Last night I MC’d Space Bounty Blues for a bunch of D&D players whose DM couldn’t make it. We made characters and had a complete adventure in under 3 hours. At the end everyone said “this is way more fun than adventurer’s league” and “we should play a mini campaign of this”. So yeah this game still shreds in 2024!
Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, the Lead/Follow mechanic (which requires at least two people) is a pretty integral mechanic in SBB, so I'm not sure how one would go about playing solo, but Spawny Toorte figured it out (see below)
If you wanna try, I've written a solo adaptation of it, with a few random tables and suggestions to play it by yourself : <a href="<a href=" https:="" toorte.itch.io="" en-lonesomebounties"="">https://toorte.itch.io/en-lonesomebounties</a>
As said by the author I think it alter the feel but it's an interesting experiment imo ^^
I finally got this on the table! It plays as wonderfully as it reads. The crew of the Comin' Home Baby had a great caper. I love how being the Lead in a Solo lets me combine my GM-energy with actually having a character to play.
We went into our Moment of Truth with +4 hold and still barely broke even! The dice deserted us at the last moment.
The companion playlist is so great, and other players seamlessly leaned into the mood of whatever song was currently playing. It led to effortlessly moody noir scenes all through our investigation.
I second @toorte who I played with in one of two awesome sessions of Space Bounty Blues I had lately.
In the first game I was playing as a biker Operator with an old score to settle with her former gang leader (and bounty’s ex-girlfriend) on Mars and a rival cyber-legged hunter on her heels. After a face-off at a casino black jack table and a hacking scene, the grand finale involved grappling the bounty during a car race in the burning Martian desert.
In the second session my crew member was a broke priest with a burnt-down church, an old gun and little left to lose. We chose the most juicy bounty - a miner's union leader gone mad after his daughter had died in a firedamp explosion. We tracked him down to a dirty town near the Karis Mine on Luna City and captured him after an epic rooftop chase...
The rules are a perfect match with the space bounty hunter theme and light enough that you can pretty much learn the game as you play. In our case I had laid out the main gameplay sections translated in French on a Miro board and we just followed that. I would still suggest one player reads the pdf once beforehand but it’s pretty much zero prep - just bring your Bebop love to the table!
My pleasure! Please let me know if you're interested in a French version of the game. I actually translated the bulk of it so it might as well benefit others :)
Hello ! Astia and I have completed a full translation of your game into French ! How would you like us to share it with the community ? If you agree to send me your PDF model, I can take care of the layout for publication on your itch page:)
Wow, that's incredible! Apologies for the delayed response (I was OOO during the holidays), but if you email me at hebert(dot)rob(at)gmail(dot)com, I can send you the indd file.
Hello ! This game is like... GREAT ! I had in my backlog for a while and jumped at the chance to try it and boy I wasn't disappointed !
Lately I'm playing a lot of solo-ttrpg, and I noticed this one game was particularly easy to turn into a solo game, with no GM, random character creation, and a pre-defined structured already here. So I wrote document, a few random tables and some tips, to play it in Solo. It's only in French for now, but would you mind if I uploaded it on Itch ? It's really an "addon", you still need you game to play the thing, so I believe it's more polite to ask you first.
Thank you for the wonderful feedback! It means a lot that it inspired you to make new tech for it.
You have my permission to upload your solo rules to itch so long as you link back to my page. And please let me know when it goes up so I can link from here, as well. Thanks!
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't notice your comment. Here is a screenshot of the character keeper from a session we played. A lot of the PC definition comes from play, but I hope this helps. Please let me know if you need anymore guidance!
Great work, Rob! Just letting you know that we're actually playing this RPG on stream (they'll be just 3 episodes, though). We're having a great time!! The only thing is that we're roleplaying in spanish, so if you want to check it out, Episode 2 will be this Sunday August 8 on ReRoll's Twitch channel, and Episode 1 (and the others) will be published on Youtube the next days.
Thanks a lot! Already waiting for the CAMPAIGN UPDATE.
There seems to be a lot of discussion here about this awesome looking game! Anyone know of any communities / servers of folks online talking about this game?
Glad you found us, Brett! There's not a dedicated server, although apparently it's pretty easy to get together a group on general RPG Discords (esp ones that focus on indie or story games) because it's GM-less and on the shorter end of a one-shot. If you have trouble finding other players, reach out to me directly and I'll see if I can find other players.
It's been a while since v14...is that the final version now?
I'm planning to facilitate a few sessions of SBB at a local online convention this coming weekend and I'd like to provide the correct info to players. :)
Oh, and would it be possible to get an image file of the solar system map?
So many teasers! "last major update for a while", "campaign index", "other work"!! :)
Thank you for the map.
