by RockyMountainNavy, 6 November 2024
Free League Publishing is one of the most prolific publishers of roleplaying games (RPGs) of today. One element of their success is taking popular intellectual property (IP) titles like ALIEN or Blade Runner and combining them with a game engine published under the Free Tabletop License (FTL). A second element of the success of Free League publishing is to take the FTL and find ways to tailor the game engine to be evocative of the chosen IP. Free Leagues’s latest major RPG release, The Electric State Roleplaying Game, mixes both elements taking the incredible artwork of Simon Stålenhag combined with the FTL to build a world for journeys on your tabletop.
From electrifying book…
In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA, where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society in decline. As their car nears the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to unravel at an ever-faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in. (Free League Press Release)
The Electric State art book was published by Stålenhag in 2017. It compliments (but is not in the same world setting) the artist’s other books Tales from the Loop and Tales from the Flood, both of which Free League Publishing released RPG games for. Amazon Prime in 2020 turned Tales from the Loop into a short-lived TV series.
A NPR review of The Electric State from 2018 provides some insight into the art book:
Stålenhag’s art has always been jarring, with its combination of dull suburban tract houses, Brutalist apartment blocks, boxy economy cars and the sleek lines of pure sci-fi machinery. He’s always done decay well, and abandonment. He’s always had a hacker’s eye for kludging together old technology and new amid a rat’s nest of cables and blinky lights. He’s got a knack for the slick sheen of biopunk grossness — all tendrils and weird fluids — and the consequent juxtaposition of humans and the machines they have made.
But State is a departure in that here — in his America, in his version of our particular sick and sweaty dream of the future — the man and the machine are one. The bodies — lost to the deathless convergence of minds inside the beaked “neurocaster” headsets his Sentre junkies wear — are emaciated and skeletal, kept alive by IV drip, then by will, then by nothing but the machine. The giant robots that litter the landscape are cartoony and childish. Or made for war. Or built from scrap and spare parts — shrouded in dangling cables and covered in fingers, like Lovecraftian monsters stalking strip malls and highway rest stops. (“Futuristic Dreams Turn To Nightmare In ‘Electric State’”, NPR.org)
…to shocking RPG
The Electric State is coming.
Players will embark on a journey of exploration and relations, conflict between groups and individuals found on the road, and they will discover what they are willing to do when they’re stuck halfway to their goal and bad turns to worse. (Free League Press Release)
The Electric State Roleplaying Game is set in the same world as Stålenhag’s The Electric State art book. Set in the same world but not the same story. The Electric State Roleplaying Game leans heavily into a theme behind the art book—a journey. As the introduction tells us:
The game is not about the goal but the journey – what the characters experience and how it changes them. This is a game of exploration, but one in which not only physical topography is crossed but also the interiority of the self. Each of you answer this: what wold I do as the world collapses around me? (The Electric State RPG, p. 8)
Free League Publishing is not afraid to publish games that go to dark places of the human spirit. They freely go there, but with warnings:
The Electric State RPG takes place in a dark world with many situations that raise issues related to personal morality. That said, this is still a game, and no players should be forced to deal with topics they find distressing in real life, or that make them feel unsafe at the table. (The Electric State RPG, p. 9)
The Electric State RPG will also be a nostalgic trip for some players:
1990s Nostalgia
This game takes place in a world where the ‘90s brought out a strange and horrible apocalypse along with pop culture anchors we remember: A part of playing the game is digging down in nostalgia, into the pop culture kitsch and listening to Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Robyn, and NIN. Imagine a road trip in an old Dodge Caravan, and where Travelers sit in the back seat drinking Jolt and playing punch-Bug as every VW drives by. (The Electric State RPG, p. 10)
FTL power
The player characters in The Electric State RPG are Travelers. Each Traveler is defined by four Attributes (Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy). Travelers also have ratings in Health and Hope. Talents are special skills, traits, or abilities they Travelers possess. Using an Archetype-driven character generation system, players can create their characters in a relatively short amount of time. This part of character generation should be very familiar to those who are experienced in other Free League Publishing RPG titles.
