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Dog Town: Core Rulebook is the flagship product of Cold Blooded Games. Its intent is to give the reader a setting and a set of rules for playing a goodfella, a wise guy, or a down-on-his-luck punk from the '70s era of mob rule in New York. The game introduces its own playground, the titual Dog Town, and its own "Split System" as the toy to play with. The innumerable technical errors combine with the clear-as-mud writing style to produce something physically painful to read.

The First Bad Signs: Page Two

"Dog Town," it says. "The Ultimate Crime Experience." This could be fun. It could be an interesting change of pace. Roleplaying not a hero or an antihero, but a downright bad guy, just trying to make his own way on the mean streets of a dirty city where he can't trust anyone but himself and his gun. It might play best as a single-player, unless everyone's willing to suspend disbelief and have a tight, trusting group, but that's not a big deal. In fact, the world might be able to use a couple more RPGs aimed at one-player, one-GM gaming. Cool.

The credits follow directly after. Written by Jonathan Ridd. Okay. Split System Design: Jonathan and James Ridd. Self-publishing a personal system isn't damning. Maybe they're brothers. Editing: Jonathan Ridd. Wait a minute.... When the author and the editor are the same person, it's suspicious, at best. Skipping to the end. Playtesters: James Ridd, Martin Pecci, and... huh? That's it? There are two playtesters, and one of them helped design the system and is related to the author? There are more illustrators than artists! The only reasonable deduction from this is that the game wasn't very heavily tested before it went to print, and there's only one way to find out if that's true.

Page Three

On the next page is a table of contents. The reader learns here that there are five chapters: Low Down, Creating a Criminal, Doin a Lil Somin, zgibbles, and tyayhgl. What are the last two chapters called? No one knows until he gets there, because the table of contents is cast on a full-page illustration that conceals the last two titles in shadows beneath a mugshot's nose and neck. Hold on. There are six chapters. The words "Chapter Six" were invisible against the chosen background, but it might be titled... Director's Chair. Those aren't the only words that are hard to read. The contents of the first chapter are easy to read, placed on the mugshot's shining forehead as they are. But then, under Doin a Lil Somin: Split System, Types of Gghrhb, __havior, __ckets, and some that are actually legible. Under the Noseshadow chapter, the first thing the reader sees is "Balls." Okay, time to skip to the next page, and coincidentally the next chapter.

So far, page two introduced playtesting of dubious rigor and page three revealed poor layout. Moving on.

Low Down on Dog Town

The first chapter begins with a Foreward, in which the author explains why he believes people are interested in gangsters and the gangster genre. He moves on to describe Dog Town as a realistic roleplaying game meant "to be an authentic portrayal of urban life and criminality in 1970's New York." Then, he explains, to be true to the genre, he has included a large lexicon of slang and slurs on all manner of people, but he doesn't condone use of these slurs in real life. Good of him. Unfortunately, it's not entirely correct. It might be better to say that the author has used a large lexicon of slang and slurs in order to use them in the text, because while a lexicon is nowhere to be found, the slurs are spread liberally throughout. In order to be true to the genre, no doubt.

The low down continues, explaining what roleplaying games are through use of the film "Scarface." It mentions that the game uses physical and metal attributes and talents and abilities. They are all ranked, somehow. It also tells us that it uses a twenty-sided die to resolve tasks. Higher numbers are harder. Fine, fine. It has a small section titled "Parole" that describes Solomon Brown being released on parole. Solomon is a recurring example in the book, but until the reader gets around to those examples, its difficult to figure out what exactly this section is doing here. The author then goes on to ramble for a couple pages about different events and heists during the period - but if the reader is interested in the book, he's probably already familiar with the genre. More importantly, he probably knows the relevant movies, which seem to be the author's source for much of this section.

Then, the author tightens the reins. In his game, the player gets to be a crook who just got out of jail and who, while behind bars, was given the opportunity to make some fantastic business deal - but it requires one hundred grand within 90 days. According to the author, this "design restricts an open-ended game where the action would become repetitive and stale." Baloney. Most successful games do not force the player's character into a specific situation, because leaving it open offers more flexibility and better repeated gameplay. Luckily, this "restriction" is rarely addressed in the rest of the book.

The chapter then has a lexicon of terms (game terms, not slangs and slurs) and a description of Dog Town, the setting. It breaks it up into different neighborhoods, then surprises its reader with an odd-looking key. It has lots of strange pictures with labels like, "Clothes Store," or "Night Club." Two pages of this gives way to 12 pages of maps. All the Dog Town neighborhoods are mapped out in a manner that resembles nothing so much as the maps Nintendo Power used to publish by taking photos from each screen from games such as The Legend of Zelda or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Wonderful nostalgia.

