AdEva Thread

It's late. I don't have work tomorrow. And I have nostalgia for a game that got cut short that I poured work into.

docs.google.com/document/d/1I288CbFlUAPUcgPzLOQi1EtEfbq6G6jzbphppz-i6M8/edit?usp=sharing

Storytime/AMA, I guess.

Otherwise, AdEva thread. Pic is my group's logo.

Other urls found in this thread:

docs.google.com/document/d/1nCTScBDXGAHWBpgOFGNLUq-ukrG21L7dwT5v798efUQ/edit?usp=sharing
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Alright, so before I get started, let's talk about group comp.

Most of the people playing this time around (planning started April this year) were vets to either my previous game or I'd played with before. For the sake of not embarrassing them here, no names.

-First dude, Texan, was in my first actual Eva game. Played a cold-ass bitch ATT who became a half-angel. He joined late because he felt the itch, but wasn't sure if he'd want to play another Eva game to completion.
-First girl, Brit, was also in the same game. Played the plucky berserker with genetics problems. She was pretty hype for an Eva game, and part of the reason why I put Liberty together.
-My bro, a guy I'd played with in a recent game before this one. He played the Russian neo-spart to my reverse trap prodigy, and we honestly had decent chemistry. Never had a problem with him, continuing not to.
-Second bro, another dude I picked up in that game. Played a chilly survivor christian extremist I fell in love with, even after I made fun of his robot waifu and then later lost the feeling in my legs (those aren't connected). He's quiet, doesn't like loud people, but he was dying for Eva, so I obliged.
-And then new girl - relatively speaking. She was in an Eva game that got aborted early on, because play-by-post, but we kept up with each other because we both liked the same anime and we're depraved lunatics. She also fed my validation as a writer, which helped with things.

The group showed promise when we got together and pitched ideas. Luckily for me, most of the group was already tossing around ideas, save for the Texan and second bro.

Basic plot goes like this (and I'll go ahead and spoil the details because I don't feel like dragging this out very long). It's a not-very-hard sci fi drama:

-In 2000, a rogue planet called Nemesis enters the solar system, locks orbit with Earth the next year, and causes gravitational calamity, wiping out a large chunk of the human population.
-The surviving remnants come back together under several states, the biggest being Wille, in a unified Britannia in England and former France.
-Just when shit's looking good for humanity, despite the floating death star, giant alien monsters, called Outsiders, launch from Nemesis and probe earth for weaknesses. A good chunk of people die, but the first wave is repelled.
-To fight back, Wille brings to bear Evangelions, weapons built specifically on stolen tech and designs from the aliens to fight them on their level.
-Another fight hits in 2023. The first pilots barely eek out a win against the next wave.
-By start, in 2026, our party is up to bat, ready to take on the mantle of pilot from the vets and serve as Earth's first semi-mobile strike force.

...

The party was pretty cheeky, but they were at the same time some of the best material I've seen out of my players. In order of introduction:

-Daniel Roberts, the pointman; He was bought from the German government and used as a diplomatic tool to keep the Germans from getting antsy that they were behind on Eva-tech. Initially had little to do, but that was more due to the player not being around than any character issues. He had amnesia from (this really isn't spoilers) waking up in a pod and escaping from a giant thing underground. Yay for German coverups.
-Patricia Stark, nee Sun Fan, the team leader ATT. Surprise Manu, and it wasn't the first time the player'd done this in one of my games. The cutie with big shoes to fill and a doting relationship with her mother, who ran things at command. Without a father and without extended family, she came to idolize her mother and take after her traits, despite being much more gifted intellectually, while being much more of a complete wimp. Ended up with many great moments early in the game and a fantastic sequence mid-game that made another player cry.
-Bruno Lombardi, big ego prodigy sniper. My favorite out of the player characters for his wit. The only fucking normie. His mom died shortly after his blind sister was born, so both had to be raised by an increasingly alcoholic father. He was recruited into the Wille army partly because of duty, and partly because he wanted to serve out his term. He hated absolutely everything, which makes his eventual adoption of a street urchin girl and a St. Bernard that much more adorable.
-Lance Straken, manu pointman. Token mysterious manu, but I'll give second bro points on asking about the plot enough to have me continuously writing. He had a tendency to write as though he knew things about the plot that, honestly, I just ran with most of the time. As a player, he was cool, but as a character, Lance ended up kinda shallow. (cont.)

