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.

Seas of Sand is a 264 page setting toolbox written, illustrated and laid out by Sam Sorensen. It’s a fantasy inspired by Dune (as displayed by the magnificent worm on the cover), but that minimises the science fiction elements of its inspirations, and replaces them with a well-curated pulp fantasy focused on merchant caravan style play, the most prominent example of which is Ultraviolet Grasslands. It’s “system agnostic”, which in this case means started for B/X, but with conversion notes for a boatload of other systems. For disclosure, I was comped a copy of this for review but you’ve seen by now that doesn’t affect my opinions.

At the beginning: The opening summary page is stellar. Evocative as all get out, and an excellent sales pitch. If you’re the type to be attracted to striking, evocative, world building, you’ll probably be sold on this after the first page. There is a bunch of interesting, promising concepts alluded to here: A monotheistic god, the changing sands, a world that rewards knowledge of its environment, and an elegance and economy of design. What I’ll get to a little later, is that the pitch is betrayed by the greater sum of the works, in my opinion. If this affects your opinion of the book negatively or positively as a whole probably is a reflection of what you’re looking for in a setting toolbox, rather than a comment on the toolbox itself.

The big point of comparison here is Ultraviolet Grasslands, and I feel because of that I should start with layout and art to get it out of the way: While the scale and unique world-building is reminiscent of Ultraviolet Grasslands, this is a far more text-forward piece of work. Sam’s illustrations are simple and elegant and generously distributed, but there’s nothing in the scale of the full colour illustrations of Luka Rejec. What you have here instead is a more traditional, clearly articulated, striking layout. It feels written into layout with usability in mind, as most topics are limited to a strictly hierarchied, high contrast single or double page spread. The appendices (and maybe once in the main text) are an exception, where this visual consistency is compromised with a few absurdly long random tables. I’m not especially a fan of the boldness here, with heavy type being overused, but there are some elegant flourishes too, like subtle interruptions in borders indicating hierarchies and inverted colours signalling optional sidebars. It’s a layout that would probably be better in colour, but it’s a supremely usable layout, better in my opinion than UVG’s for practicality and reminiscent of Hot Spring Island in its functionality and aesthetic.

The first 35 or so pages are devoted to mapping out your Seas of Sand. I’m not usually a fan of these kinds of procedures — I think an imagination like Sam’s could give me a more interesting setting in the space taken by these generators, and I’d rather that than generate it myself. But there are one or two interesting aspects to the map generation in Seas of Sand that are worth noting. Firstly, there is worldbuilding built into the map making: “The direction of the flow” indicates “The path the worm travelled in ancient days”. This is a really neat approach, and a there’s a decent amount of world building built into this map-building chapter. Secondly, we’re generating a space thousands of nautical miles in scale. There’s a decent chance if you were to simply give me the map and a gazetteer, I’d have trouble remembering it. Making me make my own is a canny solution to this problem of internalising the map. On the other hand: By the end of this you’re given a complete map, more or less. It wouldn’t take too much to turn it into your own Seas of Sand. Would that be better, or worse? I’m not sure. In an ideal world, and this isn’t a short book, I’d get both, so I can bring my Seas of Sand to the table as quickly as possible. The port generation procedure is flavourful and bizarre in the most positive way, although as usual, I think that I’d prefer 15 pages of bespoke ports than this generator. The three example ports are all sparkling, terse, fantastic examples of what these generators can evoke, and we’d have fit an additional 40 or so if the whole port generation space had been dedicated to examples: More than enough.

Initially the choice to have 7 types of sands didn’t make sense to me. Reading through the next section, which covers sand and travel, made me realise that in this world without terrain, these seven types of sand replace it, making travel less monotonous. We have fantastic terrains, for the most part, but interesting terrains most of all. They can explode, or are tainted by the dead, are suck you beneath the sands, and these can be be manipulated by the people of the world using heat. You can learn about them, and the heat-sensitivity of the sand makes the variable weather more meaningful, with high and more temperatures having palpable impacts on the danger of the sands. Clever, clever stuff, and in retrospect I’m surprised more examples of these extreme weird  terrains aren’t more wide-spread, as I imagine you could make for a lot more weird and interesting effects if you weren’t limiting yourself to things that you can do with sand. This is space ripe for innovation and future settings should learn from it.

Most notably, the travel isn’t hex-based, unlike so much in the space. You travel in miles, across a thousand miles map. Wherever you will. It calls out that this eliminates a core part of travel procedure, associated with moving through predetermined blocks of space and terrain, that is, hexes. It portrays travel as a ritual, which is, to me, a calming and interesting perspective on what is usually framed as procedure. “Eventually, return to the daily ritual montage of travel across the endless dunes.”, it says, in me of the most compelling sidebars in the book. This conscious choice, tying of course closely to the choices of map-making earlier in the book, is one I really appreciate, and it is the first sign of an interesting level of contrast that feels very Age of Sail to me: The one between the pace and violence and drama and politics of warfare and piracy, and the meditativeness of being on the open sea with little to do for weeks on end.

