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.

Nirvana on Fire is a 35 page module for Mothership by D Kenny with art by Jerome Berthier. In it, the player characters are sent to save a colony of monks by retrieving a power converter from a manufactory, one that is controlled by an AI who believes itself to be a god.

In the first location, the colony, I like the stylistic, first-person maps and the simple, evocative keying a lot. The keying is elegant and evocative, although not beautiful or poetic, and swings wildly tonally in a way that is really pleasing and thematic. I’m not a fan of the random encounter table, where events occur without fail whenever you enter a new location. This timing falls down as well, because rolling blackouts happen with the same trigger, meaning I’m rolling 3d10 and using those dice for different things. Most of these encounters don’t add anything to the adventure; they’re flavour. Using random encounters in this way is interesting, but as they’re all atmospheric in nature, they also feel very insubstantial. The exceptions are if you roll a 1 or a 10; a 1 is a concrete encounter with an interesting character; a 10 is the revolution starting! But also there’s a 10% chance that the revolution will start the first time the player characters take a walk; it almost assumes you’ll fudge the dice by the lack of any mechanism to avoid this. Overall, I think the point of this location is simply to communicate a sense of civil unrest and push the player characters to the main “dungeon” of the module, but it’s a little overwrought and complicated for such a simple role.

In that “dungeon” — Bishamontem’s Sanctum — everything is stronger and more meaningful. The random encounters are punchy and all interesting, foreshadowing or actively engage the player characters. Three of these concern the stalking monster of the space, which is really simply and well handled — unlike the meaningless complexity in the colony. The maps, however — these are the node-based maps — are neither as visually intriguing or as clear as those in the earlier (admittedly simpler) area. They work, though, and use colour as a differentiation, which is elegant although I’m not sure how accessible it is. Closely examining these maps, the whole complex is freely accessible, and only limited by specific access cards; I’d have to get this to the table to see how this feels, but my gut is that this won’t be an interesting or complex puzzle to solve. It’s a small enough space — only 10 rooms — that things like the written out admin password seem a blunt instrument, rather than a fun discovery. This same place has the password to kill the boss, which means if you don’t get this one spot, you can neither finish your job or find out what happened. I can’t find even on rereading how to get access to the final areas, which are marked for Straylight Official access only but I can’t see anywhere how to get that access; it also speaks of Genma the Prophet and I don’t know where he is, although he gets a write up early on. It’s all a bit vague, too vague for me to really feel like I could run with any confidence. I could be missing something, but if I am when I’m rereading large module chunks to find information, I’d argue it’s a failure of information design, rather than my wayfinding. This isn’t a long module; I should be able to find what I want with a find and search function let alone a re-read.

That’s it for the actual module; 24 pages in total. The rest is what appears to be stretch goal additions: Two additional modules and a custom class. Custom classes are cool, I guess, but I just don’t vibe with them for Mothership. The Acolyte should scream the religious zealots of Alien 3, but it doesn’t sing for me. Both of the modules are better than either location in the main part of Nirvana on Fire: Better, more interesting maps; Clearer, more interestingly keyed spaces; both Noora and Roz’ writing is less florid than the main module, but I’d run either of these interacting, interesting and equally large (or larger) spaces over the main section any day.

Thematically, I really like the twist at the core of Nirvana on Fire (which I won’t relate here). It brings the module from a bizarre religious twist on Mothership to solidly back under the working class science fiction horror banner. I think it’s neat and fitting.

I’m not usually a nitpicker for proofing in these reviews, but this zine really needed a good proofread. There an enough small jarring errors, missing words and missing capitalisation that it stopped being a one-off and started becoming a pattern. This team really needed to be one person bigger. This isn’t complex work: You just need someone to read the thing and circle the mistakes.

The layout in this is clear and bold, but not as hyperdense or complex as in house Mothership layouts. I think it makes a mistake here, as it chooses small condensed point sizes which aren’t especially legible at this page size, and could use the space more wisely. The art is unique and fantastic in my opinion, and very evocative of the religious undertones of the module as a whole. Maps are abstract and modular, which is not my preference, but they’re pretty good as far as modular maps go, particularly just the stretch modules, and better than in, for example, Gradient Descent which operates itself in a similar manner.

Overall, Nirvana on Fire is a promising concept with interesting themes, that utterly fails for me on execution. I’d have no confidence to run this. There are no playtesters listed and yes, it shows that nobody has run this. I’m honestly pretty disappointed that something with such great art direction and conceptual cohesion was fritters away into such a mess of a module, and that I paid for it. The positive, though: There’s room for another big, artistically innovative religious take on Mothership, for anyone else who cares to take that leap. Both the stretch modules though, make for some decent one-shot material, and particularly if you wanted to introduce someone to Mothership in one night, they’d make an excellent choice.

Idle Cartulary