Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Overview
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of the cleanest sources for campaigns about identity verification under exhausted social conditions. The world is materially depleted, spiritually compromised, and administratively cruel. Every major system in the novel asks the same question in a different form: who is recognized as real, and who gets disposed of when recognition fails?
Reusable Design Patterns
- Empathy tests as political instruments: the diagnostic is never neutral because authority decides what its outcome means.
- Synthetic passers: artificial people can hide inside ordinary urban life, forcing suspicion into every social encounter.
- Status through substitutes: rare living animals, fake animals, and visible ownership create a strong model for scarcity-status economies.
- Bureaucratic monstrosity: licensed hunters, official retirement orders, and corporate indifference make the institution itself morally radioactive.
- Spiritual technology: empathy boxes, shared visions, and mediated religion provide excellent templates for networked mysticism.
Referee Uses
- Add checkpoints where identity proof, emotional response, or record consistency matters as much as combat competence.
- Build city districts that feel half-abandoned but still over-administered.
- Treat replicas, vat-grown people, and restored bodies as labor, property, and legal anomalies before treating them as monsters.
- Let players discover that the tools used to classify the inhuman are also tools of social control.