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.

The Stone-Flesh Gift is a 38 page module for Mothership by Jordan Boschman. In it, the player characters explore a living, breathing ship that that has gone rogue and they have a chance to correct its systems. As with many (perhaps most) Mothership modules, it leans heavily into body horror and the themes that accompany it. It specifically pitches itself as a low prep module, which is an admirable goal.

The low prep approach for me is a little compromised by the 8 pages of introductory rules. These rules contain a lot of the conflicting subsystems that contribute to making the ship an interesting puzzle to explore, however it’s a lot, and most of it is the kind of stuff that’d be better off in a sidebar in a different layout approach to reduce this high prep front-loading effect. Oddly, the back matter hides relevant information like the role of Father in its text, which probably could be more interestingly front-loaded, so I wonder if this is more a lack of consideration and reliance on legacy scripting than a conscious choice. Either way, I think this front matter — which all makes the module more interesting — undermines the goals of reducing prep. I think that leaning harder in either direction — an easily referenced index section (although I wouldn’t put it at the front) or drip feeding in the text — would’ve been a better approach for usability than this hybrid approach.

I really like the approach of giving almost all rooms a single column in two column layout. These are clearly nested, well signalled body texts that are easy to understand and to find relevant information. However, it often feels like the information needed to run a location isn’t always at hand, relating back to the previous concerns on organisation. Take the Neurocouncil, for example: information on thinkmatter, what you can do from here, the nature of the malfunction, and the fact that the council is supposed to give out a quest are all elsewhere in the book and not easily referenced. This is space ripe for improvisation, but there are instructions that the module wants me to follow that I could miss in the moment because of this. I need easier reference to the intertextual links, or for it to be something I can improvise, because low prep to me is not I memorise your whole 40-odd page zine.

Some of the choices here are counter-intuitive as me as well: I thought the room number listing on the minimap was for the column that contains it, and it wasn’t clear at all that these numbers referred to different page numbers until I realised I needed to figure out what those numbers were referring to. In my opinion it needs to be used in conjunction with a printed map to take advantage of its features.

I should add there are a bunch of features I like here a lot. While the hallways are not numbered, exits are described which support with player character informed decision making. The neurolinks that feature in most rooms dole out interesting, flawed information regularly. Most rooms have some level of interactivity, although information for fulfilling the functions in the introductory section is pretty thin on the ground, and I think it seems pretty unlikely following the text that the player characters will figure out how to fix the ship; I feel like the neuro link could have more consistently provided useful information.

I really enjoy the writing flourishes here, although they’re more spaced out than is my preference. Evocative phrases such as “the constant temperature of a fever” and “a gland, hardened into a large crystal and with facets like singed emeralds” appear sprinkled throughour the book, and really bring the body horror and the text as a whole home. But most of the writing is purely functional: The professed goal of a low-prep, usable text appears in the author’s mind to be in tension with leaning into his best lyrical inclinations, sadly. I’d love to see him write a module without the gestures towards usability, and let his imagination run wild.

It also leans into its central goal of body horror in terms of its themes, taking advantage of the alive-ness of the ship and its factions to delve into topics that are interesting to me, such as reproductive rights and control, and into the ontology of cancer and cancerous growth. This is cool and interesting themes to be addressing in body horror, and most sci-fi horror isn’t as thoughtful in its faction set up as this is.

The layout in the Stone-Flesh Gift is easily criticised, but also is rather pleasingly DIY and just kind of ziney, y’know? And it was a Zinequest module. There’s some exceptional layout artist somewhere who can make something seem like it was put together with xerox and glue and also be highly usable and legible, but in the mean time I really appreciate how much this leans into the zine in zinequest. I particularly adore the cut out public domain (I assume) anatomical drawings used as maps, and the striking use of colour and highlights. In the light of the balance attempting to be struck between a DIY aesthetic and dense, TKG-style usability, the two main layout flaws that outweigh the charming DIY ugliness in some of the choices, are the choice to bottom-center the headings, which makes it difficult to find at a flick through, and the interminable line length on the single column pages.

So, reading cover to cover, what we have is an interestingly complex dungeon for Mothership, with a weird theme, three pleasingly alien factions — plenty for a relatively small dungeon — and generally interesting themes. It’s very much on my radar, but the missed opportunities in terms of organisation mean that it feels like it’ll be more effortful to bring to my table than most other modules I have, which really just need me to show up with the book. Sadly, while excellent in so many ways, with striking aesthetics, compelling themes, interesting spaces and cool interactions, the Stone-Flesh Gift fails to achieve its goal of low-prep for me. But, if you don’t mind reading 40 pages of pretty decent writing, taking some notes, and printing off the map and a few worksheets, this is going to be a few very unnerving, interesting sessions of Mothership play, that I’d highly recommend.

Idle Cartulary