Ad Eva

Hey Veeky Forumsfegs
I'm DMing an Ad Eva game for a few friends of mine.
Mixed bag of Eva fans with little RPG experience and RPG enthusiasts who are adverse to Anime in general.
First time DMing Ad Eva or any multi session RPG for that matter.
Doing this in person not on roll20
How should I go about it tg?
Any stories, ideas or resources are also welcome

Other urls found in this thread:

reddit.com/r/AdeptusEvangelion/
1d4chan.org/wiki/Campaign:NERV_Liberty
pastebin.com/A2hgCJxG#
imgur.com/gallery/hsvJr
geology.com/sea-level-rise/
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9sDNdup8sb0u_a7ZA_ozLvTI9uz5oL5b99xI7F6YiU/edit#gid=266936950
docs.google.com/document/d/1CgCGEIxYp47DEgMMondf-yKW9pGzoXlZJK3E5fBTKo0/edit
sites.google.com/view/adeva-cairo3/home
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

What version of the game are you using? The latest v3 beta, one of the older versions, or the Borderline offshoot?

Here are some links I had in my campaign notes, which I grabbed from the 1d4chan page:

Adeptus Evangelion Reddit: reddit.com/r/AdeptusEvangelion/

Someone's campaign records: 1d4chan.org/wiki/Campaign:NERV_Liberty

Suggested NPCs for AdEva Campaign: pastebin.com/A2hgCJxG#

Art for Custom Evas: imgur.com/gallery/hsvJr

Visualizer for sea-level increase: geology.com/sea-level-rise/

I'll drop back in later with some info about the campaign I've been running.

were using v3 beta 05

I have some experience with the game, years ago. What do you want to know?

The big one first off is not to think you are going to have a combat every session, because Angel fights generally take up a whole session in themselves. For every Angel fight, you should plan on having 2-4 whole sessions of pure RP on the ground before another Angel shows up. This sounds weird, but for AdEva it is not only necessary, but probably the best part of the game.

Don't put the pilots into a pscale firefight unless the goal is for them to run away, and you have ways to make that interesting. Even a single dingus with a handgun is the equivalent of a horror movie slasher villian, and should be treated as such, because if he gets a shot off on a pilot they will almost certainly die from it.

Prepare a wide cast of NPCs on the ground for different circles, and let the players decide which ones they want to emotionally invest in.

Every so often, ask your players what they think is going on. This gives you a chance to gauge how much of your epic plot they are picking up on, and sometimes you are better off secretly rewriting what you had planned to be the convoluted conspiracy theory your players came up with themselves.

With an online medium, you can separate the party into different channels when they split up or have secret meetings during or between normal sessions. Make use of this to both handle RP scenes that only really involve a specific character or two (like a kid confronting his crush, that doesn't need the rest of the party looking over his shoulder) and to provide pieces of plot or secrets. It can be really fun to give out the plot to the players in a way such that they get to decide how much, if anything, to tell the rest of the party. It leads to meetings late in the game where everyone is pooling knowledge and secrets and connections start getting drawn and people start realizing whats really going on.

I guess now I'm looking for Ideas for RP scenes that might help flesh out the characters I've never done an AdEva campaign b4 and I didn't realize they were such an integral part of the experience.
>we're at a very early point in this and only one or two of our group have characters rolled up and we're planning our first session for a few weeks from now
Going into this my idea was to reveal as little of my grand conspiracy to the players as possible and let them figure our the inner machinations of Nerv on their own. I'm glad to see it was a good first notion.
My main concern is introducing this new system of play to my friends who are not as inclined to RPGs. AdEva can be pretty complex judging by what I read and I'm afraid they'l get lost in the numbers. Previously we played various DnD campaigns with dumbed down rules while my friend was DMing.

