Blade Runner tabletop RPG will ask players to grapple with their own humanity

polygon.com:

A crowdfunding campaign for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, one of Polygon’s most highly anticipated tabletop RPGs of 2022, launches Tuesday. Developed by award-winning publisher Free League in collaboration with Alcon Entertainment and Genuine Entertainment, it sends players into the streets of Los Angeles in the year 2037 as members of the LAPD’s Rep-Detect Unit — better known as Blade Runners. We spoke with lead designer and Free League co-founder Tomas Härenstam to learn more.

“A lot of the surface gameplay is investigation,” said Härenstam. “Players will be going to places, talking to people, collecting evidence. A big source of inspiration was Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, and other classic mystery-solving games.”

Of course, every good Blade Runner story needs its protagonists to grapple with existential questions between cases.

“It’s a point that the source material makes,” said Härenstam, “that your humanity isn’t decided by whether you’re human or replicant. It’s not defined by your origin. It’s in your actions and what you choose to do, and that’s really the path that we’ve followed in designing the game.” That path is clear in the process of character creation, which asks players to generate a Key Memory and define a Key Relationship, both of which shape how their character engages with the world. Finding ways to interact grapple with these Key elements during sessions will allow players to earn Humanity points, which can be spent to gain skill levels.

Between morally ambiguous casework, players will spend a lot of their in-game time performing Down Time activities. These narrative interludes will allow characters to go their separate ways and explore their lives outside of the LAPD. “It gives us