Review: Blade Runner - Starter Set

Taking a different, if comparatively bleak, approach to CY_BORG in its depiction of living in a horrible, neon lit, future is the new Blade Runner RPG. As fans of the films might expect, this is all cop - all the way, as after 40 years of waiting it’s finally time to, officially, hit the beat as an officer of the LAPD’s Rep-Detect unit, one of the titular Blade Runners. 

Not that the game exactly glorifies your job, as it’s more than likely that you’re going to be playing a somewhat sad cop, what with the world being pretty crappy, no one particularly liking you and your days and nights spent ‘retiring’ incredibly dangerous replicants - indentured robot servants who more often than not display a humanity equal, or at least equally lacking, to your own.

 So yes, it’s the latest licensed blockbuster from Free League who having cut their teeth with the well received ALIEN RPG have turned their attention to another Ridley Scott sci-fi classic. And make no mistake this is very much a game designed to evoke not just the setting of that film, and its recent sequel, but as much as possible its tone, themes and indeed plot.

If that sounds obvious, well yes it is but it is notable just how laser focused the game is on doing that. This isn’t a sandbox experience where you can go off and set up your own ramen stall or robo-owl sanctuary. Nope if you’re playing Blade Runner the RPG then you’re here to get rained on, feel sad, and at least try to kill some robots, all whilst questioning your humanity. 

Everything in the game is designed to facilitate that experience, whilst anything surplus to those requirements is out the window. This, it should be said, is generally speaking a good thing. There’s plenty of dystopian sci-fi games which give you free rein to be or do whatever you want, Blade Runner just wants to emulate its source material as best it can. Importantly it also understands that source material. For all its sci-fi trappings, Blade Runner is a noir film, and at its heart noir is about cynical people, working in morally grey zones whilst undergoing one existential crisis of one kind or another.

If you’ve already played ALIEN, or indeed most of the Free League games you’ll have a good idea of how the core mechanics work, though like with all their games the in-house Year Zero engine has been tweaked, in this case with the addition of rules for chases, investigations and interrogations, and new rules for dealing with the passing of time and handling how you shift from scene to scene. Still, it’s all effortlessly simple really.

The Starter Set contains everything you need to play, a slimmed down but still fairly comprehensive set of rules which are mainly missing the character generation parts (pre-gens are provided), an intro to the setting should you have been living under a rock for the past 40 years, all the requisite dice, various cards to ease play and an introductory scenario, complete with an accompanying manila folder full of lavish maps, handouts and the like.

That adventure, Electric Dreams, is not just a good introduction to the game’s themes but the start of a longer campaign which, combined with the  included playing aids, makes this as essential if not more than the core rulebook and, together with all the fancy props, would definitely work as an effective if atypical introduction to tabletop RPGs.

If you want a more freeform experience or generic ‘cyberpunk’ setting to play in then useful setting material aside the game itself is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you want a game that leans into a distinctly cinematic experience and your group have no moral objections to playing robot killing cops and want to explore why that makes them sad then there’s a lot to recommend here.

Writing: Tomas Harenstam
Art: Martin Grip
Published by Free League

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)