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.

The Cowboy Bebop RPG does not have stats or skills, nor does it have a combat system. Instead of a combat system it has a structured session with three distinct parts, and instead of stats or skills it has traits and grooves. It’s very difficult to attack these mechanics from any starting point without context (you will be reading this book at least twice if you want to play this game), but I’m going to try by starting with the dice mechanic. In this game, dice are rolled when characters have a goal they want to achieve and interesting consequences to face. If these criteria are met, the player assembles a d6 dice pool based on which traits come into play for the roll (either from their character sheet or from the session itself) and what part of the session it is. The results of the roll can, on their own, grant up to two hits: The player earns one hit if the total on the dice is larger than the current target number of the session, and a second hit if they roll at least two sixes. On the flip side, the GM (called the Big Shot for reasons that are clear if you’ve watched Cowboy Bebop) also earns what are called shocks on every roll. Every die that comes up a 1 gives the Big Shot a shock, but if no dice come up 1, at least one shock is earned anyway. Hits and shocks are spent in basically the same way: Players can spend hits to reduce the difficulty of the current segment of the session (called a Tab), or to advance a Clock. The Big Shot can spend shocks to increase the difficulty of the current segment, or to advance a Clock. There are more specific mechanics, but those are the basics. Each session tab represents part of the session’s story, roughly speaking moving from exposition through rising action and finally to climax, and the clocks that both players and GMs can advance are what track movement through each subsequent section. At a minimum there are two clocks per tab: one denoting progress towards the PCs’ goal (the objective) and another denoting progress towards something bad (the threat). If the objective clock is filled first the characters succeed, and if the threat clock is filled first the PCs fail. This is a relatively simple, albeit somewhat adversarial, resolution system that sits on the same complexity level as something like Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark. Like those rulesets, though, the game really pops when you add in everything which uniquely defines the characters and the milieu.

As I mentioned before, the game has no stats. What it does have, though, are Approaches, which just like in Fate Accelerated are used to define how a character goes about a task and what it looks like when they succeed or fail. There are five approaches in this game, called Rock (cool under pressure), Dance (acting with exuberance and/or energy), Blues (spiritual, empathic, emotional), Tango (charming or intimidating others), and Jazz (assessment, analysis, and careful action). Every clock is tagged with one of these approaches, which means you must use that approach for the last hit needed to close the clock. Why this matters, mechanically, is that character traits, which are used to add dice to the pool you roll, are also tagged to specific approaches. If your character is a high-flying martial artist, they’re going to have at least one trait tagged to Dance, if not two. Similarly, if your character is a Face, you’re going to have at least one trait tagged to Tango. And what are these traits, you ask? Well, they’re pretty much anything you want, at least anything that defines how your character acts and moves through the world. A firearm could be a trait, but so could a cybernetic implant…or even a hairstyle. The important thing is that the trait helps define who the character is and what the character looks like. This works perfectly for Cowboy Bebop; we don’t have hard and fast definitions of what Ed does when they’re hacking, or whether Faye or Spike has a bigger gun. What you do have is an understanding of the items which make them unique and interesting characters.

Speaking of unique and interesting characters. Characters have traits, and they have Grooves, which are special abilities that grant a mechanical advantage. Probably more important to this sort of game, though, is the Memory. The Memory as defined in the game is fairly vague; the sample character sheet for Spike lists his memory only as “I was a Red Dragon affiliate”. The intent here is to play to find out what happens, and the way you do this is rather cool. Every character starts with six bullets (being a space western there has to be a stylized revolver chamber somewhere on the character sheet). Bullets have relatively potent effects; a player can mark a bullet to add two dice to their pool, or mark a bullet as a way to absorb a shock, which can be critical for preventing a threat clock from being filled. However, when the character marks their last bullet, two things happen. First, whatever tab the group was playing fails, the threat comes to pass. Second, the next session that the group plays is now a Personal Session. In the personal session, the character who marked their last bullet is the focus of the session, and some of the narrative control is passed to the players. This is but one of the ways that the campaign superstructure is directly impacted by events within the session; the other major one comes from when the party fails an entire session. When the party fails a session, one character must take that session as a Weight, writing the session name (yes, the game says name your sessions) on their character sheet. It is only through gaining Weights that the party advances through the two breakpoints that will eventually lead to the finale.

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The Cowboy Bebop RPG isn’t completely alien, but it also doesn’t play like any other RPG I have in my collection. A session plays like three encounters where each feeds into the next; while there’s no initiative or combat the Big Shot is advised to go around the table in a consistent order to make sure everyone gets the same amount of turns. There is clearly a neat chunk of strategy with dice rolls; in addition to the multiple ways to spend hits (and shocks), players can absorb shocks by spending resources that are fairly dear (either one of six bullets per session, or wounding a trait and therefore being unable to use it for the rest of the tab). There are two metacurrencies, Rhythm and Risk, which give the players and the Big Shot, respectively, a bit more juice (and unlike most of the math in the game, the Rhythm/Risk split favors the players) and another decision to make in each roll. Add to that the ramping difficulty in each tab, and the mechanics are clearly meant to keep the tension going through an entire session.

It’s also clear that the mechanics aren’t the whole story. Characters are only defined through traits and grooves, but even if those are numerically simplistic they say a lot about who the character is and how they work. Failure is literally required to advance the broader story, so the narrative choices around success and failure are always going to be more complicated than simply trying to win. And, of course, the memory gives a potent starting point for building up the character’s story, all the way through to that finale.

I haven’t covered much of the setting fluff in this review, and that’s because it’s not really as interesting as the mechanics it’s intended to support. The fluff is consistent with Cowboy Bebop, and the use of random tables and sample memories keep it fairly usable to a GM, which I appreciate. There is one bit of fluff which is outstanding, though: the designers have included the entirety of the Cowboy Bebop anime written as session summaries, showing each session tab, whether they ended in success or failure, what the clocks were, and all the other mechanical elements of the bounty. I haven’t discussed the bounties much either: while capturing the bounty is defined heavily by the session clocks, each bounty also gets a groove and a secret. Until the secret is discovered, the groove gives the bounty an ability as potent as any of the PC grooves, which can make the characters’ lives very difficult. This focus around the bounty and around the structural tropes of Cowboy Bebop (and other anime as well) is what gives the game so much potential to be such a good companion to the original show.

In talking about this game’s potential, I end the review with a confession rather than a conclusion. I am of the belief that most roleplaying games can be reviewed perfectly well through just reading; the fact is that almost no game on the market is really unique enough to defy a reviewer’s analysis provided that reviewer has read and played a wide enough variety of games to understand where the subject of their review fits. The Cowboy Bebop RPG is a game that excites me, that intrigues me, but these mechanics are novel enough to me that I’m not sure how well they work just by reading. I am going to play this game, because I think it could be very good…I’m just not sure. It’s my fault for thinking this was going to be just another licensed game, and if it’s not already clear I am extremely pleasantly surprised by the Cowboy Bebop RPG. If you already like games like Fate and Blades in the Dark, this is one that should pique your interest. If you don’t want to blindly throw money at a game so ambitiously different in its execution, you can still check out the free quickstart on DriveThruRPG. As for me, though, it’s time to call up Seamus and get some players together. Let’s see if I can’t get the In-Depth review (or the Now Playing episode!) done before the hardcover ships. Even without waiting for the play report, though, I will assert that the Cowboy Bebop RPG is refreshingly different, and makes a strong effort at honoring its source material.

The Cowboy Bebop RPG is available at DriveThruRPG.

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