Blade Runner RPG: Fiery Angels

We ran the second case file, Fiery Angels, over three sessions. This is my notes on the adventure and general observations on the game after more than a dozen sessions.

I had the same four players I had in my starter set adventure, but one of them rolled up a new character. This worked fine, and we were able to build up the characters. It’s important to split the characters into pairs so you can continue with the detective fantasy in a way that makes sense in the fiction.

The adventure worked fine. They continue the studio’s staple of reusing iconic moments from the original material and putting the players in the middle of it. This could be a terrible way of building a licensed IP as it’s so disposable and predictable – you just do the things you’ve seen in the movie – but they do it so well, both here and in Alien, that I’m only looking forward to more of it. Seeing just how excited a player is, sitting down to conduct a Voight-Kampff empathy test, you know you’ve already succeeded.

There is one structural problem: it’s quite likely, and indeed it happened to this group, that the players get to the final confrontation before really understanding at all what’s going on. You’re then reliant on two bad guys spilling some monologue – hardly a detective experience. Thankfully there’s enough interesting twists on the way to keep things moving. The ending is also very evocative, extremely on brand, and the players get to interface with key characters from the movies. Your players will likely forgive the “let me tell you about my scheme” setup.

There’s a lot of action towards the end. The second session left the detectives beaten and broken, having run into a fugitive combat replicant in a melee situation, and the third session was basically just two action scenes back to back. Without spoiling things, there isn’t really any other way the finale is going to play out.

I realized in advance that this looked likely, that there wouldn’t be any room outside of these action scenes, and interspersed the action with flashback sequences before both action scenes, when characters were en route to the next scene. This resulted in natural, cinematic pacing. It worked really well! So well, in fact, that in any future game that looks like it might overflow with action, I’m going to copy this structure. I set it up so that we’re reminded of the emotional and dramatic struggles our player characters are going through, thus lending weight to their decisions and fates amid the action. Everybody cares more about the outcome that way.

I had the same pacing concern in the first case file, and now feel that my reaction has been verified: the shift structure does not work at the table. I get what they’re going for, forcing the players to carefully weigh their options, and enforcing police procedural themes, but in practice the shift structure makes the players feel like they have to rush. That is toxic for the atmosphere the Blade Runner RPG is trying to evoke. You need room to stop and breathe.

In my future Blade Runner games I’m going to forgo the notion of “a shift” and instead interpret them as “scenes”. The timeline can work as-is, just without caring about how the time is supposed to pass in the game world, and opting for cinematic time instead. Many of the options at the detectives’ perusal make little sense in the context of shifts, but work just fine when you think about them as things requiring a scene of screentime. This is how the Alien RPG works – certain scenes should happen in certain order, but when they are triggered can vary.

We didn’t have any issues with the mechanics. In our previous games I found the stress mechanic too hard on the replicants, and I was keeping an eye on it, but this time that didn’t cause any need to deviate from rules as written. We had one stress breakdown, at exactly the dramatically appropriate moment.

This is a fast system! I liked being able to run quite big fights (up to 13 NPCs plus three PCs in a single scene) in the end with rules as written, only abstracting a ten cops on ten replicant commandos fight – I rolled a D6 per round to see how many go down on each side in a close quarters gunfight.

Violence is dangerous, and a critical hit can turn the situation around in a blink. This means that player choices amidst the action carry real weight: taking a risk might very well have permanent consequences, and choosing to take cover and wait a moment might very well be the winning option. The first gunshot in the session took out a major NPC in a single roll of the dice (12 on the crushing critical hit chart – instant death), which fit the situation perfectly, and served to underline for the players that these characters do not play around.