Bathtub Review: I Miss You Very Much

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.

I Miss You Very Much (henceforth IMYVM) is a 3 page module for Mausritter by Norgad, the same author that brought us the very solid The Stragglers. In IMYVM, you travel to the top of a peak — a bird fountain — to ask an oracle for one last moment with a dead loved one. I received a complementary copy from the author.

IMYVM utilises the familiarity Mausritter keying style with a strict one-sentence primary description. This worked extremely well for the Stragglers, and does so with about the same amount of success: Only 5 location descriptions feature the same playability features “orange dust”, “icy cold”, and some are very sparse “Cold. Wet. Windy. Tiring. Dangerous.” is truly a useless and uninteresting description. To make matters worse, the keys are arranged bottom-up, but not entirely due to the fact that there are two possible routes to climb, making the map quite difficult to navigate. Colour is used here, but differentiates opposite features on each page, which was perplexing a choice for me.

I rarely write home about hooks, and here they taint up 15% of the text, but all four here are excellent. All change the adventure and how to approach it remarkably. All hooks should be this varied and interesting.

The module includes climbing rules — handy to be honest, as I’ve had to intuit how to use a climbing harness in Mausritter before. I don’t hate the rules, but they’re overwhelmingly negative and concerned with failure, rather than providing interesting additional routes to success. If I’m adding rules to something as cautious with systems as Mausritter, I’d prefer to have it really change my game — and example is the racing rules in Song of the Frogacle.

Overall, this is a genuinely clever concept for a location, with hooks that make that concept sing twice as loudly, but falls apart in its execution. I mainly consider Mausritter through the lens of playing it with my kids — it’s one of the systems I play most often, because they can play it at 4 and 6 — and the climbing rules are punishing and unfun in that context. The locations don’t feature as much fun, gameable options to counteract their brevity. But it’s still a fun module, and I could see it going down a treat if I scrapped or simplified the rules, or cherry picked the hooks to be the funniest. I’d also serve well as a funnel, if you were playing with adults. I Miss You Very Much a 2 dollar pamphlet, so it’s probably worth it just for the things that are special about it. i’ve paid more for less inventive stuff, but it probably wouldn’t make it whole to my particular table without some modifications.

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