Interlude One: Art

Dog Town serves fairly well as a showcase of art and artists. The graphics in this product are good. There are several excellent pieces, many great pieces, and quite a few that are "only" good. There are only one or two that disappoint; one image depicts a fellow holding an abdominal bullet wound and grimacing, but he should be more concerned that his face is slipping off. Still, bad pictures are the exception, and the artists deserve the special mention. They did good work.

Creating a Criminal

Obviously, the typical chargen chapter. Except harder to comprehend. The author introduces three levels of starting character: Punk, Gangster, and Anti-Hero. Each gets progressively more points to distribute among Attributes, Special Talents, and Skills. This first page includes a sidebar that needs to be quoted:

The split system uses a combination of attributes to the power of four to express both innate abilities (Derived Attributes) and bases for refined skills (e.g. shooting).

The text does not get any clearer on the matter.

Now come the ten Attributes, which range from -2 to 5 in value: Bulk, Power, Toughness, Reflexes, Sense, Brains, Control, Style, Experience, and Luck. These are, for the most part, relatively clear, but just to be sure: Bulk is actually how large a character is. Power is strength. Toughness is taking constitution. Reflexes is dexterity. Sense is perception. Brains is intelligence. Control is self-control. Style is hipness and charisma. Experience is familiarity with the criminal way of life. Luck is luck.

The page that follows Luck describes how one can increase these Attributes by spending nondescript "points." The first advancement costs 10, the second 20, the third 30. The game system isn't set up such that only three incremental advancements take a character to the top rung, but it appears to be impossible to increase an Attribute more than three times. These "points" are earned by performing an activity that reasonably would increase that Attribute: Overeating or weightlifing can earn "Bulk points." Steroids can provide "Power points." Anger management gives a character "Control points." This section also describes how a character's Attributes can be reduced, most of which are injury or brain damage.

There are 11 Derived Attributes, and they come next. Trauma Resistance, because "being dumped on yo ass by a sassy shot ta the chops" is a bad thing. Hurt Modifier, which might add damage to an attack. It can reduce effectiveness numbers associated with weapons - which means absolutely nothing to the reader at this point, despite an example. Injury Points are hit points. Characters get more of them for high Power, Bulk, or Toughness.

Move, a character's traveling speed, is next, but it is strange. Up to this point, all Derived Attributes have been "derived" by multiplying the character's ratings in different Attributes by different numbers to get a final number. Move is different: For every point the character's Bulk is above or below 1, take certain numbers of points away from 5. For every point the character's Power is above or below the "ideal" range of 3 or 4, take certain numbers of points away from 5. Then, multiply whatever numbers are left by certain values (x1 or x2, usually) to get final ratings for speed, climbing, maneuvering, and balancing. This is absurdly and needlessly complex. Disgustingly so. The same sort of thing happens with Endurance, the next Derived Attribute.

It's time to skip to the end of the Derived Attributes, but not before mentioning that one of them is called "Balls" and another is "Hostility Rating," which determines not only how many people hate you, but how many people your character hates, and to what degree. Calculated by subtracting a character's Control from his Toughness, this can range from 0 to 7. The sidebar that discusses what each number means? It goes from 0 to 5.

Criminal types come next. Each comes with a brief description, one of the product's many good illustrations, and a list of adjustments taking that type lets a character make by spending points, including Special Talents and Flaws, which characters are apparently requied to take. Each also comes with a quote from a movie or book. The illustrations really are quite good.

The text then details the Talents and Flaws. It mentions that taking some Talents as themed groups can save one point off the cost of each Talent in the group, but the example shows taking one at full cost to get the other two in the package at one less for each. In the text of the Talents themselves, two Talents have identical wording, which is odd. When it gets around to Flaws, it appears that everyone has a 50% chance on a d20 to get a Flaw, and then has to roll for the Flaw. Players also roll for Vices (such as drugs), but get a set number determined by the character's Control.

Fleshing out the character is a disturbing page-and-a-half that contains five or six possibilities for why the character's life was awful. Five pages suggesting ethnic character names, and then nicknames, follows.

Skills. Oh God. Most players today aren't unfamiliar with the thought of combining an Attribute and a Skill to get a rating at how good the character is at a particular task. White Wolf fans do it all the time. But each skill uses the values of four Attributes (sometimes one Attribute is used twice or more) to provide the base, and the skill value is added on top of that. There are 33 different skills. Three are for close combat. More are for using various firearms. Then it talks a little about the skills used for hurting others or not getting hurt oneself.

Time to speed up: It details a system based on "influence points" which includes a chart that gives bonues or penalties to one's influence based on many, many factors. Influence points have a range from -30 to 150+. A character similarly has reputation points or, as they are called in the accompanying chart, respect points. Next chapter, please.

