Title: Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game
Authors: Tomas Härenstam, Joe LeFavi, Nils Karlén, Gareth Mugridge
Artists: Martin Grip, Christian Granath, Gustaf Ekelund
Publisher: Free League Publishing
Release Date: 2022

Heavy shadows drape across the city. Any stray light is unforgivingly harsh, or murky neon. Cigarette smoke is consumed by fog, and the gun by your side is still warm. If it weren’t for the whiskey, you’d be lonely. Maybe things could turn around if you find proof, if you can keep them safe, if…the ifs are the only thing that keeps you going.

This is film noir. This is Blade Runner. This is Free League Publishing’s Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game. 

But noir is more than a look, more than shadows and detectives. The genre thrives on moral conflict; on good, or good enough, people in seemingly (or truly) impossible situations; on what our world at its worst says about us. Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game understands this. 

“Noir isn’t about how you only make the right choices and defeat your flaws,” Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game’s core rulebook reads. “It’s about how the wrong choices can be made for the right reasons, and how both your case and your soul can endure or diminish when faced with the flaws, regrets, and burdens you brought with you.”

To capture Blade Runner, the game features five pillars: sci-fi action, character drama, corporate intrigue, moral conflict, and soul searching.

But how do you recreate something so complex in a game? 

Tabletop has two aspects which work in tandem: procedure, which is the shape and structure of the game, and rolling, which introduces chance and suspense. 

Cases & The Importance of Structure

You are always almost out of time. Your enemies are always on the move. You have to carefully consider your clues and when to act; with one wrong move, the house of cards collapses, the city burns, and you might be fired or fired upon. 

The ticking clock embodies the tension of film noir. There is never enough time, never enough room to breathe, and your enemies are faceless yet too connected, too powerful, to ever dream of confronting face-to-face. At least not without the dream of one real piece of evidence, one solid shot you might sacrifice your life to uncover.

But how do you incorporate this into a game?

Structure shapes a game. In Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game, players only have three shifts they can safely work per day. They can work an additional shift, sacrificing their ability to roll as well. The pressure starts with a small question: do they surrender their mathematical advantage to work through the night, rolling worse until they rest, for the promise of the one necessary piece of information?

But the pressure mounts as the case progresses. The figures behind the crime continue to act with every stage of time that progresses, covering their tracks, silencing witnesses, preparing for the violent climax of their plans. Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game presents a system where the players aren’t the stars of something borrowing the appearance and flavor of Blade Runner and film noir, but a system that plays out like Blade Runner and film noir. Tomas Härenstam have designed a system which captures the same essence, the same pacing and goals. 

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game is at its best when the players are pressed: when the in-game clock is ticking against them, and when they are presented with murky choices. Few games embody their genre and inspiration as well. Of all the mystery games I have played, run, or read, this captures the spirit of the investigation best. The case is on a countdown to disaster, and the deadline is invisible to players. They need to do everything in their power to collect the necessary information, solve the case, and prevent disaster. The rules for generating cases emphasize physical evidence and concrete clues, encouraging GMs to make real, solvable sci-fi noir mysteries. 

This breathes the spirit of the film and the genre into every moment of the game. There is never enough time, and carving out what additional time they can will only put their back tighter against the wall. 

The systems for running a case on an objective clock that the players advance scene by scene are excellent. Already one of my favorite game systems, I have incorporated it into other games I run. The players loved it. On a similar note, the GM tools for generating the outline of a mystery, and a broad path of clues, are excellent. The game provides an incredible toolkit, which allows for depth to the cases run, significant chances for character development,

All of this emerges from the core, rock solid procedure at the heart of the system. 

Hitting the Ground Running

Relatively uncommon for rulebooks, Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game is written with clarity. Apart from checking damage calculations and a couple questions about gear, we didn’t have to consult the core rules as we played.

The game benefits from tying most rules into either the structure of the case itself, or into the core resolution mechanic. There are few “stray” mechanics. The game is lean, tying most rolls into combined attribute and skill rolls.

Characters’ attributes and skills are assigned a letter grade from A to D, each corresponding to a die between a 12-sided die (d12) to a 6-sided die (d6). When attempting to accomplish something, the player rolls the dice tagged to their attributes and skills. For example, if a character has an A in Intelligence and a C in Tech, the player rolls a d12 and a d8. All results of 6 or greater are a success. While other elements can add or subtract dice from a player’s hand, these modifiers are always easy to track.

I praise my favorite games for having clear gameplay that I can teach in about five minutes. Even if they feature robust systems and significant complexity, I love when I can give someone an overview of the basics and start playing immediately. 

I especially love it in Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game because you now know everything you need to know to start. You know what to roll. You know how cases work. Apart from combat and some advanced situations, you already know everything you need to know to jump into a game right now. 

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game’s two most important pieces are your intellect and your morals. The dice cover everything else.

Characters & Systems

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game is, by and large, a skill-based system. Players have four key attributes—strength, agility, intelligence, and empathy—which then break down into a number of individual skills. Based on a number of factors, primarily time on the force and whether or not they are human, players elevate their attributes and skills to higher tiers, possibly all the way to A-rank and its 12-sided die. Players can freely choose between playing a human and a replicant. 