And fwiw, my group reskinned the game for a high fantasy one-shot last night; it worked just fine as we played a group of adventurers who answered the call of a wanted poster. The only large change was that "Hacker" became "Arcanist".
Can you offer some advice re: Flashbacks? There's not much to go on in the rules. Do players tend to narrate just one per session (assuming a session = a one-shot)?
When you say "illuminate a character's past" does that include mundane topics like "That time I went grocery shopping and they didn't have the melon I was looking for"? (Hey, we're learning that character likes a specific kind of melon!) Or are Flashbacks supposed to be relevant to the character's Trouble or the current Bounty?
What about trying to come up with new Flashbacks for the same character over a long-term campaign? That could be a lot of "past" and "motivation" to wring out of one character.
So far, my group hasn't been interacting with the Flashback mechanic, and I think that's because it doesn't seem to have a direct impact on the narrative surrounding a session's current Bounty, where all the action is.
You can have multiple Flashbacks for one character as long as they're not too same-y or uninteresting. For the melon example, is it really "illuminating" in context? Probably not. That being said, I can imagine a scenario where it would be, because Cowboy Bebop can be really silly sometimes, and that's totally fun to play. Like if a character is obsessed with a melon that only grows on their homeworld, and they haven't been able to find one for 5 years or something. That actually *would* illuminate something about their past, and is totally something that could become something of a running gag. The Flashbacks don't have to be connected specifically to a Trouble or Bounty. You could use a Flashback to show how you know a particular contact, or why you were kicked out of your gang, or what growing up on Venus was like, pretty much anything. It's basically a way to sneak extra "moments" into a session. For campaign play, you can use multiple Flashbacks to show how your character's motivation has changed or deepened, explore a new facet of their past, or anything like that.
What about Leverage-style Flashbacks where we learn that the characters had prepared something ahead of time to deal with the current problem or obstacle? (Something like "Oh yeah, I did some research yesterday and set up a fake account that I can use to get past this checkpoint. Let me tell you about it..")
Rob, in your playtests, how often does "You may end up rolling more than once in a single scene, depending on
how the story develops" come up?
I'm asking because one of my players dislikes the possibility of outright failure during the Tension ("6-, things go real bad; you fail, and it costs you dearly").
Depends on the table. Usually when we get to the end of the scene a little too quick so we added another short "set piece" to the sequence.
One time, a Hacker PC tried sneaking into a high-roller casino and rolled a 6- trying to use a fake ID with the front desk guy, so we had security take her into custody. The guards left her alone to get the head of security and she pulled a panel off the wall to access the ductwork (second roll, which was a 10+). We decided that she got out the room (that was the success) but we didn't gain the Hold since that didn't seem right given the initial 6-.
The main point I was trying to make was that you can roll to "let the dice decide" what happens before you answer the question of the scene with the Release.
What does your player dislike about a 6- on the Tension?
Another of my players just summed it up nicely; "the [Tension] rolls weren't so much the problem, the problem was failure in a [Tension] roll blocking the intended path of the solo. Removing the [Tension] rolls and letting the [LEAD decide to] take conditions or consequences or narrating a stylish and clever counter would be more fun."
So, it looks like my group will probably just keep the Solo to a single roll from now on. :)
In this week's game, my group chose to avoid mid-solo rolls by asking the LEAD to include a cost whenever they were overcoming an obstacle. We didn't put a lot of nuance into it and just left it up to the LEAD to decide how severe the cost was. It worked really well and kept the game flowing nicely.
Going forward though, I'm thinking about having the LEAD consider whether they were using their EDGE or a TRAIT at the time to give a better indication of how severe the cost should be.
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Last night I MC’d Space Bounty Blues for a bunch of D&D players whose DM couldn’t make it. We made characters and had a complete adventure in under 3 hours. At the end everyone said “this is way more fun than adventurer’s league” and “we should play a mini campaign of this”. So yeah this game still shreds in 2024!
Amazing! That’s exactly the kind of situation I wanted SBB to help with, so it’s great to hear that it worked for your group :)
Hey! This looks amazing - is it possible to play this solo?
Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, the Lead/Follow mechanic (which requires at least two people) is a pretty integral mechanic in SBB, so I'm not sure how one would go about playing solo, but Spawny Toorte figured it out (see below)
If you wanna try, I've written a solo adaptation of it, with a few random tables and suggestions to play it by yourself : <a href="<a href=" https:="" toorte.itch.io="" en-lonesomebounties"="">https://toorte.itch.io/en-lonesomebounties</a>
As said by the author I think it alter the feel but it's an interesting experiment imo ^^
Oh my stars and garters... Spawny Toorte with a solo adaptation of game by lil ol me???
It's really more like a "guide", with random tables and ideas for each part ^^
This looks absolutely incredible! Can't wait to play and get a proper review out.
See you space cowboy...
