A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement The Haunting of the Dorogan

The Haunting of the Dorogan by Joseph Mohr is a role playing game supplement published by Old School Role Playing for use with Cepheus Engine. And such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.

The supplement is available as a 16 page Pay What You Want DPF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, three the front matter and three the Open Game License.

The opening paragraphs explain that the titular deep space survey ship Dorogan disappeared whilst exploring the neighbouring sector nearly eight years ago. It has now appeared again orbiting a world in the Sonora sector – the adventure is set in the Frontiers of Space, though this isn’t stated outright – and a salvage team were sent to recover anything of value. The ship’s crew was missing, but the ship seemed to be haunted. The characters are employed to do a better job and not run away.

Patron is the person hiring them.

Complications are things that aren’t known – the patron isn’t keeping anything back, but there are unsurprisingly things he doesn’t know – and other issues that can make the job harder.

The Haunting is what’s really going on on the ship.

Strange Occurrences is a 2d6 table of strange random events.

Key to the Dorogan covers the locations on the ship.

Mission Completion is what’s needed to succeed.

The final page of content has a map of the Dorogan.

The Haunting of the Dorogan in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text follows a single column format and appeared to be free of errors. Bar the covers and map, there are no illustrations. Presentation could be better.

Perhaps sadly, this isn’t a technohorror haunted ship of any kind; it would have been interesting, and plausible, given the events, if the ship had brought something back from its trip that wasn’t of this universe. But that’s not the case. The haunting has a mundane explanation. As it stands, it’s a fairly straightforward adventure. Admittedly, the players don’t know. The Haunting of the Dorogan isn’t a bad little adventure and it can be found by clicking here.