Free League Publishing - the Sweden-based tabletop game company behind RPG adaptations of franchises such as Alien or The Lord of the Rings, has recently announced a Kickstarter for an upcoming roleplaying game set in the Blade Runner universe. According to this game's website, the Blade Runner RPG will focus on the story of Replicants - artificial humans who seek refuge in the polluted cities of future Earth - while putting players in the shoes of (mostly) human "Runners" who are legally deputized to hunt down and "retire" them. This Runners vs. Replicants gameplay aside, players of the Blade Runner RPG will also get to participate in a wide variety of investigative challenges, delving into corporate politics, the blind spots of human empathy, and other staples of the cyberpunk genre.

The original 1982 Blade Runner movie, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford and the late Rutger Hauer, was an adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick novel called Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? This novel, a key inspiration for cyberpunk stories and games like CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077, took place in a future Earth irradiated by nuclear war. The surviving humans were encouraged to immigrate to off-world colonies where biological androids perform all the manual labor, while the book's protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter hired to hunt down and "retire" rogue androids who've escaped to Earth, using a special empathy-measuring psychological test in order to detect the supposedly callous-minded androids.

Related: What Cyberpunk 2077's Extended Romances Look Like

The first Blade Runner movie kept the same general premise of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, but referred to the renegade androids as Replicants, introduced the idea of them being used as soldiers in epic space battles, and put more emphasis on the idea that they were desperately searching for ways to extend their naturally short lifespans. The 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, switched focus from Deckard to a Replicant-hunting Replicant named K who is struggling to find meaning and volition in his artificial life. Free League Publishing's Blade Runner RPG takes place between these two films, in a time period where the old models of Replicants were being phased out and the new Nexus-9 models phased in.

Blade Runner RPG Lets Players Try Cyberpunk Noir Mystery-Solving

The Tyrell Building in the Blade Runner Tabletop RPG

Along with classic novels such as William Gibson's Neuromancer, the Blade Runner movie wound up codifying key visuals of the cyberpunk genre seen in games, films, and books, taking place in an urban sprawl of massive skyscrapers, slums, and pyramid-shaped arcologies, the polluted air lit by the glare of animated advertisements from powerful mega-corporations. The first Blade Runner movie also popularized the use of film noir tropes in cyberpunk stories and roleplaying games, with the Replicant-hunting Rick Deckard being a futuristic version of the world-weary but truth-seeking private investigator. The upcoming Blade Runner RPG, by all accounts, will learn heavily into the in mystery-solving parts of noir-themed cyberpunk, featuring gameplay centered around the act of investigation and mystery-solving - not just the tracking and hunting of different types of rogue Replicants, but also investigation of corporate conspiracy, societal corruption, and (according to the Blade Runner-RPG website) what exactly makes a human being human.

Blade Runner RPG Explores Themes From K. Dick's Original Novel

Poster for Blade Runner and the cover of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The original Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? novel closely interrogates the concept of empathy - what it means for humans to possess empathy, whether creatures besides humans possess it, and how empathy can be circumvented by humans seeking to commit cruel deeds. The future humanity of Philip K. Dick's novel, living in a world where most animals have been rendered extinct, are culturally conditioned to affectionately care for the few remaining animal species on earth, to the point that there's a thriving trade in "electric sheep" and other synthetic animals for people who can't afford to own real ones. However, just like the choice-based Detroit: Become Human, humans in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and the Blade Runner movies shut off their sense of empathy when faced with androids/Replicants, using their short lifespans, false memories, and stunted emotional intelligence in order to justify enslaving and murdering them. In true counter-cultural fashion, the described gameplay of the Blade Runner RPG seems to encourage players and their Replicant-hunting characters to question this callous status quo and eventually challenge it by making "impossible choices" and empathizing even with their enemies.

Next: D&D Campaign Ideas For Blade Runner & Phillip K. Dick Fans

Source: Blade Runner-RPG