Casting Shadows

While I believe that all who play an RPG are players first and a game role second, be that character or Game Master, for the next two days I will split that hair. Technically, the game I play most often (Day 3’s question) and the game I have played most recently (but as GM) are the same. To go for a little variety and ride the wave of semantic nuance generated by play vs run, I will write today about Blade Runner, the game that I have played most recently as a character.

Released under license to Free League using a tuned variation of their Year Zero system, Blade Runner puts you very firmly in the titular role of being a police detective in the specialized Unit that deals with crimes by and upon the artificial life-forms known as replicants. As I had run Alien, I got to enjoy this Free League game by playing a character.

To get ready, we each generated two characters, and then talked about them to figure out who we wanted to play. I chose to generate one randomly and one by selection to test both of those options out. Character creation was vast and evocative and gave each of us an interesting character to play who was obviously cut from the cloth of the films. As the line expands, more options for play will become available. Recently, a supplement for playing a wider range of replicants, including those in the underground, was announced. However, I really enjoyed the tight focus on making the requirements of the detectives and the processes of institutionalized deduction and detection as transparent and easy to use in play as possible. The game made it very easy for us to speak to each other very much in-character with a grounding of the day to day responsibilities each of our characters had.

Our play of the game was overseen by Ivan Podgwaite of YouTube fame. He put us on a case of the murder of a young socialite from a stratospherically elite family. That in turn put us on a brutally short timeline for getting the case solved before word of the murder leaked to the media. Why was that a problem? The prime suspect was a replicant.

If you have a fondness for police procedurals, thrillers, and speculative fiction about the state of the world and how its sins will propagate in the future, I can heartily recommend Blade Runner.