What is SLA Industries?
In 1993, the Scottish company Nightfall Games released SLA Industries, its roleplaying game of science fiction horror, a very British antidote to the slick and angsty settings that were popular at the time. Set in The World Of Progress, the sphere of SLA Industries’ influence in the known universe, players take on the roles of operatives, employees of an all-encompassing company that controls a frightened population with reality TV and violence while a creeping horror claws its way through the edges of reality.
SLA Industries.
SLA (pronouced Slay) Industries was, actually is, a RPG from the minds of Dave Allsop and Jared Earle and was first published in 1993 by Nightfall Games in Glasgow, Scotland. The game is set in a dystopian far-flung future in which the majority of the known universe is either owned or indirectly controlled by the eponymous corporation “SLA Industries” and incorporates themes from the cyberpunk, horror, and conspiracy genres.
The game combined concepts inspired by a range of aesthetics and ideas. Elements include: song lyrics from David Bowie and the Industrial music scene, cyberpunk fiction (including Blade Runner and Max Headroom), anime / manga (including Akira, Appleseed, Bubblegum Crisis, and Trigun), and the growing cultural obsession with the media (including 24-hour news services and the Gladiator TV Show).
There is a very rich background and SLA Industries itself is a fictional corporation run by a mysterious and seemingly immortal creature called “Mr. Slayer”, whose upper management team includes two other creatures like himself, “Intruder” and “Senti”. The corporation is headquartered in “Mort City”, a densely populated city-sprawl larger than Eurasia and surrounded by the urban ruins of the “Cannibal Sectors”. It is all located on a vast planet (also called “Mort”) that had been stripped of its natural resources to the point that the ecology had been utterly destroyed. SLA Industries controlled an undefined but vast number of planets, collectively referred to as the World of Progress, and governed them in accordance with Mr. Slayer’s Big Picture. The setting is bleak and surreal, with much left deliberately ill-defined in the source material.
Players take the role of freelance employees of SLA Industries, called Operatives, living in Mort City and taking care of odd jobs assigned to them by the corporation. These jobs usually involve keeping the peace—chasing serial killers, hunting monsters in the sewers, quashing riots, foiling terrorist plots, and silencing dissidents are common themes. Appearance, style and branding are emphasized in the game world as much as combat ability, due to the omnipresence of television; for ambitious Operatives public persona and TV ratings are often as important as professional abilities. A supplement, the Contract Directory, also provides the option for players to play as celebrity gladiators called Contract Killers. As a role-playing experience, the game tends to be predisposed towards splatterpunk horror, noir, dark satire, and/or gunbunny high action. However, the complexity and Byzantine politics of the setting allow for slower-paced campaigns based around subversion, inter-departmental rivalry, and cut-throat power struggles within the company.
Along with humans, playable races include the drug-addicted mutant humans called “Frothers”, the stealthy feline “Wraith Raiders”, the formidably violent saurian “Shaktar”, and the two ‘Ebb’ / pseudo-magic using races: the emotionally sensitive and charismatic Ebon, and their more sadistic and violent evolution, the “Brain Wasters”. There are also a variety of biogenetic vat-grown warrior races called Stormers, produced by SLA to fight in their endless wars.
Now that is the background and a petty messed up “World of Progress” it is, but there was never a range of figures to go with this RPG, much to my disappointment, even though there was rumours, over the years that suggested that there might be one in the future and this is where Daruma Productions stepped in and said this…
The game combined concepts inspired by a range of aesthetics and ideas. Elements include: song lyrics from David Bowie and the Industrial music scene, cyberpunk fiction (including Blade Runner and Max Headroom), anime / manga (including Akira, Appleseed, Bubblegum Crisis, and Trigun), and the growing cultural obsession with the media (including 24-hour news services and the Gladiator TV Show).
There is a very rich background and SLA Industries itself is a fictional corporation run by a mysterious and seemingly immortal creature called “Mr. Slayer”, whose upper management team includes two other creatures like himself, “Intruder” and “Senti”. The corporation is headquartered in “Mort City”, a densely populated city-sprawl larger than Eurasia and surrounded by the urban ruins of the “Cannibal Sectors”. It is all located on a vast planet (also called “Mort”) that had been stripped of its natural resources to the point that the ecology had been utterly destroyed. SLA Industries controlled an undefined but vast number of planets, collectively referred to as the World of Progress, and governed them in accordance with Mr. Slayer’s Big Picture. The setting is bleak and surreal, with much left deliberately ill-defined in the source material.
Players take the role of freelance employees of SLA Industries, called Operatives, living in Mort City and taking care of odd jobs assigned to them by the corporation. These jobs usually involve keeping the peace—chasing serial killers, hunting monsters in the sewers, quashing riots, foiling terrorist plots, and silencing dissidents are common themes. Appearance, style and branding are emphasized in the game world as much as combat ability, due to the omnipresence of television; for ambitious Operatives public persona and TV ratings are often as important as professional abilities. A supplement, the Contract Directory, also provides the option for players to play as celebrity gladiators called Contract Killers. As a role-playing experience, the game tends to be predisposed towards splatterpunk horror, noir, dark satire, and/or gunbunny high action. However, the complexity and Byzantine politics of the setting allow for slower-paced campaigns based around subversion, inter-departmental rivalry, and cut-throat power struggles within the company.
Along with humans, playable races include the drug-addicted mutant humans called “Frothers”, the stealthy feline “Wraith Raiders”, the formidably violent saurian “Shaktar”, and the two ‘Ebb’ / pseudo-magic using races: the emotionally sensitive and charismatic Ebon, and their more sadistic and violent evolution, the “Brain Wasters”. There are also a variety of biogenetic vat-grown warrior races called Stormers, produced by SLA to fight in their endless wars.
Now that is the background and a petty messed up “World of Progress” it is, but there was never a range of figures to go with this RPG, much to my disappointment, even though there was rumours, over the years that suggested that there might be one in the future and this is where Daruma Productions stepped in and said this…
To be continued............................
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