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Now, Sanguine Productions has turned it into a RPG.
There are two categorical problems with that. They're not specific to Usagi Yojimbo RPG; they'll show up just as much in the Star Wars RPG, or in the Conan RPG, or in the Jeeves RPG for that matter.
First, how do the PCs fit in to the extant fictional universe? The Star Wars movies are ultimately about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Can PCs in a Star Wars game be just as important? Or do they turn irrelevant when the main characters walk on-screen? Or are Vader and Skywalker PCs? Usagi Yojimbo RPG more or less dodges that problem: Miyamoto Usagi doesn't seem to be as overwhelmingly powerful or important in his own comic as Vader and Skywalker are in the Star Wars universe. Yes, you can play Miyamoto Usagi, or a clone, and things should work out fine.
Second, when you change the medium from fiction to RPG, little matters that were handled by authorial fiat are suddenly open for players to poke at. The comic is one kind of fiction, and the reader will give Sakai poetic license to tell his story without being bothered by huge but deeply-buried and irrelevant logical inconsistencies and mysteries. But in an RPG, the players are in the world, doing what they want, and it's much harder to keep those inconsistencies and mysteries at bay.
For example, the readers of the comic don't know whether the anthropomorphic animal characters have tails or not. Sakai never shows them -- but all the characters wear clothes that would hide tails anyways, and (pace furry stereotypes) no naked rumps are ever shown. That works in the comic, since Sakai has full control over all his characters. In the RPG, though, a player can simply say "When I'm alone in my room, I take my clothes off and look in the mirror. Do I have a tail?"
I asked one of the authors how to handle that. He said, not entirely seriously, "I would have the player get distracted by ninjas."
Which would work, I suppose. It would keep the game exciting. Still, you can go through a lot of ninjas that way. Or, more seriously, you can make something that's actually irrelevant become a major tug-of-war between player and GM, or require the GM to go off-canon, or somehow persuade the player to participate in the cover-up without knowing exactly what's being covered up. Some excellent gamers will be fine with this, but others -- equally excellent gamers -- will find it offensive.
On a larger scale: Usagi Yojimbo is set in a historically accurate Tokugawa Shogunate Japan. Except that all the people of Japan are anthropomorphic animals, and all the mammals of Japan have been replaced with lizards.
As a literary work, that's just fine. Sakai's poetic license covers it.
And for dramatist and gameist players, it should work just fine too.
Simulationist gamers who think about it a bit will find it maddening. Those are huge changes. How could such a different world possibly wind up with such a parallel history as to imitate the Tokugawa Shogunate? Like, human history would have been massively different from the beginning without dogs and sheep. And Japanese history was crucially shaped by an attempted invasion by Mongol-dominated China (foiled by weather -- the kamikaze, the divine wind, which became an important Japanese symbol after that)... and without horses (or with lizard rather than mammalian steeds), Mongol-dominated China would have been very different. And so on.
A book doesn't have to address such things. But some gamers will care about them, and may even have trouble dealing with the game world because of it.
Well, grand philosophical issues aside, how is the game?
Part 1: Setting
The book starts off with a 40-page summary of the history, culture, geography, and so forth of Tokugawa Shogunate Japan. It's readable and interesting, and, unlike many RPG setting chapters, feels real and solid. It ought to; as far as I know, it's a summary of real-world Tokugawa Shogunate Japan.
Next is another ten pages of summaries of the main characters from the comic. Presumably this will be useful for coming up with character concepts, even if your game won't meet up with the actual characters very often.
So, fifty pages -- a quarter of the book -- is setting. I generally enjoy setting material, but I found myself wondering just how relevant this was to what I would actually be doing in the game. The answer was, "moderately". The backdrop of wars and conflict certainly applies, and the complex system of social classes and religions definitely. I'm not so sure of why half of what I know about Noto province should be that its capitol is "home to many pleasant springs" -- or why this information should be so close to the front of the book. That's hardly enough information to do anything useful there.