And, finally:
-Sigrun, the mysterious 'notsureifmanu' girl who rounded out the party as a zerker. Second girl always had a flare for dramatic characters, this one wasn't different - though she was mostly appearances until we worked out her arc. Game start, she was infected with something the veteran pilots also had, a technoplague that ate away at their flesh and replaced it with cancerous, ego-eating metal, fibreglass and living electronics. Surprisingly, this opened up a romance with resident deadfish Edgar, one of the vets, which blossomed into two blonde Germanics smexing and humping each other every other scene.

I was okay with this.

I might as well talk about starting NPCs, because they were important to character setup.

-Resident not-Gendo, Jack Mosley, taken after Oswald Mosley. A civil engineer heading a military dictatorship through connections. He wasn't a bad guy, but could be a cold motherfucker if he had to. Otherwise, he was distant grandpa (in more ways than one). As the plot unfurled and more details came out about his connections to previous bad organization Nerv, the party turned against him. He also made Patty shoot herself when she accidentally infected herself with the technoplague. That might've helped switch opinions (still was best scene, but I'll talk about that later).
-Olivia Stark, same nee name. She was Misato at a core level, but when first girl came to me with the idea to make her and Patty related, a single mother dynamic came way into prominence. She's a big, kinda dim lug who fell into the position of operations director, but has the charisma and the willpower to back herself up (and the sense to hire smart people). I had a really good time writing her, and she came off as a badass to the party, despite being cucked by Jack because he was technically her father. Even if she was abandoned in Hong Kong as a bastard before finally being picked up again. Her story was long, sad, and she honestly preferred getting shot to talking about it.

>tfw I will NEVER be a player

So like

Do you want help finishing it or something?

In research, we had two Germanics:

-Not Ritsuko, Jo Hershko. A gigantic bitch. Liked her quite a bit, though she didn't get that much screen time. She was the tech head everybody thought was Kaji or something similar, but I ultimately kept her good. She's ego-driven and respects people who aren't bound to serve others or causes that surrender individuality. Unintentionally ironic, since she built the MAGI of the game. Jo and her tits were the biggest disappointments for me, but only because I didn't have that much to write with them. Save for bullying:
-Ingrid Eidemann. Bookish, slightly PTSDed biological scientist responsible for the Evas. Had a frankly miserable existence with her mother before the latter died, and can't handle people like Jo without losing it. Otherwise, she was a neat mentor and somebody who was still steely in the eyes of an alien invasion. She was staunchly pacifistic when it came to military decisions - always siding on technology before drafts and ramping up industrial conversion. Which produced an interesting party dilemma early on. She was a doctor first, not a weapons tech, Ultimately became the plot's favorite trauma beatstick when it came to terrible things. She was shot in the first season climax trying to protect first bro's sister, after having most of her work taken from her.

Nah, I'm just posting all this because I'm wistful. And commiserating with people over failed games.

I've never played this system before

Rounding out the NPCs were the trainers/vets:

-Alice Brooke, taken after Alan Brooke (can you see the trend, user?). Lots of crazy. She was the ATT equivalent. She's also Asuka with the looming existential threat of physical termination. Due to the technoplague and due to her own previous mental instability, she was slated to be murdered at an undetermined time by the secret police. Sheltered for most of her life, she naturally attempted to murder Patty on a camping trip, but got cold feet when she started hearing voices in her head. Got better over time. I feel like I played her a little too hard at first, then backed off too much, but ultimately ended where I wanted her to be. Ended up good friends with the Patty, surprisingly enough (after a strict 'don't kill me' clause was signed in her contract, blame Jack for needing that).
-Edgar Kesselring, taken after Marshal (I think?) Kesselring. Originally planned to play this guy as the extremely reluctant berserker, but then butt plans happened. He and Sigrun got along really, really well, to the point they were making out by session 3 (not during session time, thank christ). Me, I'm personally gay, but I've played a lesbian and a straight person before, so this was honestly a little cathartic. While he started as a dead fish personality wise, the survival mentality, rock solid competency and the reluctance to accept Sigrun's independence really fleshed him out. He's also a biter, likes cheap wine, and is really, really easy to tease.

