Bathtub Review: These Bloody Sails

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. These Bloody Sails is a 50-odd page module for Pirate Borg, by John Christoffersen and William Tramp. In it, you have been hired to steal back a ship that was lost in a wager, and to do so you must sail deep into the dark caribbean. I backed this on Kickstarter. These Bloody Sails doesn’t start well. It opens with 7 pages (not including the inside cover tables) of rules content before it ever actually starts to tell you what the module is about. It makes my first impression that the design process started at “can we make a depth-crawl for a nautical adventure?” and that the content itself is an afterthought. It was really disconcerting having to search for the actual story being told here…