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.
Fangwitch’s Falls is a 24-page pointcrawl written and illustrated by Em, for Cairn. It’s about a pending flood that will crush a local village if the supernatural cause is not investigated. But it’s an adventure that is not so crass as to say that outright, and I like the degree of You’re Not An Idiot present in this module a lot.
The writing here is often good, sometimes great, “A coiled and spined thing the size of a baleen whale. Destructive, though not necessarily malicious. It resides behind the Falls.” This is the whole description of the big bad. I love this brevity and evocativeness. More authors need to trust in their words and audience like this. The details behind the nature of the Fangwitch and the weapon to defeat it with are randomised. For me, I’d rather these be set in stone; I’d rather a single excellent idea than a dozen less interesting ones. Random tables and lists are best used for things that are effectively quantum in the first place: people you encounter along the road, loot, magical effects and the like.
The locations are summarised in ten or so words each, and all fit in a single page. This page also has rules for events and the events themselves. This is excellent work. Then the locations are expanded, each with a single page summary and occasionally with an extra page of NPCs or something like that. These are uniformly pretty good, although the elimination of redundancy here means some flipping to and from the summaries.
It finishes off with NPCs, loot, and gear packages for Cairn. These are whimsical and designed to match the fairytale vibe of the rest of the module.
Overall, this module is absolute fire. This is the kind of module I wish I saw more of, and at a larger scale. I prefer it when it veers from fairy tale into horror (which it does in parts), but f you and your table appreciate dark fairytale vibes, terse evocative writing, and you don’t mind improvising appropriately or the lack of dungeons, this is a great small pointcrawl.
7th September, 2023
Idle Cartulary