All images were taken from the Ryuutama game

Again I found myself in the situation of introducing someone to the TTRPG world. D&D keeps being the one everyone knows about, but it can be hard to grasp how to play a game with such depth. I looked into my TTRPG collection, looking to find something new I haven’t tried and there it was: RyuuTama. Having heard good stuff about the book, I thought why not give it a try? It did not disappoint.

A brief idea of what Ryuutama actually is

This game is not new, published in Japan in 2007 (that is around the same time as D&D4e!), and translated to English through a Kickstarter that launched in 2013. The cover already indicates what the game is about, with teenager anime characters hand-drawn in a Ghibli-esque way with several dragons everywhere, but looking very chill and inviting. No action depicted. After all, as the text below the title indicates, this is a Natural Fantasy Role Play.

In Ryuutama you play as Travelers from a medieval world forged by dragons. These are not your usual adventurers from roleplaying games. In fact, the playable classes are: Minstrel, Merchant, Hunter, Healer, Farmer, Artisan, and Noble. Your character has a reason to go into a Journey, and because it can be dangerous to go alone, you will do so in groups (your player characters’ party). Colloquially, the game is called “Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail“, thus telling you this is a game about journeys and helping people, not actually about fighting monsters. There are monsters you can fight in the game, but it is not the essence of the system itself. There are more rules related to traveling than rules about combat.

The Game Master plays as a Ryuujin. This is a dragon that can transform into a human and/or an animal. The Ryuujin is in some ways a player character controlled by the GM, which usually GMs are always told to never do. However, this Ryuujin may not ever appear in sessions, or it will only do so at crucial moments to help or guide the actual travelers. This is the most vital difference from other TTRPGs that makes the game quite interesting.

Art & Layout

Let’s start with possibly the thing that will grasp you the most about this game. That is certainly the art and layout. With a gorgeous art style that seems hand-drawn all the way from the front cover to the art within the multiple pages of the book, this is a true work of art. The whole section about dragons had me fangirling for each of them, due to their unique designs and hand-drawn style. The layout itself looks nice, with the borders of the pages and the titles being very colorful while using color palettes for the different 4 season dragons. That, in addition to the fact that you can easily differentiate each section from the side is a HUGE accessibility boon. The rest of the layout is quite simple with lots of tables and flowcharts for guidance. I LOVE those flow charts to easily get a grasp on how the game works. I just wish the tables that inspire the GM were tables you could roll on…

The Rules

Having only played enough to introduce my players to the game in a session 0, I can’t say I have the firmest grasp of the rules already. However, I read through the whole book now, so I feel that the fact that at least most of the rules I can easily remember means that this is an excellent choice for starting GMs and new people to the hobby.

Comprised of just 4 stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Spirit), these have a die assigned to them, similarly to the “Kids on…” games. Once you have to make a check, you combine two stats together. For example, when negotiating with an enemy, you may use INT + SPI, whereas on climbing a tree it might be STR + DEX. This just means you roll the types of dice associated with them and sum the results. For climbing a tree, if I have a D4 in STR and a D8 in DEX, then I have to roll both and compare it with the difficulty set by the GM. With the game being a simple game about mostly taking journeys, the difficulty to surpass is static most of the time, but can be affected by the GM. For example, if the tree to climb is in a forest while rainy, you check on the terrain difficulty and the weather difficulty and sum them, in this case being 10+1 = 11. Once you have this stuff printed out, it becomes incredibly easy to GM.

Session Planning

Ryuutama has a whole section about how to craft an adventure for the game. While I find it to be extremely detailed to the point that it can be a bit too much, I can see this being incredibly useful to new GMs. The book encourages you to create detailed scenarios with three act events going on, and more. This is definitely not my GMing style, myself being more improvisational. However, I really liked the way it teaches you how to create a town and/or world with the help of the players, having everyone answer questions in turns.

The Ryuujin

While the only game I played so far was the session 0 and I had not read the Ryuujin section of the book by that point, I got to read it afterwards and I think I now know enough to sell you on it. As indicated before, the ryuujin is this dragon-humanoid that guides the player characters while they are on adventure. Their goal is to look for stories from travelers to feed the Season Dragons with. That’s why they go after the travelers, and the GM gets to play with them. Just like player characters, these ryuujins have a progression system to become more powerful as time goes on. As they grow in level they get access to Benedictions. These help carry the story in a certain direction, giving boons to the Player Characters. In addition to benedictions, ryuujins get Reveil, which are pretty much abilities that are used when the characters are doing so bad they need a bit of extra help to be able to survive, but the ryuujin needs to sacrifice a bit of their life essence to do it. Picture a giant dragon appearing out of nowhere to save the characters in the middle of a combat that is WAY beyond their level, all the way down to players not planning ahead the amount of rations they needed for a trip, and the ryuujin appears to save their starvation with a banquet.

