Bathtub Review: Chateau Amongst the Stars

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.

Chateau Amongst the Stars is a 32 page module for Shadowdark by Anthony J. Zinni. In it, you explore chateau that has magically been transported into the sky above a village, raining massive items down upon it. If you can’t reverse the spell, the chateau will destroy the village on impact. I backed this as part of Zinequest

Structurally, Chateau Amongst the Stars has 3 pages of introduction, an 8 location chateau grounds, then the 49 location chateau itself. The layout is very good, particularly in the key — an attractive 2 column layout, utilising decoration and textual highlighting, bullets and excellent key art that looks good and aids navigation. The exceptional art and maps appears to be by William McAusland and Felipe da Silva Faria, although its hard to tell. Sidebars are inverted, and bring a gothic feel through decoration rather than hard to read type. There is some art on most spreads, and the maps are good looking but functional. This is solid stuff.

Three of the hooks out of six, are solidly juicy. Honestly, it’s a rare thing I get excited by hooks lately, and it was great to see how these have the players focusing on different aspects of the Chateau — I just wish they’d all passed the bar. You start the module with these, technically, but the module proper starts with some admittedly pretty boxed text, and the combination of the two is clumsy. I’d rather a briefer boxed text, or just the hooks, than the combination — this is a bit too much narration up front for me.

The writing is, for me, workmanlike, but pleasingly terse, after the style of Necrotic Gnome. Read aloud text in the bulk of the module is brief and useful. The NPC descriptions, however, are immensely interactive, and there are 3 in the grounds. They use a structure of situation / what they’re like / what they want, which is a good take on NPCs. These are the kinds of touches that make modules like this memorable. Random encounters, however, are a little too random for my taste, with only 1 of 12 being tied to any specific event or location; there are also 6 for the grounds and 6 for all 49 rooms — we need unique biome random encounters for something this big, or at least more variation. This generic, random selection, along with the lack of string theming in the light of “chaos” effects, means that the chateau comes across as more generic than Shadowdark typically pitches itself. There is also a complete lack of page referencing, which makes me suspect that referrers other than the author have not read or attempted to run this — how am I supposed to describe “description of the kytherian mechanism” without a page reference, unless I’ve memorised the whole module?

Puzzles and interactive points of interest aren’t consistently OSR-style challenges, although there is space for them to be treated as such. There are puzzles without clues — perhaps it’s obvious to some that you press the button with the statue’s finger, but I think there should be a clue deeper into the dungeon for those who didn’t get it. I’m playing Blue Prince, and the best thing about it is hearing people talk about the different ways they figured out the solutions. If you’re including puzzles, make sure there are multiple solutions. But make them hard puzzles to balance this out! At least one here is a riddle so easy that it isn’t even a challenge (“Surround me, with a substance from the sea. A ring of crystal, that remains when you distill”) — I’m not sure why this is even a riddle?

Sadly, in terms of spatial design, the chateau falls into the mansion problem: Houses make boring dungeon shapes. They have too many exits, and loop so much as to make exploration trite. The chaos theme could’ve been used to justify some weirder spaces (as could the collapsing from above and dropping chunks to the ground below), but sadly advantage wasn’t taken.

The events table acts as a timer to provide a deadline, but there are a few odd aspects to it. It’s not clear why the environment becomes more deadly over time — it feels like random encounters would decrease as doom approaches given they’re largely creatures. The events themselves — likely because there are 21 of them — don’t really bring an aggressive sense of time proceeding, and the fact that you’re counting rounds seems fiddly and too granular to me. That’s not to say it wouldn’t work — just potentially there are ways of making the same progress more elegant.

Overall, the bulk of Chateau Amongst the Stars is a really solid dungeon. The chaos theme makes for a less cohesive space than I’d prefer, and it begins to feel quite generic D&D — something Shadowdark feels like it’s trying to avoid. I like a few proper biome changes when a dungeon is touching half a century’s worth of rooms, and this doesn’t offer that. It’s also a very high level dungeon — it’s good to see them existing, but it feels like you’re putting a team together especially to play this. If you do, though, there’re probably 5 or 6 sessions in this 32 page book. This is a solid beer and pretzels dungeon, but with some tweaks — improvements on the puzzles and interactions, and the NPCs being more prominent inside the dungeon and not just on the grounds — this could have been a classic. I’ll certainly keep an eye out for Zini in the future, as if the game design can develop to match the visual design, future modules are going to be a treat. But if you’re looking for a higher level, beer and pretzels dungeon for Shadowdark, I’d look no further than Chateau Amongst the Stars.

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