This book caught me eye during a kickstarter to fund its translation and printing. I backed it then, years ago, but then it sat on my shelf as I played other games.
At the end of 2020, I was looking for a more reflective game and Ryuutama came to mind. I opened the book and fell in love with this game. It's wonderful. It knows what kind of stories it's trying to tell and provides really useful guidance to get there. It also has lovely art that's reminiscent of 90s console role-playing games, certain manga, or Miyazaki films.
Many role-playing games (like Dungeons and Dragons, the best known example) are laid out roughly like technical manuals. They are designed to be references at the table, but they're not always laid out in the most intuitive way for a first time reader. Ryuutama excels at presentation and organization. There's a short introduction to the game and the different player options at the start, so you have a frame of reference. Then, the rules are organized into chapters named after seasons. Spring covers character creation with notes on how to simplify things for first-time players or short games. Summer covers the majority of the rules for journeys and combat. Fall covers more game master (GM) focused rules and the way that the game master gets a character (kind of) to participate in the story, too. Winter includes monsters for the players to encounter.
As a bonus, on the physical book, the sides of the pages are color coded to go with the seasonal theme. This logical organization plus the color coding makes it easy to find rules and information.
As for the actual rules, they're pretty simple. Characters have stats with dice ranging from a four-sided die to (usually) a ten sided die. Dice with more sides reflect being better at skills or attributes. When challenges come up, players roll a couple dice to beat a threshold number. That's it. It's pretty quick to understand and to teach.
There are some fun wrinkles to the rules like how rolling a fumble gives you a resource to do better on later rolls. The game is pretty transparent about why the rules function as they do and even has a Q&A section at the end to handle common rules questions.
Much of the game's page count is dedicated to travel and weather. Ryuutama deliberately doesn't have 200 pages of setting information and encourages the GM to make the world with their players. The combat section is relatively short, too, and functions very much like a 16-bit Final Fantasy game in a charming way. The most important part of the Ryuutama world is that, at least once in their life, every person goes on a journey. The player characters are people on that journey together.
This emphasis on moving through nature and experiencing new places is not too common in RPGs. I've read a lot of RPGs and it's a breath of fresh air that makes me excited to run the game. I've only run it for one person so far, but it turns out that the rules work pretty well for single player character games, too. I'm excited to run more of it in the coming year.
A lot of RPGs have a pretty vague game-mastering chapter, but Ryuutama has three involved examples of play that are extremely helpful. (This idea, often called "replays" is more common in Japanese table top/table talk games,) It also has practical guidance on planning sessions and includes worksheets. This matches how I like to prepare for games anyways, so it was really appreciated. The worksheets are a great reminder to keep things moving and include evocative details (like something for each of the five senses) for the different scenes in the game.
I know I'm gushing about this game but I love it. I haven't got to some of the aspects like the gamemaster's Ryuutama character, but I have to stop somewhere.
It was out of print for a while but is available again as of January 2021 in hardcover at Indie Press Revolution. Honestly, I can't recommend Ryuutama highly enough. It's going to be my go-to fantasy game going forward.