Behind the Scenes with the Blade Runner Tabletop RolePlaying Game

Rick Liebling
The Adjacent Possible
14 min readFeb 20, 2023

I grew up in the late-70s and early-80s playing Dungeons & Dragons (and maybe a little Boot Hill, Gamma World, and other TSR games). During that same time, Blade Runner hit theaters and became my favorite movie (and still is). I’m sure I would have loved a tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of Blade Runner back then, but it turns out I had to wait until 2022 for that opportunity. But at some level, that’s not totally unusual for Blade Runner IP.

Having played the game a bit now, both with the included campaign and a homebrew campaign of my own, I can say the game is a lot of fun and is well-crafted. It leaves a lot of room for players to add their own elements while still providing enough core rules and background to make the game playable for people who aren’t hard-core gamers or don’t have the differences between the seven versions of the movie memorized.

Recently I had the opportunity to hop on a Zoom call with Tomas Harenstam, CEO of Free League Publishing and the lead designer for the game. Tomas is a veteran game designer, having led the production of many Free League games, including the official Alien TTRPG. It was great to speak with Tomas and hear about how the game came together. Below is a transcript of our conversation with some minor edits for clarity. I hope you’ll enjoy the rather informal nature of this Q&A.

Note: I spoke with Tomas just as the Wizards of the Coast Open Game License kerfuffle hit and so didn’t get a chance to ask him about that. For more on that issue and what Free League has planned, check out this article as well as this statement from Free League.

The Adjacent Possible: Now that the game is out, what aspect of the final product are you most excited or proud of?

Tomas Harenstam: Ah, good question. I think just the overall feel of it. After a game that we put out is done, I kind of enjoy just picking it up every now and then to flip the pages and look at the art¹. I feel we — not only me but the whole team — kind of got the feel of it right. I think that’s the main thing, and I think that’s what I’m most proud of.

I did most of the mechanics work on Blade Runner, that’s usually my role, and I think that turned out well also, but I think the thing that kind of stands out is just the whole production. I mean the work that was done by the whole team just to capture the feel of Blade Runner in it. So I think that’s the thing that strikes me the most right now.

Here’s everything backers of the Kickstarter campaign received. Impressive.

The AP: Speaking as someone who bought the whole package, it feels and looks really nice, really high quality from the cardstock to the imagery to the care that was put into the text. So I agree with you, I think overall it’s one of the better pieces of Blade Runner IP that has been created.

Next question: Is there any aspect of the lore of Blade Runner that you were unable to incorporate in this initial product that you hope to include in future modules or other elements that might be coming from Free League in the future?

TH: I don’t think there was anything specific that we left out that we would have wanted to keep in the core game, but there’s definitely stuff that we would like to explore in future modules. I don’t know now exactly what that would be, but it would be interesting to see what’s happening Off-World. We have a bunch of ideas that we are interested in exploring more on the Replicant side of things; the Replicant Underground, how that works, for instance. These are just ideas. There is nothing currently that is concretely planned. It’s just ideas at this stage, but those are the kind of things that we are interested in.

But I don’t think there was anything that we left out. I think the core book is fairly focused on Blade Runners, and of course, obviously, Los Angeles in 2037, but that is by design. We wanted to have a fairly focused game to create a specific gaming experience and then you could expand on that in modules, but for the core game, we did what we wanted to.

There’s always a limit on how much we can put into a book.

Trailer for Free League’s Blade Runner TTRPG.

The AP: I’m sure you heard from many fans, who are similar to me, who would say you couldn’t put in too much stuff — they would have been happy with a 500-page book or an 800-page book with everything in there because they grew up with the movie. I saw it in the theaters in 1982, but I appreciate the fact that you realized that would be crazy. You can’t put everything in the game right from the start. It would be overwhelming for all but a few people.

TH: That’s true. There’s always a balance there. Of course, we want to make the book comprehensive, especially for the hardcore fans who really want to dig deep into the lower end and all of that, and I think we want to give them that because we are like that ourselves. We won’t have enough of that in there. But then it also needs to be a game that is in some sense accessible to new players and even people who are obviously familiar with Blade Runner but maybe not a superfan. They need to also feel that this game works for them as well so there’s always that balance.

Nice Blade Runner-inspired touches on the included dice.

The AP: I will say, even being in the superfan category myself, you still managed to surprise me. There was a reference to the Dix Huit in the core rule book and I could not figure out what that was. And then finally, literally a week ago, I was reading the Encyclopedia Blade Runner (app) and saw the entry for Dix Huit. It’s a reference to a security code access level for the Tyrell Corp. that only appears in a screenplay version (dated 2/23/1981) that never even made it into the movies. So Joe (LeFavi, the writer of the Blade Runner TTRPG) and your team there certainly did their homework which I really appreciate it.

