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Once upon a time, there were many stories in many mediums involving animals with anthropomorphic or pseudo-anthropomorphic qualities. From the cheesy horror of the Wolfman, to the children’s tales of Benji, to literary classics like Call of the Wild, these stories were widely popular. Then, some time in the last few decades, fans of these types of stories began to congregate. Their ranks expanded and they ran into another fandom, those that prefer a wider aspect of anthropomorphism, such as Mickey Mouse or anime cat girls. This group tended to be more passionate and more visual, and so became iconic of the whole culture – and that culture became a fandom. And fandoms attract most of all the most extreme fans. And thus this “furry” attraction was linked to such extremes as cartoon pornography, fetish sex, theriolatria, lycanthropy and even bestiality.
Thanks to the ‘net, we live in a world where every fetish is well documented, and the end result is that now you can’t read Call of the Wild or watch Rin Tin Tin without connecting it to people dressed as squirrels doing it doggy-style or Doug Winger art prints. Some would claim that Call of the Wild isn’t “furry” because the wolves act like wolves, but it’s too late now – in many people’s minds, the “taint” is already there. Well, many people who post on RPGNet, anyway.
This is a terrible tragedy, partly because Call of the Wild is a really great book, but also because if it wasn’t for this trend, I’m sure there’d be at least nine or ten people in the world who want to play Simon Washbourne’s prairie dog RPG, “It’s a Dog’s Life”. As it is, it’s probably just me and some guy from South Dakota who lives in a burrow in his basement, dressed as a giant prairie dog – assuming prairie dogs have a fetish for bondage, piercing and Werewolf LARPs.
And I already play D&D with that guy.
Which is a damn shame, because I happen to think that this is a wonderful idea for an RPG. I think playing animals (as opposed to humans with cat-ears or tails) is a fantastic experience, one of the most powerful and interesting ways to use roleplaying to explore a fundamentally orthogonal – yet still conceivable - point of view, and I think the game industry is terribly short of good examples of such games. Neither the original nor the GURPS incarnation of Bunnies and Burrows really got it right, and One Fine Mess is conspicuous because it is so isolated in the field.
The only question is “why prairie dogs?” The answer is: why the hell not? A read-through of these rules instantly convinced me they are just as interesting as rabbits, perhaps more so. With super-powered barks and a wampum of Native American mysticism, these dogs are exotic and fantastical enough to remove the sense of just playing mundane, boring animals. The only remaining impediment is that it doesn’t fit the mould of wish fulfilment that is the core of most RPGs. Still, when there are RPGs devoted to being Sheryl Crow, nicotine-addicted teenage girls and undead professional wrestlers, I really don’t think we can point the finger at prairie dogs.
In short: this is a good idea for a game: a fun, playable concept that many people will enjoy, especially since the game is well-designed to make the most out of the premise. Which is why it is yet another terrible tragedy that all of these facts are hidden behind some of the worst editing I have ever seen in an RPG.
I know, that’s against some stiff competition, but this book makes HOL look well-edited. We’re talking page breaks being out of whack, four or five typos per page, and worst of all, a complete lack of a spell-checker. I can barely handle misusing “their” instead of “there”, but this book is full of words like “rol” and “fught” and “inthis”. Plus, there are sentences that don’t end, or don’t start, or disappear somewhere in the middle. The RPG is written in the voice of a prairie dog; I was forced to wonder if this was actually the case, that perhaps a million of the little buggers had been jumping up and down on the keys and Mr Washbourne had simply stumbled onto their manuscript while he was mucking out their feed-trough at the secret laboratory.
It’s terribly frustrating - even insulting: thirty seconds with a spell-checker and five minutes with anyone reading above a fourth grade level would have made this RPG perfectly easy to read, instead of a constant agony on my eyes and bowels. Which, as I said, is a great shame, because behind this crime against the English language is a pretty good little game.
The game begins, appropriately enough, with an introduction to prairie dog life: their social structures, politics, lifestyle and traditions. The game is set in Great Home, a gigantic prairie town made up of many different tribes. Much like Vampire, there is much jockeying between tribes to have their tribal chief names High Chief. The more influential clans and families live closer to the centre of the town, where the soil is the most fertile for growing grass, and the High Chief holds the Great Gatherings. The town is massive, taking days for a dog to cross, and in the outer-lying burrows there are troubles that don’t always get taken to the Gatherings.
