Tag: Electric Dreams

Modular Gaming

Improbable hot-takes

“The Discourse (TM)” has been focusing on running published adventures/modules/campaigns as opposed to custom/homebrew/sandbox games for the last little while. First Quinns reviewed Impossible Landscapes, an epic and almost legendary campaign for the modern Cthulhu-ish game, Delta Green. This is the first time Quinns has reviewed a campaign/published adventure on his RPG review channel, Quinns’ Quest, so it was unusual enough to spark a significant amount of discussion all on its own. And then Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and Rascal reviewed the same campaign. I believe this was purely coincidental, especially as Impossible Landscapes came out about five years ago now. Both are great reviews in their own right and are based on full play-throughs of the campaign so you know they’re of real value. You should check them both out.

Anyway, on Bluesky, Thomas Manuel went looking for recommendations of other modules to run and this spawned a lot of interesting answers and quote-bleets from RPG luminaries, such as this one, which I found interesting.

I have opinions on the conversation, of course. I have shared a lot of them in other posts from the last year or so, actually. If you want the summary, though, I had a lot of bad experiences running D&D scenarios in the past, especially from the AD&D 2nd edition era. I found they were difficult or impossible to just pick up and run. In fact, they required maybe more preparation time than adventures and campaigns I wrote myself. The one published 5E campaign that I ran, Storm King’s Thunder suffered from the same issues, actually. This made me feel like it was a “me” thing. But, it turns out, a lot of GMs feel the same way, according to Bluesky, at least.

However, I have had my mind changed somewhat by running pre-written adventures for some other games, particularly Free League’s Blade Runner, Dungeon Crawl Classics and, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin.

This is a link to my first post on Electric Dreams, the introductory Case File for Blade Runner:

Blade Runner

And this one compares the same module to a 5E murder mystery adventure I played in around the the same time:

Case Closed

Here’s my post about Sailor’s on the Starless Sea for DCC:

Dungeon Crawls are Classic

And this is my post on running Duty Unto Death, a short intro adventure for the Dragon Age RPG:

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

And finally, this post, although ostensibly an excuse to discuss DCC adventures, also includes my opinions on the one 5E campaign I ran:

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Individual Modules

I will say that, despite my generally favourable outlook on most of these modules, I still find I have to to do a lot of prep for them. The main fear I have is messing things up so bad that I essentially spoil the rest of the adventure. Although, I should really have more faith in my abilities as a GM at this stage. I feel like I can probably improv my way out of any hole, to be honest. But it does not change the fact that I spend hours rewriting long paragraphs presented in module texts into digestible bite-sized bullet-points. I am running another Dragon Age scenario right now. Amber Rage is from Blood in Ferelden, an anthology of scenarios for the game that came out in 2010. It suffers from verboseness and unnecessary detail and makes for a lot of work from the GM. I’m enjoying the contents of the scenario but its presentation is horrendously dated and needs a sprinkle of OSR magic to tighten it up, in my opinion.

I realise that none of the modules I have mentioned here are anywhere close to having the size and epic scope of something like Impossible Landscapes, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have largely changed my mind about running anything pre-published. The one I have my eye on right now is Dagger in the Heart for Heart: The City Beneath. Actually, I have a post about that right here too:

Dagger in the Heart

OK, I’m off to discuss the discourse on Discord of course!

Blade Runner

IP

These days I don’t play a lot of games based on an IP. At least not ones as big as Blade Runner. That wasn’t always the case, of course. When I was kid I played Palladium’s TMNT and Robotech quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t think Robotech really counts as a “big IP.” I also played a bit of Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP).

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, maybe the only major IP based game I played in the last few years was the One Ring from Free League. Now, as a player who had been liberally punished by the unforgiving and gruesome crit tables in MERP, I had my reservations going into another Middle Earth game, but I shouldn’t have worried. We played the introductory One Ring adventure as a bunch of Hobbits wandering around the Shire getting into relatively innocent shenanigans. It wasn’t brutal and it wasn’t unforgiving, it was fun!