It's Adeptus Evangelion. Long and short of it, it's Dark Heresy mixed with awkward mecha combat mechanics that really don't mesh, but I play it anyway because I'm a stubborn donkey of a person. It's fun with the right people, as character creation is designed to help you build dysfunctional kids. It's something a lot of my players like to do???

And that's 'played a lesbian and a straight person IN A RELATIONSHIP.' Fug, it's late.

A few more NPCs to round out the cast, who weren't in Wille itself:

-Demetrius Nivelle, otherwise known as the fat bastard. Friend/burden of Jack who worked with him in the past and designed one of the original mecha. Really fun to play. A corpulent old geezer in a wheelchair who was still completely untouchable and scary, while never really leaving the realm of affable bastard. He basically owned:
-Ruya Alloulah, the robot maid. Gasp! Through jury-rigging, she was hooked up to serve Demetrius for decades, after her non-biological mother died working with D. She claimed to be Daniel's hoe from the past, and wasn't wrong, but ultimately ended up freed from imprisonment and brought into the party. Sweet, but very bitter. It was a roller coaster ride giving her something to be, but she was remembered fondly by the players.
-Noel Nivelle, the street urchin. Demetrius' granddaughter who was thrown out into the streets because she was a drain on his retirement money. Always optimistic, always cheerful. She, Bruno and the St. Bernard Joffre (who was a Swiss army dog) were pals before session 2 kicked off. She turned out to be an alien shapeshifter who'd watched over the planet's survival processes for millions of years. Tough break, Bruno.

I think that's everybody. Plot incoming - I'll keep it in-universe chronological to keep it from looking like the festival of dark turns it turned out to be.

Did this party defeat any cyborg ninjas with unusually gun-like paintball guns, and their bare hands?

The basic conceit of the overarcing plotline is that humanity was never really alone. Billions of years ago, the first ancestral race (FAR) fucked themselves in the ass when they discovered Eva-tech. They didn't handle it well, and died as a result, scattering their ashes in the form of colony ships. The ships contained the seed for life, Ambrousia, which was maintained by individual watcher aliens, Eva-tech derivatives and monsters that were kept in suspension in case the FAR ever came back.

Spoilers: they did.

It was hinted fairly early on that Nemesis itself was an undead abomination of the FAR, the result of Instrumentality. In this universe, when souls come together and bridge the physicality gap, they literally become entangled in a web of technocancer that congeals around a dominant will. High ATS is required to make it, so naturally the person who started instrumentality gained control over all this biological mess.

The technoplague (which was kept a secret from the rest of the party and the public at large) is that, basically. A long-term strategy put in practice by Nemesis to wipe out life. I was never clear on the mechanics of it, but it provided a good impetus to find a cure once the base details were revealed.

Daniel fought a metal gear on foot. Does that count?

go to bed nurgle

say that to my face and not through animal crossing, see what happens

History-wise, the whole 'monsters under the earth' thing was more prominent than space monster/progenitor aliens for a long time. First mentioned around the Gallic Wars, a tribe around the Seine was approached by Julius Caesar for rumors everlasting life and controllable monsters. He was cucked.

Several centuries later, 1654. French monk goes into the catacombs and goes batshit when he hears voices telling him not to go further, and to warn people about monsters in the earth. Naturally, it was Noel back before she was a little girl.

Fast forward to the French revolution and Napoleon and the right people (read: early secret societies/occultists) were beginning to believe the secret to everlasting life and fresh tech lay under Paris. This persuaded the leaders of Europe to listen.

Then drilling techniques got better, and Frenchies saw exactly what was waiting for them. They didn't drill into the monsters, but came across giant, hulking, piloted machines while blasting the catacombs. Naturally, this validated many secret society people. It also created a secret arms race between France and Germany that might've been the real reason behind the Franco-Prussian and first World Wars.

Silly Europeans. Can't trust each other with alien tech.

Cut to World War 2, things really get messy. The Germans start pulling out Eva-tech and poking around with it to give them an advantage against... pretty much everyone else. Discovered through the process of reverse engineering was the concept of soul duality - every soul/working mind has a net drive to live (libido) and a net drive to destroy (destrudo) that can be separated.