(Though I've read gazetteers which only mentioned fighty things about every place, and every place was extraordinarily fighty. Usagi Yojimbo's gazetteer, at least, makes it clear that Japan is a place where people live.)
Character Creation
Your character will probably be some kind of warrior or quasi-warrior.
Next comes a long section on character creation. This uses a variation of the Ironclaw system. Characters have about five stats: Body, Speed, Mind, Will, and Career. Interestingly, Career is a basic stat, like Will -- if you've dedicated your life to being a good swordsman, you can have a high Career stat, and you will be good at it. You don't need to try so much to put that concept together out of raw ingredients like Strength and Dexterity, a la D&D. Your highest stat gives you a few Gifts -- loosely corresponding to D&D3 Feats. If Will is your strongest stat, you have Grit and Fighting Spirit. (Which is to say, this game is going to take combat very seriously -- most of the Gifts are combat-related.)
Then, you choose your species. There are a dozen choices, including "Unknown" for the many characters in the comics who have no recognizable species. Each species gives two Gifts: foxes get Cleverness and Danger Sense. The Species chapter is quite explicit that species is not very important, socially or technically.
Then you choose a career. The career gives three Gifts and several Skills. Your Career stat will help these skills. There are sixteen choices of career, from fairly generic ones like Yojimbo (Bodyguard) to very setting-specific ones like Sumotori (Sumo Wrestler) and Komuso (Flautist Monk, and yes, they play the flute and have pretty interesting history behind them).
Then you put some points in some skills, and pick three more Gifts, and that's all the technical work. The book does talk about choosing a name (giving many example Japanese names), and talk about motivation and disposition and such -- though these are presented as afterthoughts. One might want to think about your character's motivation before picking his skills and such.
Then we get to see what the Gifts actually are. They're their own little subsystem. Some Gifts exist only as fuel for other Gifts -- e.g., the only thing you can do with Cleverness is to power a gift that requires you to spend Cleverness. Such Gifts can become Exhausted after you use them, so that you can't use them again until you get to rest. Other Gifts have actual in-game significance: Combat Sense lets you spend Cleverness to turn a critical hit on you into an ordinary hit. Other Gifts simply give you bonuses on a set of skills. The descriptions of the Gifts are full of as-yet-incomprehensible phrases, like "Do not roll your Attack Dice -- Maximize them instead" (sounds good, but what does it mean?) and "Your foe includes their Inquiry Dice (if any) with their Counter-Attack" (sounds bad (if any) but what does it mean?).
Then we come to the Skills, and another partial indication of what the system is like. Skills are rated in marks (1,2,3,...), and the number of marks tells you what skill dice to use. One mark is a d4, two is a d6, three is a d8, four a d10, five a d12, six a d12 and a d4, and so on. We don't yet know how these dice are to be used.
The actual set of skills is modest -- 25 skills, some of which have sub-options -- and mainly geared towards a game of fighting and intrigue.
Rules
In this chapter, we finally get to see what all those dice are for. The basic roll is this. You pick up all the dice that apply. These can come from a stat (e.g. Body or Will, but not Career), a skill or several (e.g., sword-fighting), a Career Trait (if it's a sitution in which your Career applies), and bonus dice. This may leave you with a handful of mixed-size dice.
The GM or your opponent will generally pick up a similar handful of mixed-size dice, too. If it's an opposed roll, your opponent gets dice the same way you did. If it's not opposed, the GM will pick a difficulty level like, say, 2d8, which is the standard target for "medium difficulty".
Then you and your opponent roll all those dice, and you both look at the highest number. If your highest number is higher than your opponents', you succeeded. If it's lower, you failed. If they're equal, you tied. If your highest two rolls are higher than your opponent's highest roll (e.g., you rolled 9,8,3 and your opponent rolled 7,7), you succeeded overwhelmingly.
There are a few variations on that -- ways to reroll bad dice, how to handle bonuses and penalties, how to do extended actions, etc. -- but that's the basic idea.
