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For people unfamiliar with the long-running comic-book series Usagi Yojimbo, a bit of explanation is probably in order.
It's the story of Usagi, a ronin warrior in medieval Japan... his lord treacherously slain, he wanders the land having adventures, some of which are inspired by Japanese folk tales. He's largely modeled after the famous swordsman Miyamoto Musashi... if Musashi were a rabbit.
Yes, Usagi is a rabbit. It's an anthropomorphic setting, with characters being represented by whatever animal most closely matches their personality and ethnic background. So foxes tend to show up as clever schemers, rhinos as strong and irascible warriors, and dogs are mostly loyal retainers. There's even an official website at http://www.usagiyojimbo.com/.
Now this is not the first Usagi Yojimbo role-playing game. The first one was made by Gold Rush Games and was based largely on the Fusion system. The new one is made by Sanguine Productions, the same company that makes Ironclaw and Jadeclaw. So it's not like they're any strangers to anthropomorphic settings.
The setting is an odd mix of sword-fighting action, brutal realism, humor, and parody. But considering that the series has been going on for more than 20 years now, it's got a lot of appeal and staying power. I have two of the trade paperbacks myself.
Playtest Summary
The new Usagi Yojimbo game bears a good bit of resemblance to Sanguine's existing Ironclaw/Jadeclaw system, but with some influences from their Albedo: Platinum Catalyst game and some completely original new bits. It does not use the straight Ironclaw system; it's got similarities, but the differences would take some getting used to. Enough so that I decided to run a playtest before reviewing it.
I had 3 players write up starting level ninja warriors, then send them on a slightly tweaked version of the introductory adventure.
The three PCs were dispatched to the city of Nara to see whether or not they could find a way to interfere with Lord Akimaru's attempts to raise funds for an army. The ninja clan wanted to prevent the province where they resided from being engulfed in war.
The PCs were instructed to do so subtly so that ninja interference would not be noticed. Their chunin further instructed them to avoid acting against Akimaru directly, as anything that left his forces too obviously vulnerable would doubtless draw an attack from his enemies and plunge the province into war anyway.
So the PCs (disguised as a gardener, a priest and a ronin) went to Nara and poked around. They soon figured out that Lord Akimaru's agents were trying to persuade Yuufuuku the moneylended to backroll his military campaign, but weren't having much luck. They also found a number of very suspicious-looking ronin that they suspected of actually being in Lord Akimaru's employ.
When the Lord's top representative sent a secret message to those ronin, their suspicions were confirmed. They spied on them and learned that Yuufuuku was leaving town to visit a particular shrine and would be back the next evening... that's when the ronin planned to leave. Figuring that they were supposed to capture or kill the moneylender (while maintaining deniability for their lord, since they were pretending to be ronin), the PCs arranged to meet Yuufuuku first and travel back to Nara with him.
When the ronin sprung their ambush, the PCs were ready and they fought and defeated them. One PC was incapacitated, but the six ronin were defeated and the moneylender agreed to host the wounded PC in his home.
How does the game actually work?
Characters get four normal stats (Body, Speed, Will and Mind) and a Career (which is treated as a fifth stat, but what it applies to depends on the career chosen). Stats are rated from d4 to d12. Skills are rated the same way, but you can continue to increase them above d12... the next step is d12 & d4, then d12 & d6, et cetera.
When you are asked to perform a task, you'll usually roll a particular stat die and whatever skill dice you have (if any) for that skill. Your career may be included too, if it applies to the skill being rolled. The highest number rolled is your overall result.
The difficulty will either be someone else's roll, a set value, or a random value, depending on the circumstances. If your highest die beats their highest die, you get a success for every die that was higher than their highest. So the more dice you have that rolled higher than the target number, the more successes you get. Basically, as long as you had at least two dice beat the target, it's an overwhelming success. In combat, every extra success after the first lets you include a special "Critical" bonus with your attack.
If your highest die ties theirs, it's a tie. If their highest die beats yours, you failed... if they beat you multiple times, it can be a critical failure. If you manage to roll all ones (rare unless you're trying something you're totally unskilled at), you botch.
Like Ironclaw, you can declare a "favored use" for a skill, which lets you reroll a single 1 that you just rolled if the appropriate circumstances apply. For example, if your blades skill has the favored use "With my favorite sword", and you attacked someone with that sword and rolled 8, 3, 1 and 1, you could reroll one of those 1s.
Bonus and Penalties are handled with a much nicer system than Ironclaw's. A bonus is an extra d12 you get to include with your roll; a penalty is a bonus d12 that's included with the difficulty. They cancel out, so if you get a +2 bonus and a -1 penalty, you'll end up just adding one extra d12 to your roll.
