Nick and Perry are back!
Hands down, our Thursday group’s favorite game right now is the Blade Runner RPG. My brother and my middle son make for a perfect detective team, the veteran human bladerunner (“Nick”), and his young replicant partner (“Perry”).
It’s a whole different playstyle than the usual dungeon crumping. Sure there’s action at times. But much of the time, they’re sifting through clues, pursuing leads, questioning witnesses, and hunting down renegade replicants.
Free League fills these case files with lots of visual aids. The Blade Runner RPG can certainly be run on virtual tabletop, but plays best at a real table. See the end of the post for a guide to what’s available for the game.
Electric Dreams
The first case file is from the BR Starter Set, called Electric Dreams. I profiled that mission previously.
Electric Dreams ended for my duo at the Memory Lab in a shoot-out with a crew of Wallace Corp goons on a slash-and-burn, cleaning up the mess, no matter who was involved.
Bug Hunt
After that, Nick and Perry took on a homebrew case I made, “Bug Hunt”. The seed of the scenario I generated from random tables in the core rulebook.
Unknown individuals released Batch 731, a variant of Variola Smallpox Virus. Los Angeles 2037 had itself a plague brewing.
The nascent pandemic created a pressure-cooker environment in dystopic LA. And not just from paranoia about an infectious disease. Replicants – due to broad disease resistance encoded into their DNA – were immune to the Bug. Rumors ran rampant that Wallace Corp had finally settled on genociding real humans.
Wallace Corp, combatting the ugly rumors, wholly-bankrolled the treatment centers and aggressively pursued a vaccine.
The physicians quickly identified patient zero as Kilo Farahani. Nick & Perry’s investigating soon centered on rogue biochemist Reinhard Leck. Turns out, Leck was robbed. Farahani, a ne’er-do-well, believed the vials of powder to be a designer drug… and ended up snorting Smallpox. He soon died, but not before spreading an infectious disease.
The duo ran down Leck and a pair of suspects who got into a shoot-out with Wallace security at one of the quarantine tents. They were uncannily fast! Surely replicants, but even more enhanced. No records of them could be found.
Nick & Perry, having located Leck, tracked the unidentified replicants to a rogue lab amidst the chaotic San Diego Trash Mesa.
The unidentified agents were KGB. (The Soviets wanted to knock down Wallace Corp a notch or two.) Nick & Perry penetrated the underground lab, found themselves in a gunfight with replicants with artificial Augments (BR rulebook, page 193).
Perry got blasted with a shotgun. Nick pulled him out, covered the entrance, and called for backup. A LAPD strike team promptly arrived, eliminating the rogue lab.
Fiery Angels
Session 1 was busy. Obviously, spoilers will follow.
The fan whisps slowly in the ceiling above but does little to dispel the thick musty air in this interrogation room at the Rep-Detect Unit headquarters. It’s morning in downtown LA, but this deep inside the hulking monstrosity that is the LAPD Tower, it might as well be on the dark side of the moon.
You [indicate the interrogating character] sit across the table from a dark-haired young man with a black eye and a sullen disposition. The rest of you are watching through a one-way mirror from an adjoining room [give the players Mugshot A].
The prisoner is a service technician at Wallace Corporation by the name of Ellis Vale, a simple man with no off-world potential but a spotless work record. Until now. Early this morning, he was arrested at the Wallace Corp HQ having gained unauthorized access to its massive Replicant Memory Vault. When confronted, he reacted violently and displayed extraordinary strength. It took an entire squad of security guards to take him down.
Given the target of his infiltration and his physical capacity, Ellis Vale was handed over to the Rep-Detect Unit for interrogation. His right retina has no serial number, as any Nexus-8 or 9 Replicant should. None of the older Nexus-6s should be alive today, given their limited life spans. You have been given an old vintage Voight-Kampff machine to learn what Ellis Vale is. Human – or Replicant.
Nick ran the suspected Replicant, though a series of probing questions, eliciting muted, non-committal responses from Ellis.
Nick succeeded at every step, as the V-K test is about body responses as much as verbal replies. At his 3rd success, he determined Ellis was probably a Replicant. At the 5th, Nick was certain.
But at the 5th question, Ellis stood up, snapped his handcuffs, and brutally attacked Nick, breaking some of his fingers. Perry, watching from the adjacent room, fired shots from his PK-D bladerunner pistol through the one-way glass.
