I’ve been running the Blade Runner published adventures for two separate player groups side by side, in addition to a series of homebrew investigations. The player groups share a Discord server, so they’re aware of each other’s exploits, and while we don’t serve spoilers on the shared channel, they do keep an eye on what the other group is up to.
We play rules as written as much as we can, and the Blade Runner RPG only gives three name options for each character archetype. So we ended up with two player characters sharing a name, Visser Janssen. Through the Discord channel, the players became aware of each other, and for a time had fun seeing how different the other Visser seemed to be, seen through what was posted on the channel. One has a donkey, the other wears eyeliner, that sort of thing. (Neither seemed like very nice people.)
One of the players said that it would be fun to see what would happen if the two Vissers should meet. That got me thinking. I couldn’t just put them in the same game without altering most of their established past – they had worked the same cases, with different outcomes, with different colleagues, in the same precinct, and so forth.
I had always wanted to interject more of Philip K Dick into the game. The movies don’t feature very much of the surreal qualities found in the original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. There’s the odd dream, and that’s about it. As a result, the roleplaying game only features the dreams and sometimes odd, unlikely encounters as ways for the surreal to touch the fiction.
I wanted more. What if the two Vissers with similar themes but very different details were in alternate dimensions, and their worlds would overlap for a brief time? How could that work?
I talked about my plan with my players on a high level: I’m going to bring them together, and they’ll need to play along with some pretty substantial assumptions I’m going to make about their characters.
Framework
It made sense to focus on as few players as possible to give plenty of room for the Vissers to interact. But I had a concern: the game could easily slide into unbound unreality, with scenes that barely stitched together. I felt I needed an anchor to keep this from happening. One of the Vissers had just one pair, a detective they worked with, whereas the other worked with three other Blade Runners. I included the other Visser’s pair as a third player, and explained to her that their role was to support the interplay between the Vissers.
I put in place some rules: the not-Vissers in the scenes wouldn’t see anything out of place. Their minds would rationalize the paradox so it didn’t bother them. This reality barrier would start to leak as the game progressed.
For the players, I asked them to just take it all in stride, and not start to question everything (or anything, really), or we’d spend the whole game empirically testing what is real.
How it went down
I wrote two instigating scenes, where one Visser found themselves in the other Visser’s life, unsure about what was going on, but with enough familiar details to feel like things weren’t completely off the rails.
One Visser’s focus is his awkward life-long not-marriage, and the home they share with an artificial donkey. I inserted the other Visser right there, scratching the donkey, wishing that they had chased their early life dream of owning an animal. (Instead they put down money on a really nice jacket.) They also encountered the other Visser’s not-wife, who they had decades ago had a one night stand with, in the very same apartment they were now in.
The other Visser doesn’t have a home, but they have a storage container full of high fashion. The wrong Visser wakes up in the container, hungover like he’d prefer to die, having tried on the other one’s clothes, but none of them fit, and having made an attempt to put on his make-up, now smeared all over his face and pants. While the container is strange, the storage facility is not: he has hidden something in another container along this same corridor.
Then we jumped to the anchor player, who’d get a briefing from their boss, Holden, for a menial task – finding the stolen classic car of a Wallace corporation executive, their old acquintance, Quell. (It’s a Blade Runner job because there’s the Wallace connection and because someone hates Holden, who hates the detectives.) I wasn’t going to run the case as you normally would, but rather use it as an excuse to jump from scene to scene.
As the case progressed, I kept changing the Visser the anchor was working with. In the first scene they were both in the same police department with the anchor, but the anchor would only encounter them one at a time, leading to low key confusion and sense of unease.
Ultimately, the two Vissers met at a noodle stand while waiting with the anchor for an informant to show up. I didn’t make it too explicit, but small details hinted at them being the same person, only from another timeline.
I hinted at the other Visser’s decision to leave the apartment the morning after, instead of moving in with the not-wife-to-be, being the point where their paths diverged, decades ago. The two characters looked nothing like each other, and we had to bend expectations a little to make the story work, but the players accepted it because we had agreed in advance that they would.
They had a good time with the anchor character, having birthday drinks with the anhor’s antagonistic Joi at the table in a strip club. The missing car (a 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 that Google’s AI tells me would be considered a classic car in the BR universe) was recovered without firing a shot, and making plenty of not replicant related arrests without hurting anyone, including themselves, a first for both groups. I imagine both Vissers started to appreciate the other’s very different approach to the work, at least to some degree.
Towards the end the paradoxes were too numerous for reality to cope, and the anchor started doubting the other Visser was pretending to be someone else. Their last case had involved replacing people with replicant copies, after all. I let the anchor see slightly more behind the curtain, while looking for a natural place to conclude things. A Voight-Kampff test was administered on both Vissers, with inconclusive results, except they did not seem to be replicants.
In the end, the Vissers decided to visit the “other” Visser’s home, the one with the donkey and the not-wife. The wrong Visser entered the apartment, and the door closed, and we cut to black. Cue original Blade Runner credits theme.
So how was it
Nothing was explained in-game, but we did talk about how I approached things in the after action section. I was initially concerned that nothing would feel real, resulting in nothing having weight, but the opposite happened, with deep immersion and introspection. Some of my favorite roleplaying scenes from these campaigns took place in this game. This did require the anchor player to deliberately step back and let the Visser players to explore.
I’m never going to replicate this since it required the not quite identical but shared history of full played campaigns for both players. Doing this cold, with fresh characters, would not work. The Vissers needed the weight of their past for the crumbling reality to matter in any way.
This wouldn’t have worked if the players didn’t agree in advance that they wouldn’t start poking holes at it. Aside from the two Vissers really looking nothing like each other, they had a noticeable age and career difference, too, which didn’t make any sense when they at one point started comparing their service records. But that’s surreality to you.
I didn’t expect to be able to continue playing with both Vissers after this game, but ultimately it worked so well I don’t see any issue with that. We did agree in advance that this would all be “real”, as in, we wouldn’t treat is as a dream, even if we didn’t set this in any particular time in the characters’ histories.
All this, thanks to name charts in the book having just three entries. That turned out to be plenty.