Careers and Gifts
A Career applies to a set of four skills and includes three Gifts (basically the equivalent of Edges, Feats or Advantages in other systems). So the career of Nukenin (rogue ninja, the ninja equivalent of a ronin) applies to the skills Deceit, Hiking, Observation and Stealth. It also comes with the Gifts of Danger Sense (exhaust to negate surprise or wake up when attacked), Resolve (allows you to avoid Reeling when an attack leaves you Scratched, exhaust to avoid Reeling from an attack that did real injury) and Ninjitsu (you can include your Deceit skill with attack rolls, but your target gets to include their Observation and Insight, too).
"Exhaustion" is an interesting bit of game design. Rather than having all Gifts always work, or giving them arbitrary uses-per-day like D20, most Gifts can be "exhausted" to perform a particular function. After that, you can't use the gift again until you restore it, which requires rest.
Some Gifts are exhausted automatically when used, whereas others require you to roll a particular stat vs a particular difficulty in order to avoid exhausting it. Four Gifts (Cleverness, Might, Grit and Quickness) serve no purpose on their own, but when you use certain gifts you can avoid exhausting them by tapping one of those four instead.
For example, Speed Save allows you to reduce a hit that would leave you Crippled, Incapacitated or Devestated (dead or dying) to merely Wounded. Using it requires you to either exhaust Speed Save (so that you won't be able to use it again until you rest) or spend Focus (usually meaning that you spent an entire turn preparing first before using it) or use your Quickness Gift to pay for it. Since Quickness is only exhausted if you roll a 4 or less on your Speed die, it's possible to keep using Quickness over and over again so long as you keep rolling well. Of course, if you don't have the Quickness Gift, you'll probably be stuck exhausting your Speed Save Gift.
Damage is handled totally unlike Ironclaw and is much faster. But they seem to have traded the slow-but-detailed handling of the Ironclaw system for a new set of problems.
Don't Get Hit
Your Soak rating is equal to the size of your Body die (4 to 12, basically) plus up to 5 points for armor (which hardly anyone wears off of the battlefield).
A hit will inflict a certain number of d20s in damage. You roll them all, then see how many of them exceeded the target's Soak. Since Soak maxes out at 17, it's always possible to roll a success. Typical damage is 2d20, with certain crits adding more.
If none of the dice rolled higher than their Soak, they are Scratched and will be sent Reeling (meaning they lose their next action) unless they have the Resolve gift (which automatically negates Reeling from Scratched effects).
If one die rolled higher, they are Wounded and Reeling. Wounded means that their opponents automatically add an extra d20 damage die when they hit the character (increasing the likelyhood of more damaging hits).
If two dice rolled higher, they are also Crippled, which seriously limits their combat options. If three rolled higher, they are Incapacitated, which takes them right out of the combat. If four or more d20s rolled higher then their Soak, they are Devestated and will be dead or dying (GM option for which).
Note that hits are not cumulative... once someone is Wounded, you get that single extra d12 and that's it. Since you only need 4 successes to kill someone outright, though, that's plenty. We had someone score 7 successes on a hit (it was basically a "finishing blow" on a fallen foe and had every die succeed) and I ruled that they had cut the guy to pieces. Typical hits seemed to inflict 2d20 to 4d20 damage.
Whoosh! You're Dead
So weapons can take out foes very quickly, but there's a lot of randomness involved. You could have a lucky foe emerge unharmed from a fabulous hit or an unlucky foe taken out of action right away. This is generally common to any system where a hit might not do any damage, though, and isn't necessarily a flaw.
The Counter-Attack rules make combat even quicker. Once per round, when you're about to parry an attack, you can declare that this is a Counter-Attack instead. If you win the contest of weapon skills, you not only parry their attack, you hit them as though you had just rolled an attack yourself.
So a skilled swordsman, even without any special Gifts to help him out, can kill two foes per round... one with his regular action, and one by declaring a Counter-Attack when another foe attacks him. This enables skilled adventurers to take on dozens of minor foes and win, but it also means that most fights are settled really quickly.
Of our three ninjas, Sean's was the unlucky one. Despite having better combat dice than his foe (2d8 vs their 2d6), he failed to parry his opponent's first attack, then lost the contest for his own attack, which let his foe hit him with a Counter-Attack. The first hit left him wounded (and required him to exhaust his Resolve Gift to avoid being sent Reeling and losing his action) and the second one left him Incapacitated. All in one round.
Unfortunately, he had neglected to take any damage-reducing Gifts like Speed Save, so that was that. The other PCs did better and managed to best the rest of their opponents, but Sean's PC was out for the count.
Realistic Healing Times == OUCH!
So, exactly how long was Sean's PC going to be out of action? Let's just say that UY has realistic healing times... unfortunately.
We did the math... even with Yuufuuku agreeing to hire an expert doctor to provide constant care, it would take a month for him to heal from the Incapacitated state down to "merely" Crippled.
