One of the main advantages of playing a licensed RPG is playing in a world everyone at the table already knows. It’s fun to imagine your characters crossing paths with the heroes you all love, facing the bad guys you all hate and kicking off each session with the theme song that gets stuck in your head. Sometimes this familiarity can be a negative aspect, however. Take, for example, Cowboy Bebop. This wildly successful anime series from 1998 has been influencing tabletop games for decades. That’s not even counting games that try to directly emulate the show, such as Scum & Villainy or Orbital Blues. Mana Project Studio took on the task of officially adapting the anime world to tabletop with Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game. Mana Project director Michele Paroli put a copy of designers Davide Milano’s and Marta Palvarini’s work into my hands at Gen Con along with a set of Swordfish II dice to try out. Does the game lay down some sweet beats? Let’s play to find out.
Clocks are central to the mechanics of Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game. When players make rolls, they are looking for hits to advance their clocks while the game master is looking for shock to advance theirs. Often, these clocks are at cross purposes like the players trying to advance “find the terrorist bomb at the big concert” while the GM wants to fill up “the bomb goes off”. When I saw the six-sided dice sets for sale and heard the basic mechanic, I assumed we would be getting into Forged In The Dark territory. There are some similarities but this game goes a different way. Players get a chance to get two hits: one if they beat a difficulty number with their dice total and two if they get two or more sixes on the dice. Game masters always get one shock to use to advance their agenda, more if the player rolls multiple ones on their dice. Players can absorb the shocks by marking off traits that can’t be used for later rolls to represent things like a gun being out of ammo or a devastating shade of lipstick only getting you so far at the casino. They also can put bullets in their Memory chamber, which we’ll get to in more detail in a moment.
Ultimately, this means that players rarely get a clean success, even more so than this system’s PbtA and FitD inspirations. I think it works to emulate the show and its protagonists who can never seem to catch a break but I can see how it could be frustrating for players who play RPGs for the power fantasy they afford. It also took me a bit to let the mechanics sink in before I realized they help moderate pacing. Reading the massive play example in the back helped as they go through each episode and define big moments with game mechanics.
Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game is built to make you feel like you are in the show. It sets up each session with a three act structure and the game changes slightly as the acts shift. The first act is about establishing character moments for the bounty hunters and discovering who the bounty is this week. The second act is discovering the bounty’s big Secret which inevitably complicates the hunters pursuit. The bounty might be an old flame under a new name or doing their criminal pursuits because they need the money for a sick kid. The third act puts a hard choice in front of the hunters. Do they let their old flame run away? Do they help the bounty with a heist to steal an experimental treatment from a private clinic? Pacing a story is one of the most important skills for a GM to learn and it’s also the most difficult. Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game installs a structure that paces each game like a television episode.
The pacing model extends to the campaign as well. Remember those memory bullets the characters stash away? When the six shot chamber clock on a player’s character sheet fills up, it’s time to run a Very Special Episode next session where the player’s memory comes back to haunt them in a big way. Every character in Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game is haunted by the past and the game gives those episodes special rules. I like the mechanical incentive to have a session where a character has to deal with some big feelings. Once each character has had at least one of these episodes, the game recommends it’s time to bring the campaign to a close soon, either as a season to be continued later or with a big finale in the next session or two.
There are some fans who might not care about emulating the TV show who want to use this as a background sourcebook for their system of choice. The book is not an exhaustive resource with technical information on the ships or maps of famous locations. Instead, tt contains a lot of charts and advice for its system that could be more universally useful. Ship design is talked about more in themes and concepts rather than hard numbers. Bounties are discussed in broad terms such as why they might go on the run and what secrets they might have that will complicate the hunt. The planets all have location charts that offer plot hooks and episode moods. I don’t think enough of this material is in the book to justify this purchase for people not interested in trying the system, but I enjoyed my time going through the charts, rolling up random ship traits and then plugging them together to make stuff that felt like it could be in the show.
Bottom Line: Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game takes a little time to find the melody but once it does, it offers a great lesson on how to keep players coming back for more.
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