulder guardians, dodging and ducking thrown meditation cushions, until the losers are stuck sitting together for an hour thinking about what they’ve done.

Random tables litter this book. For every single occasion of travel, there is something that happens, randomly generated, but often not an encounter: “It’s claustrophobically still. Your heartbeat pounds in your ears”. This is stellar use of random tables to make every instance of travel feel meaningful without the drudgery which is complex travel rules. On the other hand, some of these tables probably could have been lists. One generator might produce a caretaker from a funereal city that “repairs burial jars with colourful, powerfully adhesive gums, has a glowing ghost arm that cannot carry weight, and was given away as a child.” and adds a few prompts to develop them further. But the two pages spent on generating this caretake may have been best simply creating six caretakers from this list, saving one and a half pages. I don’t think there is any replayability lost from minor characters being repeated in these cases.

There are a series of spirits in part 3 that are just evocative and I want to play them all. They’re born from particular desires, and Mun Kao’s art of them is weird in a particular way that feels unique and true. They are just so cool.

Part 6, the section focusing on Odoyoq, the Roach-God and the cult attached to it, provides an incredible amount of support for the rest of the book, while also requiring a huge amount of interpretation. Flip to a page and you’ll always find scripture to quote, which is absolute gold. But also, it incorporates a huge amount of Roach politics that were unexpected to me and in retrospect would change the way I ran the campaign, but also, provides me with a huge amount of material to sustain the campaign that comes after Odoyoq inevitably wins.

After Creatures of Near Kingdoms, I don’t think anyone’s surprised that this includes a spectacularly illustrated, inventive and evocative bestiary in chapter 7. My misgiving with the bestiary here, is that none of these entries are referred to before the bestiary occurs; there might be stalagmite-animals in the bestiary to complement my stalagmite-people in the gazette, but that’s not something I, running this at the table, would necessarily be able to facilitate incorporating without a lot of preparation. However, the bestiary is referred back to in the following section.

I alluded earlier to the stretch goal in chapter 8, a map-generation system using a series of action figures. This is something I was completely disinterested in from the description, but what we actually have is a way to customise your map and how all six sections link together, as well as fleshing out the connections between the places. This is where the story locations, gazetteer locations and peoples and bestiary are tied in together, dynamically. It is very, very cool, particularly as a proof of concept, but Mun Kao literally illustrates a map of the world as part of the explanation in a gorgeous two-page spread. And I can’t help but feel like I’d have preferred to have that map of the world up front, as chapter 1. Chapter 8 pulls a lot of disparate elements together in a way to make the book something I can actually run as opposed to just something I can enjoy reading, and it gets very short shrift as an implied appendix here at the end of the book.

Perhaps I view the zines in A Thousand Thousand Islands through rose-coloured glasses, but to a degree I feel like Reach of the Roach God fails to reach the heights those zines did. Why? I think it’s worth speaking of the effect of format in expectation setting. In my library, the only roleplaying games with a book as beautiful as Reach are Thousand Year Old Vampire and Trophy Gold, both excellent but flawed books that are not in the same league. Other books? My first edition of The Gods Themselves; an illuminated Apocrypha; a folio edition of Under Milkwood; a complete Lovecraft. These are definitive editions of these texts. The implied expectation from the format chosen for Reach of the Roach God is that Reach is the definitive A Thousand Thousand Islands; I think that the typography choices, the point sizing, the titling choices, and the density of illustration (among other things support this expectation. Instead, I think what we are given is six new zines and two appendixes, in a novel format. And, why am I disappointed in six new zines in the most consistent series of modules in recent times?

Reframed as such, Zedeck’s writing is absolutely without peer, as are Mun Kao’s illustrations. Reach of the Roach God is innovative in a number of ways that I would love to see implemented more widely. Despite my criticisms, this one of the best long-form books released in a long time – perhaps ever. The experience of reading the hardcover was the most tactile pleasure I’ve gotten from reading anything roleplaying-related in a long time (the only other that comes to mind was the Art & Arcana artbook). An absolute recommendation.

24th June, 2023

Idle Cartulary