The work of Simon Stålenhag is inspirational in the true sense of the word. His art captures elements of nostalgia, existential horror, and a fair amount of dystopia, and has not only inspired a variety of derivative works such as Generation Zero but also a fair amount of adaptation. Such is the case with The Electric State Roleplaying Game, an RPG based on the man’s third art book and set in the same dystopian, pre-apocalyptic universe as the upcoming film of the same name.
What Is The Electric State Roleplaying Game?
As well as being an artbook and an upcoming movie, The Electric State is an RPG set in a just pre-apocalypse West coast of the U.S. in an alternative history version of the late 90s. You and your group are on some sort of journey across this dying landscape littered with crumbling sci-fi set pieces and an insane amount of eye-popping corporate branding on monolithic structures. Every icon of the era is present, from the fashion to the architecture, to the choice of colours, even the overindulgence in a highly sanitized corporate pop culture.
One of the bigger differences in terms of history is that in this universe, the VR revolution actually happened. Unfortunately, this VR revolution might have happened a bit too much and has turned a large part of the population into mindless slaves to the euphoria-inducing paradises that have cropped up in the Neuroscape (the metaverse). With your country dying, you’ve banded together to make one less trek for any number of reasons. From life-saving research to wanting to see your home one last time before you die, your reason for journeying is personal and brings us onto your Traveller.
Traveller = Player Character, In Case That’s Not Obvious
Creating your traveller is incredibly important for The Electric State Roleplaying Game, much more so than in many other RPGs. Your Traveller’s reason for taking a journey (a campaign) is deeply connected to the story and who they are, and the RPG is certainly built around these characters, their relationships and shifting dynamics. In some ways, it feels almost necessary to create your traveller along with your GM in a collaborative process, something which is suggested by the book, if not outright encouraged.
A big clue towards the relevance of interpersonal relationships in the game is from the tension system. Each member of a group will have a numerical indicator of the level of tension between them and other members of the party, and you’re required to start out the game with at least a few people at 1 or 2 levels of tension. As the story and characters develop, scenes can change these levels of tension and how characters interact with each other as the story goes forward.
You can also give your characters personal flaws that can be developed, modified or removed by big story events during the journey. It gives everything a much bigger focus on moments that push the story forward and, in those moments, changing the characters as much as the characters can change the story. It helps to facilitate role-playing, and it makes The Electric State one of the best games for encouraging role-playing in a group of newer gamers who might not be otherwise comfortable with it.
Mechanics and Mechs
When it comes down to making the characters, there are certain elements that should be familiar to anyone who’s played another TTRPG before. You have different Archetypes (Classes), four attributes (Strength, Agility, Wits & Empathy) and various Talents that define what your character is good at. You also have some stuff that is going to be less familiar, such as having to give your Traveller a favourite 90s song or picking a Dream for your character to follow.
Every character also starts out with a Neurocaster, one of the headsets needed to access virtual reality. However, in the case of the Drone Pilot archetype, you start the game as some mysterious figure somewhere else in the world, using virtual reality to pilot some sort of robot body instead. It’s all very cool and definitely fits into the vibes of the art book.
Robots and drones are huge fixtures in the game world. You can see them in illustrations littering open tracks of the west coast desert, wandering through parking lots with youngsters, or even lying derelict over giant traffic bridges like on the front cover. Combined with the illustrations of 90-foot neon billboards for Burger King blasted on the side of a cylindrical tower in the middle of nowhere, you’ve got a pretty powerful sense of worldbuilding.
Combat and Skill Tests, Oh My
When it comes to that good stuff, rolling dice, The Electric State keeps things simple by relying solely on standard 6-sided dice. For best effect, you should have a couple of different colours available to help differentiate dice from your gear and dice from your stats, but you won’t have to invest in any new polyhedral dice sets (as if you don’t already have a lot of them.) You can elect to invest in some custom dice from Free League to enhance the experience, which includes little sad faces and explosions on the 1 space for each type of dice.
To make a check for taking a challenging action or surviving something harmful, you roll the number of dice indicated by your attribute and any relevant talent or equipment you have. If you get any 6s, you succeed, and any 1s do damage to your character’s Hope stat or damage your equipment, depending on the type of die rolled. Combat works much the same way, but the defending player has the option of taking the attack or fighting back to turn it into an opposed roll where the person with more successes wins the fight. Though, it’s important to note that fighting back costs the defending player a turn.
