D&D Campaign Ideas For Blade Runner & Phillip K. Dick Fans
The stories of science fiction novelist Phillip K. Dick have received more mainstream recognition for their screen adaptations than they did as written works during the author’s lifetime - most notably in Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner. Dick’s novels deal with themes of paranoia, drug use, grand-scale conspiracies, artificial realities, and monolithic corporations. They carry motifs of psychics, precognition, simulacra, and, often, the use of Judeo-Christian imagery and concepts, alongside more common trappings of the science fiction genre. Beyond their intrinsic worth as works of fiction, Phillip K. Dick stories can also provide ample inspiration for games of Dungeons & Dragons, allowing for some truly unique campaigns and characters.
Other tabletop RPGs have the stylings of Phillip K. Dick baked into them by design. Paranoia, set in a dystopian, AI-controlled future where the rules differ based on a character’s security clearance, could seemingly be the setting of one of Dick’s stories. KULT, a grim RPG taking place in cities that are illusory prisons for the soul, touches on the same Gnosticism-inspired themes as many of Dick’s novels. Games like Unknown Armies and Mage: The Ascension mirror the works of Dick, where subjective and objective reality bleed into one another.
Dick often revisited the same elements in disconnected stories; the presence of androids or psychic prophets might be central to one novel and serve as window dressing for the setting of another story. A seemingly crucial plot point - like "everyone in the story is dead and the world is a simulated half-life," as featured in Ubik - might not even be the final reveal a Dick novel has to offer. D&D Dungeon Masters can make the most of a Phillip K. Dick-inspired setting by liberally borrowing from these themes and plot devices for their campaigns.
D&D settings typically include pantheons of gods that are indisputably real, but DMs can create a Phillip K. Dick-like sense of unease and paranoia by having the gods communicate in unusual ways. A central character in Dick's VALIS receives messages from God via a pink laser beam from outer space, and the legitimacy of this schizophrenic character's unreliably narrated visions is dubious. If a D&D character only receives messages from their deity via a talking animal, when imbibing a hallucinogenic herb, or via a pink beam of energy from the sky, other members of their holy order might question whether these visions are actually from a trickster deity, a conniving demon, or the character’s own madness.
Dick’s themes of simulacra and inauthenticity can easily come into play in a D&D game, too. The level-7 simulacrum spell creates a duplicate of a creature formed from ice and snow. A DM could build paranoia by offering hints that one or more party members could be simulacra, as they feel unnaturally cold, find their wounds leaving behind shards of ice, or sense a distant voice that might be their creator - their "original" that they are compelled to obey. The DM might introduce a group of shapeshifting Doppelgangers who subject themselves to the modify memory spell in order to become perfect, deep-cover spies. A focus on Eberron’s Warforged race can bring up notions of purpose and authenticity of self (although this might mirror the Blade Runner film adaptation more than Dick's original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).
Players also have options to let Phillip K. Dick inspire their own characters, but without complete control of the story and the game world, they will need to run these choices by the DM, in most cases. A D&D character who has standard fantasy adventures by day but, every night, has vivid dreams of the mundane life of a tax preparer or insurance investigator would have reason to question whether their more heroic life is an escapist fantasy. An undead D&D character so in debt to a kingdom that they have to provide several lifetimes' worth of labor to break even can mirror the crushing poverty and hopelessness many Dick protagonists face.
Taking elements of Dick’s fiction and repurposing them for D&D is surprisingly simple and can give campaigns a fresh, unexpected vibe. While the high-fantasy heroics of a typical Dungeons & Dragons campaign might seem worlds away from Blade Runner and the works of Phillip K. Dick, DMs and players alike can take inspiration from the author to create strange and memorable campaigns.