I love this so much that I need to hack it - with credit given of course - could I get your blessing to do so?
Absolutely! Please link it here when you publish!
Thanks so much!! Here's my hack:
https://usaagi.itch.io/heart-and-soul
I finally got this on the table! It plays as wonderfully as it reads. The crew of the Comin' Home Baby had a great caper. I love how being the Lead in a Solo lets me combine my GM-energy with actually having a character to play.
We went into our Moment of Truth with +4 hold and still barely broke even! The dice deserted us at the last moment.
The companion playlist is so great, and other players seamlessly leaned into the mood of whatever song was currently playing. It led to effortlessly moody noir scenes all through our investigation.
Thank you! I really appreciate the feedback on the playlist!
I second @toorte who I played with in one of two awesome sessions of Space Bounty Blues I had lately.
In the first game I was playing as a biker Operator with an old score to settle with her former gang leader (and bounty’s ex-girlfriend) on Mars and a rival cyber-legged hunter on her heels. After a face-off at a casino black jack table and a hacking scene, the grand finale involved grappling the bounty during a car race in the burning Martian desert.
In the second session my crew member was a broke priest with a burnt-down church, an old gun and little left to lose. We chose the most juicy bounty - a miner's union leader gone mad after his daughter had died in a firedamp explosion. We tracked him down to a dirty town near the Karis Mine on Luna City and captured him after an epic rooftop chase...
The rules are a perfect match with the space bounty hunter theme and light enough that you can pretty much learn the game as you play. In our case I had laid out the main gameplay sections translated in French on a Miro board and we just followed that. I would still suggest one player reads the pdf once beforehand but it’s pretty much zero prep - just bring your Bebop love to the table!
Thank you for the kind words, I'm so glad you enjoyed the game!
My pleasure! Please let me know if you're interested in a French version of the game. I actually translated the bulk of it so it might as well benefit others :)
That would be so awesome, let me know whatever assets you need
Hello ! Astia and I have completed a full translation of your game into French ! How would you like us to share it with the community ? If you agree to send me your PDF model, I can take care of the layout for publication on your itch page:)
Wow, that's incredible! Apologies for the delayed response (I was OOO during the holidays), but if you email me at hebert(dot)rob(at)gmail(dot)com, I can send you the indd file.
Hello ! This game is like... GREAT !
I had in my backlog for a while and jumped at the chance to try it and boy I wasn't disappointed !
Lately I'm playing a lot of solo-ttrpg, and I noticed this one game was particularly easy to turn into a solo game, with no GM, random character creation, and a pre-defined structured already here.
So I wrote document, a few random tables and some tips, to play it in Solo.
It's only in French for now, but would you mind if I uploaded it on Itch ?
It's really an "addon", you still need you game to play the thing, so I believe it's more polite to ask you first.
Thanks for the good work !
Thank you for the wonderful feedback! It means a lot that it inspired you to make new tech for it.
You have my permission to upload your solo rules to itch so long as you link back to my page. And please let me know when it goes up so I can link from here, as well. Thanks!
Wonderful, thanks !
Just to let you know : i just posted the solo-module !
Thanks again for all this !
https://toorte.itch.io/en-lonesomebounties
So cool! I just downloaded it and can't wait to read it.
Are there any example characters out there?
Sorry for the late reply, I didn't notice your comment. Here is a screenshot of the character keeper from a session we played. A lot of the PC definition comes from play, but I hope this helps. Please let me know if you need anymore guidance!
Oh, this is nice! Could you make this character keeper available?
Hi TheGiftofGabes! The character keeper can be found here tinyurl.com/sbbcharkeep
Just copy it to your own Drive account and it should become editable for your own sessions :)
Awesome! Thank you so much!!!
Great work, Rob! Just letting you know that we're actually playing this RPG on stream (they'll be just 3 episodes, though). We're having a great time!! The only thing is that we're roleplaying in spanish, so if you want to check it out, Episode 2 will be this Sunday August 8 on ReRoll's Twitch channel, and Episode 1 (and the others) will be published on Youtube the next days.
Thanks a lot! Already waiting for the CAMPAIGN UPDATE.
AHÍ NOS VEMOS, VAQUERO ESPACIAL
Holy crap, that's awesome! If you'd been interested in being part of an official Spanish-language release, please contact me!
Space bounty blues is just an absolute gem : taking storytelling in a jazz form, has great game design and layout design, simplet yet elegant.
Wait, there's more ? A complete playlist of 10h+ awesome score to play your hunts ? A fillable character sheet ?
The game would have been perfect if its inspiration was a perl of japanese animation.
Wait a minute...
You convinced yet? So,
Let's Jam!
Wow, thank you so much, Gates! This review absolutely made my day
I think it's time to blow this thing, get everybody to start together.