TH: That’s absolutely right. I think that’s usually what we tried to do and when presenting a setting like that, we do a lot of research and we do dig deep and look at not just the obvious sources, but also the more obscure sources. There are many, many things that we were inspired by for this game, but then we don’t necessarily put everything into it, but if you have that kind of body of facts and lore to pull from I think even if you don’t put everything into the final game, you get a sense that it’s there and it gives a feeling of a more real living world and that’s really what we tried to do.

The core rule book is well-made, with fantastic artwork.

The AP: Well that’s a good segue now to my next question. So we’ve talked about the feel. Philosophy and psychology are such an important part of Blade Runner, right? Thinking about those intellectual aspects of the franchise, how did you think about those aspects as you put the game together? It’s not just “shoot, shoot, bang, bang.” There’s that real kind of “inside-the-head” element to Blade Runner.

TH: Yeah, that I think was one of the major challenges when designing the game, to get that into the game and get it right and get it to work because that’s not super easy in an RPG. We do all kinds of roleplaying games and some of them are your typical ‘going into a dungeon and kill some monsters or steal the treasure.’ That can be a lot of fun, but that’s not enough for Blade Runner.

It has a lot more going on and that needs to be reflected in the game. So that was certainly a big part of the challenge. The way we approached it was to focus a lot on the characters. And so we have the key memory and the key relationship aspects and the downtime aspect of the rules. Those things tie together, indeed are built to, and also the concept of promotion points and humanity points are built to push players into that space to ask these kinds of questions and make that part of the gaming experience. So that was how we approached it.

A detailed map of LA is included to help ground your adventures.

The AP: Blade Runner is famously a neo- or future-noir. Did you look at any classic noir films from the 40s for inspiration? I know Sweden (home of Free League), and more broadly, the Scandinavian countries also have a rich noir tradition. Was any of that an influence for the game?

TH: I think so, indirectly. It’s a great question for Joe, but I didn’t personally watch lots and lots of old films while designing the game, but I have seen many of them throughout the years before and I love those films and so definitely they are an influence, of course, on the Blade Runner franchise as a whole but also on this game. But I didn’t personally make any specific research for the game to do that. I think it’s just part of our background and just kind of things that we like, so in that sense, definitely.

Illustrations like this, by Martin Grip, really capture the Blade Runner mood while still being unique to the game.

The AP: Okay. I want to talk now about the broader Blade Runner, IP, the intellectual property. It’s had such a strange and kind of circuitous life. Are there any behind-the-scenes stories that you can share that speak to that kind of unusual and sometimes difficult birthing process for a Blade Runner product? Was there anything in terms of maybe working with Alcon (Entertainment, owners of the Blade Runner IP) or if you work with Electric Shepherd (Productions, legal guardians of PKD’s work) but in general, what was the behind-the-scenes process to bring something like this type of a game to life?

TH: Yeah, our partner for this one is Alcon, that’s our partner for the license. We do the Alien game another licensed game as well. They work pretty much in the same general way. And that means we design the game, we pitch what we want to do and we present the finished texts. And then we have a number of stages that we present what we want to do to them and they give us feedback, and then there’s the back and forth, and hopefully, it gets approved and then printed and that’s kind of how it worked this time around as well. We definitely got feedback on things from Alcon as they are the custodians of the franchise. And that’s what we all want. We want to present a unified world aligned with the two films of course, but there are also other publications being done, there are comics by Titan that are coming out, there was the Black Lotus anime, and there have been some video games as well, both old ones and more recently.

So obviously we want to present a world that makes sense and continues and builds a coherent whole. That’s the idea. There was no particular behind-the-scenes stuff, it was fairly smooth. I can’t really think of anything strange or interesting enough to bring up as a story here.

Love the attention to detail. The newspaper he’s reading follows the layout of the in-game paper. The illuminated umbrella, as from the movie, the noir clothing, the feeling of a rain-drenched street.

The AP: Well, my experience has been when there are problems on the back end, they usually manifest in the final product. I think the fact that your game is so terrific and looks really good and is just smooth, speaks to the fact that there probably weren’t big problems on the back end, nothing where maybe they wanted you to make big changes or something like that. So it makes sense that it was probably fairly smooth.

You mentioned Titan books a minute ago. They of course also do the Alien novels. And a recent one, Alien: Colony War, had a special supplement for the Free League game, which I thought was really interesting. Is there any potential for something like that with the Blade Runner franchise?

The game’s copy, written by Joe LeFavi, does a nice job of setting the scene and capturing the tone. Lot’s of nice little eater eggs for hard-core fans as well.

TH: We’re certainly open to it. It’s not in the works at the moment. It’s not something that we’re doing right now. But we have a good relationship with Titan. We’ve talked to them over Alien. We have been working with them a lot, and I see no reason we couldn’t do the same for Blade Runner. It hasn’t happened yet, but we’d definitely be open to that.

