The Island of Dr. Moreau Review

by Sprinting Owl

Creation is a process that can be sanitized. Hide your rough sketches. Keep your design files internal. Show the audience only as much as has been focus tested---don’t talk about your work, preserve the mystique.

But none of this can ever remove the mess at the heart of the process.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau is a feature length transformation fetish ttrpg by usducktape. I am using this phrase as a neutral descriptor, and because duck has used it to describe previous works. For me, the notion of being slowly turned into something else in a way that invalidates my agency as a person is horror, but I am not everybody. Especially in an age where payment processors are pressuring shopfronts to censor content—not on legal grounds, but because they find it icky—it is vital to be able to say “this is not for me, but I think somebody else’s gonna love it.”

So if you resonate with the idea of a cruel and capricious scientist slowly turning you into an animal, that’s rad. I think you’ll enjoy both Dr. Moreau and several other works in duck’s back catalog. But this is going to be a long review with quite a few things to unpack, so let’s talk about the basics first.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau was kickstarted in the summer of 2024, raising a total of $22,754 from 273 backers. It delivered in digital format the summer of this year, with physical components still on the way. Its highest backer level was $1,200---allowing you to add a character and 6+ illustrations---and this level was backed fairly heavily, amounting to more than 25% of the total sum.

The PDF for The Island Of Dr. Moreau is 272 pages, full color, well organized, and packed with art. The characters are extremely varied---both in age, gender, ethnicity, background, and in the types of creatures they are being transformed into. The book’s artists are a sizable team, and the book differentiates between transformation artists and non-transformation artists in its credits. Darling Demon Eclipse (Sapphicworld, Biotrophication) is listed among the contributing writers.

Duck’s other works consist of The Quiet Life (a cozy card placement game about gay nuns in the countryside,) Cuticorium (a lavishly illustrated PbtA about insects,) and To Change (an earlier feature length transformation fetish ttrpg that is not specifically about being turned into animals, but into all manners of thing,) as well as other smaller games and scenarios. The To Change scenario, Candied Blood, has some layout and early script work from me---although my writing was quite reasonably reworked for the final copy.

Now, let’s talk about creation being messy again.

In The Island Of Dr. Moreau’s introduction, it discusses the origins of the game as a GAIA Online roleplaying group in 2005. As it was hosted on a loosely anime themed social website aimed at a teen audience in an era right before the hyper-permeation of D&D into mainstream culture, GAIA roleplaying tended to have more social rules than mechanical ones. You didn’t roll dice. There wasn’t a GM. You had agency over your own character, but you didn’t have agency over anyone else that they didn’t give you, and everyone shared agency over the story collectively. These are the rules of forum RP in general, but GAIA was specifically an environment where a lot of people were learning them for the first time. It was anarchic, but it was beginning to formalize.

Anyway, the Island Of Dr. Moreau’s GAIA version had GMs, multiple characters per player, and a substantial community---all on a site at a time where “do not god-mode” was still having to be taught. It feels reasonable to describe it as an audacious undertaking.

The modern Island Of Dr. Moreau includes a section at the back acknowledging these roots and giving advice on how to duplicate them. It talks about how to structure your forum, how to accommodate for delays in posting, how to RP, how to GM, and how to deal with players vanishing.

Of course, the game can also be played as a ttrpg, using a system with tarot mechanics and shared control of characters that floats somewhere in the space between Belonging Outside Belonging and Wretched And Alone. Basic checks are performed by drawing three cards and picking one---different cards correspond to success on different attributes. Various factors affect the number of cards drawn, and players have resources that they can spend to negate the need for a check entirely. Cards can also be drawn as oracular prompts---to determine the context of an action, or to add a character to a scene. And cards correspond to characters---when a character’s card is drawn for the first time, the group decides who will play as them.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau’s plot revolves around a modern day Dr. Moreau running a company called Feral Labs, which operates a facility on a remote island that is at the center of a nexus of abductions, unethical experiments, and boundary pushing research. This is in service of a serum that transforms but regenerates living things. There is lore, but I would describe the setting as more of a way to enable the intended gameplay. Feral Labs has strong control over the island---although this control decays over the course of a campaign, with a dwindling counter of Authority Points measuring the collapse.

Until that collapse, though, there is a lot of room for having desired involuntary experiences on the island. The game’s content warning covers a lot of ground, but it includes torture, degredation, medical horror, exploitation based on gender or ability, deliberately induced dysphoria, suicide, addiction, coercion, and more. I am not sure to what extent these routinely overlap with transformation fetish, but the fiction’s tone overall trends towards slightly mean. Not in a negative way, but in the sense that groups that enjoy mean stories may get the most out of this system.

In terms of resources for the players, Island Of Dr. Moreau provides a lot. In addition to a full description of the island, overview of the forces in play, and complete dossiers on a ton of playable characters, there are detailed events that occur at specific times in the island’s story. These are included in the same way that a game might include adventure hooks or full scenarios, but by being part of the island’s calendar they give the game an interesting sense of time’s passage. They even feed into branching endings—although the game expects it to be a long while before you reach these; 20--30 sessions as calculated at the start of the book.

Ultimately, I think The Island Of Dr. Moreau is a sign of the flourishing of the indie ttrpg scene. For an art scene to be healthy, there should be lots of works in it---and I should not be the target audience for most of them. Moreover, I think designers, reviewers, and players should not be afraid of mess. Over the course of two decades, a GAIA Online forum rp aged into an impressive full color book---featuring a cast of talented contributors, a ton of lavishly detailed art, and a novel way to tell a shared story through tarot prompts, tokens, and skill checks. It then forced me to think a lot in the process of writing this review---art that can make you genuinely stop and consider it is good art.

So in closing: whatever you’re passionate about, embrace it loudly and without fear. You’ll have fun, and you’ll create something to be proud of.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau’s itch.io link can be found here.