Written by Peter Weilnböck
Published on: 2023-06-25
The third and last session of playing the Blade Runner beginner box. The Blade Runners glimpse behind the scenes of what was going on and why.
Since some of them were still quite banged up from the fight in the afternoon, it was decided that they split up once again.
While Jake, Marilyn and Sol were resting and getting medical attention, Jay and Willem should continue with the investigation. And since they had their suspicions about the assailants (to be precise: that they are from the replicant underground), they wanted to be at full strength when following the leads that pointed in that direction. Therefore they followed another, almost forgotten lead: The picture from Leah’s apartment.
Jay and Willem entered the small and fully stuffed Pawn Shop, where they were greeted by Doc Badger himself.
First Doc Badger was reluctant to reveal anything about his customers, and Willem’s threads did not persuade him. However Jay’s more gentle and understanding approach led him to soften up and to reveal that he remembered Leah coming by a few weeks earlier. She had wanted to review her memory implant using a Stelline scan - something for which he happened to have the equipment. And after reviewing the memories, she wanted a hardcopy of one of the memory slices - the picture of the girl that the Runners had found in her apartment. He did not see the memories himself, so there was nothing else that he could tell the investigators.
Knowing about the trouble Leah went through to get the picture, and in general starting to think that the memory was important, they decided that Jake, Marilyn and Sol should visit the place where they thought of having the best chance of finding out more about those memories - Lilith Memory Labs. They had seen the advertisement in the papers and thought it worth a shot. In the mean time Jay and Willem should get some rest so that all of them could go after the replicant underground the next morning.
They arrived in the middle of the night, but still were immediately buzzed in by the receptionist Terry. After flashing their badges, he told them that Lilith Tyrell herself could be found in the main lab and pointed them in the right direction.
They walked in on a scene of children playing and drawing something on the floor. Before they got frustrated with Terry, that he had pointed them at the wrong place, the scene flickered and fell apart and a woman stepped out of the shadows. Lilith Tyrell. Once again they explained that they were here on police business, investigating a N-9 replicant who went AWOL.
Ms. Tyrell confirmed that she had designed the memory from which the picture came from, but insisted that it should have worked perfectly fine for the replicant she designed it for. The Runners did not give up and insisted on learning more about that specific memory, while Tyrell remained evasive and talked about trade secrets. Before the situation could escalate, they heard a shot from the entrance.
Jake immediately called Jay and Novak to skip the rest and get down to the Lab.
Leah seemed unstable, but not necessarily aggressive. She pleaded that the Runners should let her kill Lilith Tyrell, and explained that she was sorry for what had happened to Sandor. Jake proofed to be surprisingly gentle and sensitive when he needed to be and continued to calmly ask her questions and to deescalate the situation.
With his careful probing he found out that she had killed Sandor because he would have killed Styles - and she could not have let that happen. With some reluctance she slowly revealed that Styles was helping her to leave the LAPD and to get off planet. She also explained that she did not think it possible that Styles was responsible for the strike team that had attacked the Investigators. During the questioning Jake slowly took Leah to the entrance area while Marilyn and Sol kept Lilith and Sarah Tyrell save at the main Lab. Jake made Leah help him give first aid to Terry and this helped build a bridge of reason and trust.
Leah pleaded again that they should let her kill Tyrell. As reason why she told them that Tyrell should show them her memory, then they would certainly understand.
Jake kept Leah around the entrance while Marylin and Sol convinced Tyrell to show them the memory. And what they saw made them question the sanity and motives their host and furthered their understanding of Leahs desires. It took them a bit to understand that Leah did understand that her daughter - Diane - in the memory was not real, never had been, and she therefore did not truly blame Lilith Tyrell for her death. But she did blame her for the pain of feeling the loss. In the mean time Jay and Willem showed up.
