Why Were We Playing Rabbits in 1976?

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

(This continues our 2024 series, 10 Games From The First 10 Years)

It is genuinely surprising to me that in 1976, within two years of D&D coming out, someone published a game about being rabbits. It makes a little more sense when you realize that it was inspired by Watership Down and the designers were, I believe, zoologists or something similar. But having read it, the premise is the least interesting part of this game. It has so many fascinating little ideas.

Bunnies & Burrows is a game about rabbits … but these aren’t just rabbits, they fight, explore, gamble, study herbs, see the future, parley with beetles, find love, have children – and the list goes on. The end result are characters that ironically feel more human than you’d imagine.

As I play more games, I learn about games, sure, but I’m also learning a lot about myself. And a rule of thumb has slowly emerged: I want to play games that lead to interesting, surprising, unique things being said by the players. I’ve sometimes phrased it as “people want to say cool shit at the table”. I’m people.

Bunnies & Burrows starts with D&D as a jumping off point – there’s that old, familiar rolling 3d6 down the line to get your stats. But that’s more or less where the similarities end. You have rules for fighting but it’s not D&D combat – this game is often described as having “the first martial arts system” but what this means is that fighting is mostly weapon-less and involves declaring actions that flow into each other as patterns or c-c-combos. Basically, some actions set up other actions – you can’t Rip into another rabbit unless you already pulled off a Bite & Hold in the last turn. Some actions like Run aren’t possible if you’ve just done a Pin or a Rip in the previous turn and so on. I didn’t actually get to play out a fight but these rules got me grinning.

And the whole thing is like that. The study and application of herbs is meant to be a little puzzle where through trial-and-error and dice rolls, you slowly figure out what’s good for you and what isn’t. The languages and persuasion rules mean that certain characters can become envoys to other species. Because a language can mean the difference between things turning violent and a peaceful negotiation between rabbits and a mother scorpion that has accidentally wandered into their warren.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of these little pieces are eccentric and inelegant – always more convoluted than you’d like but still a major leap forward in playability because in the end, it’s a d100 roll under a target number. All the fiddliness – and there’s a lot of it – lies in the absolutely esoteric ways this game invents for calculating that target number. But I find it easy to forgive this in an old game, especially when the most interesting part of the game doesn’t lie in the mechanics but the negative space the rules seem to create.

The donut hole in the centre of this game – fruitful void? uncrowded centre? – is the question: What is rabbit society like? This is a setting question – or rather, a system of relation question – that is never asked but it must be answered. The mechanics have some opinions. For example, every player picks a profession when they make a character – Empath, Seer, Storyteller, Scout, and so on. Some of this comes from Watership Down, which can, of course, be your ready-made answer – it’s the unstated but obvious setting sourcebook for this game. But if you don’t go down that route, you’ve got a juicy problem: What do we value? What do we despise?

Humans exist out in the world, great and terrible and mysterious. There’s no reason to assume rabbits built a society that looks just like human society. How do you want their society to be different? Why? It’s a line of thinking that goes to some interesting places.

The art from the game is so DELIGHTFUL.

Yours hoppingly,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

  • Magical Kitties Save The Day feels like a great RPG to play with children with a very cool GM section and comic book teaching guide.
  • Planet Fist is a weird sci-fi skirmish/PbtA game which gets a nice overview from dragonkid.

III. Links of the Week

News

  • NASA released an adventure for a TTRPG. It’s probably not surprising that there’s a bunch of nerds at NASA but it’s still extremely charming to read about.
  • Rascal News reports that venerable RPG.net is merging with group matchmaking start-up RPGMatch. Hopefully this means good things for the forum – which I don’t use but I think is a great little community.

Articles and Reviews

Misc

From the archive:

  • Always worth returning to the classic Indie Game Reading Club post: Characters in transformation, about what makes a good character and what makes them a good fit for storytelling. (Issue #16, November 2020)

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • From the Ennie-nominated studio The Wanderer’s Tome comes an expansion for the comedic roleplaying game Flabbergasted! Discover a myriad of mysteries in Mystified! Coming to Backerkit end of March!
  • Back Hecate Cassette Archive on Kickstarter! Hecate Cassette Archive is a supernatural Mothership 1e adventure of anarchy and analog audio.
  • Travel to a spore-covered paradise & ashen wastelands destroyed by a falling city in the next expansion to Cloud Empress, the Nausicaa-inspired Mothership 1E science fantasy setting. Follow on Kickstarter today!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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