And here we are at Day 17 of the RPGaDAY 2025 Challenge. Today our topic is ‘Renew’. I’m going to show some of my geekness by describing a world that I think an RPG campaign can come about from the memory I have with this word. This is from the 1976 dystopian Science Fiction film Logan’s Run. In the 23rd century, survivors of a devastating war lives in a domed city. They have no wants or needs as everything is self contained and provided for them. They don’t even know that the rest of the world exists outside the city walls. However, when they reach the age of 30, they report to the Carousel on Last Day in order to Renew as demonstrated in this video.
The members of the city who didn’t report for renewal were considered runners and hunted down by a special police force called Sandmen. There were ruined parts of the city where untamed youth ran rampant and an underground resistance trying to get runners to a mythical place called Sanctuary.
While I never saw this movie in the theaters, it was one that I caught on those Saturday matinees on different TV stations looking to fill time. I found it interesting and would stop to watch it each time it came on. I didn’t know there was a TV spin-off series until later (it seemed like everything in the 70’s ended up with a one-season spin-off series).
I thought this would make for a good serious Science-Fiction roleplaying campaign. What happens when you just take orders from the computer. Is it more than just the computer in charge? This theme was touched on in the TV series but not in the movie. What is outside the city walls? Should the players just save themselves and go explore, or should they try to shut the city down and save everyone?
So what system would work for this campaign? If the first thing that came to mind was Paranoia, you wouldn’t be far off. There are a lot of similar concepts, but I don’t think it would have worked for me. While I enjoyed making a Paranoia 2nd Edition character in a past Character Creation Challenge, the base for this game is silliness. I don’t recall seeing any mutants in Logan’s Run, so if you ignored those you probably could run Mutant Future or Mutant Crawl Classics. Another game that might work is Fallout (characters come from a bunker like shelter). I’ve never played (or owned) Gamma World, but I assume that it could be used as well.
Do you think that the setting in Logan’s Run could make for a good RPG campaign? Are there other systems that would fit this movie/series better? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.