HomeMain MenuPress ReleasesJourney into the Unknown with The Electric State Roleplaying Game, Available Now

Journey into the Unknown with The Electric State Roleplaying Game, Available Now

The Highly Anticipated Adaptation of Simon Stalehag’s Narrative Artbook Takes Players on A Road Trip on the Verge of Reality

Today, Free League Publishing is excited to announce that its highly anticipated tabletop RPG adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s narrative artbook, The Electric State, is now available in the Free League webshop, hobby stores, and digitally on DrivethruRPG.

Learn more about The Electric State Roleplaying Game here.

The Electric State Roleplaying Game includes lavish art by Simon Stålenhag, including 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 The Electric State Roleplaying Game.

The Electric State Roleplaying Game is a standalone book that contains all the tools you need to play and create campaigns in a society on the brink of apocalypse. It also includes a complete short campaign, ready to play out of the book.

Following the discovery of neuronics in the late 1960s, technology diverged from our world. It is now the year 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.

The Electric State is coming.

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.

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.

The Electric State is soon to be adapted into a major motion picture by the Russo brothers (Avengers: Endgame), starring Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy).

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.

Free League Publishing is a game studio and publisher dedicated to speculative fiction based in Stockholm, Sweden. Voted Fan Favorite Publisher at the ENNIES in 2020, 2021 and 2023, Free League has published a wide range of award-winning tabletop roleplaying games and acclaimed art books set in strange and wondrous worlds.

Our game portfolio includes the official The Walking Dead Universe RPG, the fantasy RPG Dragonbane (ENNIE Award winner 2024), the official Blade Runner RPG (winner of two Gold ENNIE Awards 2023), The One Ring™ (Gold ENNIE Award winner 2022), the official ALIEN RPG (Gold ENNIE for Best Game 2020), the Gothic horror game Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying (winner of three ENNIE Awards 2021), the pitch-black fantasy RPG MÖRK BORG (winner of four ENNIE Awards 2020) and its two spin-offs CY_BORG and PIRATE BORG, the alternate ’80s Tales From the Loop RPG (winner of five ENNIE Awards 2017, including Best Game), the retro-fantasy Forbidden Lands (winner of four ENNIE Awards 2019), the postapocalyptic Mutant: Year Zero (Silver ENNIE for Best Rules 2015), the science fiction games Coriolis – The Third Horizon (Judge’s Spotlight Award 2017) and Death in Space, the dark fantasy game Symbaroum, the weird-fantasy game Into the Odd Remastered, and the new edition of the RPG classic Twilight: 2000 (Judges Award for Best RPG at UK Games Expo 2022).