Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

When I get a submission for Critique Navidad, I put them all in a big folder, so I can access them on the various platforms I write on easily. This means I lose the context of who the author is, the page the game was purchased on, etc. When I first opened Mandog, my response was “What the absolute hell is this”. What Mandog turns out to be is a 16 page module, primarily an investigation, written for OD&D, but set in 2018, in a suburban neighbourhood, by Wilbur H. Force, also known as Gromb.

Layout in Mandog is basic and works for the most part. Nobody likes a monospaced font, but here it works. Highlighting is left to bolding and italics, which works well as keying is kept simple. The keying is arranged by address, so it’s hard for me to flick easily through the key, and section headers (or some other way of identifying things at a glance) would be helpful. That said, this is an investigation module; I’m not sure the player characters are going to be crawling through this space, and even more to the point, I wonder if location was the right choice to separate this by at all given it’s an investigation. I’ll come back to this point later. One particularly egregious issue with the layout is that Mandog is completely unsearchable; this made the smaller issues I had with information design far, far more significant. For example, it’s not clear what the “Black Moon” or “Black Moon Syndrome” is and I can’t look it up; I don’t know who Bill “Brainiac” Quimee is and I can’t find them without scanning 20 pages of text. It renders this completely impossible to run on the fly, and difficult to run without printing it off and marking it up. There are page references in some places, but many things I need to reference don’t have page references — any of the random encounters for example. I don’t really see any good reason for a digital file to be unsearchable. The art is mostly limited to maps, but they all look scrawled out by someone taking their best guess, which honestly slaps and suits the subject matter perfectly; when it isn’t, it’s impressionistic charcoal and crayon stuff like the cover above that also slaps. Great choices.

The basic gist of this investigation is that there’s a monster on the loose, and each night, it kills another victim, becoming stronger. The cops are useless, and so the responsibility of investigation falls to the player characters. The player characters take 2 investigation rounds per day and 2 per night, and might encounter specific characters or monsters. at a rate of 1 in every 6 rounds or so. There’s no invitation or suggestion of why the investigation falls to the player characters. I have no idea why the player characters might be here, whether they’re internal to the community or external, and without that, it’s pretty hard to intuit where to start here. In order to kick off the investigation, as a referee I’d have to do a fair bit of work developing the hooks, or else I’d have to do some collaborative worldbuilding with the table. The latter might work pretty well, but it’s definitely not supported in any way, so I’d still have to do a fair bit of work to make sure the worldbuilding doesn’t contradict the test. I’d far prefer if there was support for one of these options.

Mandog’s writing is urgent to a fault. It’s good, though, and the terse and evocative word choices often work here where they don’t work as well in fantasy settings, because most readers have deeper hooks into what an imaginary town would look like than a musty cave. “A small crack in the basement floor opens to a chittering world of filth, a world that armies of pest exterminators fought and lost. The realtor considers a fire insurance policy.” is a pretty typical example: There’s humour, terseness, and more, packed into only a few words. It’s genuinely great. But, it’s filled with forbidden easter eggs, things like “Bobby does not know May prepares his body for possession after her death.” which just aren’t discoverable or interactable, even though they’re a hell of a vibe. In fact, that same home is a good example of the recurring problem with these locations: There’s no reason, really, to get to know these people, and similarly, there’s no mechanism beyond breaking into random homes to identify who’s been killed by Mandog; and there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme nor reason to Mandog’s killings, so there’s no way to anticipate them and stand in Mandog’s way. There are 15 locations before someone suspects anyone of anything. There are only 2 characters with any suspicions at all that might point you to Mandog’s lair. You find out some clue regarding what the Black Moon is on page 11; it’s in the single longest and sloppiest piece of readaloud text in the book, and would better have been directed at the referee non-diagetically, or parceled out somehow.

Now, there’s the question of whether choosing a system other than 0D&D would have made these issues less meaningful. I think, in some ways, it would. Liminal Horror, for example, would be a good choice for this module, and it comes bit a bunch of presuppositions that would help breeze past some of the hiccups with initiating play. But, it wouldn’t eliminate enough of them, and I don’t think the built in rules would be better than 0D&D for many of the included rules. The issues here are primarily level-design, and not resolved by picking a different system.

Overall, Mandog is a conundrum. This is a gorgeously realised and written suburb infected with evil and plagued with a demon in a relatively unique setting; this should be a super-compelling module. But it’s almost completely unplayable; there’s nowhere to start, there are few clues to find out what’s going on; it’s difficult to navigate to a fault. This is not a playground, and that’s a mistake for a module, because nothing works together. There’s very little level design here. I would never run this, because the preparation just to get started is way more than I can justify when there are so many other modules out there; I’d need to mark everything up, develop hooks, and figure out what the characters know so that the investigation will lead somewhere. It’s too much for me. That said, if an investigation set in an alternate demon-haunted 80’s American suburb is your jam, or you’re a sucker for stellar evocative writing, I’d jump on Mandog without hesitation, so long as you have a lot of confidence to fumble through the gaps, or would enjoy building on what’s here in your spare time.

Idle Cartulary

Playful Void is a production of Idle Cartulary. If you liked this article, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing to the Idle Digest Newsletter. If you want to support Idle Cartulary continuing to provide Bathtub Reviews, I Read Reviews, and Dungeon Regular, please consider a one-off donation or becoming a regular supporter of Idle Cartulary on Ko-fi.