Dog Eat Dog

RPG PDF Spotlights is our daily look at a recent release for a new tabletop roleplaying game, supplement or scenario, or solo journaling game, that has caught my eye.RPG PDF Spotlights is our daily look at a recent release for a new tabletop roleplaying game, supplement or scenario, or solo journaling game, that has caught my eye.

Dog Eat Dog

Core Rulebook by Central Michigan University Press

Dog Eat Dog: A Game of Imperialism and Assimilation on the Pacific Islands is a multiplayer, tabletop roleplaying game that places players in the midst of a struggle between a colonizing Occupation force and a targeted Native force.

Originally released in 2012, this revised edition is being published as part of the Art & System: Games for Expanded Play game series from Central Michigan University Press that highlights innovative, historically important, and artful games that explore the intersection of mechanics, narrative, and design.

Dog Eat Dog is a roleplaying game of colonialism and its consequences. As a group, players work together to describe the conquest of one of the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, defining the customs of the native people and the mores of the outsiders arriving to claim it. One player then assumes the role of the Occupation force, playing their capable military, their collaborationist government, and whatever jaded tourists and shrewd businessmen are interested in a not quite pacified territory. All the others play individual Natives, each trying in their own ways to come to terms with the new regime.

The game begins when the war ends. Through a series of scenes, players explore the inevitably conflicted relationship between the two parties, deciding what the colonizers do to maintain control, which natives assimilate and which run amok, and who ends up owning the island in the end.

Dog Eat Dog is available in PDF through DriveThruRPG