The Germans didn't do that, and made a giant sad monster that killed itself in agony after the Nazis attempted to put a mind in a giant monster.

Man you think you've got it bad? I'll be finishing up my second game of AdEva as GM.

It's suffering.

Postwar, things quieted down on the giant monster front. The OSS found the remains of the Nazi Suicide Machine(tm) and ordered all research in that direction halted. Thanks to the efforts of the covert ops group EDEN, it was put under wraps.

But by now, world leaders at least knew that the tech buried under Paris was worth the trouble. So, they kept digging. Over the Cold War, Soviets and Americans looked into the ambient objects of the remains - the language of the FAR (which turned out to be what's expressed as thoughts through the AT field) and ways to communicate with other species. And the technoplague, unfortunately. Fallujah in 1986 was rough.

Even while Evatech research was prohibited, secret society people were getting dumb ideas. Namely attempting to talk to the FAR, if they still existed. They didn't even know if the FAR were alive in the cold vacuum of space, but were eager to try to find out. So, they started turning the cogs of the machine together to get people to work on it.

Ingrid's mother, Hilde, Demetrius and old Jack were the secretary-level people in charge of everything while the bigwigs made plans to make contact. Hilde was a widow and a murderer, Demetrius was a (fun) sociopath, and Jack was so fucking directionless and depressed he dropped baby Olivia with her single mother in Hong Kong for 15 years before thinking about taking her back.

That's how Nerv starts.

The day comes, the bigwigs send a signal out to see if the FAR are still kicking, and wouldn't you know it - underground monsters start causing mayhem.

Now, there's a lot I'm going to skip here, but basically - the main game is built on the idea this wasn't the first time Evas were deployed to fight alien monsters. The 'first campaign' was actually fought underground, prepping kid pilots for an eventual arrival of the FAR by cleaning the planet's insides up. Pilots included Olivia, as a rage-filled brat with nothing to lose, Daniel, an EDEN agent who was the exact same age as he is at the start of the game and who was working to stop the FAR from showing up, Ruya, who was still robot, and some other guy I kinda forgot about.

It's all long and messy, but the gist is that things ended terribly. Daniel was frozen, Olivia bitch-slapped, Ruya reprogrammed and earth fucked.

Now we can talk about the actual PLOT. Yaaaaay.

Things start out promising... enough. The pilots are promoted to being pilots, they move in together. The only complaints come from Bruno, who complains about everything. But he ends up getting a dog and a pet child, so he's not too mad.

First angel hits - it's a pair, a hoplite and a floating hydra. The fight goes well. Pointmen corner the hoplite and slowly widdle it down, while the ATT, Bruno and Sigrun back the hydra into a corner and murderize it. Overall, the team worked together, but only on a superficial level.

Post-battle, the first hints of instrumentality were laid out through the hoplite's sword, which was taken off its corpse after being stabbed/beaten to a pulp. A shared consciousness through the blade, the implication that the creature had been scaled up and grown before gutted and turned into an abomination of technology and flesh and tossed at the party. Patty was spooked, Bruno (who was actually smart enough to participate in the conversation) didn't believe it, the vets were worried and Sigrun was scurred.

Then they tried turning the sword on to reverse engineer it. They didn't do that again.

Story after that went easy. We have 'minis,' which are scenes between sessions that take place during the week long time skips. After the first session, people went apeshit for scheduling things to do - mostly to hang out with other characters and get roleplaying under the fingers.

The main group, which had Patty, Danny, Ruya, Olivia, a small-time NPC in their flight controller who totally wasn't Alex from Street Fighter, Lance and Bridgie, another small-timer. Major plot events:
-Lance asks Eidemann, his surrogate mommy, for help in cheering up Patty. She recommends Bridgie, a trained prostitute but close family friend. Hilarious misunderstandings.
-Daniel finds out about Demetrius and Ruya, pushing him down the rabbit hole of 'past wife???' and 'conspiracy???'
-Patty and Olivia continue to be a cute mother/daughter pair; and
-Patty and Daniel have a short, emotional relationship that was really quite adorable.
-Emotional tension between Olivia and Jack.
-Emotional tension between Lance and party because he's weird.

