Nerding Day: Ghost Dog the RPG🌭

We’ve discussed Mark C. MacKinnon and Guardians of Order once before. But a game about cartoon rodents was far from the strangest product they ever shipped out to hobby shop shelves. That honor belongs to what may be the only licensed tabletop roleplaying game to be based on a film in the Criterion Collection. It’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Role-Playing Game and Resource Book.

Can we just take a minute to really process this? A year after Jim Jarmusch’s postmodern samurai mob movie came out, a small Canadian publisher released D&D but for people who wanted to imagine being Forest Whitaker with a katana. Today, that concept would get you upwards of three likes on your itch.io page. But in 2000, your family could get you declared mentally incompetent for even proposing the idea. And yet, somehow, it gets stranger still.

Ghost Dog isn’t your typical RPG. It’s intended to be a one-on-one experience, where one player is the Game Master and the other is Ghost Dog. Mark pitches this as being a more convenient game for busy roleplayers on the go. But as someone who’s slung my share of dice, they do not seem like equivalent experiences. Hanging out with a group of friends and goofing around is a lot of fun. Being alone with a single other person and co-imagining a story about Forest Whitaker? That’s foreplay.

Maybe you’re like me and have been totally meaning to get through Jarmusch’s filmography and like Night on Earth was really good there’s just so many other movies, you know? Despair not. Roughly half of Ghost Dog‘s 158 pages are dedicated to recapping the events of the movie and explaining its themes, which include: sword, Mafia, and what happens when the worlds of sword and Mafia meet and make forbidden, passionate love.

I know it was a long time ago, but the authors seem way too excited about the idea of a black samurai. Ghost Dog is a cool concept, but when you get all breathless about how a gangsta player is actually an honorable warrior, it feels like maybe you have some preconceptions about different types of people that you should explore. Like, do the words “black” and “gangsta” always need to go hand in hand?

So what is Ghost Dog all about? Long story short, a Mafioso shoots three children who were beating up a fourth child. That child finds a book about samurai and decides that’s his whole deal from now on. He tracks down the mobster and swears fealty to him. It’s sort of a Han and Chewbacca life debt situation, if Chewbacca just hung out on a roof with pigeons all day until Han wanted him to shoot someone in the face for breaking space omertà.

Ghost Dog is assigned to kill a guy who’s been having an affair with a mobster’s daughter, but in doing so, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that results in nearly everyone in the movie getting stabbed, gunned down, or exploded. That’s the fast version. The book, no joke, lays out a scene by scene retelling of the movie as if the authors were in the room with you trying to pitch you on the concept.

The summary is six pages long. And maybe it was useful to have a synopsis of the movie in the pre-Wikipedia era, but I have to imagine that anyone purchasing this book was already familiar with the film. But the authors had to consider every contingency. What if the player hadn’t seen the movie and the dozens of pages of summary and background material didn’t adequately convey the experience of watching Ghost Dog? Well, there’s a solution here.

Something about this paragraph bothers me, and it’s not just that this “advice” is the equivalent of telling someone “to satisfy your hunger, there is simply no substitute for food.” The phrasing of “theatrical movie,” the needless parenthetical… These are the hallmarks of a writer desperately struggling to hit a page count. Are there any tortured reaches comparing the themes of the movie to those of a beloved children’s series?

How about needless enumeration of the film’s entire cast, including “Dog,” and “Jaguar Lady?”

Wait, did they just misspell the name of one of the more important characters in the movie? I am now developing a theory that the authors penned this book under duress. I believe they were pressed into this impossible task by profligate licensor and Guardians of Order CEO Mark C. MacKinnon. They did their best to complete the project with the minimal amount of effort possible in order to satisfy their mad king.

As Exhibit A, I present the numerous sidebars throughout the text, which contain quotes and useless bits of trivia. Take, for instance, this list of businesses owned by the Vargo family:

Or consider this list of all of the cities where Mafia lives, maybe?

Or what about this misspelled quotation? Who could forget that classic Ghost Dog character, “Long Hiared Man?”

Exhibit B: The actual mechanics of Ghost Dog are simply lifted wholesale from Big Eyes, Small Mouth. Like Kevin Siembieda before them, Guardians of Order managed to pad out their books by copying and pasting the same insane, dysfunctional rulesets across all of their products. In the case of Ghost Dog, it’s just BESM but without all the elves and magical spells. You can still put points into being sexual dynamite, though.

