Funnily, I saw the Kickstarter for the Blacksad roleplaying game before I’d ever known about the comic books. The comics are written by a Spanish duo — author Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido. The six or so graphic novels follow the adventures of a private detective named John Blacksad and is set in 1950s America…kind of. In the book, however, all the characters are anthropomorphic animals — this is more to help define their personality traits. The comics are well worth reading, although I’ve only been able to find a few of the volumes in English, hardcopy; you can get the Kindle versions, however.

The art in the comics, which is used liberally in the RPG corebook and the GM screen is stunningly good. The background art, from city street scenes to the clutter of Blacksad’s apartment/office is highly detailed. Cars, buildings, clothes — everything is perfect. It’s also not a kid’s series — these are classic noir stories with femme fatales, people getting killed, drug use, etc. and the roleplaying game leans into the noir storytelling with rules that allow you to use and lose conscience points as the drag of evil pulls you in. The rule book is available in Spanish and English, and the translation to English was superb.

The Kickstarter campaign, like most that started in the midst of COVID, ran long on getting the physical materials out, but the PDF has been in my iPad since last year. This past month, the boys of Nerd Night™️ finally got a chance to kick the tires on the system. Our experience was, surprisingly, very good. One of the players has a soft spot for the anthropomorphic animal thing, and I will admit I was into Albedo and Fusion back in the 1980s. The others were more reticent about that, but two of the players are hard-core noir fans, so they were in. The story revolved around a group of ex-army buddies who fought in Europe together and have come home to varying degrees of success — a motorcycle gang member who does petty crime (a coyote); another that does “odd jobs”, Equalizer style (mountain lion); another who was a demolitions guy and now works construction (Kodiak bear); and their former captain, a banker (owl). Their friend, a member of a rival biker gang that the coyote, is killed — shot under mysterious circumstances, and they are hired by his brother to find out what happened. Over the next few weeks of play, complete with well-timed cliffhangers, they found out he had been involved in buying H from the local Chinese gang, apparently in an attempt to bolster their gangs position for a proposed merger with the Pissed Off Bastards (creating, eventually, the Hells’ Angels). They figure out his girlfriend, a Chinese white tiger, might have set him up, but it also appears their buddy’s MC president might have done the deed. Gang fights, gun fights, motorcycle chases, and a showdown between the coyote, the tiger, and the other gang leader ended with both gang boys being shot by the tiger — who skips town.

The story gave us the chance to work a lot of the rules. There are four basic characteristics: Fortitude, Reflexes, Willpower, and Intelligence. You can have from 1-5 in the characteristics and this allows a number of “action dice” to be rolled equal to it. You then top off your “hand” of dice with “complementary dice” of a different color. (Black for action, white for complementary is the norm.) There are also “tension dice” (red) that can be added instead of the complementary when the character is doing something agains their principles or giving in to their worst impulses. The action dice have a success on a 4-6; complementary a success on a 6, but a failure that negates a success on a 1; and the tension die give a success on 4 and 5, two successes on a 6, and a failure that negates a success on a 1.

Characteristics also give you the number equal to the dice in Traits. A Kodiak bear, with a fortitude might have Big & Tough +2 and a Hits Hard +2 and a +1 to their protection against damage as Traits for that Characteristic. You get these for each characteristic. This allows even a klutz with a Reflexes 2 to have a +2 in Steady Hands or something similar so that even though they aren’t the fastest on their feet or quickest to respond to things, they’re good with their hands. The traits can be added to any one of the dice rolled in the dice pool. That includes flipping a failure (say adding the +2 Steady Hands to a failure on setting a bomb). It allows for more nuances characters. We found that the die mechanic and the characteristics/traits really made it feel like the characters got to act like they should — with failures mitigated where they should be, and successes being — if not assured — certainly not as reliant on sheer luck of the roll.

Milestones give two elements of the characters past — like Grew Up in the Wilderness or WWII Sapper — and two that tie to the character’s nature, like Easygoing or Defender. These traits are there to help the player direct their actions. There’s also the Complications — the weakness of the characters — and these can led the GM to push Conscience checks on some things. There are rules for resisting temptation and corruption by doing things that are morally damaging. We saw these in use for characters taking actions that were a bit outside of being the “good guy” — like shooting an attacker when they couldn’t see the character and were unable to defend themselves; or when the coyote character was duped by the white tiger girlfriend of his dead buddy.

The mechanic is simple — beat a number of successes needed for a task. An average task might be a two difficulty, negating the first two successes a character might roll. Anything more and you pulled it off. In combat, it works the same way. Most characters start with a 2 Defense, requiring three successes to really do damage. (It’s pretty easy to pull this off.) Get more than one success through, you multiply the damage by the number of successes. If you shoot a guy in a darkened alley who can’t see you, the dark and his lack of seeing the danger he’s in might cancel themselves out — he’s got a 2 Defense. The character blasts away with four successes…his Walther PPK .32 does 6 points times 2 [the number of successes that got through] = 12. The target’s in some trouble. There’s some derived combat scores like Endurance — typically about a 4. In the case above, the guy would have also suffered a serious injury (a concussion or a broken bone) from the attack being three times his endurance.

The rules only take up 50 pages of the 160 total run deal with running the genre well, NPC portraits based on the set piece for a scene — like a pool hall or the like. I would have liked a bit more fleshing out of the chase rules, but outside of that, the game is rules light and simple. It was fun to run and easy for the players to pick up how things worked.

So, is it worth the $40ish bucks? Overall, I’d say yes. We really enjoyed our trip back to 1948 San Francisco (where I set the adventure) and I could see us playing this regularly on our game rotation. You could conceivably just run a straight noir game with the ruleset and just ditch the anthropomorphic characters, if that’s not your bag (baby!) You can find Blacksad at Nosolorol’s website.