Following this introduction we learn much of prairie dog myth. Borrowing from actual Native American legends in some places, or just using the style in others, the stories explain how the prairie dogs live and think. Their creation legend tells of how Thunderhoof, Lord of the Bison made a deal with Kynos, Lord of the Prairie Dogs: Thunderhoof would stop his herds trampling their homes if Kynos’ dogs would tend the grasslands that the bison eat so that they would grow even in times of drought. Other legends tell of the lost city of Thundertown (which is a nice little game hook) and how Great Home founder Flies-with-Eagles got her name. Although it’s not nearly as deep and wonderful as the legends of Frith and Elahrairah, it gives the dogs a playable culture and a roleplay-able mindset, while the Native American approach provides an appropriate yet exotic flavour.
Next up comes chargen. Dogs are built on four attributes: Size (which conflates strength and constitution), Agility, Alertness and Wisdom. You roll four d6s and assign your scores to each, then increasing any of them you wish so that your stat total is at least sixteen. Each dog also gets a physical or mental characteristic that sets them apart from the pack. This has no game effect, it is simply to give the dog more character and to remind the player that their dog is something special – a dog marked for destiny. I found this a great way to get into character too, because it makes you focus on your physical appearance – fur, tail, the lot.
As such Dogs of Destiny (which would make a good band name, by the way), all characters in IaDL have acquired Roles in their Tribe. Most prairie dogs simply tend to litters of pups, harvest food or maintain the tunnels; Roles are positions of great import and status given to dogs that have shown skill and talent above their fellows. In the game, they operate like classes, clearly defining the PC’s niche and duties. The five Roles are Braves (fighters), Healers (clerics), Scout (dextrous ranger types), Speaker (bards and diplomats) and Sentinels (guards and watchers). Each Role gets a unique Ability and a unique Bark (see below), setting them strongly apart from their fellows. Only Healers may heal, for example, and only Scouts may move silently.
Players must put one point into each unique Ablity and unique Bark, then one point into any one of the Abilities listed as secondary for that Role, and one point into their Tribal Bark ability. After this, players can assign four more points to these four qualities, and finally, they get four more points to spend anywhere they like (except on the qualities which are reserved for the other roles).
For example: my test character, Talks-to-Coyote, is a Speaker, so his unique Bark is the Bark of Command, his unique Ability the telling of Prairie Tales, and his secondary Ability Critter Lore. I put one in each of them, giving me Bark of Command 1, Prairie Tales 1, Critter Lore 1 and Tribal Bark 1. Next, I spend my four Role points on these four again, ending up with Bark of Command 1, Prairie Tales 3, Critter Lore 3 and Tribal Bark 1 – I want Talks to be big on stories but not so much on playing diplomat or big cheese. Finally, I have four bonus points that I can spend anywhere. I raise my Prairie Tales up to 6 (the maximum) and put my last point into Tooth and Claw (a non-unique Ability), so Talks can fight a bit if he needs to.
Yes, I just told you about my character. Shut up. No, he is not a ninja!
The only problem with chargen is that there are only three non-unique Abilities: Tooth and Claw, Plant Lore and Critter Lore, so most dogs will stick to their niche when it comes to Abilities. There are more general Barks to choose, but the unique Barks are often so important (like the Bark of Healing) that it would be foolish to skimp on them. The end result is that dogs tend to strongly adhere to their Role, and it would be difficult to find distinction in a group of more than one in each. Contrarily, it would also be difficult to play a game without Braves, or Healers, or Speakers: the game suffers slightly from too much niche protection, just like old school D&D (where a party without a thief could not so much kill things and take their stuff as kill things and save against poison or die).
Stats and Abilities both initially range from 1 to 6. To make a test on them, you add your Ability to the appropriate stat and try to roll under of equal on a D20. A 1 is always a success, a 20 is always a failure, and so is, you’ll notice, 13 to 19. Characters can improve above the starting limits but looking at stat blocks confirms that even High Chiefs don’t have stat+skill totals above 12. Which means that the most bad-ass dogs out there still fail their rolls 40% of the time. Your average PC meanwhile has about 20-25% chance of success with their good stats, and 5-10% for their weaker ones. On the one hand, this is a great way to bring home just how small and ineffectual prairie dogs are in their big, scary wilderness – but it can also make for lousy gaming. Nobody wants to play a game where they mess things up three times out of every four (unless they’re WFRP fans, of course). A d16 would be preferable; otherwise a GM is going to have to put lots of easy modifiers on tests, or handle a lot of frustrated players.
