From Netflix to Tabletop: ‘The Electric State RPG’ Invites Players Into a Stunning, Somber Alternate Reality from the Mind of Simon Stålenhag
This week, Netflix released the major motion picture adaptation of The Electric State, bringing Simon Stålenhag’s gripping narrative art book of the same name to a global streaming audience. The movie, starring Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy), tells the story of an unlikely team adventuring across a world on the brink of collapse.
If that brief glimpse of Stålenhag’s vision of an alternative near-apocalyptic 1990s left you wanting to dive deeper into this dark and strange world, then keep the adventure going with The Electric State RPG by Free League Publishing. The Electric State RPG — which released in October 2024 and remains available in the Free League webshop, hobby stores, and digitally on DriveThruRPG — asks players to explore themselves, their friends, and what they are willing to do when the world collapses around them.
Learn more about The Electric State Roleplaying Game here.
The Electric State Roleplaying Game includes lavish art by Simon Stålenhag and pieces created for The Electric State art book project but never published before.
Written by Nils Hintze (Tales From the Loop RPG, Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying) in collaboration with the Free League core team, the rules of the game are based on the acclaimed Year Zero Engine, used in award-winning games such as the ALIEN RPG, the Blade Runner RPG, the Tales From the Loop RPG, and The Walking Dead Universe RPG, but uniquely tailored for this new game. The Electric State RPG is a standalone book that contains all the tools you need to play and create short to mid-length campaigns in a society on the brink of apocalypse.
Here’s a quick synopsis of the story: Following the discovery of neuronics in the late 1960s, technology diverged from our world. It is now 1997, and the world is on the verge of apocalypse. The ever-present Sentre corporation pushes neuronic technology to the population via cheap headsets. Civilization crumbles as something strange spreads through the neuronic net. People fail to turn up for work, basic services cease to function, and the government is rapidly losing control.
Players will embark on a journey of exploration and relations, conflict between groups and individuals found on the road, and they will discover what they are willing to do when they’re stuck halfway to their goal and bad turns to worse.
© 2024 Simon Stålenhag. This game is published in partnership with Skybound Entertainment. All rights reserved.
About The Electric State Art Book
In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA, where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society in decline. As their car nears the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to unravel at an ever-faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.
About Simon Stålenhag
Simon Stålenhag (b. 1984) is the internationally acclaimed author and artist behind Tales From the Loop, Things From the Flood, The Electric State, and The Labyrinth. His highly imaginative images and stories depicting illusive sci-fi phenomena in mundane, hyper-realistic Scandinavian and American landscapes have made Stålenhag one of the most sought-after visual storytellers in the world.
Tales From the Loop was ranked one of the 10 Best Dystopias by The Guardian, along with such works as Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca. The narrative art book was turned into a multiple award-winning tabletop roleplaying game and a board game by Free League. In 2019, his book The Electric State was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Locus Award. His first book, Tales From the Loop, was adapted into a TV show on Amazon Prime in 2020.
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