The two titular companies produce semi-playable simulacrums of RPGs. Not RPGs themselves. Hollow, unplaytested shells, full of trash, and painted in stylistic colors. Considering the amount of support MAYBE Conan was an exception.
As people are apparently waking up to the above fact, the Blade Runner and Dune RPGs were both put on extreme discount for Black Friday and after. I bought both. I am returning both. Each has a functionally different problem.
Blade Runner is a scenario generator. But that scenario is specifically the Blade Runner movie. This is not unique to Free League, many companies who purchase an IP can't seem to rise above it's inception and actually build something usable for gaming. The best example of this is Star Wars d6. A lesser example would be Eden Studios Buffy and Angel and Ghosts of Albion... really Eden Studios was great at IP games for a while there. Blade Runner isn't a game. It has zero customization, even making replicants and humans nearly mechanically identical. The art is all stylistic soup. It looks like every piece is being viewed through the reflection of a muddy rain puddle. The text within is all much ado about nothing. There is barely any gameable content, every statement is so vague (probably trying not to alter canon) it may as well have not be said. It doesn't even deserve a full review, and it's not the first piece of Free League trash to enter and exit my house. Their take on Twilight:2000 is garbage in comparison to the originals. Mork Borg is a bizarre art project masquerading as a RPG. Forbidden Lands is beautiful aesthetic trash non-designed and unplaytested game theory masking it's inadequacy behind a simple die pool system like so many games do.
Dune actually has a lot of good info in it. The system is hot trash in the same way as Blade Runner, and both have some wokeness sprinkled throughout, but the actual problem with Dune is that it could not sell me on the campaign setting. I'm a fan of the board game as a RPG stand in as the great houses moving in great ways is how the RPG should behave. It does, to an extent, but also does not, tying too much to new agey bullshit design even worse than Blade Runner. The stats in Blade Runner are at least quasi rooted in something tangible. In Dune, the stats are all abstract narrative bullshit. The Player gets to decide which he uses, and they will always use the most plusses. The book makes mention of this and just shrugs. Like good game design wasn't worth the hassle of mitigating a crippling fault with the entire system. That's the game's greatest sins. Drives are complete garbage. I've been leery of 2d20 systems because they never really explained how they worked to the public, and after seeing this one I can see why. The designers don't even know how they work.
So I'm done with both of these scam companies forever.