This wasn’t the first Free League game I had played. I had also run a few sessions of Tales from the Loop, which is a game based on the art books of Simon Stålenhag, where you play kids solving mysteries in the sci-fi 80s that never was. It was almost universally loved by my players and was fun and engaging for all of us.
So, when I saw that Free League were Kickstarting a Blade Runner RPG I smashed that “Back this Project” button. Unsurprisingly, it ended up 16,153% funded…

You know what? They put that money to good use. The core book looks gorgeous with the sort of noirish artwork that draws you into the future megalopolis of LA, its rainy streets, its crumbling facades, its neon drenched midnights. It lays out a version of Free League’s by now familiar Year Zero Engine rules that is specific to this iconic setting. The focus is very much on the dramatic juxtaposition of human and replicant, the mega-corps and the working stiffs, the thriving off-world colonies and the decaying Earth, the LAPD and everyone else. The focus is on those things and the investigation.

Electric Dreams

And that’s where Case File 001: Electric Dreams comes in. This is the scenario you get in the Blade Runner Starter Set and it’s fair to say that this box is all about the investigation. Oh, and you can see all those sweet, sweet Kickstarter krona in it too. It is full to the brim with beautifully rendered handouts, mugshot cards, initiative and chase manoeuvre cards, detailed and evocative character sheets for the pre-generated characters and maps maps maps. chef’s kiss

This case file is meant as a starter scenario, easing players and Game Runner into the style of play in Blade Runner as well as the rules and unique aspects of the game. I really think it does a great job of that. Everything is laid out efficiently and yet beautifully, with the same type of high quality artwork from the core book throughout. It introduces the ideas of Shifts, 6 to 10 hour periods of time that your days are split into, and Downtime, which you generally have to take after 3 Shifts on the job. It does an excellent job of guiding you through the LAPD, the hierarchy, the resources and the characters there and the ways the Blade Runners can use their abilities and skills to investigate their case. It takes you to a nice selection of areas in the city, too, without overwhelming.

And it does all this while hitting some major touchstones from both Blade Runner movies. My players and I were all delighted by the cameos and the familiar locations, the flying cars and the replicant cats. But none of it feels forced or wedged into the scenario. It feels natural and serves to bring a familiar world even further to life.

Mechanically, it uses the Year Zero system, where you build a dice pool and count up the number of successes. Unlike in Tales from the Loop where the system relied entirely on d6s, and only 6s counted as successes, Blade Runner uses every dice from d6 to d12. 6 or above is still a success but if you roll 10 or over, it counts double. The introduction of the different types of dice in this is quite satisfying and makes for more interesting mathematical permutations when players are trying to figure out who should do what actions, we have found.

Working the case

This game was always going to be a bit different. For one thing, it’s only me as the Game Runner and two friends as the players. For another, they decided to use two of the pre-generated characters, which is unusual in my experience but got us playing as soon as we could. We are spread pretty far and wide around the country so we are using Zoom and Roll20 to play it. It’s not ideal because it means I get to use my beautiful boxed set props only sparingly. However, I have to say, having purcased the Roll20 version of the module, it works really well. I would recommend it. The character sheets are top notch and all the hand outs are there at the tip of my fingers. An added bonus is that I recently figured out how to use the juke box feature so it’s nice to have the Blade Runner soundtrack in the background too.

Our player characters are:
– Willem Novak, a human Inspector. He is an old timer whose back-story says he doesn’t trust replicants, though that is not currently the way the player has decided to go with him, which I love.
– FN9-2.39 “Fenna,” a replicant Doxie (I am really not sure about this particular archetype name, to be honest. I think it might be a case of sticking a little too closely to the source material.) Fenna is a Nexus 9 Blade Runner who has only been alive for about a year. It’s a weird situation and the player is making the most of that.

We are only two sessions in and most of the first session was an intro to the game, the system and the characters. I would expect anywhere from two to four more sessions, depending on how quickly they figure things out.
It’s going well, so far they have been to the morgue, the Esper wall, the LAPD mainframe, Wallace Corp HQ and the crime scene. There have been precisely zero fights and no action scenes of any kind but I feel like the investigation and the NPCs involved in it have a hold of the players already. They are making connections and coming up with theories and it is all very cool.

As for me, I am loving going ham as the Deputy Chief with the synthetic lungs, the traumatised replicant dancer and the inconvenienced club owner and I genuinely can’t wait for session number 3 next week.