Bathtub Review: Blackout

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. Blackout is a 15 page module for Mothership by Martin Orchard with art by Zach Hazard. In it you venture deep into an industrial colony to restore its power supply; but you’re not the first team to try, and what secrets did the previous one discover? I was given a complementary copy by the author. We open with a timeline — effectively what the crew will know going in — and a “what’s going on” that’s pretty detailed. I usually wouldn’t like such a detailed plot for such a brief module, but here there’s a twist: Basically everything here is based in an environmental or NPC clue, meaning the mystery of what happened down here will be almost certainly able to be discovered by the players in…