October 11, 2021 – An official Cowboy Bebop tabletop role-playing game has been announced this morning by Mana Project Studio and Don’t Panic Games on social media. It will reach Kickstarter in 2022 and hopefully hit shelves by the end of the year. Its initial launch will feature English, French and Italian languages.
There are some other Cowboy Bebop games, including the 2018 cooperative storytelling Cowboy Bebop: Boardgame Boogie and the 2019 deck building Cowboy Bebop: Space Serenade, but this is the first Cowboy Bebop tabletop RPG.
Details about what exactly will be contained in the Cowboy Bebop tabletop RPG are sparse but you can assume it will bring you plenty of characters and settings you know and love from the seres.
Cowboy Bebop is a beloved piece of IP and this has been even more apparent as of late with the large anticipation of the upcoming live-action series coming to Netflix on November 19, 2021. Created by André Nemec (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Missions Impossible: Ghost Protocol) and stars John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Franchise), Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage, The Deuce) and Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World, The Vampire Diaries).
The property has a long history. The first volume of Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star was released May 1998, just one month after Cowboy Bebop originally aired on TV Tokyo on April 3, 1998.
The plot is that in 2071, roughly fifty years after an accident with a hyperspace gateway made the Earth almost uninhabitable, humanity has colonized most of the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System. Amid a rising crime rate, the Inter Solar System Police (ISSP) set up a legalized contract system, in which registered bounty hunters (also referred to as “Cowboys”) chase criminals and bring them in alive in return for a reward.
It is great to see Italian design outfit Mana Project Studio as one of the parties behind this release. They are also behind other tabletop games such as Journey To Ragnarok, Historia, Nightfell, Not The End and Norse Grimoire. They also do a ton of other graphic work.
The other partner is Paris, France based board game and game book publisher Don’t Panic Games. Their catalog includes everything from original creations Maiko, Escape Quest, Attack on Titan: The Last Stand, and Game of Dragon Boule Dead, to carefully-crafted localizations such as Champions of Midgard, DC Comics Deckbuilding, Rick and Morty: Total Rickall and Don’t Drop the Soap.
