Games - SLA Industries

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	Games - SLA Industries

SLA Industries is an obscure roleplaying game first published in 1993 by Nightfall Games in Glasgow, Scotland. The game combined some of the nastier elements of Glaswegian life with concepts inspired by a range of song lyrics, the gothic lifestyle, cyberpunk fiction (including Blade Runner and Max Headroom), and several other unusual sources in order to create an ultra-dystopian far-flung future in which the entire known universe was run by a single corporation: the eponymous SLA Industries.

Setting

The SLA Industries corporation itself was run by a weakly godlike creature called "Mr. Slayer", whose upper management team included a number of other creatures like himself, such as "Intruder", "Senti" and "Preceptor Teeth". The corporation was headquartered in a planet-covering city-sprawl called "Mort". Much of the setting was surreally disturbing, and tended to provoke as many questions as it answered.

Players took the role of freelance employees of SLA Industries, on Mort, taking care of odd jobs assigned to them by the corporation. These jobs usually involved keeping the peace -- everything from hunting down serial killers, clearing out monsters from the sewers under the city and foiling terrorists to bodyguarding celebrities, quoshing riots, assassinating irritant civilians and generally making sure the public towed the line. Appearance and style were emphasized in the game world as much as combat ability, because everything was televised, and a character's television ratings were often more important to her career than her abilities. Later expansions to the game also let players play as celebrity gladiators. As a playing experience, the game tended to be predisposed towards horror, noir, dark satire and/or gunbunny high action.

Along with humans, playable races included the feline "Wraith Raiders", the Predator/Klingon-like "Shaktar", several biogenetic vat-grown races, and two human-like races who had the only magical powers in the game. The races were remarkably unbalanced; humans were at a significant disadvantage to members of any other race, and the two magical races were the only ones who could later become "Necanthropes", the most powerful race in the game.

"The Truth"

According to the Nightfall Games backstory, the SLA Industries universe was actually created inside the mind of a modern-day man from Kilmarnock, Scotland named Brent Walker, who brought it into reality as a parallel dimension with the aid of both a drug called Reathanol and his own objectively-sentient alternate personality, "Tide". The creation process killed Brent on Earth, and sucked his remains into the SLA universe. Tide had also been drawn in. Brent discovered that Tide had been poisoning his supposed utopian creation, and the two fought. Brent was defeated and banished to imprisonment on the planet "White Earth", where he became "Bitterness", a rarely mentioned nemesis of the game's background. Tide, mutilated by Brent during their struggle, became Mr. Slayer. Bitterness is featured in the inside cover story of every SLA Industries game book. Extremely vague hints and clues to the nature of "the Truth" are given throughout SLA Industries in the form of hidden references to David Bowie songs such as Diamond Dogs, songs by The Pixies and posters in the background of some of the in-house artwork.

The Truth was detailed in the SLA Industries Writers Bible.

Publication

SLA Industries was first published independently in 1993. The game was later bought by Wizards of the Coast late in 1994, after their success with Magic: The Gathering. It was later republished by Nightfall Games Ltd and distributed by Hogshead Games, until Hogshead Games was sold to its current owners. A small minority of fans of the game hoped that Nightfall Games would then re-release the game again under the popular d20 system, but a d20 version never materialized.

Product Line

SLA Industries Main Rulebook

Karma Sourcebook

GM Screen

Mort Sourcebook

The Key of Delhyread Scenario

The Contract Directory Sourcebook

Preserved for Posterity

Here is a Station Analysis subscriber's "pre-vandalization" of this page, before it was replaced with correct information:

SLA Industries is the role-playing game design company that designed the classic RPG Nightfall in 1993. Nightfall centers on the lives of unemployed writers and artists living in the nightmarish metropolis "Glasgow", slaving away for "Nightfall, Ltd.", an uber-corporation headed by the mysterious Dave. Other power players include the tragi-gothic Jared, the dark sorceress Anne, and the terrifying Preceptor Tim. An expansion pack also introduced the powerful but unstable character Angus.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for SLA Industries ]

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