The rest of the travel section is somewhat unremarkable, although with elegant theme-reinforcing touches: The distance from trade routes impacts your encounter roll, for example, and there are rules for cannibalism when water and food are scarce. There are also touches which betray the promise of simplicity, though: There’s a lot to those pages on each of the sands, and the rules on starvation and heat exhaustion in particular add complications that I’d have preferred rolled into that elegance on the first page one, which equates water with money. To some degree, there’s an equivalency with inventory and heat exhaustion. If a similar equivalency had been found for food — and to be honest the heat exhaustion rules are a little too complex for my liking, I’d keep having to refer back to them to get them right I suspect — it would simplify book-keeping considerably. I recognise what these rules add to the game, and they exemplify the themes to some degree, they’re just strapped-on compared to how thirst is integrated, and because of the prominence of the elegance of water in the world, I wonder if it would have been a stronger choice to focus on thirst, a conscious decision between survival and riches, rather than to be more “realistic” and include other ways to die from exposure. The metaphor of thirst might be more powerful in the absence of these gestures. That said, there is indication they’re not supposed to be regular occurrences, and further there are humorous and world-building elements here, such as the revelations table which you roll if you’re exposed to near death by the elements add to the appeal of these systems if you choose to use them.

The time spent on naval battle suggests it’s going to be a not insignificant aspect of play, which is interesting. Bulk, zest and twist are flavourful stats, but it’s not immediately clear what they’re for — it becomes clear as you read the further rules, though. Formal roles emerge as part of this, giving the PCs a task in play, and there are special rules for wages, shares and piracy. The thoroughness of these rules give me an interesting new perspective on the drama of play: Early on, it suggests there is a traditional, dungeon crawl approach to the world and a trade caravan approach, and this is the first time where it suggests that the drama from moment to moment may be in the party’s relationship with the larger crew itself and the pirates who might plague them. Very, very cool, although they are a monolith here, something I suspect this model of play would require individualising (this is gestured towards in a later appendix). But that — that is a fun twist.

We “finish” the rules — noting that we’re scarcely a third of the way through the word count — with rules for trade and smuggling. This, to me, is something that’s transferable to any merchant caravan campaign, and is just so, so good at supporting interesting and dramatic play around trade. It leans heavily on the very clever and very long trade events table, which, in combination with seers, risks and rewards for smuggling, and risks associated with the crew being in port, make for exciting times both on the sands and off them. It’s filled compelling hooks for further travel, and reasons to avoid otherwise appealing ports. Excellent stuff, the best I’ve seen for supporting this kind of self-perpetuating play.

I said “finish”, because what follows really amount to a metric ton of appendices. We have a bestiary (including unique plant life, and I’ll throw in the phenomena which are locations and unique weather), which is…well, a work of art if you enjoy bestiaries, although it would benefit from weirder art. I usually don’t care about bestiaries — the last good one I saw was in Beyond Corny Grón — but this is half a book filled with encounters that if you use them one at a time alone, will likely make for a great session in and of themselves (although admittedly, there are a few slow burners in there). This is really great stuff. The best. My only criticism is that it doesn’t point you directly to the strongest asset it has: 7 sets of encounter tables designed to assist you in meeting these encounters, one for each type of sand. This is relegated to an appendix — delightfully, the last one. It would have been perhaps better to frontline them, or to arrange all the flora and phenomena and fauna together alphabetically, to make it easier to navigate all of these encounters as a whole with the tables. A rare mistake in usability, I think. I suspect I’d be printing that particular appendix out.

Other appendices are very useful for the style of play: Loads of trade goods and contents of pirated holds, rules for surfing and desert magic, and an NPC isn’t bad (and includes crew members, something I alluded to wishing for earlier). It doesn’t hit that key requirement for an NPC generator to be useful, though — the one the Zedeck Siew articulated in response to my complain about his generators in Lorn Song of the Bachelor — which is to tie these random NPCs to each other and the world. In this world, there’s nothing to tie them to, because most of it is designed to be created by you. But, they do make it easier to run your whole campaign from this one book by their presence.

I haven’t really spoken about the writing here, and I should. It’s workmanlike, rather than poetic in classic actuary-accountancy and naturalistic style, but full of character. And there is so much imagination on display here. That conceptual density is a major factor in my choosing to pick something up, and Seas of Sand has this in spades, and in a format I think can be really challenging: Lots of big, random tables that give you bite-sized inspiration. The entire set appendices — a solid third of the book — reminds me of the classic patch table from Mothership, but at massive scale. Here, random tables are used to their strength, rather than to less powerful uses — like map making and NPC generation. Really good stuff, that will be exceptional at supporting play long-term. And in general, a bunch of fairly subtle additions contribute to the overall evocativeness of the  setting, without being full fleshed out, in the best possible ways: The never-spelt G-d that looks over everything, the unique and unexplained magics, and the odd creatures and phenomena that gesture towards an unexplained and unspoken of apocalypse. Solid anticanon writing after the style of the classic Psychic Maelstrom.

