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Since this is my first review I should probably give a little bit of background on taste and so on. I have been gaming for about 7 years, I started on AD&D under an older dm who had been gaming for a long time. I did not really like AD&D, I had more fun playing Fallout the CRPG because it's more freeform in what you can make your character. But stuck with it just because I liked the concept of creating it yourself plus hanging out with friends. That group eventually fell apart made a new group with 3rd edition D&D, and still I found something lacking. Then I moved into Vampire 3rd edition a couple years later, in which I got kind of a tabletop second wind, but eventually got annoyed with a lot of the vampire concepts (the whole player vs player mentality) and started GMing. Found Unknown Armies fell in love with it. Which is probably the reason I am still gaming. My preference tend to be rules light, even though I enjoy fooling around with math meaning I do calculations for the fun of it, I don't like waiting for others to do math and I find simple just works better without the need to apply higher maths or really any math at all. I will play anything except I am a little burnt out on your typical Fantasy games, with dragons and all that.
So I was walking around the Canadian National Expo looking around when I stumbled aross the only gaming stuff that seemed to be different and new. (It was quite a sad convention in terms of RPGs) And there was Pieter Van Hiel with copies of Usagi Yojimbo. Through a brief conversation with him, I decided to buy his book, even though I was not a furry fan of any sort. Later on in the convention, he ran a game which was great. I enjoyed it quite a bit and suddenly found myself liking furries (Which resulted in me buying 6 trades of it to date) so I decided I should write a review for this game to give it a little more coverage.
Setting
Usagi Yojimbo is a comic made by Stan Sakai about a rabbit ronin in 1605 Japan. The overall concept of the comic is one person trying to make the world a better place but has lost all sense of belonging when his master died. The setting is heavily set in the history of Japan but creative liberties have been taken, along with whatever variatation that the different races have. Ultimately the comic is a collection of one-shots that have connecting points and Usagi is mostly the focus. And just for those wondering about the stereotype of furries about intercourse/nudity, it does not appear on the pages, which does not mean there is not any love it's just not there in a vulgar way. So basically the setting material is quite serious, issues of honour, loyalty, love and war come up coupled with humourous events to spice it up, but I would say that it's not supposed to be a humourous, joke or children setting. It is quite a good comic and I would recommend it to almost anyone.
The RPG book give a good reference on Japanese culture for the time period. It gives a brief history of Japan and a description of every province. All of this material is quite useful, but I found when it got into the descriptions of every province to be a little dry, but if I had a travelling group, it would be a good reference. I feel that the space could of been better used to give the reader general description of areas with highlights of the places of interest, with perhaps a further expansion on certain aspects of society. While I am not hugely unsatisfied with it I just thought it could of been a little better done.
Sample Characters
After the setting information there is about 9 pages worth of characters from the comics. Gives a brief background and what kind of things the character has done in the series. I think this is meant as inspiration for character creation. The comic is heavy on characters so I think this was the best way to give someone new to the series a description of the series without reading the comic.(Which I believe would be the best way)
Character Creation
Character creation is quite simple but not entirely quick. I would say once you know the system it would be around the same time as making a D&D character. The first step is you choose a primary trait and weak trait. There are five traits: Body, Speed, Mind, Will and Career. Each is assigned a die, d8 for the primary trait, d4 for the weak trait, d6 for the other 3. Some of you may ask what is Career. Well your career gives you 4 skill and you get the die in all those skill. (I will go more indepth in the mechanics section of the review) Based on your primary trait you will get two gifts (Kind of like charms in exalted, or feats in D&D), next step is picking your race, there are 13 to choose from, but it's quite easy to make up another one, basically you get two gifts according to your race. Next, you choose your Career, there are 16 careers, which as I mentioned before gives you 4 skills but also a couple gifts. Then you get 13 marks to put into skills, which basically decides the skill die. Next you choose three gifts. And then it's just the minor details
Playtest:
While playtesting this with a friend, I found character generation to be fine up until you chose the three gifts, the first part took about 15 minutes, the gifts took about 15 more minutes, just going over them and over them. The player also chose a ram as an animal which was not in the book but I could quickly compensate for it. Overall I found character creation to go quite well. It was quite organized in the book (with a summary page of it too), the only overall problem I could see is doing multiple people at once and gifts being a hassle.