Interlude Two: When Backgrounds Go Bad

There are many, many charts and tables in Dog Town: Core Rulebook. As if that weren't enough to make baby Cthulhu cry, many of them are also backed with photographs of dilapidated buildings, dark alleys, and subway platforms. The text on top of the picture is also, inevitably, dark. As with the table of contents, this makes them very hard to read. That's okay. No one really wants to read the tables by this point anyway.

The "System"

After reading the entire system chapter, this is what someone should be able to understand: Compare the character's skill (plus any relevant bonuses) to the difficulty of the task (as determined by the Director). Refer to a chart on page 101 of this .pdf to find the number that the player has to roll over to be successful. For some reason, this is expressed as (target #) vs. (20 - target #). The second number doesn't appear to have any meaning whatsoever. The difference between the roll and the target # determines degree of success or failure. What the author never mentions is that the target number could be determined by this simple formula: # = 10 - (skill - difficulty) = 10 + difficulty - skill.

The chapter also details brief actions, longer actions, actions that require lots of rolling, and the open-ended aspect of the die roll. Here is how the text describes that the second part of the open-ended roll is divided by ten to determine its value:

So the follow up 1d20 roll is divided into 10 equal bands of 2 to put a cap on what can be achieved. This produces a maximum of only 10 additional successes where a 19 to 20 is rolled instead of the usual 19 to 20.

This person needs an editor. Wait! He has one... himself.

The chapter then goes into serious detail on when a player needs to roll a Derived Attribute and exactly what happens based on the roll. This isn't a waste of space because the Derived Attributes themselves don't give clear ideas of what they do. Further, it appears that some of these Attributes determine whether a player's character runs like a little girl... or not. It talks about running "rackets," and, while any reader will know what that means, no one is going to know how to do it, because it makes very little sense. But there are six-and-a-half pages of charts for it, so it must be important. Then there are charts for how loyal flunkies are, and how likely they are to actually carry out orders when given. A chart on business points, which are like injury points (which are like hit points) for businesses, follows. And then a chart of how many business points worth of damage different intimidation tactics inflict. This chapter includes how to do anything the author thought might be worth doing, and this is all important because no part of the book earlier, like where it introduced the Attributes, skills, or the system, let the reader know any of this. And there are charts. Lots of charts.

The Next Chapter

It turns out not to be called "Noseshadow." It's actually "Thug Life." Really, that's little better than "Noseshadow." It's all about hand-to-hand combat.

Combat in Dog Town uses a countdown tick intiative system, much like Feng Shui. A speed roll goverened by four Attributes determines how many "slots" a character has to use in a given round, and using them counts down toward zero. Once everyone's shot or stabbed someone else as many times as they can, they get to go again. This is also where weapon effectiveness is discussed. Not very well, because it's still not clear what it does. For some reason, "(EFF)" is placed at the end of the paragraph - it is probably a secret message. Oh. Nope. It's the abbreviation for effectiveness. That's less exciting.

Then, after a short (but mercifully free of background image) chart telling the reader all about weapons, come 22 pages of more charts giving complete detail on the damage inflicted by various attacks at various levels of effectiveness, complete with lost injury points and injury point loss due to blood loss per minute. Then, there's some info on healing such damage.

Interlude XXX: Copyright... or Copywrong?

Throughout the text, the author quotes characters from movies such as Superfly, Goodfellas, Scarface, and others in order to demonstrate the tone of the game. Now, a little bit of text from a foreign source isn't a big deal, even if it is a good idea to make sure those sources have fallen into the public domain. And if they aren't, nobody's going to jump a publisher for sticking two lines from a movie or play into a roleplaying book. The degree of quotation present in Dog Town seems extreme. It's not going to trigger a lawsuit, but if someone's going to play the game, that person is already familiar with the genre, at least somewhat. To use that many quotes is sloppy - especially when they're quoted poorly.

Another Chapter

This one is called "Shoot Outs." This is about firearm combat and how people get hurt from falling, car crashes, explosions, and dogs. It includes another 23 pages of "how people get injured" charts.

One More!

This is the one called "Directors Chair." It contains basic suggestions for running the game. It ends with a list of influences and a "rap sheet" - a character sheet - which runs eight pages long.

Summary

The Good:The art. The funny, video-game-nostalgia maps.

The Bad and Ugly:Everything else.

There is a reason that many respected publications that accept public submission require said submissions to be in hardcopy and mailed to their physical address. Because it is harder. It requires more effort than typing a lot in Word and sending an email. It weeds people out. Until the advent of .pdf publishing, there was a similar element to RPG publishing: It takes money to make a dream into a real, paper-and-ink book, and if someone is spending that money, it'd better be good. Not all paper products were good, but a consumer might have better chances. Not to suggest that .pdf publishing is crap - there are many excellent .pdf products available. But this isn't one of them. Don't buy it.