Table-Tested Review of “Mooncroft Manor”
Mooncroft Manor is a social intrigue game about ambitious mages attending an exclusive magical gathering while competing to complete their theses. It crowdfunded for a digital-only version and delivered a visually stunning product shortly after the campaign wrapped up.
Before I delve into the details, some quick facts about the game.
- Game Designer: E. R. F. Jordan
- Artist: Katrine Atlas
- Publication Year: 2026
- Page Count: 121
Since this is a digital-only product I decided to print and bind it myself. More on this further below.
The Vibes
Mooncroft Manor sits somewhere between magical academia, gothic mystery and social intrigue.
The way the game is written on a meta level is refreshing: the GM is ever only referred to as “the house” and “the house” is at the same time also this unknown entity that has invited the characters to this exclusive gathering of mages. But who is “the house”? Who is actually inviting these mages? This is up to the GM to define, which I thought was cool on the one hand, but I would have loved to have some suggestions, too.
Character creation has excellent prompts to get the characters as well as some fleshed out NPCs and the plot going. The mages can be from one of four different regions, each with their own approach to magic and societal rules. These will make the characters clash with each other, as their differing world views and complex relationships to their home countries stand at odds. There are some complex topics brought up such as classism, xenophobia and colonialism; you might want to tailor that to your table’s preferences.
The part of the book for the GM was quite brief, whether that's a downside will probably depend on how comfortable you are improvising social scenes. But considering that character creation already starts the session with a bunch of rumours, paired with Scene Starter suggestions and Places of Interest from the book, we got the ball rolling pretty fast. I do recommend that the GM should think about some evocative hooks as rumours beforehand, just in case. I went with rumours about a restricted section that contains the forbidden knowledge some of them seek.
The Rules
The basic skill resolution is extremely simple: you roll a pool of d6 and pick the highest number rolled to see if you rolled a hit (6), a mixed success (4-5) or a miss (1-3). The dice pool always starts at 2d6 and can lose dice due to difficulty or gain dice due to your abilities, spent resources or other mages helping.
The core gameplay loop is working on your thesis, which will be the thing driving your mage to interact with the game. Most scenes characters will be collecting Ideas (which are represented as numbers 1 to 6) and assembling them to advance your thesis (e.g. by collecting a set of odd numbers). Some sections aren't entirely clear about whether using Ideas consumes them, but I assumed so when in doubt.
On top of that there are also some specific situations that can arise that use special rules, like participating in a duel, solving a mystery, casting spells, performing rituals or casting curses. Most of these build upon the basic roll resolution or use other preexisting mechanics like the thesis and use them in slightly altered or expanded ways. Additionally there’s different phases to do things like keeping up with rumours, writing letters (I would totally do this on real paper with real wax seals in a campaign) or having special events.
What was missing for me were a few additional play aids like cheat sheets as well as rules that are a bit more concise. I needed to reread some sections a few times until I got the intention. Character creation also took us considerable time (about two hours) and I can totally see a more fleshed out character sheet with preprinted prompts for each culture and thesis could speed up this process by a lot. We spent a lot of time reading prompts from the book one by one. I would also recommend filling out Experiences as you go, instead of making players filling them out beforehand.
What I found interesting was that it occasionally reads and plays as if it could be GM-less. In the session I ran, I let the players make a lot of the decisions and there were a lot of moments where it made sense to let the players control the NPCs, since the group is split up anyways. With an experienced group and a few adjustments, I could totally see this work.
For me the game sits in a good spot between simplicity and mechanical depth. It’s a highly narrative game with some processes (e.g. phases to go through) and almost mini games (like the duel rules and Idea collection) as structure.
DIY Printing
I understand why creators choose a digital-only release, considering volatile prices and the current expensive shipping situation. DIY printing is kinda big in the hobby anyways, so it was a bit of a downside for me that the book is white text on black background. I’m stingy like that with my printer ink!
To save a little I decided to print in A6. It took a bit of fiddling to get the page order right and a lot of cutting pages into shape, but I quite like the result. The text is quite small in A6, but readable enough.
The book having 121 pages was also kind of a bummer - 120 pages (or any number divisible by 2 or even 4) would have been a lot easier to print without having blank pages. I ended up printing one of the book’s images again on the last page.
None of these issues prevented me from making a copy I was happy with, but they are worth keeping in mind if you also prefer physical books at the table.
Conclusion
Mooncroft Manor successfully emulates a very specific genre of social intrigue, spookiness and possibly dark academia and it probably works best with people somewhat experienced with narrative games. The group needs to give the GM drama to work with, so the game recommends that players make characters that want to explore, socialize and have interesting flaws with the potential to horrifically self-destruct. These are the games I enjoy most!
It is also a game that wants to be a campaign. While one-shots are possible, this really shines in long form play where you can try to actually finish your thesis (or fail, or abandon it altogether). I have only run a single session, but my estimation is that a campaign might roughly take 5 to 10 sessions.
I’m definitely planning to give this another go in the future, to give it the room to breathe within multiple sessions and I can recommend it to anyone who is into narrative and drama-driven games.
