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.

Tomb of the Twins is a 30 page system-agnostic dungeon crawl, with attached stats for B/X, Mork Borg and Cairn, by Luke Simmons. It’s laid out in A5 with monochrome watercolour art and maps by Molomoot. Going into this, I’m a little concerned: I can see that it’s a twelve room dungeon, so it having such a high word count makes me concerned about it being over-written.

Certainly, the introductory text is clear, to the point and practical about how the module is to be run. It opens with three parallel histories with varying levels of discoverability (landmark, hidden, secret!), and a bunch of characters with terse descriptions and clear goals and methods. Factions are less clear, but intended more as supportive information for their representatives than to play a major part in faction play.

The tomb, being the tomb of a necromancer, traps ghosts in it, including the ghosts of the PCs if they die. This is a lovely touch, and the d6 table of NPCs is cute, although I’d prefer them to be a little more specific about what their names are, what they know, and how to role play them. It wouldn’t have taken much more space to full them out as full NPCs in a similar way to the three questgivers; if I played through this I’d want them to be the stars of the show.

But why? Because there’s only one faction inside this dungeon (it’s only twelve rooms, after all), and aside from their leaders and a nameless trapped Swampkin, they’re not given much personality. The twin necromancers have a fair bit of personality, and as an encounter is likely to swing from danger to comedy quickly — something most people enjoy. I think this dungeon would benefit from more internal swampkin politics, though.

The rooms themselves are competently written, in a classic style of description, seemingly modelled after the OSE house style. However because of the lack of NPC interaction and random encounters (aside from the aforementioned ghosts), it’s a pretty static affair of going from room to room.

The map quality here is a major failing, in my opinion, as the keying is tiny and difficult to parse, and while it’s thoughtfully included as a minimap in some pages, here it’s even smaller. I appreciate the graphic inclusion of the puzzle symbols though. I appreciate the unique art style here, and how the maps match the art, but overall it’s not a successful alternative approach. The layout however, is a resounding success. Clear, attractive, simple. A little font overuse — we don’t need to use bold, underline and italics in every entry — which makes it less readable on some pages but with a little more restraint it would have been stellar. This is where modules like Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier and Aberrant Reflections use colour to a layout advantage, and where monochrome aesthetics lose out on utility.

Overall, this is a neat dungeon to keep you occupied for a session or two, but it lacks the strong faction and relationship play that would make it stand out from the crowd. This is all the more disappointing, because the questgiver descriptions strongly suggest that the author is capable of bringing characters to bear. Hopefully we’ll see a fleshed-out second release in the future.

Idle Cartulary