Hope plays a very important role in The Electric State RPG. Hope is reduced by pushing (rerolling) rolls and traumatic events. When (not if, but when) Hope is reduced to zero, the Traveler has a Breakdown and might suffer mental trauma.
When creating their Traveler in The Electric State RPG, players must also give their character a Dream, a Flaw, a favorite pop song, and a name. These character aspects drive play of The Electric State RPG towards a more narrativist style of play. The narrative style of play is also driven by another game mechanism called Tension:
Tension lies at the heart of any narrative. Think of any book or film or TV show you like, and you’ll realize what moves a narrative is tension, leading to conflict, between the characters. This game is no different – unlike some RPGs where the story is best when the characters get along.
The Travelers have relationships to each other, whether they just met or know each other well. These relationships will change due to what happens along the way and what you learn about each other an your Flaws. To each of the other Travelers you have a Tension score ranging from 0 to 2.
———
Effects of Tension
Tension makes you try harder when you are in conflict with the other Travelers. In any opposed rolls (page 54) against another Traveler, no matter what the roll is for, you get a number of bonus die equal to your Tension rating. You can also regain lost hope by reducing Tension (below).” (The Electric State RPG, p. 64)
The major plot premise in The Electric State RPG that players/Travelers have to deal with is Neuronics:
The Neuronic breakthrough came when scientists finally mapped the human mind. Like the mind, the neuronic space is a web of neurons that signals to all other connected neurons, either relaying on or off. But as billions of neurons are connected, the level of complexity grows unfathomable. However, while territory has been mapped, few have charted its actual contents.
Since the start in the ‘60s, the application of the field became more advanced and grew both in size and scale. Now the infrastructure – such as the neurographic towers that relay signals, and the neurospheres, where the mind of thousands of people dwell in crafted neuroscapes – are everywhere, connected by massive black wires maintained by robots who ceaselessly travel the landscape to find and fix glitches and repair severed connections. The red lights of the neurographic towers glow in the night like eyes watching all. (The Electric State RPG, p. 31)
Travelers in The Electric State RPG who use neurcasters risk accumulating Bliss. If a Traveler’s Bliss score ever exceeds Hope, they are fully lost in the Electric State.
Lone traveler
Like most roleplaying games, The Electric State RPG is designed for a small party of Travelers. This is unlike the story in the art book which focuses on a single individual and their accompanying toy robot. “Chapter Eight – The Lone Traveler” is a set of rules for playing the game solo. The Lone Traveler still calls for running a small group; the player will take turns featuring a “main character” as the adventure unfolds. The core game engine remains the same but a deck of cards is used generate input to the adventure or trigger Countdown events, Conversations, or other events.
Electric Lite
Players that are familiar with The Electric State art book will recognize that the more…disturbing elements of the world are not directly mentioned in The Electric State RPG. It is unclear at this point if the absence of those story elements is intentional or not; perhaps Free League is holding those back for development into future adventures or sourcebooks. It is also possible that Free League adopted a more moderate take on Stålenhag’s The Electric State art book because those elements are too disturbing to deal with in an RPG setting. That said, The Electric State RPG draws heavily from the art book for its illustrations; indeed, the RPG actually adds some artwork that was not previously published.
Serial state
It is also important to note that The Electric State RPG is not a tie-in to the upcoming Netflix TV Series The Electric State. From the lone trailer released, the Netflix series looks to use the IP in the same manner The Electric State RPG does; user of the setting but taking the story in a somewhat different direction.
Dark electric
If you are a fan of the story found in The Electric State art book, the RPG version may disappoint. If you are knowledgeable of the art book or a potential player without knowledge of that book and want to use a narrativist-RPG to explore Stålenhag’s world-building more deeply without the darkest elements of the original story then The Electric State RPG will likely be interesting for you. Learning The Electric State RPG, built on the proven Free Tabletop License, will be easy and not difficult to use to embark on an electrifying journey of hope and tension. Just avod the bliss….
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