Now that we have the review out of the way and the GOTY status update, let's talk about the future, and my plans for it. I've been meaning to break this news for months now, but I didn't want to do it before I had the review and updated GOTY feature ready. Now that I have them, here's what's been recently announced.
But before I get into it, one more thing. Up till now, the only scenario available for the Blade Runner RPG was the one included with the "Starter Set", called
Case File #01: Electric Dreams. This takes approximately 8 hours to play through, so for half a year that's the ONLY thing you could do with this game: play a single 8-hour session (or at most two if you were taking your time while learning the system, etc.) Free League had said that they plan further scenarios at the rate of one or two a year, and indeed the first one was part of a campaign titled
The Immortal Game (which is now also in my GOTY feature), but nothing concrete had been announced beyond the two launch products. Moreover, reviewers had been noting (as did the
Insomnia review) that the game was hyperfocused on LA and in particular the LAPD, and they wondered how appealing would this be to a wide playerbase, and/or how long the game could last if "Case Files" were the only type of scenario you could play. Free League's CEO did say in an interview at some point that they are exploring expanding the setting, but again, nothing concrete was given. You can read the interview below, by the way, it's extremely instructive if you're interested in the game or Blade Runner in general, and shows you how much true passion and expertise have gone into it:
Blade Runner RPG: interview with Tomas Härenstam, CEO of Free League Publishing and game designer
https://www.tomshw.it/culturapop/blade- ... e-designerAnd then in mid-July we finally got the announcement we'd been waiting for, but it gave us twice what we'd been expecting: not merely the second scenario in the campaign, but a whole other sourcebook with an entire new campaign inside! Moreover, this campaign has nothing to do with the LAPD or Blade Runners!
Two Major Expansions for the BLADE RUNNER RPG Announced
https://us3.campaign-archive.com/?u=2dc ... 2624b23a20So first off, we have
Case File #02: Fiery Angels, the second part in
The Immortal Game campaign. This will reportedly take about 3 sessions, so it'll be longer than the first Case File because the first one was included in the Starter Set which also included other materials like a basic rules book, so now the box will have extra space for a longer scenario.
Free League wrote:This new investigation starts off with the Blade Runners assigned to question a suspect arrested while trying to infiltrate the Wallace Corporation Memory Vaults. The case leads the team down a perilous path that explores the boundaries of Replicant technology and its consequences. The player characters need to contend with an array of physical, mental, and moral challenges.
Though Fiery Angels is a stand-alone adventure, users who have played Case File #01: Electric Dreams will experience a continuation of story elements from that narrative.
Fiery Angels releases towards the end of the year, so by New Year's we'll have two scenarios to play. That still brings us to only about 4-5 sessions for both Blade Runner scenarios though, which could be done in about a month if we focus on them.
But, as aforesaid, there's more.
Free League wrote:"Replicant Rebellion" expands the scope of the core game, allowing players to join the ranks of the Replicant underground in the Los Angeles of 2037. The characters are an independent cell loosely organized under Freysa Sadeghpour's leadership, and undertake a variety of operations – from helping fugitive Nexus-8 Replicants elude capture to sabotaging installations of the Replicant industry. This beautifully illustrated hardback sourcebook will include:
- An overview of the history and organization of the Replicant underground, charting its presence throughout the Blade Runner timeline.
- Detailed guidelines on how to play a Replicant underground campaign, including several new player character archetypes.
- Half a dozen complete Operations (i.e., complete adventures) to play for a cell in the Replicant underground.
If you wanted to play Roy Batty, this is your campaign!
The "Replicant Rebellion" sourcebook and campaign bring a whole new dimension to the Blade Runner universe, and it's precisely what critics of the game's narrow focus had been clamoring for. Moreover, though the base game is made for 1-4 Blade Runners (and the fewer the better, because this is Blade Runner not D&D), "Replicant Rebellion" is written for 5-6 replicants, and I am only going to run it when I have 6 players, which is 1 more than the required for the Alien scenarios, which is itself 1 more than the required for the Pathfinder adventures. So for the biggest co-op teams in
Battlegrounds yet, "Replicant Rebellion" is where it's at.
But it gets better. Because who will be the adversary of the replicants? Of course I haven't read the book as it's coming out next year, so I don't know, but I expect that on top of the corporations, the replicants will have to deal with the LAPD, and the LAPD... is again the players! So I foresee that the entirety of the campaign in "Replicant Rebellion" can be played up to 4v6 PVP!!! We're talking not only a TEN-PLAYER roleplaying game, but WITH PVP on top of it!
Of course it won't be easy getting that many players who want to play, but we have plenty of other stuff to play while we wait for the slots to fill up. And I think once people see us playing the first two Case Files (which can be played even with a single player, and are perhaps best played that way), they'll start to get onboard. Worst case scenario, I know how to bring in new people, as I'm doing with
Star Citizen, if necessary.
Bottom line, Blade Runner is the most exciting new GMRPG of the past couple of years, and Alien is the most exciting one of the last half-decade, and there's not a hell of a lot of material for either of them yet, because they are so new, which means that unlike Pathfinder or D&D it's quite easy catching up to what's released, and then playing every new product that comes out on release. And as long as there are people who want to play this stuff, we will play all of it on
Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds, and soonTM.
P.S. Compare the new concepts and excitement above, with how shitty the upcoming traditional BR videogame looks:
Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth
https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=8959
