3, 2, 1,… Let’s Roll! Cowboy Bebop Gets Table Top RPG

Cowboy Bebop is getting an official tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG).

Don’t Panic Games and Mana Project Studio are joining forces to bring you the official Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game. They’ll be launching a Kickstarter for the project, sometime in 2022. Likely, that means that the development of the game is already well underway, but few details have been released regarding the actual mechanics. We do know that the game will use a variety of colored six-sided dice (hopefully not custom ones, blegh!), has a memory mechanic for burdening your character with unresolved issues (yay, angst!), and lets you create more of 2071-flavored space.

Cowboy Bebop was created and animated by Sunrise and premiered in Japan in 1998. Right now, it’s a hot topic because of the forthcoming Netflix live-action adaptation. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes, but Cowboy Bebop has been an anime cornerstone for long enough that a TTRPG will likely appeal to a wide range of fans. Considering my average attention span, it’s unfortunate that we won’t have our books handy when the adaptation launches, because that kind of timing would make it easy to recruit players.

Don’t Panic Games produce a wide variety of tabletop games from properties you’ll know and love, such as Naruto (a dice game), Attack on Titan (a board game where you get to climb a titan), and Rick & Morty. They already have a Cowboy Bebop deck-building game that comes with gorgeous miniatures of the five main characters (I must has all the minis!).

Italy-based Mana Project Studio is more firmly in the TTRPG space, having produced such titles as Journey to Ragnarok, which was one of their many crowdfunding campaigns to date.

Both companies look like they love their custom dice.

What a time to be alive though! Another week, another anime or manga tabletop roleplaying game gets announced. We’re already expecting great things from the Lupin the Third Roleplaying Game and the Transformers Roleplaying Game. This can only be a sign of a healthy anime and TTRPG industry, with the former still riding high on Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and the news of an upcoming Sixth Edition.

I have a confession to make though — and bloggers love arbitrary confessions, it gets lonely in cyberspace, and this is how we connect. Cowboy Bebop has always been a cursed intellectual property for me. I’ve probably sat down to watch episode 1 three or four times now and never finish it. That’s not for lack of wanting to. I love the premise. Bounty hunters in space, western themes, inescapable pasts. I’m sold. Maybe this game will break the curse, or maybe it’ll frustrate my players with another unfinished campaign.

Whatever happens, we’ll be watching this one for sure.

How about you? Is there an anime or manga series you’d love to see turned into a TTRPG? I know I’d love somebody to take a crack at creating Gunbare Doukinchan, the Roleplaying Game. It could be a two-player game, just you and the sexually frustrated game master…