The second group, which had Sigrun, the vets, Bruno, Lance, Noel, Maria (Bruno's sister) and Joffre, who definitely does have a plot arc, was a little less cohesive, but still had fun moments:
-Sigrun and Ed built their relationship on trust and learning why the fuck their machines were talking to them. After visiting Ed while he was looking over his old zerk tape, the two finally became a couple and loved on each other there after in the comfort of Ed's flat.
-Bruno adopted Joffre and Noel after finding them scrounging for money - which led to introducing Demetrius to him, and cementing his hated for the system.
-Alice got her hateboner after the second angel; punched Ed in the nose
-Sig helps Ed afterwards, only then realizing the crazy in Alice and Ed's previous lack of ability to even want to fight it. Cowed into emotional submission by zerking, he lets it happen and suffers the broken nose, only for Sig to get him to believe in fighting for something. Sig and Ed's first kiss was here, and it was a pretty gosh darn cute scene.
-Bruno meets his day on Earth day; subtle (read: blatant) hints of ghosts
-After the second angel, holy shit fucking ghosts
-Jack recruits Lance, Sigrun and Bruno as his ghostbusters to catch Bruno's AT ghost of a mom before she kills his dad, after a holding tank and lab underneath the pilot's barracks breaks open. To be honest, this was me stretching to give the crew something to do, but it made a lot of fun and got few complaints. Heavy Ring/Grudge vibes. The fight at the end of the storyline was pretty magical.

The first big turning point for the game was its biggest scene - Patty's forced suicide. Patty and Lance contracted the technoplague after accidentally touching Noel, who'd be infected by proxy under mysterious circumstances. Olivia freaks out, Lance freaks out (and promptly guts himself while locked in his room to protect his soul), and Patty is freaking out because her mother's freaking out.

When they get to Jack's office for a private meeting... Olivia is forced to step out. Patty has to address Jack directly. By now, the beans have been spilled a bit about Daniel's connection to the past, and Patty is concerned, but dutifully loyal to Mosley.

He tells her to aim for the temple, not the mouth.

Effectively, Patty wasn't human, but a clone created with ambrousia. She didn't know. Through creative use of mental commands (that first girl picked specifically for a scene like this), Patty was forced to raise a gun to her head...

And kill her first self. She was resurrected the next morning in a fresh body with minor changes to her skin tone and height.

New girl cried her heart out. I think that moment is one I'm going to keep with me for a while.

After that point, the party firmly turned against the emerging secret police and Jack. It's also at this point that the game started to lose its cohesion, as a result of missing dates.

But that's for next time. I'll continue this in the morning, I guess.

docs.google.com/document/d/1nCTScBDXGAHWBpgOFGNLUq-ukrG21L7dwT5v798efUQ/edit?usp=sharing

Here's an archive for all the scenes recorded for the game, if you want to keep reading.

Pretty cool story bro.

Bump for AdEva goodness.

So, do you think anyone will pick up where BMJ left off?

There are clearly still some people who enjoy the game enough to play it. I wonder whether anyone likes it enough to finish it, though.

Guess I can share my story.
We were playing a standard game, elder gods in place of angels, etc.
The party to begin was composed of Sean, a neo Sparta trained to obey nerv above all else. Little empathy, and no remorse for actions.
Next up was Yasa, a girl who was practically owned by Nintendo, one of NERV's sponsors. She also came with not one, but two stalkers. Next on the list was Shiori, a girl with a crush (read as all-encompassing obsession) with the resident poster child.
Finally there was Lucas, a young scavenger who had displayed potential and had been press ganged into Nerv.

Now with the NPCs.
first was Dr. Fortner, the kindly doctor. Eventually, it was revealed that Fortner was up to some weird shit, first when he gut-shot a journalist who was snooping around, and second when he convinced Sean to find his missing documents which may or may not be something rei-tier.
Next is Boris, the Pilot's teacher. A veteran from the USSR, Boris is always prepared for a fight. That is to say, he keeps a loaded rifle underneath his desk at school. Fucking Russians. He has aided the party in more than a few ways, and has come to see them as surrogate children.
The other stalker was Katherine, who was pretty much an expy of Tomoko, with all the weirdness that implied. She threatened a few of Yasa's friends and fellow pilots, eventually culminating in her stabbing her guardian to death and attempting to kidnap her. It didn't go too well, and she is now in a mental institution,

Charlie, your internet fame is dead. This is honestly cringey. Stop.

