Blade Runner TTRPG will ask players to grapple with their own humanity

A crowdfunding campaign for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, one of Polygon’s most highly anticipated tabletop RPGs of 2022, launches Tuesday. Developed by award-winning publisher Free League in collaboration with Alcon Entertainment and Genuine Entertainment, it sends players into the streets of Los Angeles in the year 2037 as members of the LAPD’s Rep-Detect Unit — better known as Blade Runners. To learn more, we spoke to Tomas Harenstam (free league co-founder) who was the lead designer.

“A lot of the surface gameplay is investigation,” said Harenstam. Harenstam said that players will go to different places and talk to other people to collect evidence. A big source of inspiration was Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, and other classic mystery-solving games.”

Of course, every good Blade Runner story needs its protagonists to grapple with existential questions between cases.

” It’s not a decision that your origin material makes. Harenstam said, “That your humanity doesn’t depend on whether or not you are human. It’s not defined by your origin. “It’s your actions, what you do and how it feels, and that’s the way we designed the game.” Character creation requires players to create a Key Memory, as well as a Key Relationship. These are key elements that will determine the character’s interaction with the world. Players can earn Humanity points by interacting with and grappling with the Key elements in sessions. These points can then be used to increase their skill level.

Image: Martin Grip/Free League

Image: Margin Grip/Free Leauge

Image: Martin Grip/Free League

Between morally ambiguous casework, players will spend a lot of their in-game time performing Down Time activities. These narrative interludes will allow characters to go their separate ways and explore their lives outside of the LAPD. Harenstam stated that it gives us an insight into these characters’ personal lives. “[Down Time] This is where mechanisms like Key Memory or Key Relationship are used. They work in the same manner regardless of whether you’re human or replicant.

The Core Rulebook contains over 200 pages of world-building, immersive details, and the official Blade Runner ruleset, not to mention gorgeous art by Martin Grip. His distinctive design will be recognized by fans of other Free League projects such as The One Ring Roleplaying the World of The Lord of the Rings .

Fans Alien will recognise the Roleplaying Game Tales from the Loop , Forbidden Countries _, and the Year Zero Engine which is a modified version that’s tailored for the neon-noir environment. For each roll of the Year Zero Engine, a six-sided pool of dice is used. A six indicates a successful roll. More sixes indicate a greater success rate.

Image: Free League

In Blade Runner, the mechanic has been streamlined. Players are equipped with just two dice: one each for the base attribute and skill associated with the roll. Increases in player competence are reflected in the kind of dice used, ranging from d6s to d12s. Harenstam says this was to keep the game rules light.

“We didn’t want the rules and the dice to dominate the table too much,” he said, “so we decided to scale down the feel of the dice and the mechanics so that they’re a little more in the background than in some other Year Zero games.”

In the Kickstarter materials, you will also find the first Cinematic Module for Blade Runner , as well as the adventure titled Electric Dreams .. Game Runners will be provided with everything needed to create their Case Files in the Core Rules ,, but Electric Dreams is a great introductory module that helps players and Game Runners get settled into the real world.

“We didn’t want to railroad players,” said Harenstam. That’s why players can interact with the materials presented to them in Electric Dreams and other Case Files in any way they’d like. “Every Case File is an interconnected web of clues — locations, NPCs, evidence — but players will have a lot of freedom to go where they want and talk to whoever they want, and in how they arrive at a solution.”

Any backers that pledge at the $55 Core Rulebook tier or higher within the first 24 hours of the Kickstarter’s launch will also receive an exclusive art print by lead artist Grip. The Rep-Detect Bundle ($95) contains the standard Core Rulebook and the Blade Runner Starter Set, which includes a condensed rulebook, a print version of Electric Dreams, four pre-generated characters for players to jump right in, and a selection of physical handouts representing data files, photos, and evidence for use during the investigation.

Also exclusive to the Kickstarter is the deluxe collector’s edition of the Core Rulebook, available in the Off-World Bundle ($140). The special edition features a faux leather cover with an embossed holographic stamp of “Origin”, and it will never be reproduced again. For players short on Chin-Yen, the Diji Bundle ($35) contains PDF versions of the core rulebook and Electric Dreams. Digital versions will also be made available to all backers at higher tiers shortly after the Kickstarter ends.

Stretch goals include additions to the Starter Set such as custom dice, an initiative card deck, a full-color map of future Los Angeles, extra character archetypes such as the Doxie and the Cityspeaker, generator tables for Case File and Key Memory creation, and Crime Scene Photos with hidden clues for players to find.

Players hoping for a cut-and-dried mystery game should definitely look elsewhere, Harenstam says. “It’s not just going to be ‘solve the case, go home, and be happy’; that’s never going to happen in this game. It will always be more complex than that.

The Kickstarter campaign for the Blade Runner RPG will run until May 29.