In a role-playing game like Hot Chicks, where sex and violence sit side-by-side (and are oftentimes the same thing), the use of tentacle adversaries was most likely inevitable. However, that doesn’t make them any less compelling, or disturbing, as antagonists. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to make them MORE disturbing as well. Which brings us to their set-piece Tentacle Madness.

I call this a “set piece” because this product sits halfway between being a supplement and an adventure. While it thoroughly describes a single location and its inhabitants, it’s also quite clearly meant to be an adventure locale, which your heroes can invade to beat the bad guys and get some glory. Tentacle Madness gives you the tools you need to thoroughly build up what’s here so that your PCs can tear it down.

The book is fairly substantial at being a forty-two page PDF. The book has copy-and-past enabled, and comes with full (albeit non-nested) bookmarks. Of course, it hits the regular high bar for Dakkar Unlimited products, having almost all of its interior art be full-color CG images, alongside the odd black-and-white line-scale art. There’s no printer-friendly version, which is something of a loss not because you’d likely want a version without the pictures (after all, this is a game called “Hot Chicks”), but rather because this is likely to put at least a moderate strain on your printer as it is.

Tentacle Madness sets itself up as something out of a horror movie (albeit one of the porny ones). We’re introduced to the Sunny Rest Mental Care Facility through a combination of an in-character narrative revolving around a new inmate named Trishia, and metagame prose directed at the Game Master (helpfully, the in-character material is in italics while the metagame text is in a normal font). The book has no chapters per se, instead being divided into various sections by a series of headers.

Ostensibly a sanitarium, we’re quickly shown that Sunny Rest is a “normal” mental health care facility only insofar as outside appearances are concerned. The veneer quickly falls away as the book progresses – the only “treatment” that patients receive at Sunny Rest is a combination of strange drugs being injected into them and being manually masturbated to orgasm a large number of times a day. If right now you’re rolling your eyes or snickering that that doesn’t sound so bad, the book does a good job of making it clear that this is rape, and not something the inmates enjoy.

The situation grows steadily more horrifying from there. Slowly, we’re introduced to how the nurses there aren’t so much health care workers as they are tentacle monsters, maintaining their (and the facility’s) normal appearances with powerful illusions. Likewise, the drugs and forced sex aren’t just their idea of a good time – they all serve to prepare their victims for their “final procedure,” after which time they’re allowed to leave the facility. Of course, this last treatment presents the full reason why this book has “madness” in its title.

Roughly a third of the book is character sheets for the various people at Sunny Rest, including the so-called staff as well as poor Tricia. Full maps are given, though there are no room-by-room descriptions beyond a general overview of the facility’s defenses (e.g. how tough the walls are, the locks on the windows, etc. Adventure seeds that could get your PCs involved are provided. And of course, the book makes sure to end with a full-page picture of the “staff” in their human guises, completely naked (unlike the picture on the RPGNow storefront, there are no tentacles obscuring the naughty bits) – fan service at its finest.

If there’s a flaw in Tentacle Madness, it’s that it isn’t quite sure what sort of book it wants to be, straddling the line awkwardly between being, as mentioned before, a supplement and an adventure. The back-story, for example, is interesting, but there’s virtually no way to present it to the PCs (though the manner of showing how the threat extends beyond Sunny Rest is very artfully handled). Similarly, the abbreviated description of the actual rooms of the facility (and standard adventure tropes like boxed read-aloud text) make this less than an actual adventure, per se.

Ultimately, what’s here will largely depend on the strength of an individual GM’s presentation. The most obvious way to go about this is to have the PCs be inmates here, but that’s seriously stacking the deck against them, considering how much of a disadvantage the inmates are kept at. Still, these aren’t problems that an experienced GM can’t overcome; it’s just going to take some deftness. Otherwise, your PCs will have their work cut out for them in overcoming the Tentacle Madness.