Okay, that's realistic. Someone who took a nearly lethal blow in real life may never be the same again. A month of hospitalization is not unreasonable.
But this is an RPG... given that the setting has no magic and the honor-based culture makes recruting new party members on short notice iffy, this could seriously cramp your game's style. Personally, I think that if I ran UY, I would definitely add in some sort of "Hero Points" or something that could be spent to prevent injuries like that or to enable the character to make an unrealistically fast recovery.
This is obviously a matter of personal style... but given the ability of the main characters in the source material to defeat dozens of minor foes at once and emerge with only minor wounds, I really think that UY might need some sort of additional buffer to keep the PCs from eventually (and inevitably) rolling badly and getting instantly killed by some no-name thug.
Summary
So, overall, the playtest didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped. The system was interesting, but the "two-hits, you're out for a month" combat system was probably a bit too harsh for my players' taste.
Like Ironclaw, the game also makes starting PCs too weak, in my opinion... fortunately, the book does contain optional rules for more experienced PCs. I'd want to start any serious campaign with at least "Highly Experienced" characters (in my opinion, closer to "No Longer Incompetent" characters than "Highly Experienced"), which would give them 2 extra Gifts and another 5 skill points to throw around.
They also didn't care for the abstract money system. To buy an item in UY requires you to roll your Career plus any "bonus money dice" you wish to expend, vs the difficulty (the Gift of Wealth grants you an extra d12 to roll). Depending on how expensive the item is, you might need to get one success vs a difficulty of 2 up to 4+ successes against a difficulty of 8.
Cash rewards are represented by giving folks bonus money dice, such as a 4d12 windfall from collecting a major reward to a d4 bonus for finding a few small coins. You can add them to any attempt to buy something, but once rolled, the bonus dice are lost, regardless of whether or not you successfully purchased the item. That could produce some really counter-intuitive results sometimes, such as spending a giant reward to purchase a Cheap item and ending up broke and still not having the item... obviously, you could explain it as the character being pickpocketed or making poor spending decisions, but it's still very random.
Another thing I would probably house-rule... they set the difficulty for purchasing Cheap items at 2 rather than making it an automatic success. Unfortunately, this means that no matter how rich you are or how many bonus money dice you add to a roll, it's always possible for your character to not be able to buy even an inexpensive, everyday item like a staff.
The Book Itself
The art is mostly black & white excerpts from the comic book, which is absolutely perfect for a game that's trying to emulate that world. The pictures chosen as illustrations are usually perfectly suited to the section of the book that they're used in, which is always nice.
The history & setting information at the front of the book is also great. We get detailed maps of Japan, even if they don't go into as much detail as I'd like... they're all political boundary maps, whereas I would have liked to have seen a topographical map as well. Since that game's setting mirrors real-world Japan, though, it's not like it would be hard to find one.
The weapon section also has a lot of detail and includes nicely done illustrations of each weapon. Unfortunately, there's a small problem here... there's no equipment list other than weapons. Since the game uses a very abstract money system, that's not too bad, but it would have added a lot to the setting to see names and descriptions for the sort of equipment that should be present.
The rules for advancement and experience are very nice and the XP costs all seemed quite reasonable. Unlike Ironclaw, it's cheaper to increase a Career rather than increasing all of the skills it applies to seperately, making improving your Career a much better deal than it was in Ironclaw.
There are a wide assortment of Gifts, with the majority being combat-related. There are advanced "secret" techniques that are often quite expensive to use but correspondingly powerful. The rules for combat are surprisingly detailed and quite nice. I particularly like the rules for ties on parries, where the defender must retreat or get hit... and retreating into an obstacle or onto rough terrain causes you to fall down unless you have an appropriate Gift. There really is an advantage to pushing your opponent up against a wall where they can't retreat here.
The game even has an index, something I always like to see.
Overall Summary
So, is Usagi Yojimbo for you? Well, first of all, if you're already familiar with and like the setting, this seems to be a pretty decent emulation of it. As I said, my only qualm is that the PCs are liable to break more often than the comic book characters do. The lack of a standard equipment / common price list is a bit of a flaw, though. I'd also toss the abstract money system in an instant, but then I've never seen one that I actually liked.
If you're not, well, bear in mind that Usagi's world is magic-light, combat-heavy and has realistic recovery times. To some folks that may sound like just what they're looking for... and for others, it may be a warning to avoid it.
All in all, I liked it. Some elements (particularly the new bonus/penalty and experience rules) seemed like definite improvements over the Ironclaw system. Others, like the money system and the lack of a standard equipment list, turned me off. My group, in particular, didn't like how fragile characters were.
Overall, I give it a 4 for Substance and a 4 for Style (probably a 5 for style if you already like the comic book series).
