Jazz Up Your Game Night with the New ‘Cowboy Bebop’ RPG Playtest
Get everybody and their stuff together, it’s time for a new update to the Cowboy Bebop RPG playtest. Three, two, one… let’s jam.
Mana Project Studio released a major update to the Cowboy Bebop RPG playtest rules earlier. If you’ve already got access to the document from DriveThruRPG you will find the new update awaiting download in your library.
This latest update brings some pretty big changes to the core mechanics of the Cowboy Bebop RPG. So if you played the game, it’s worth revisiting. If you haven’t tried it yet, then now’s the perfect time to jump in. Mana Project Studio brought about these changes based on fan feedback and testing. So there’s still time to help the game shake out to be the best it can be.
New Update For Cowboy Bebop RPG Playtest Rules
Cowboy Bebop (カウボーイビバップ Kaubōi Bibappu) is a Japanese animated television series, movie, and other media created by Shinichiro Watanabe. Set in 2071 and centered on the adventures of a gang of bounty hunters in space, the story delves into the unresolved issues of the protagonists’ past, exploring concepts such as existentialism, boredom, loneliness, and the influence of the past.
If you have somehow, never heard of Cowboy Bebop, you are in for a treat. It’s easily one of the best anime out there. And once you start sinking your teeth in, the RPG from Mana Project Studio offers up a unique way to play through the game.
And scrolling through the new playtest rules update, you can see how far the Cowboy Bebop RPG has come since it was first released in May. This latest playtest has overhauled the dice mechanic:
Gone are the positive and negative dice of different colors. Instead, you are looking to generate hits. You build a dice pool as before, but now you’re looking to generate hits by beating the difficulty of the tab and also by having at least two 6s on the die roll. Any 1s you roll become shocks the GM can use to shake up the fiction.
And fictional positioning is important here because this game is all about leaning into the fantasy of being Bounty Hunters in the Bebop world. That means a certain kind of style. A vibe all its own. The book has guides for different approaches: Rock, Dance, Blues, Jazz, Tango, all of which outline different approaches. And will yield different information based on what actions you’re taking.
The game wants you to play hard and fast and to burn out rather than fade away.
Which is as Bebop as it gets. You can find the Cowboy Bebop RPG Playtest Rules update right here. Take ’em for a spin, and see what you find.
See you, Space Cowboy