Ellis was inhumanly strong and tough, making it difficult to take him out without killing him. Soon, Ellis was writhing on the ground, gut shot.
He died in the hospital.
Deputy Chief Holden, wheezing from the synthetic lungs he got after being shot and nearly killed by the Nexus-6 Replicant Leon Kowalsky 18 years earlier, is sitting behind his desk. Veteran Bladerunner McCoy stands nearby.
“Sit down,” the Deputy Chief says with his rasping voice, without mentioning McCoy’s presence. “This is a fine mess you made. You were supposed to run an Empathy Test on the prisoner, not kill him. Now, we still have no idea why he did what he did or who he really was, and dead men tell no tales. What do you have to say for yourselves?”
The pair managed some half-baked excuses, and passed their Manipulation rolls, avoiding losing Promotion Points.
Ellis had been, until recently, a model employee at Wallace Corp. Who suffered from muscular dystrophy. And now it seemed he had been a super-strong unregistered replicant.
Holden was clearly under pressure to locate and eliminate this embarrassment to Wallace Corp.
“Bootleg Replicants are not like the obedient Nexus-9 lapdogs,” he says, nodding to Perry. “So, I brought in McCoy to advise on the case. We took down the last N-6s together back in the day.” McCoy grins again, exhaling a blue cloud of smoke before he speaks.
“These bootleg skinjobs are attack dogs without a leash, capable of anything. This is old school,” the grizzled Blade Runner Ray McCoy rasps.
Perry went to an ultimately fruitless meet with Quell at Wallace Corp. Nick – still wounded – grabbed a couple of unis for backup, and went to the Yukon Hotel. Which ended up a surreal experience.
Nick met the manager, Lok Tang, who told him:
Ellis Vale has stayed at the hotel for the last few months, paying for his room weekly in advance. He never caused any trouble, always paid on time, and he was always alone, until the night before he was arrested. That night, a group of people, five or six maybe, came to visit him.
He didn’t get a good look at Vale’s visitors, except a dark-haired woman, perhaps in her forties, who did the talking. Oddly, she had a large bird on her arm – surely artificial.
The manager kept sneaking looks at Nick. They went to Ellis’ room.
The room held several clues, not the least of which was a brutally murdered corpse. The body, despite the crushed head and gouged eyes, was likely Ellis Vale 1.0 – Nick had the body transported to LAPD HQ. There were two Ellis Vales, and this one had clearly suffered from muscular dystrophy.
There was also a feather. And a newspaper with a piece torn off.
The manager had a video still for him.
On the way out, Nick confronted Lok Tang over his strange behavior, the frequent staring.
The hotel manager leaned in and whispered to Nick, “I know you came here with the others. I saw you leave. Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me – for just a few chinyen.”
Nick was reeling. Was there a clone Nick on the loose? He brushed aside the manager, telling him to mind his own business.
Back at HQ, Coco the medical examiner had autopsied Ellis 2.0, with the 1.0 corpse just arrived. There was little to tell, essentially identical DNA, except that 2.0 was “improved”.
The investigation continues…
Blade Runner RPG: What’s available
Blade Runner RPG items for sale at Wayne’s Books
The Starter Set has the first case, Electric Dreams. This beginner box is an embarrassment of riches: A basic rules book, the Electric Dreams adventure, Cards and lots of Handouts, and the special dice. Fiery Angels is also available of course.
I also sell the Blade Runner Dice sets separately, but they’re purely optional. You can use normal RPG dice; just know that 6+ is a success, 10+ a double success, and a 1 is particularly bad if you “pushed” the roll.
The hardcover rulebook and screen are great if you want to deep-dive into the system – and you probably will.
See Also:
Shame on you. I love it, therefore, it’s expensive 🙂
This is such a great and concise summary of your story so far. I’m currently running Electric Dreams on Roll20. I do have the boxed set but my players don’t live nearby. It’s a shame not to be able to use the handouts from the box. They’re so good. The VTT set up is pretty good though.
Yeah, we live near each other and we were *still* using VTT interface with laptops at the table. For this Blade Runner campaign, I really wanted to return to classic tabletop play, rolling dice, paper character sheets, and all that. And fortunately, the BR game really lends itself to PnP.
I’d love to be able to use those beautiful paper character sheets!