Ryuujins can be of 4 different kinds. Before the campaign stars, everyone decides which kind of adventure they want to play, and choose one kind of ryuujin according to it, as these can provide abilities that help the game move towards that direction. The green ryuujin is best if you want stories about exploration and discovery. The blue one is for stories of people, and relationships. The crimson one is for parties that want lots of combat. Lastly, the black one is for those who want to play a dark, and/or tragic story, looking to find the hope within it.

The Journey

As indicated before, the journey is the core aspect behind Ryuutama. This is done by giving you a variety of streamlined rules to make it important. You can take a look at the flowchart below for more details. Nevertheless, the core aspect behind it is that characters roll to see in which condition they start their day. This condition will affect how easily they may take damage, or fall sick during their trip. The Travel Check lets every character know how well they traversed the land to move towards their destination. It’s up to the players and GM to flavor what the result of each of these rolls mean. A Direction Check is used afterwards to see if the mapper of the group gets the rest lost or if they manage to move forward, giving that feeling of uncertainty in the wilderness that I so much love. Lastly, if they don’t get to destination, it’s time to prepare camp! Make a Camping Check to see how well you manage to spend the night in the wild. Repeat this loop, filling the story with interesting encounters like the game suggests you to and you will get a great journey experience.

My Experience

Again, this is just my experience of running a session zero to an experienced D&D player, a new person to the hobby with a bit of experience in other games, and someone who never touched a TTRPG before. We created the characters together using the step by step process to give the characters details and depth, and decided to go with the “Picnic Rules” for now, which tell you what to do to streamline the process and create the characters quicker, thus jumping in to the game easily. We will give more details and properly create our characters if the game goes well enough.

So, the short session zero “get to know your characters adventure” started. I improvised a scenario glimpsing through the back section of the book to look for creatures that could be interesting to easily bring the game feel. I found the “Nekogoblins”, which had art all around the book and looked really cute and brought them to the game. The classical “Monsters disturbing a farmer” scenario. This time, the nekogoblins were stealing pumpkins from the farmer, and so the farmer asked the travelers to get rid of them, and bring back his pumpkins.

The travelers went through the journey checks, two doing really well on their rolls, and one botching the Travel Check. Because they were traveling through a forest, we decided that it would make sense that these nekogoblins would lay traps to not be followed. The character got caught in one of them and according to rules, they would end up with 3/4 of their hp lost. This really changed everything, cause now they would not be as prepared to fight if they had to, and made the travel there have meaning. Fortunately for them, the one who got caught in the trap was a healer, and there was a hunter in the party who knew how to disarm the trap. With a few checks, the trap problem was solved, and the character went back to full health. Had they not had a healing herb that would have been disastrous. The hunter also managed to find marks on trees from the nekogoblins, suggesting they are used to planning ambushes.

The characters arrive to a cave, and shout towards the entrance that they only want to ask some questions. They rolled surprisingly well, causing a nekogoblin kid to come out, being excited to answer the questions. The farmer of the group, being the one that can better communicate with animals, in addition to the healer, chatted with the nekogoblin, while the hunter looked for possible ambushes. The nekogoblins were in fact planning an ambush, but the kid ruined it by approaching the travelers. The whole family came out for the cave, asking the travelers not to damage their kid (not that they were planning to). After a series of checks, the travelers manage to convince the nekogoblins to give out the pumpkins to the farmer again, and help the farmer hunt mice and other pests, in exchange for the delicious pumpkin soup he makes. They all head back, and successfully get to all share a delicious pumpkin soup with the farmer. Because of that soup, their Condition Role the next day will have a bonus.

This was a very straightforward way to try out most of the mechanics the players have. I didn’t use any of the Session Planning tools as I improvised everything on the spot, and don’t think I will be using them on further sessions. The players really loved the cozy vibes the game gives, and I managed to offer them a glimpse that a creature was following them at all times, which by the end I revealed in a cinematic that it was in fact a ryuujin. I’m looking forward to continuing the adventure and trying out the ryuujin mechanics!

Conclusion

Ryuutama seems to be a fantastic game to introduce players of all ages to the TTRPG space. I believe this is an incredible game for kids and those who are looking for a cozy and feel-good vibe. Not that it can’t get dark, but those are the themes the game offers the most, on top of all the journeying to the unknown vibes. I absolutely recommend it for those who love artsy books, as few games manage to give such beautiful looks as this one. If there is one thing I would complain about the book is its lack of random tables, but that can easily be done by the GM with the tools provided, so it is not as big of a problem.

If you want to get Ryuutama, you can do so by getting it at Indie Press Revolution:

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