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 Undying Sea is a 100 page game by Joseph R. Lewis based on Cairn and Into the Odd. I don’t usually review games as Bathtub Reviews, but to be entirely honest this is a game about as much as, say, Wolves Upon the Coast or Vaults of Vaarn are games, that is to say, technically, but you’re playing the module that it comes with as much or more than you’re playing the game itself. And I bought it under the impression it was a module, as it pitches itself as a depth-crawl akin to the recently reviewed Stygian Library, but reimagined to crawl the archipelago of a violent and death-defying sea.
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The rules basically add firearms and ships to Cairn. Most of the rules are not even 10 pages, including inventory and two character sheets. But then there are a bunch of combat rules that come much later in the game, after the depthcrawl rules. It’s all more than I want to learn to run this module, and weirdly organised. Should this have been a game? Like, no, I don’t think so. The main unique things it adds are the ship rules, which are obviously essential to making this kind of game interesting, but if I’m running a Cairn table — and Lewis is a strong Cairn advocate so I’d be playing other stuff by him in Cairn — I’d just strap those rules on instead of remake my characters or whatnot.
The way the sea travel sells the “depth-crawl” mechanic is that the sea is blanketed in mist, only ten feet deep, and filled with the undead. There is a dark secret in the uttermost depths of the Undying Sea, that you can uncover, perhaps ending the curse upon the ocean. I don’t hate this as world building and it justifies the mechanic well, but the timeline on the curse is unclear — is this something that’s just happened, or something that’s been present for generations? There are five factions in the sea, but it’s not entirely clear to me why this treacherous, unnavigable sea is a valuable asset at all for them to fight over. Two of these factions are aggressive, blatantly evil colonisers. Two of these are good, either searching for the secret cursing the sea, or searching for a cure to their own curse. One is just there to screw with the PCs. They’re good, iconic, driven factions.
Port Joro is supposed to be your home town, and it’s the centre of the campaign. But it falls into the pitfall of too much customisation. I don’t need to pick from three governors, I want a single compelling governor. You have actions to take there, but no one to interact with with any built in meaning. Suggested quests are not tied to characters or quest givers, and rumours are vague and about half don’t affect how the players will interact with the world (there are a few gems though — “The Harpy is real, and it hunts in a most beautiful garden. Beware both.”). I’m going to have to put in a hell of a lot of effort to make Port Joro a place to care about. One thing Port Joro does have going for it, though, are the events tables. One appears modelled after the events table in Pirate Börg, the other simply adds events to each visit to town. These make the Undying Sea feel like a living, dynamic place, and while they’re no substitute for some actual characters to interact with, they go a long way.
The depth-crawl mechanics are pretty typical — you map as you go, discovering the shape of the archipelago island by island. Once it’s discovered, it’s not a surprised anymore. Travelling on land has its own little procedure, which is probably the messiest part of the procedure, because unlike the Gardens of Ynn, the island you land on is randomised, not just the location and a detail, but a terrain, encounters and treasures for its shore and interior, as well as a feature and relics. It’s also not clear if you cross things off as you encounter them — some are clearly one offs, but many aren’t. This is a lot of work — enough that there needs to be an example, and that the book suggests giving the players a break each time you land on an island. I’d feel the need to generate islands ahead of time, to be honest, which isn’t promising for me to bring this to the table. And, I’m not sure what it adds? Like, how much of a difference does it make to my campaign that the goblin labyrinth is on a white sand and palms island and not a boulders and baobabs island? I’d have rathered the time be spent on making islands complete with these randomisers built in meaningfully, than be forced to do this extra work in the name of what? Replayability? I’m not even sure what it’s supposed to add, for the significant additional complexity.
It suggests you can allow the crew to dungeon crawl room by room, but I don’t see how, because all of this complexity does not bring with it any specificity. My Moss & Frost island has a treasure hidden perhaps under ice, and a few encounters, but no points of interest or landmarks. If I roll an Undine Tower, there is no map of the tower, simply some relics hidden by members of an otherwise friendly faction strangely hostile and looking for violence. I’m a big fan of Atop the Wailing Dunes, which similarly generates a lot of its adventure from random games dependent on terrain. But there, everything you need is in a single spread, and here they are spread throughout a whole book.
There is an excellent bestiary at the end, full of fun creatures all illustrated by Hodag. It’s really good. That’s all I have to say about that. A lot of this book is, in isolation, really good. The layout, for example, is pretty good, utilising it’s large letter format to excellent, easy to read effect. The art is all very good. It’s an easy book to flick through, although I’m glad I have the print version because it’d be nigh impossible to navigate digitally.
My problem with the Undying Sea is that it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. It spends time being evocative when it needs to be specific; it spends energy being random when it needs to be bespoke. The same page length could’ve had 70 custom islands that you encounter randomly with the original Garden of Ynn rules — it could have had mapped lairs and locations as well — but instead we have pages of rules I don’t want or need, spread randomly amongst tables I have to roll on to generate islands that rely entirely on my imagination to create. I can make up my own islands, without tables, thank you very much.
I’ve got to say, though, the setting, the factions, the concept of a major town the player characters are attached to descending and rallying the locals to the defence of, what is out there on the sea: This is all incredibly compelling. I want to like the Undying Sea. It’s a damned cool setting, and the islands are gorgeously described, the features for the most part striking, the creatures and beasts unite and compelling. I want to play Undying Sea.
But while Lewis’ writing is solid here, he’s at his best when writing concrete locations like in the Raid on the Obsidian Keep. I can’t see myself using the Undying Sea — it leaves me to do too much of the work, and I just don’t have the time when I could run Stygian Library or my own Hell on Rev-X for a good depthcrawl, or Wolves Upon the Coast or Seas of Sand for some great swashbuckling. That said, if you don’t want to stray far from the Cairn framework, enjoy on-the-fly location generation as an exercise, and your table isn’t attached to blorby exploration, this is likely to be a great game for you. Or, if you love the idea of the Undying Sea as a setting, and don’t mind doing a fair amount of legwork to make Port Joro your own, or to customise the locations that feel like they could’ve been a module in and of themselves, or want to drop your collection of modules into an island setting, then the Undying Sea is a good choice for you.
Idle Cartulary