Bunnies and Burrows
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Bunnies and Burrows (B&B) is a role-playing game (RPG) loosely (and unofficially) based upon the novel Watership Down about a group of talking rabbits seeking to found a new warren. Originally published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1976, only two years after the first RPG was published, it is now long out of print. It is notable in the history of role-playing games as the first to allow players to be a non-humanoid race, the first attempt at a detailed martial arts system (known as "Bunny Fu"), the first attempt at a non-combat skills system and the first RPG to appeal equally to women as men. While it has been far surpassed by advances in RPG mechanics in the past twenty years, at the time of its creation it was revolutionary.
While the players interact with many different animal species there is only one monster race - humans, whose thought processes and motivations are completely alien. B&B also had the advantage of offering players an intuitive grasp of relative dangers and appropriate actions not possible in game worlds that are substantially fictive. For example, a person playing a rabbit, when told that his character is confronted with a fox, has an immediate intuition on the amount of peril he or she is facing. Because players are substantially weaker than many of the dangers they face, the game is also notable for being one of the first to encourage problem solving and outwitting obstacles, rather than out-fighting them.
B&B maintains a certain cult status among some older role-playing game enthusiasts. It was licensed by Steve Jackson Games in the early 1990s and adapted to the GURPS rules, thus making it not only one of the oddest RPG settings ever, but also the first RPG to be licensed as a setting or expansion for another RPG. It has also been adapted to several rules-lite universal systems such as FUDGE and Risus.
External Links
Comments by Stefan O'Sullivan (http://www.panix.com/~sos/rpg/bunny.html)