It was sorta finished - as in, we had a final battle, wrapped up most of the loose threads, even had a lovely epilogue.

Have some art I did; I like to think I balanced out my noobness by offering arts for the vets that helped me, and sheer enthusiasm,

But we're the ones that asked him to storytime.

I didn't even know I was famous.

Also - me? Stop being cringy? Presuming you know me, that's not likely to happen, bucko.

I have returned with microwaved peas and some sleep. Will give this a slightly less cringe-y closing.

After the midpoint, cohesion started to slip. I would say that it started earlier, but by this point the cracks in the seam were hitting a fault. Mostly in OOC - I don't think the Texan minds if I say here he's easily annoyed. New girl bothered him because she was loud, second bro really bothered him because of his ticks. Said bro wasn't sure how to play his manu and feeling the existential weight of not having things to do, so he was asking for time with other characters without thinking about the content of scenes.

And after a while, first girl's health declined to the point that playing on a weekly basis wasn't possible.

It came at the same point as when I was writing up operation documents for other battles across the world. Expanding the scope of the universe with battles in more far-flung, grandiose locations. Don't read those docs, they were rushed.

That would be the point where my plotting went down the drain of comprehensibility.

As things got worse, so did my attempts to revive the frankensteined campaign. Name changes, music changes, speeding up plot developments. It didn't hurt (I hope), but the feeling was apparent for most of the players that just being there was taking a toll on their patience with each other. First bro was a notable exception - I don't think I heard a hateful word out of him throughout the proceedings.

The longwinded background is, well, my fault. Knowing me is to know that I just don't stop writing. While all this backstory wasn't shoved in the player's faces, the time between early April and early November nurtured a serious dependence on building the story up.

Dependence is an apt word. Emotional dependence. Forever GMs, the people who don't get games, they know the feeling. When you finally get the game you want to play and you invest a serious amount of your life into it; when the party does the same, draws fanart of a ridiculous scale (title screen was actually gifted to me), has scenes without you just to advance their characters and start relationships, talk about plot developments and NPCs with some form of reverence... it's honestly overwhelming. As a GM, I don't think I've ever gotten over the cycle of building dependence. And I know it's taboo to talk about here, because we're among functional human beings who've run big games and kept level heads. (cont.)

My players know. I know. The world here probably knows - I'm not a functional human being. The fetishizing of the game's better moments, the bloated backstory, all giant cues. I'm depressed. Anguished. More than wistful, bitter that the game died after it's mid-game finale. By that point, players had moved on, but just started turning inward and losing sleep over what I was doing wrong.

This is coming from a guy with criminal anxiety about failure and completing things, which has only gotten worse over the years as a combination of cold feet, scheduling conflicts, declining health and poor party selection broke up too many games to count. The specter of worn down trust and recycled plots hangs over my head like an existential Damocles.

Did I blame my players? Yeah. Not often and not vocally. I talked to them in private, didn't stoke any fires, but I had my favorites. You can probably pick them out. I had people I thought were the problem who weren't. I had people I thought weren't trying hard enough, when likely they were afraid of committing to a game that wasn't likely to go anywhere anyway.

Not doing well on that promise up there, I must say. But anyway, this is the final post on this.

I think it's human to love something you put your heart into. It's human to be Pygmalion, building something you love and unintentionally embracing it as a fait accompli that confirms your right to keep doing what you're doing. To me, the game was that. Like my previous Eva game, before I fell down the path of GMing.

I can't really gauge how my party's feeling now. I don't know if they share my feelings, or if they are like the shitlord above me and find this all really cringe-y and awkward to read back through again. I'm too saccharine and too beta to pretend like I know.

But regardless - drunk on nostalgia, embittered, made low by holiday botulism and depression, I'm putting this shit up on Veeky Forums because it hurts, and I don't have a healthy way of dealing with this. All the I's, all the nonsense, clogging up the board with my ramblings, it's all a way to try to get over it and get in the fucking robot.

/story; y'all do whatever the fuck you want

So, what you're saying is. Your game ended because you don't know how to pace a game and your group didn't actually know each other or care to communicate like friends do.

You do realize that you and only you can fix yourself, right? And that it's not really hard.

My advice, as humble as it may be, is
don't worry about it