(Ironclaw players swear by this. Others swear at it. Every dieroll involves several dice, rolled by the GM as well as the character. Not much arithmetic, at least, since you don't add the dice together. Still, it sounds slower than a mechanism that rolls one die plus modifiers vs. a target score.)
Then we get to combat. The combat system has a variety of tactical options -- this is important, because it's more or less the heart of the game. One useful concept is "Focus", which I believe means that you have taken a moment to focus your will or spirit or whatever in preparation for a mighty deed. (A nice concept, which fits the Japanese style well, I think.) You can get Focus by spending an action doing it -- or, nicely, you can give Focus to your friends by taking an action to Rally your side, using Leadership. When you have Focus, you can do many useful things, like grab initiative away from someone, or turn a hit critical, or apply certain Gifts.
If someone tries to hit you, you'll probably want to counter-attack. Counter-attacks are pretty nice. They're a contested roll. Whoever wins the roll hits the other person. On a tie, either party can retreat; if not they both hit each other. You can only counter-attack once per weapon per round though. If you don't counter-attack, you might parry, which uses the same opposed roll but doesn't do damage. Parrying, obviously, is much inferior for general use. But there's a Gift that allows you multiple parries, and situations in which parrying is possible but counter-attacking isn't. Still, the overwhelming advantage of counter-attacking over parrying emphasizes the very aggressive nature of samurai combat.
If you score an overwhelming success, you may choose a critical hit -- or several criticals, if it was that good. Criticals can include entangling your foe's weapon, impaling for extra damage if they don't retreat, and tripping your foe; your choice of them depends on your weapon.
Damage is rolled as a number of d20's against a fixed target, which is usually around six or so. Wounds are deadly. Even if you take no damage (all the d20's fail), you will probably be sent reeling by the attack. If one of the d20's succeeds, you are Wounded -- reeling, and you take an extra die of damage on all further hits. Two successes and you are Crippled, which is just as pleasant as it sounds. Three successes and you are Incapacitated, and four or more and you are pretty much dead.
In all, combat sounds quick and tense and deadly.
Experience
You get experience, which improves your skills and lets you buy gifts and such . You must distribute your experience fairly broadly. You can dispose of gifts and such that are no longer useful, and get about half their cost towards new ones. You can also train in a school of martial arts, which lets you learn the school's preferred fighting style more quickly.
Finishing Up
After that, there's some minor end material -- a list of weapons, an unremarkable section on GM advice, some sample characters, a sample adventure. Then, unaccountably, several pages of variant rules, which I suppose will let a GM change the feel of his game somewhat. There's a two-page glossary, important for a game that's solidly rooted in its culture, and six-page index (kudos!) and some sample characters.
The Judgment
If you want to play anthropomorphic animals in Tokugawa Shogunate Japan, this is obviously the game for you.
And, after reading the book (and especially if you like the comic), it's not so ridiculous that you might want to play that, even if you wouldn't think of it on your own. It's a swift, dramatic, deadly game. It's got a strong flavor -- which, like natto (the gluey webby fermented soy bean paste that many Japanese and few non-Japanese love), isn't to everyone's taste. There's a huge amount of supplemental material available, outside the RPG book: the whole comic, and every decent Japanese history book.
But you have to be prepared to stay in the mindset of the game, as well as the game world. You can't go looking at your own rump, much less ask about the history of your country: these are mysteries that Anthropomorphic Rabbit Samurai Were Not Meant To Know.
And not because they're dangerous mysteries, or even interesting ones. They're just irrelevant to the style of the game.
That's not my style; those sorts of gaps in the game world bother me a lot. But if you can ignore them, then you could have quite a lot of fun with Usagi Yojimbo.
(Incidentals: It's a small book: 200 pages, and not full-sized. It's not missing anything, it's just small. It's got plenty of artwork, by Stan Sakai, which means it's perfect for the book.)