Mechanics
The mechanics are quite simply roll attribute die + skill die + career die against the difficulty the GM (2d4,2d6,2d8 and so on) sets if one of your dice is higher than the GM's highest than you succeed, two of your dice are higher than his highest it's an overwhelming sucess, if all your dice are lower than his lowest then it's an overwhelming failure, all ones it's a botch.
Combat is where it gets complicated. You roll to hit and the person can choose to counter-attack, parry or dodge, if you succed you hit, you roll a number of d20 according to your weapon. There is no hit points, only four levels, wounded, crippled, incapacitated and devastated. Each success on the D20 determines a level, 1 success means wounded, 2 success means crippled... Wound levels aren't cumulative, meaning if you get a success one turn, and then a success the next turn they are not at crippled but still at wounded. Wounded makes it easier for you to get more injured, while crippled is much more server, limiting your actions, incapacitated means you are out and devastated usually means dead. Also another rule called reeling is applied, any time you get hit you can possibly be sent into reeling, which means you are easier to hit and next turn you must spend your action to recover from it. While these rules may seem to be pretty deadly, the players have gift which help them stay out of trouble quite well and not be sent into reeling.
Playtest:
I found the overall system pretty easy to work with, my learning curve was very small with it. The biggest problem that arised was the gifts, the constant looking up of gifts slowed down play the most something that would go away with a bit of play and perhaps some quick reference cards.
Recovery is really straight forward and non-problematic. There are rules for if you nursing and becoming more ill so I would say it's rather complete.
Character growth is neat. The Gm gives you 4 numbers which you can put to 4 different things you are improving. Once you put in enough to hit the next level you get the skill and choose something else to start putting xp towards. I found it neat and straight foward and had no problems with it. There are also school which allow you to put two of the number in a skill depending on your school.
Then there are all the spot rules which read like they should but I can't comment on actual play of them because they did not come into effect.
The weapon section is nice, full of illustration and descriptions.
Playtest:
My player ask me what the skill definition of the navigate skill. There was none. It seemed to have slipped.
GM Section and Adventure
The GM section is pretty good. It's not too long, most of it I already read before in previous books so it has not given me anything incredibly new. There is some advice on genre and tone of the book which was helpful but there was not that much. The adventure is nice, can be play through in about 2-4 hours depending on your players. It's rather simple but does not force the players into a railroad and can be entered at multiple places.
Appendices
Appendix 1 gives some addential hooks or adventure seeds which are good. Appendix 2 gives some variant rules some of which I enjoyed so I employed. Appendix 3 is some variant races such as the bats, serpents and moles which are all very atypical races in Usagi Yojimbo so I can understand the seperation. Appendix 4 is variant carrers mostly designed for NPC. Appendix 5 is a form of the bushido which gives a good insight into the honour system. A bunch of sample character where some are not complete, they forgot to fill them in, it's a shame though. There is also quite a long index which I highly appreciate.
Overall
The Good:
I really like the system it's simple and easy to pick up, allows for a decent amount of variety and I like how no task is impossible. The book is quite nice, I think the layout has been done well, nice and clean, a very uncluttered feeling to it. I enjoyed playing I just wished more people were into furries. I plan to keep running my one-on-one game with the player.
The Bad:
The combat can slow down with the rolling GM needing to roll the difficulty everytime. The gifts add a learning curve. Some minor editing could of been added for further clarity. Some minor things that seemed to have slipped through like the character sheets. Overall nothing too horrible.
I'm giving it a 4 for style, I like the nice clean interface of it and it easy to reference but the art is mostly from the series which fits but it's all really good. I like the idea of gifts to represent powers even with the complications it adds. But overall there is nothing hugely impressional, it's just incredibly solid.
I'm giving it a 4 for substance, all of it's pretty solid. I like the system. It's just the minor problems which make it lose that one point.