It costs the same number of character points to be the most attractive person in the world and to be a low level Mafia soldier, by the way. Need more points? You can always take a Defect. For an extra character point, why not be a 15 year old? You can’t legally buy cigs or booze, but you can — uh, I’m not sure this is right — legally consent to sex?

Let’s not worry about that too much. We’ve got bigger issues. Since this is Tri-Stat, the combat is just as unwieldy as it was in BESMouse. We don’t have Scratch points to contend with this time, but if your narrative-focused vibes-heavy one-on-one RPG needs a flowchart to work, then you have failed your Role-Playing Game Design skill check.

Got all that? Because we’re not done.

Fuck me, I don’t want to do math, I want to tell a story based on the work of the guy who comes up with his movie ideas while riding an adorable bike in circles around an empty Williamsburg loft.

If Ghost Dog were a game actually designed for two players to recreate the movie or variations on it, I guess I could understand that. I’m still not sure who it would actually be for, but it could have worked as a fifty-page softcover book that explores the vibes of the world and has some thematic rules calibrated for quick combat punctuated by reflective moments of downtime.

But it isn’t that. It’s a hardcover tome that spans over 150 pages, and its pretensions to being a new and interesting kind of RPG collapse almost immediately as its authors admit that there is no reason why you couldn’t simply add more people to the mix.

Have you ever wanted to roleplay as Mark Wahlberg trying to fuck a teenager? How about Lou Diamond Phillips and Robin Dunne doing an annoying, interminable bit about tracing a phone call? With the power of Ghost Dog: The Roleplaying Game, this is finally possible.

So, hold on. There is absolutely nothing about Ghost Dog that makes it any more suited to one-on-one roleplaying than any other Guardians of Order book. Is there anything that distinguishes it mechanically from BESM, a genre-agnostic game?

Of course not! Do whatever you fucking want, you shmuck. You already bought the book, whadda we care? Eyyyy, fuggetaboutit.

But it doesn’t stop there. Now that we know that Ghost Dog is just reskinned BESM, a lot of possibilities open up to us. Hell, the authors even point out that we could bring Sailor Moon into the mix.

And remember, this is the year 2000. Today, I’m fairly certain that you can play as both Forest Whitaker and Sailor Moon in Fortnite. But imagine the roleplaying campaign that could have come out of someone owning both of these books a quarter-century ago. Ghost Dog is assigned to kill some deadbeat who started a new beauty salon and won’t pay protection money to the mob. But when he takes the shot, it turns out that the target is some kind of space monster! Bullets are useless — only moon magic can defeat it!

But how will Sailor Moon deal with the revelation that Ghost Dog is involved with the Mafia? And how will Ghost Dog, as a sort of proto-weeb figure, react to the knowledge that anime is real?

More importantly, how many bee stings from Big Ears, Small Mouse would it take to kill Forest Whitaker? Recall that the true-to-life “suicide” bee sting inflicts 15 Scratch points, which resolves to three normal damage points. And Ghost Dog has 70 Health Points, thanks to his “Damn Healthy!” Attribute.

Thus, we learn that it would require a mere 24 bee stings to defeat Ghost Dog. What about the rest of the cast? Well, nearly every named character in the film has 40 Health Points. Due to the quirks of the Tri-Stat system and/or authorial laziness in statting out the cast of Ghost Dog, everyone from a middle-aged gangster to a mob heiress in her early 20s to a ten year old child is equally as resilient.

It would take a mere fourteen stings to bring down each of these characters. That might seem like a strangely low number, considering that 1,000 to 1,500 is the usual range given for lethality. But the Ghost Dog book, with all of its rich detail on the film’s setting, has the answer to this conundrum.

And here I thought all that background information was useless. What a fool I was. I must now commit seppuku, as I have dishonored myself. No, Sailor Moon. Don’t try to stop me. This is the Way of the Samurai. But if I can’t get that last slash done, I will need you to take my head off with your Moon Tiara Magic.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, my original OC (do not steal) of a cool guy samurai mafia hitman assassin hedgehog that uses katanas and guns.