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 Dream Shrine is a 19 page module for Old School Essentials (with conversions for Cairn) by Brad Kerr with art by Skull Fungus. In it, the player characters have fallen asleep in a magic bed and been transported to the Dream Shrine, a dreamworld pocket dimension, where they must learn to think like a dreamer or die trying.
The layout here is simple, single column stuff, with Skull Fungus art decorating almost every page, and featuring a beautiful Skull Fungus map. It has clear headings, a simple colour palette which is both dreamlike and used well as a highlighter. Keys are page-to-a-room, with the right hand side of each spread featuring a node-based version of the map in the margin (utilising aforementioned colour highlighting) as well as descriptions of exits. It’s not my favourite information design, but it does the job and is clearly a part of ongoing experimentation in how to better integrate information into a key, and it works pretty well without relying on preponderance of fonts used for flagging. The use of node-based maps is an admission that as beautiful as Skull Fungus’ map is, it’s not particularly legible, and using cut outs of it wouldn’t have worked for the purposes of the mini maps.
The Dream Shrine is a 10 room dungeon — a tiny dungeon, like last week’s Tomb of the Primate Priest. My preference always lies with social interaction in dungeons, but a 10 room dungeon doesn’t have a lot of capacity for complexity and interconnection, and instead it needs to rely heavily on individual rooms being interesting, building on one another, then making you feel clever, and an abundance of mood. The random encounter table for Dream Shrine, for example, is all about the vibes, and providing opportunities to understand the kind of dream logic the Dream Shrine follows. Half of the entries are there to teach the party that helping dreamers in their dreams will reap rewards; the other half are devoted to the villain of the shrine, a crocodile-clown that steals human teeth. Similarly, a recurring character in every room is there to teach the player characters about how to manipulate dream logic. This is a neat and interesting approach to random encounter tables in smaller dungeons. Tomb of the Primate Priest does away with them altogether, a strong break from form, but works there; twisting the form to achieve different goals, such as this does, is a clever decision.
Kerr’s writing here is off-beat and weird, and anachronistic in a way that even in a dreamlike context I’d hesitate myself to incorporate into my fantasy worlds. But it’s very evocative, interesting writing, much that you’ll want to read aloud: “pink marshmallowy clouds, miles above a cerulean sea at sunset…a frizzy-haired lady in a nightgown sulks cross-legged, face in her hands, two clouds up”. Every room is sumptuous, and a pleasure. All of the rooms contain something interesting to interact with, although just under half of them are mainly concerned with providing traversal options or interesting long-term consequences as opposed to providing interesting or challenging encounters in and of themselves. The rest are directly related to solving the primary problem, which is the entryway to the secret room, a puzzle involving finding a way to kill or take advantage of the tooth-eating clown. It really all loops back to that, and providing ways to easily move between rooms in order to solve that problem through cleverness. Off the top of my head, I see three solutions to the main problem, and I suspect that there are plenty more solutions in the hands of a clever group of players.
In the context of all of this, the one thing that jars me desperately is the presence of mundane things: There’s gold sitting around, and fairly mundane magical items, and it’s absolutely beyond me how this is justified aside from “well we’re playing a game that requires gold for XP”. It feels like this is a recognised problem, as a number of the treasures with gold value — all the ones in the random encounter table for example — are justified by dream logic. But the others are jarring for me. I’d change these to weirder items.
A few negatives: I solidly dislike room 2 and in the context of the whole module it seems pointless and unnecessary. None of the other rooms are vestigial so it’s strange that there is one that is. I feel like it could’ve been more clearly connected to everything else had effort been put in; the dream here is interconnected, so this single disconnected room feels off in context for me. Finally, there’s a mini-module at the back. It’s 2 pages of a cursed forest, which is fine, but I’d have rathered it simply not be there or have simply included a location that was the Dream Shrine’s cottage itself.
So effectively, the Dream Shrine is a single puzzle, all revolving around the choice in the final secret room to free the chained goddess that is imprisoned here. The entire module is designed about driving the player characters to the 10th room, including both of the hooks. In this way, you could frame this as a railroad: I disagree with this analysis, but I do think that a module designed like this should be clearly flagged ahead for anyone playing. This is a module seemingly designed perfectly to be played at a con, or as a one-shot when the usual group doesn’t show up. The puzzle solution will get lost in a week’s break I suspect, and the purpose of the narrow funnel and recursive structure that could be interpreted as a railroad is to be sure the players are provided the information to solve the puzzle in a satisfying manner, while getting a chance to feel clever in almost every room. I think it’s smart design, and with a bit more polish could’ve been incredibly elegant. It would be very interesting to see more tiny modules designed as 5 to 10 part puzzles, instead of just as an exercise in pushing your luck, or room-by-room combat. Combining the high-density spaces of Priest with the innovative structure and conceptual density of the Dream Shrine would be a hell of an approach to tiny dungeons — I’d love to see that.
It’s probably worth mentioning the difference in format between this tiny module and the Tomb of the Primate Priest: 2 page vs. 19 pages. One contributing factor here is the complexity of the rooms, the additional random encounter table and other complicating factors. The Dream Shrine is simply more complex and more wordy than the Tomb of the Primate Priest. I suspect that if it was shrunk down to the same font and two-column layout, it would still be over double the length. Tomb of the Primate Priest makes that 2-page spread incredibly easy to read, I must say, but for the complexity here, I think larger fonts and more white space and art is a smart decision. The space is used to make a complex space more legible to the referee, which is an exceptional use of space in layout in my opinion. Your mileage may vary, however, depending on your preferences; I think the Dream Shrine makes the right call, although a more compactly laid out version would be a very valuable supplement to what’s already here. To some degree, whatever Skull Fungus’ gorgeous art adds to the module, it also to a degree detracts in terms of size and also map legibility. Whether it is worth that trade-off is also a personal preference. I certainly think that the clarity of the map here is not at the clearer end of Skull Fungus’ work, compared to, for example, the work in Workers Work Rulers Rule; how much of that is the nature of the dream-like map, which Skull Fungus does an admirable job of communicating, rather than the art itself, is up for debate, although there’s no doubt it contributes.
The Dream Shrine is an exceptional 1-shot for any table that enjoys puzzle-based play. There are a few caveats though: If you’re running it as part of your regular campaign, the anachronistic, dream-state humour here may not be a great fit; on the other hand, it’s in a dream, and if you provide warning, it might just be right for an off-kilter evening. The significant ramifications suggested for ending the module are likely to destroy whatever your status quo is. If you’re not in the middle of any big political plays, though, honestly those very ramifications are damned interesting and much less weird than everything else that’s going on in this module. I wouldn’t say no to them changing the direction of my world at all, if changing the world introduced a battle between gods, a titan-mammoth and a tooth-eating clown to my world. And, of course, if the table doesn’t enjoy puzzle-solving this isn’t for them. If it still appeals to you, the Dream Shrine is a hell of a tiny module to pick up.
Idle Cartulary