Overall, Seas of Sand is damned good, but in its desire to be a broad sandbox, I feel it ends up hiding some of its strongest ideas behind simply good ones. The drama of the crew, of survival on the deadly but fantastical seas, of self-sustaining merchant trade, could have served as front-page hooks that would genuinely have me begging to run this at my table next if they’d simply been leaned into harder. It’s a bit disappointing that this isn’t a more directed work, but instead seems to want to render its fascinating world more generic and less iconic and abstract. And I suspect it’s a gesture towards broadening appeal, but what it does is a misdirect, I think, from the power of the unique combination of rules and of worldbuilding, of random tables, that it provides. I think the book I general would benefit from a solid reorganisation with the true intent of play at the forefront, because I took it at face value when it told me it wasn’t just a merchant trade campaign, and not only was I wrong, but it wasn’t until I was a fair way I to the book that I realised it. The sales pitch here shouldn’t be “you can play this as a dungeon crawl or a trade caravan game if you want”, but rather, “this is the best damned merchant caravan toolbox out there, enough for years of play”, and that’s a very defensible pitch in my opinion. I didn’t feel compelled to run one even after Ultraviolet Grasslands, but now I do. In fact, give this an art budget to equal Ultraviolet Grasslands (impossible, I’m aware) and this would easily surpass it as a pitch for that type of gameplay. If you don’t care as much for art, this is a better book, in my esteem.

I alluded to printing sections of this book out, and that’s both a strength and weakness of Seas of Sand as a product. The organisation of the text is just a bit of a mess, partially because of the aforementioned misdirected play direction, partially because of the piles of tables being difficult to sift through. I don’t know that this could be easy to access in the format it’s in. It’s designed for what I’d call binder play: A big 4 ring binder full of notes on what my players have encounters and easily referenced tables and lists. I’d put together little forms probably, so I can quickly write down notes on my generated locations and the NPCs in the world, and all the delightful drama we’re setting up. But it kind of undermines the physical book as a useful purchase — yes, you get the digital version with it, but this is almost something that would be better in workbook format that in book format. It makes me want to return to the 90s when things were actually released in binder format. It could’ve included those supportive worksheets! And to a degree, I think this format failure reflects a lack of imagination in the broader indie publishing space, where an creativity in graphic design is considered to be sufficient white space or a square page format rather than considering more interesting formats that reflect the style of play of particular products — something that totally also reflects the lack of support in the market for weirder formats. Seas of Sand would thrive in a non-traditional format, though, rather than the generic hardcover half-letter it comes in, despite the beauty of the cover especially, and the striking layout choices. Absolutely thrive.

Despite what it says, this ain’t a dungeon-crawler. It doesn’t support it well. Most modules you might bring to the table would require a fair bit of modification to bring into this sand-drowned world, and it doesn’t bring a slate of dungeons with it. If that’s what your regular table looks like, and you don’t want it to change, this isn’t the book for you. Honestly, if you really wanted to try, I feel like the best source for those dungeons would be the main competition in the caravan space, UVG, but the aesthetics may be too varied for it to work well.

Of recent releases, Seas of Sand is the most compelling world I’ve dipped into since Valley of Flowers. It’s very compelling. Many of the modules I review I don’t think about after I finish them. There are exceptions: Atop the Wailing Dunes, Reach of the Roach God, Valley of Flowers, and now this. The fact that is compelling is huge for me. This isn’t something I’m happy to throw on the table for a session or two, it makes me want to scrap my regular table for a change in direction.

But! For me personally, as someone looking for a low-prep game, I’d choose Valley of Flowers over this. 5 years ago, before my kids got old enough to make significant prep for a regular game challenging, I’d have chosen this world in a heartbeat as a place to spend my time. I can see the Sea becoming a Duskvol-style pressure cooker for eternally sustaining play, where Valley of Flowers will eventually run out of content (at least until volume 2 is released).

If your table loves unique worlds, is interested in a seafaring or mercantile campaign, or wanted to enjoy Ultraviolet Grasslands but it felt too picaresque or undirected, this is a book for you. What it will require from the referee, though, is a lot of prep work, both before session 1, and between sessions, and a decent level of confidence with improvisational play. I’d recommend Seas of Sand if you enjoy binder play, and doing a decent amount of prep to sustain a campaign that will last you months of weekly play. I think the digital version of this is a no-brainer purchase to anyone interested in elf-games, and if Penguin Ink keep producing such beautiful books, maybe I’ll pick it up in print along with a few others when I get my tax return. It wants to be your Thursday night game, truly, and if you’re looking for one, take a look at Seas of Sand.

Idle Cartulary