Barks work differently to Abilities. These are the magic spells of the game, and the number of points assigned to each is how many times it can be used per day. So it’s a magical battery again, but as everyone has Barks and Abilities (ie not just mages), running out of juice isn’t a problem. The Barks are powerful and interesting, varying from simple power-ups in combat to tricky voice tricks that players will enjoy finding endless ways to use.
The most important Bark, however, is the Tribal Bark, because it is with this the dog declares who he is and where he comes from: his name, his tribe, his totem, his quest, his favourite colour - and perhaps also more details on all of these. A dog with a weak Tribal Bark can only shout his name and is unlikely to get much respect, nor convey much information. Without a Tribal Bark, a dog is nothing, and this unique, alien concept makes for some wonderful roleplaying opportunities.
The rest of the rules are composed of a short section on combat (opposed Tooth and Claw+Agility rolls are used, with Size determining both damage done and hit points) and then a large bestiary. Twenty seven animals of the great plains are listed, with descriptions from a dog’s point of view. Combat is set up so that you don’t need to scale for size – the same rules are used if a dog is fighting a gopher or a bison (hint: the bison will win). The bestiary is almost too large: I don’t really need to know the stat differences between a chipmunk and a ground squirrel, especially when there aren’t any story hooks provided for each.
After the rules come some excellent tips on presenting a dog’s eye-view to your players, and then some ideas for adventures. Four outlines are presented, of various lengths and in various states of completeness. Two are really just encounters and none of them are going to win any Pulitzer Prizes, but they cover the ground (if you’ll forgive the pun).
The 32 page PDF finishes with some much-appreciated prairie dog facts (how many pseudo-historical games bother to explain the actual historical facts they’re twisting?) and one of the rarest things in gaming: a character sheet that is both wonderfully attractive and highly functional.
Similar compliments could be paid to the game as a whole: care has been taken to provide an attractive setting, rich with flavour and roleplaying opportunities, and then to back that up with a functional system, dedicated to enhancing that flavour and supporting those opportunities. Both the setting and system lack any great depth, and both have a few bugs to be fixed, but these are hardly significant flaws given the simplicity of the game, and given that this is a game hardly likely to see long term play.
In fact, this is a game likely to see no play at all. You can get a few cat lovers to play the Bast in WitchCraft and maybe a few Watership-fans to get into Bunnies and Burrows, but prairie dogs are far too strange. Playing animals is not something many gamers really get excited about, but really, the greater problem is that nobody gets excited about prairie dogs. I’d say that 99% of people who live outside of Wyoming or the Dakotas rate them fairly high on the “animals I’ve never really bothered thinking about” scale. Coyotes and foxes are legendary tricksters, wolves get lots of good press as hunters, bears have been known to sing country jamborees, and chipmunks, gophers and roadrunners all have cartoon series. Even groundhogs got a movie. But nobody, nobody cares about prairie dogs. They have no resonance in fiction, and thus, inspire nobody to pick up this game.
But if they’d just read it, people might discover there is, in fact, a big world of prairie dog adventure just waiting to be played. It might not be as likely to give you a geekgasm as playing your extra-glowy Exalted ninja babe with the Hypnotizing Mammarian Concavity Prana, but there’s almost as many stories to be told, heroes to play, different lives to live and lessons to be learned down on the prairie as there are on the Diamond Isle. If they’d just read it…but that’s the problem. Nobody wants to read it. Or even hear about it.
I could condemn this game for languishing good design on a ridiculously narrow and unmarketable concept, but I just can’t do that. Rather, I instead ask why we gamers aren’t more interested in games like this. Indeed, I find – to paraphrase Shakespeare – that the fault is not in the dogs, but in ourselves.
Substance: 4 Style: 1
(NB: This review is based on the pay version of the game, available on RPGNow. The earlier edition uses the exact same rules but is significantly shorter on material; it is available for free on the above Dog's Life website. As are lots of other free goodies.)
