The Electric State RPG is the latest collaboration between artist and author Simon Stålenhag and Free League Publishing. When it comes to high-concept sci-fi, few contemporary artists can craft a world quite like Stålenhag. Likewise, when it comes to cinematic, character-driven tabletop role-playing games, few publishers are as proficient as Free League. It’s no surprise that when the two collaborate—as they did with Tales from the Loop and its sequel, Things from the Flood—the resulting RPGs become instant classics.
For The Electric State RPG, Free League has modified its Year Zero Engine (YZE) to enhance immersion in the dystopian world of Pacifica, the setting of Stålenhag’s award-winning graphic novel The Electric State. The result is yet another classic and arguably the most effective and engaging RPG I’ve played in years.
The Electric State graphic novel tells the story of a young woman travelling across the country of Pacifica to reunite with her estranged brother. Her journey unfolds in an alternate-history, retro-futuristic vision of late 1990s California that is both familiar and surreal. In this timeline, insidious technologies and rampant consumerism have plunged America into a second civil war. In the war’s aftermath, California was reformed into the country of Pacifica.
Pacifica bears the scars of both the war and a culture of excess. Ruined gunships and colossal battle drones litter the landscape, while piles of discarded consumer technology and refuse line the streets. To escape the realities of their crumbling society and the traumas of war, much of the population has retreated into the internet. They use helmets called Neurocasters to live parallel lives in digital worlds known as neuroscapes—or collectively, The Electric State.
The story is told through a series of short prose pieces arranged like a journal, but it is felt through Simon Stålenhag’s signature style of atmospheric, retro-futurist paintings. It’s a format that Free League has repurposed to great effect, shaping both the layout of The Electric State RPG rulebook and the structure of its included premade campaign.
The Electric State RPG puts players in the role of “Travelers,” a group of individuals who, for their own reasons, come together to embark on an introspective road trip across Pacifica. The journey is broken into stops, each a small, self-contained story that unfolds like scenes in a film. Each stop begins with a blocker that forces the Travelers out of the car, a situation they must navigate, and a looming threat that must be overcome or avoided.
“There’s no shortage of cultists or brigands to battle in this world, but a stop doesn’t always involve physical danger.”
There’s no shortage of cultists or brigands to battle in this world, but a stop doesn’t always involve physical danger. Game masters have ample room to incorporate murder mysteries, moral dilemmas, or interdimensional puzzles. A trip into a neuroscape to outwit a malevolent AI or diving into the head of a malfunctioning pizza delivery drone can be just as perilous as facing challenges in Pacifica’s physical world. Threats can be personal, physical, manipulative, environmental—or something called past sins.
Past sins are a particularly engaging and creative threat to weave into a story. Maybe one of the Travelers robbed what seemed like a helpless drifter back in Bakersfield, only to meet him again in Stockton—this time, he’s backed by his motorcycle gang. Or perhaps a robotic drone has become romantically obsessed with the party’s pristine 1995 Honda Accord and has been stalking it for days.
From the details of a location to the nature of the threat, every aspect of a stop can be crafted by hand or determined using procedural generation charts. It’s not just stops that can be rolled for—nearly every element of the game can be created by rolling D6s. The Year Zero Engine has never been a difficult system to use, but here, it has been streamlined to be nearly frictionless. Character sheets, dice pools, and skills have all been simplified to ensure that players remain immersed in Pacifica and focused on the story.
Travelers solve their problems with skill checks, which challenge a character’s strength, agility, wits, or empathy. When a check is required, a player rolls a number of D6s equal to their skill level in the relevant attribute. The more sixes rolled, the more successful the check. If no sixes appear, the check fails. A failed check can be pushed—meaning it can be rolled again, but at a cost.
There is very little math or stat tracking required on this road trip. To stay in the game, Travelers must monitor their health, hope, tension, and bliss. If a character takes too many baseball bats to the face, they will predictably become physically incapacitated. But if another character witnesses that horror, they may lose hope and suffer a mental breakdown.
Similarly, failed checks while using a neurocaster grant the traveler a bliss point. If their bliss and hope levels ever match, that traveller becomes hopelessly addicted to their device. Recovering from any of these scenarios requires a teammate to come to their rescue and almost certainly leaves a lingering injury on the traveller’s body or mind.
“In short: The Electric State RPG is fantastic.”
The book also includes a system for solo adventures, where players take on the roles of both game master and player. It relies on dice rolls and drawing from a deck of playing cards to randomly build an adventure. It’s a lonely experience but one that fits the setting exceptionally well.
Overall, it’s an incredibly efficient game, but it also exists within an exceptionally beautiful book. The layout employs a scrapbook-like design, packed with full-page copies of Simon Stålenhag’s digital paintings. The stats and charts are easy to find and formatted in dense blocks that make scanning for information effortless. If judged by its cover alone, this book is too beautiful to pack away. I had to reorganize my bookshelf to ensure The Electric State RPG had space to sit sideways, like a picture framed by the spines of lesser books.
In short: The Electric State RPG is fantastic. It’s not only one of the best adaptations of a setting that I’ve seen–it’s also one of the easiest tabletop games to set up, teach, and run. Fitting for a game about road trips, the simplified Year Zero Engine is perfectly balanced for collaborative storytelling and serves as the ideal vehicle for exploring Pacifica.