It’s a great system in terms of both combat and making checks. The game is run on Free League’s Year Zero engine and is a really approachable and easy-to-learn set of mechanics. You can easily get a grasp of what dice you need to roll as well as handle all of your bonuses without needing to fumble through different types of dice or figure out complex modifiers or skill calculations. This is probably also facilitated by the removal of skills entirely, with talents filling that gap to give each archetype different roles and strengths.
Welcome to Pacifica
Another huge factor that makes The Electric State so enjoyable is the setting. There are plenty of games set in a fictionalized version of our normal contemporary universe, but the alternate-history 90s setting of Pacifica offers a vivid glimpse into an intricately re-imagined world. Physically, Pacifica is a country that takes up a lot of the space that the original Western United States used to inhabit. After a dreadful war renders most of the east and middle America completely uninhabitable (by anyone sane), the new state emerges from the ashes, scarred and forever changed by what it’s been through.
Corporate America has been kicked into overdrive, with a single entity monopolizing a large number of businesses and services (entirely unlike today). Corporate branding and iconography are everywhere, from the giant mascot drones that stalk cities, to the millions of giant neon signs and logos that adorn every inch of available space. You’re encouraged to use real, well-known brands and icons from the era, and it really helps to tie in everyone’s personal nostalgia, second-hand or otherwise.
Combined with the fantastic art that is included in the book, plus the already-produced art in Stålenhag’s book, you really get a sense of the world you’re trying to inhabit. It’s a fantastic example of a game that leads with its world-building, allowing the players and GM to actively participate in constructing and shaping the world rather than using a fully formed setting in which you’re passive participants.
Please Drive Carefully
In any given game of The Electric State, there is one character whom you will always have, no matter how many players or what archetypes you’re using: your car. As each campaign is a Journey, you have to have a means of transport in which you can fit every member of your party, and of course, it has to be fitting for the time period.
When you’re creating your party, you also need to make a car or other vehicle. If you’ve got a larger party, it might need to be a van or a minibus, but you can also get away with family sedans or similar five-seat options. Remember, drone pilots can be various sizes, so if you’re lucky, they’ll fit in the glove box.
How much you’ll enjoy this element of the game depends on how much of a gearhead you are, but I would point out that despite the U.S.-based setting, there’s nothing stopping you from importing the ‘89 Toyota Supra of your dreams. Just make sure that whatever car you pick, there’s at least one 90s mixtape on cassette in the player.
Starting Your First Journey
Of course, all of the stuff we’ve talked about only matters if the game is any fun to run, and luckily, The Electric State has a fantastic system in place for running the campaign well. In most cases, it’s down to the DM/GM to keep track of their campaign themselves, which is why there are so many videos and other pieces of advice online that’ll teach you how to run a campaign and keep it all organized.
However, The Electric State has some fantastic ideas about running a campaign that has been included in the mechanics. Namely, the main element that is so useful is the Threat Countdown. This is basically a list of important story moments that you ideally want to have your players experience at any given Step on the Journey. This bullet-point list makes it incredibly easy to track what is happening, even if your players go off-script, and let’s face it, we know they will. Combined with personal goals and flaws for each Traveller, it’s never been this simple to run a campaign before.
Even better, the Threat Countdown is fully explained over the course of the included Journey: “Into the Dust”. This is a relatively short storyline, seeing the players travelling through a few inhabited towns and a rip-off Burning Man Festival to deal with the various issues plaguing the towns. There are a decent number of small encounters included in the throw-in between stops, and with everything else included, this journey ends up being a pretty perfect starter for GMs and players alike.
The Final Word
The Electric State Roleplaying Game is a triumph of tabletop design. Not only does it perfectly encapsulate the vibes of the 90s and of Simon Stålenhag’s book, but it also does it all within a system that has got to be one of the simplest to understand and use. With fantastic art and some awesome ideas about how to run a game and keep it under control without restricting player freedom, this is easily one of the best RPG releases of the year, if not the last decade. It’s going to be a challenge to find a game that’ll top this one in a hurry, and I can’t wait to see what other modules and Journeys that Free League can publish for this thing.
Designer: Nils Hintze, Tomas Härenstam
Publisher: Free League Publishing
R.R.P: 538.00 kr (£38.98/$50.63)
