When I talked to Jason Cordova about his crowdfunding campaign for Public Access, he talked about the idea of specificity in tabletop roleplaying games in a way that really stuck with me. Games are very often pitched by the wide variety of adventures they can be used to tell, but there’s something about the focus of a very narrow RPG that’s extremely fun to explore. It allows you to go in-depth on the concept in a system that’s fine-tuned for that exact experience.
Three years ago, I reviewed the Blade Runner RPG and praised it for that exact specificity, but was concerned about the idea of maintaining a campaign where you are essentially playing the evil system of power oppressing Replicants. The recently released Replicant Rebellion supplement for the game flips the script on the setup, casting the players as freedom fighters pushing back at the system of repression. It’s an interesting exercise in reframing the game’s laser-focused mechanics to give you a fresh perspective on such an iconic world.
After a brief history lesson about the Blade Runner timeline, you’re introduced to the Replicant Underground, a decentralized network of crews that all work for the same cause. It’s a drastic change from playing as a Blade Runner, allowing you to finally fight the injustice that keeps the replicants down.
Instead of reporting to the police force like in the base game, as a member of the underground you’ll report to a handler who gives you your mission briefings that come from the unseen leadership.
From Blade Runner to Rebel Operative
What’s cool about the player sections of the book that explain your role in the rebellion is that it’s written in a voice that is meant to lightly mimic recruitment information, speaking to you, the player, as though you’re being inducted into the group through this rulebook. Aside from a few pages that are inspired by zine culture, it’s still laid out in pretty standard rulebook fashion that matches the base game, but it’s a nice touch that sells the fantasy a bit more.
Given that you’re using different archetypes as members of an underground resistance than you would as an investigator, Replicant Rebellion contains a handful of new character classes for you to choose from. When you’re creating your character, you’re given the option of being either one of two models of replicant or a human, and that choice will be important in coloring your character.
Classes in Year Zero-based games have always felt a little less consequential to me, but there’s a decent variety here to give you something to work off of when you start thinking about who you want to be.
The best part about character creation in this new version of Blade Runner is that, as a distributed network of agents, you all have other lives that you’re living before you’re activated by the underground. Not only do these provide great flavor for the action, as it’s really fun to play out the scene where you’re going about your regular life and get the coded message to report for duty, but there are also mechanical repercussions for your choice as well. This supplement still uses the base game’s concept of tracking time through shifts, carefully regulating the way you spend your time each day, and in order to keep your cover, you need to make sure you spend at least one shift a day doing business as usual.
Building a Life in the Shadows
If you’re lax on your responsibilities, the noose starts to tighten as you get closer to being identified as a member of the rebellion. Time management is one of my favorite mechanics that this game uses, so adding this extremely character-focused wrinkle to the game just adds that much more texture. A critical moment where you have to decide between an urgent objective and keeping up with your cover is rife for drama, giving GMs a perfect way to put the screws to their players.
Maintaining your normal life will give you Cover Points, while helping the rebellion will give you Rebel points. These are the two currencies that allow you to improve your character, giving you the ability to purchase new specialties or improve your skills, respectively. I love it when level-up mechanics can come from different activities in this way, as forcing you to make a narrative decision for mechanical benefit creates a nice tension in the choices you make as you evolve both your character and the overarching narrative.
Since your resistance group is technically a criminal organization in the eyes of the law, things aren’t going to be easy for you as mission preparations get underway. Each day has four shifts, and you can visit one location per shift, but movement between places can require rolls that can have dire consequences. There’s also a table of encounters that the GM can pull from to complicate things for players, whether that’s someone from their cover life showing up or a Blade Runner walking into the scene.
Doing illegal activities in public can raise your Heat, which will slowly ratchet up the danger for players as it climbs as a consequence of your actions. Increases in Heat can cause various types of rolls to be given disadvantage, making any move you make more challenging. Certain areas will count as home turf, where Heat is considered to be one level lower, while others are hot zones that act as one higher, making you think carefully about every step you make during your operations.
A Campaign Built Around High Stakes Operations
Much like the base game, a lot of the action will be talking to people or staking out locations, but inevitably things are likely to get violent. In order to keep that fresh, there are a couple of new weapons that this new book adds, along with updates to the rules for autofire weapons. It’s not the most substantial part of the book, but it’s there if you need something more unique and want to have a stat block prepared for it.
The real draw of the book is the GM section, which gives you a wealth of resources to use Replicant Rebellion’s new structure and focus. With how much you’ll be pushing your contacts to help set up your missions, the book thankfully lays out a web of NPCs that you can reach out to, each with their own background and use case.
My favorite was the explosives expert named Gimmick whose expertise is simply listed as “watching the world burn.” There’s just enough information about each of them that it’s easy to slip into the character after reading their background, making it easy for GMs to populate the game with compelling personalities that your players will latch on to.
Not only is there good advice for creating your own adventures, but there’s also a series of five prewritten operations that build into a campaign for you to run your players through. These are the real meat of the book, taking up about a third of the page count. While it includes standard prep elements like maps and NPCs associated with the mission, the coolest thing about these is the timelines provided, giving each mission a ticking clock that the GM can use to put pressure on the players.
Why Replicant Rebellion Improves on the Base Game
As I mentioned, the Blade Runner RPG has a shift system used to keep track of time, and each mission has a series of events that happen at specific shifts if the players don’t take action to prevent them. They’re all pretty drastic turning points for the narratives they are trying to tell, giving you a natural pacing mechanism to keep the action moving towards its thrilling climax.
While there is a lot of detail that’s provided for the setup of the mission, it’s the type of setup that leaves a lot of room for the players to come up with their own plans. There are plot points for the players to experience and discover, but the book doesn’t have one specific solution that the players are required to use to solve the operation’s problems. They almost feel like Hitman missions, with a playground of characters and locations that operate on their own logic, waiting for the players to figure out the best place to jam a wrench in the machinery to bring it all crashing down in their favor.
The five missions provide a decent variety of mission types, not only keeping things fresh for players but demonstrating to GMs the kinds of new operations they can plan for themselves.
As much as I love the neo-noir detective vibe of the base game, I think Replicant Rebellion reworks the system to tell the type of adventures I find more compelling to both run and play. Cyberpunk games seem built for stories of fighting back against systems of power, and the tense structure of Blade Runner’s ruleset allows you to easily create adventures that feel cinematically-paced with daring plans and thrilling twists.
Even though you’re fighting for the right side this time, there’s still plenty of morally compromising decisions for your characters to make, bringing the best parts of Blade Runner stories to the forefront. It’s an impressive example of recontextualizing a very specific game that improves upon the original, making for a great book that complements, but doesn’t replace, the base game.
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