However, classes—called archetypes—are also provided as part of this character creation scheme. Archetypes grant you a key attribute, key skills, and starting money.

The archetypes cover a wide variety of Blade Runner and noir archetypes. The Inspector embodies Rick Deckard, and the Doxie draws from Roy Blatty and his crew. The archetypes cover noir stalwarts like corrupt cops (the Skimmer), power brokers (the Fixer), blunt instruments (the Enforcer), crime scene inspectors (the Analyst), and the rumpled heart of the city who might just save everyone (the Cityspeaker). Instructions are provided to quickly make your own archetypes. 

All of the above has the benefit of being fast with a wide variety of possible characters, all of whom will play differently. The next step is where the game’s character creation takes on a life all its own.

Players then roll on a number of tables to determine their key memories, key relationship, key item, and details about their home. I’ve seen it radically enrich the character, and take them in unexpected directions. Asking players to incorporate interesting key memories, and unexpected relationships who may have it out for the players. It’s incredibly fun, and presents a roleplay challenge to the players. It quickly became one of our favorite parts of character creation. 

The World

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game incorporates the same visual language and design of the films, which the designers described as retrodeco. 

“I invented the phrase, ‘retrodeco,’ which became the look of what we were doing,” production designer Syd Mead said in a June 1982 interview with Fantastic Films Magazine. “We were taking existing machinery, regardless of what it was, interiors, cars, anything, and adding onto it to make it work, to make it look better, work better, or adapt it to legislative demands And once we set up that continuity gate, that idea gate, we could hand different items to any of the set fabricators in different set shops and get the same look to everything.”

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game offers over 100 pages of information about the world and characters. Unusually, most of this is directly actionable: information about how to run a case and the relevant advanced rules and guidelines; information about the armory of the world, and the tools the department uses. Even the setting information is tooled toward what is useful for the game, limiting details that are extraneous or unknown to the police. 

This makes the entire book immediately useful.

Martin Grip’s art is beautiful. The book immerses the reader in the art and design of the world. If playing with a virtual tabletop, the art presents a wide range of NPC portraits. If playing in person, the art is often a perfect illustrative look into the world of retrodeco.

Final Score

Perfect scores should be rare. This score should stand as a sign of rare excellence, recognizing a piece of art that not only achieves what it sets out to do, but stands above many other examples from its genre and medium. 

I chose to begin this series of tabletop reviews with a game that excels in all areas:  structure, clarity, possibility, and the quality and selection of physical materials. Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game represents a standard of excellence. A standard that I can compare back to in future reviews.

It is the exceptional game that not only perfectly encapsulates the source material—I cannot imagine what another Blade Runner game could do better as an adaptation—but the rare game that can serve as the keenly correct base for a campaign set in a variety of times and places without watering down the whole or ignoring a better system. The game can just as easily accommodate a campaign set in the 1950s styled after Ida Lupino’s noir films as it could a inter-war PI campaign as well as it could even accommodate a Sherlock Holmes campaign. Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game is incredibly specific about style and tone, working its core genres so well, that this may be the best game for running any kind of mystery or crime drama.

Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game is the rare licensed game that not only embodies the source material, but lives up to its potential as a roleplaying game. It’s the all the more rare licensed game that is genuinely great, and I think advances the medium. I fully expect it to be talked about in the same breath as West End Games’ d6 licensed games, or Call of Cthulhu.

The game’s structure does two excellent things. First, it perfectly emulates the structure and feel of both Blade Runner and film noir. Players feel the pressure, and the enclosing threat. Second, it is an extremely direct, easily adapted system. If your players are excellent investigators, the timeline can be set from the start to put the pressure on and keep the pressure on. This is the best version of Free League’s countdown system, and the best version of the clock systems that emerged in the wake of Blades in the Dark. It benefits from being objective (each location generally costs one shift; each shift advances the clock by one), and from being one overarching clock which the case, character details, healing, etc. all tie into, rather than leaving the GM to manage and advance a half dozen different clocks.

The mechanics are clear. A baseline system of combined attribute and skill rolls means that the core rules for play can be explained in minutes. Complexity is layered on from there, with various abilities, situational modifiers, stress, and combat states that can affect those rolls and overall situation in radically different, modular ways. The modifiers also succeed in never becoming too many pluses and minuses to rolling, and each has a direct, non-flavor impact on the situation.

The game has an incredible amount of freedom and possibility for modification. The game features a robust system for rolling fairly fleshed out randomized cases, and instructions are provided for players and GMs to create their own archetypes. While instructions are not provided, the templates for weapons make it easily feasible to create your own armory. Beyond that, the systems are easy to adapt for other other mystery and crime campaigns. 

The art is excellent, evocative, and useful in-game. The worldbuilding material provides numerous hooks, room for player and GM interpretation, and a great deal of well-thought-out material on the state of the world. The material is actionable.

Physical materials should withstand handling. Books should hold together through session after session, pages shouldn’t tear. The book is bound well, with heavy stock pages. It has not shown a sign of wear through use.

All of this together makes Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game a must-play.

Disclosure: Boss Rush Network received a copy of Blade Runner The Roleplaying Game. Free League Publications did not make any stipulations upon this review, nor did they or any representatives read it prior to publication.

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Featured Image: Free League Publishing

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