Adaptations are dangerous business, and that’s true no matter what medium you’re working in. Licensed RPG adaptations fall all over the map; for every The One Ring you get rules for Power Rangers contracting tetanus, and for every Star Wars there’s a Fallout. Reimagining old properties stays risky even if you’re staying in the same medium; the live-action reboot of Cowboy Bebop was a cautionary tale, albeit not quite as badly panned as live-action Death Note or live-action Ghost in the Shell. But what happens if you take Cowboy Bebop, the celebrated anime, and make it into an RPG? Well, in this case, something kind of magical.

The Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game was developed by designers from Italian company Fumble GDR and published by (also Italian) Mana Project Studio. While Mana Project is mostly known for publishing 5e settings, Fumble has a fairly impressive list of original games, including Not the End, a heroic game using an original ruleset called HexSys. A variant of HexSys powers Cowboy Bebop and, while it employs elements from games you likely know, it is completely original. The result is a game that feels like jazz; there is structure, rules, and even system mastery, but the mechanics create a loose, free environment to tell stories. And, because this is Cowboy Bebop, the stories center around bounty hunters, the bounties they’re chasing, and the memories from their past that haunt them.