They continued the questioning of Tyrell and her motives, who explained to them that the trauma only was there to keep the tools in line. Nobody wanted a blaster that disobeyed, and to her replicants were nothing more than more complicated versions of that. The Investigators got more upset with Tyrell, but before they could do anything rash Willem heard sounds from outside - a Spinner was getting close fast. He and Jay sprinted out of the entrance area while Jake and Leah took cover behind the robust receptionists counter.
Shortly after everyone had taken cover a tactical missile blasted open the entrance doors.
The Blade Runners went into defensive positions waiting for the members of the strike team to enter the building, so that they could take them into a cross-fire.
Leah joined their defensive formation, while Marilyn took the two Tyrells further back to keep them safe.
The fight was once again rather brutal, with the Runners proofing their marksmanship by rather quickly landing a few crippling critical hits, including a few headshots.
Willem retreated further back into the right wing of the building. Leah, while shooting at the attackers (and hitting them, proofing that she was not in league with them), also moved back - towards the Tyrells. Marylin got suspicious and retreated further, up the stairs into the second floor. There she laid waiting, ready to shoot anyone that comes up, be it a member of the strike team or Leah.
In the meantime it got clearer that the Investigators had the upper hand, taking out more and more members of the strike team. Willem retreated out the side entrance, while the strike team decided to retreat, killing their fallen comrades on the way out.
In an heroic effort to find out more about their assailants, Willem quickly snuck up to the getaway spinner and managed to remain unseen by the driver and the retreating fighters. It helped that the Runners kept shooting at them, even taking out another one, so that only one managed to get into the spinner. Willem affixed his KIA to the chassis before hiding again, just before they took off - sending another ballistic missile into the entrance area as a fare well present. Not only wounding the defenders but also making sure that the bodies they left behind did not yield any forensic value.
When the Runners regrouped, they found out that Leah was missing. Apparently she had escaped via another side entrance instead of going after Tyrell.
Leah was gone, and by the time the Investigators found out where she went, she was already off world, out of their reach. Not that they minded to much, after what they had learned. The strike team retreated to Wallace Corp. While they now had some hard evidence against them, they did not put anything in official writing, but instead asked Inspector Holden how to handle it. He told them to do nothing, and that he will take care of it. A short time later Willem got his KIA back - apparently Quell had brought it to Holden and blatantly told him that they had found it in one of their vehicles and that the Blade Runners should be more careful with their equipment to not loose it again.
They followed up with Styles and found out that the Aurelian was a hub for the replicant underworld - helping them hide and flee. They did not charge them, but instead offered their help, in case they required it in the future. In exchange they asked that they could send some replicants to the underground on occations where they prefered not to retire them.
With the disappearance of Leah off world, the case was now considered closed. Not the most glamorous ending, but one that they could live with. Nothing to further their career, but something that let them keep their humanity. And that they were able to save Lilith and Sarah Tyrell was at least something to be proud about.
This concludes the case file. Overall, as I already had mentioned, the material provided by Free League was brilliant. I never before worked with this amount of hand outs and I think the players enjoyed it as well.
That the booklet itself fell apart is a bit unfortunate, but for now I just think that this was a bad batch and not hold it too much against them.
The rules… well, overall they seemed rather intuitve to me and facilitate a fluid game. The only real trouble we had was when the strike team attacked the memory lab. We did not really found any good option in the rules to allow the players to hold their fire and cover the entrance until the strike team came in.
Even though the fight officially already had started, we improvised based on the ambush rules for that, but somehow it feels like this should be a rather basic action in a cyberpunk setting, and I am a bit disappointed did it was not clearly covered. Other than that: light and deadly.
The Players continued to had a lot of luck with the dice, and I am not one for fudging them to make it more exciting. So the threat from the strike team probably felt a bit less than it should have - the attackers where actually better combatants on average than the PC. At least on paper…
Still, we had fun and decided to keep the characters - so that we can continue to play once the next case file in the series comes out.
I do not want to design adventures for this system myself, however. It seems to live with the wealth of hand outs and materials, and it would take too much time for me to prepare something that can convey at least a similar level of immersion.