OK,
3
2
1,
Let's Jam!
[brass instrument sounds]
There seems to be a lot of discussion here about this awesome looking game! Anyone know of any communities / servers of folks online talking about this game?
I’d like to find a group and try a one shot!
Glad you found us, Brett! There's not a dedicated server, although apparently it's pretty easy to get together a group on general RPG Discords (esp ones that focus on indie or story games) because it's GM-less and on the shorter end of a one-shot. If you have trouble finding other players, reach out to me directly and I'll see if I can find other players.
It's been a while since v14...is that the final version now?
I'm planning to facilitate a few sessions of SBB at a local online convention this coming weekend and I'd like to provide the correct info to players. :)
Oh, and would it be possible to get an image file of the solar system map?
Cool! Let me know how it goes. Map is attached.
v14 is probably the last major update for a while. I might drop a full campaign appendix later this year, depending on what happens with other work.
So many teasers! "last major update for a while", "campaign index", "other work"!! :)
Thank you for the map.
And fwiw, my group reskinned the game for a high fantasy one-shot last night; it worked just fine as we played a group of adventurers who answered the call of a wanted poster. The only large change was that "Hacker" became "Arcanist".
Oh, that is an awesome idea!
Can you offer some advice re: Flashbacks? There's not much to go on in the rules. Do players tend to narrate just one per session (assuming a session = a one-shot)?
When you say "illuminate a character's past" does that include mundane topics like "That time I went grocery shopping and they didn't have the melon I was looking for"? (Hey, we're learning that character likes a specific kind of melon!) Or are Flashbacks supposed to be relevant to the character's Trouble or the current Bounty?
What about trying to come up with new Flashbacks for the same character over a long-term campaign? That could be a lot of "past" and "motivation" to wring out of one character.
So far, my group hasn't been interacting with the Flashback mechanic, and I think that's because it doesn't seem to have a direct impact on the narrative surrounding a session's current Bounty, where all the action is.
You can have multiple Flashbacks for one character as long as they're not too same-y or uninteresting.
For the melon example, is it really "illuminating" in context? Probably not. That being said, I can imagine a scenario where it would be, because Cowboy Bebop can be really silly sometimes, and that's totally fun to play. Like if a character is obsessed with a melon that only grows on their homeworld, and they haven't been able to find one for 5 years or something. That actually *would* illuminate something about their past, and is totally something that could become something of a running gag.
The Flashbacks don't have to be connected specifically to a Trouble or Bounty. You could use a Flashback to show how you know a particular contact, or why you were kicked out of your gang, or what growing up on Venus was like, pretty much anything. It's basically a way to sneak extra "moments" into a session.
For campaign play, you can use multiple Flashbacks to show how your character's motivation has changed or deepened, explore a new facet of their past, or anything like that.
What about Leverage-style Flashbacks where we learn that the characters had prepared something ahead of time to deal with the current problem or obstacle? (Something like "Oh yeah, I did some research yesterday and set up a fake account that I can use to get past this checkpoint. Let me tell you about it..")
I'd support it. Especially if it was interesting, cool, or moody (and not just some perfunctory procedural stuff).
Rob, in your playtests, how often does "You may end up rolling more than once in a single scene, depending on
how the story develops" come up?
I'm asking because one of my players dislikes the possibility of outright failure during the Tension ("6-, things go real bad; you fail, and it costs you dearly").
Depends on the table. Usually when we get to the end of the scene a little too quick so we added another short "set piece" to the sequence.
One time, a Hacker PC tried sneaking into a high-roller casino and rolled a 6- trying to use a fake ID with the front desk guy, so we had security take her into custody. The guards left her alone to get the head of security and she pulled a panel off the wall to access the ductwork (second roll, which was a 10+). We decided that she got out the room (that was the success) but we didn't gain the Hold since that didn't seem right given the initial 6-.
The main point I was trying to make was that you can roll to "let the dice decide" what happens before you answer the question of the scene with the Release.
What does your player dislike about a 6- on the Tension?
Another of my players just summed it up nicely; "the [Tension] rolls weren't so much the problem, the problem was failure in a [Tension] roll blocking the intended path of the solo. Removing the [Tension] rolls and letting the [LEAD decide to] take conditions or consequences or narrating a stylish and clever counter would be more fun."
So, it looks like my group will probably just keep the Solo to a single roll from now on. :)
In this week's game, my group chose to avoid mid-solo rolls by asking the LEAD to include a cost whenever they were overcoming an obstacle. We didn't put a lot of nuance into it and just left it up to the LEAD to decide how severe the cost was. It worked really well and kept the game flowing nicely.
Going forward though, I'm thinking about having the LEAD consider whether they were using their EDGE or a TRAIT at the time to give a better indication of how severe the cost should be.
Still having a blast! :)