The AP: Yeah, it’s so interesting to me, that the Alien franchise — and obviously there are parallels and places for comparison between the Blade Runner and Alien franchises — Alien has something like 30 novels that have come out over the years. In comparison, the Blade Runner franchise just has those three K.W. Jeter books, which are really more Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep sequels or it’s a combination of the two (DADoES and Blade Runner) but it seems like there’s plenty of room, there’s an opportunity if Alcon or Electric Shepherd want to go in that direction.

The Kickstarter was quite successful, and people have been excited to receive the hard copies of the game. This is something you touched on a few moments ago: Is it likely we’ll see additional game content for the Blade Runner RPG in the near future? Can you tell us a little bit about what we might hopefully see or expect down the road?

Deckard’s iconic blaster.

TH: Yeah, I think there are two paths here, and the main one, the immediate one, is that we want to do more police files and tie them together into a larger, longer narrative, a longer campaign. That’s already in the works. The next case file is being worked on. It’s early days, but it’s starting out. That should take a bit of time to finish writing it. There’s also the art layout, and then printing, and so on, but definitely, throughout this year, there should be new things coming. It’ll be a few months before we’ll have anything concrete to announce but hopefully, not in the too-distant future.

So that’s one path and then the other one is that we look at other ways to expand the game. I personally don’t think it’s a weakness, but the game is very focused. I think that was by design and something we wanted to do. To focus on being a Blade Runner or being a small team of Blade Runners.

There’s also the idea that playing different types of characters [ed: Beyond Blade Runners] doing other things would be cool. The obvious one for us is to turn the tables and allow players perhaps to be Replicants as part of the Replicant Underground. That’s an idea, nothing confirmed or anything like that, it’s just an idea. That’s something we’d like to explore and see if we can do that; it would be a separate branch so to speak from the case file expansions, which are more a continuation of the format of the core rule book.

Another great piece by Martin Grip. Check out Elden Tyrell in the top right corner.

The AP: Well, that sounds exciting. That’s good stuff. Okay, so final question here. And again, I’m very interested in Blade Runner, and I touched earlier upon the Alien franchise and Blade Runner and you guys work with both of those. The original films, Alien and Blade Runner are so iconic, and are so revered, and are held up as really, the top in their genres. And I’m wondering, what sort of responsibility or burden or obligation did you and the team feel? Like, “hey, we really have to get this right,” because the expectation of fans is, in their mind, they’re thinking about the Alien movie, they’re thinking about the Blade Runner movie, and that’s where the bar is set. How do you and the teams you work with think about that? And how does it affect you as you build the games?

TH: Yeah, it’s definitely a big thing and a big responsibility when we put together something like this. I think mostly it’s a positive right? I mean, because it’s also a huge opportunity to dive into the world — we feel the same way about these franchises as these fans do, we are them. So it’s this feeling, this pure joy, but then there’s also the responsibility for sure. And so that’s one reason and one strong drive to make these games as best as we possibly can be. I mean to put our hearts into it, and that’s, that’s one of the reasons because we have a bit of a principle. When we take on a lighter game — we have done several of these — then we do Blade Runner, and then we also have The One Ring based on The Lord of the Rings, we only do licensed games on franchises that we feel really strongly about ourselves. Even if a franchise were to come along that would make sense for some other reason but none of the core team are passionate super fans then we won’t do it because I don’t think it would be a good game.

So I think that that makes it easier also because we want this game to be good not just for the company and put out a good product but also because Blade Runner is one of my absolute favorite films of all time. And if I worked on a Blade Runner role-playing game that wasn’t good, that would be unacceptable to me personally. I think that that also kind of pushes us into making hopefully good games.

The more I see Martin Grip’s work, the more I’m impressed with it.

The AP: We’ll wrap it up here but I think something that a lot of people forget is nobody sets out to make a bad movie or write a bad book; and forget quality, just to make any game, just to make any movie is really, really hard. And to do any of those things at a high level, everything’s got to go right. So I appreciate the fact that you guys were able to do it right, you were able to put something out, and then on top of that for it to look and feel so good. I think that’s really a great accomplishment. I think you have a really good foundation, and as you say there’s room for growth and for it to go in different directions. I’m really excited to see where this game franchise goes over the next couple of years. I know I’ll be excited to pick up those new materials when they are available.

Tomas again, I really appreciate your time.

Hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tomas. If so, you’ll probably also be interested in my deep-dive look at the Blade Runner IP.

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Rick Liebling
The Adjacent Possible

Passed the Voight-Kampff test. Dix Huit Clearance. Ex-Weyland-Yutani & Tyrell Corp exec. Read my writing on Science Fiction https://medium.com/adjacent-possible