Here, have two things I used while running AdEva myself

Combat Status Screen
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q9sDNdup8sb0u_a7ZA_ozLvTI9uz5oL5b99xI7F6YiU/edit#gid=266936950

Operations Director Handbook, cobbled together out of Black Mesa Janitor's unused notes
docs.google.com/document/d/1CgCGEIxYp47DEgMMondf-yKW9pGzoXlZJK3E5fBTKo0/edit

The important things to keep in mind for Angels is that it's super easy for them to kill pilots. But the upside is that between Fate Points, forced ejections, and Berserking, pilots always have a chance to avoid death and still win. The trick is to not make them reliant on them, and try to hit that sweet spot where the Angel disables one or two Evas and heavily cripples the others before going down.

The important thing to keep in mind for players is encouraging interaction and discouraging the silent antisocial child soldier archetype. It's done to fucking death and it rarely progresses the story at all, and everybody who tries it thinks that child soldier pilots are a unique thing they came up with. But I digress, give your pilots some allies smart enough to not treat the pilots like children and thus a means to interact with the world and plot, and you'll likely see good results.

One of the messages that I want to instill in the players is that they are all expendable. Because in a real life Nerv that's how they would view the pilots. Especially with Evas costing billions to develop, repair, equip and build and potential pilots in no short supply.
I'm at a loss on how to do this without killing a PC.
Sure I could tell them they are expendable, but how do I make them feel it. My first thought is to make and kill an NPC pilot but that feels like a cheep way out. Is this a bad idea?
As for dealing w/ the antisocial child soldier archetype I'm not worried cuz no one in my group is that emo.
I was thinking of finding a way to link all their back stories together as part of the secrete plot to encourage RP and character exploration.
thx for the help btw

You have to put them into situations where they will be in more danger than their machines. Give them orders or force them into situations that high a high likely hood of them taking Ego damage and then show their handlers as being completely uncaring about it. If things get hairy, don't hesitate to drop N2 mines on them, or give them orders to leave the most injured team member back as a sacrifice or as bait for some sort of trap.

Out of their Eva's have them treated like lab rats. maybe throw in some real unethical shit like directly exposing them to core fragments or something just to see what will happen. Basically treat them like shit and let it be well known that if they get out of line or become ineffective then they will be liquidated and replaced.

The easiest way to do this is to make them all clones, or to have the whole reason they are able to pilot Evas be a sort of easily applicable gene therapy or something so there is nothing stopping their handlers from just replacing them with someone else except that it's a minor inconvenience. Or take the Hunger Games approach and have pilots families/communities/government get lots of extra supplies/funding or whatever and there is a really long list of people who would literally kill to take their spot.

How many players do you have?

Also, have you watched the Evangelion TV series, or the Rebuild movies? Before we started our campaign, our Session Zero was watching Rebuild 1.0 and 2.0, to establish the tone and feel of the campaign.

If the PCs still have to attend school or otherwise pretend to have "normal" lives outside the Evas, that means you can offer up all the standard school life scenes, like romance, bullies, and keeping your pilot status a secret as long as possible.

Other good scenes involve rivalries (with PCs or NPCs), interrogations (GM book has a trial scenario, but there may also be internal security audits), press briefings, or meetings with friends and family members.

I'd like to echo the warning about antisocial characters, and expand it a bit farther. It is vital that the players be on-board with playing out the pilots interacting, forming positive and negative relationships. If the players don't help create the drama, the story won't work as well.

> One of the messages that I want to instill in the players is that they are all expendable.

I would strongly suggest rethinking that.

Eva pilots, by right of being children, don't have a lot of agency. Which is to say, they usually can only do things that the adults let them do. In the conspiracy to come, the adults hold virtually all of the cards, and unless you are going to make your characters into teenage Batman, they are not exactly on the level where they can fight back on the same footing, either as a personal scale combat threat or as a spy.

Their status as an Eva Pilot is the ONLY card they have in their hand that they can play for leverage, the fact that they are important tot he survival of the world and are difficult to replace. Remove that last part, and suddenly you create a situation where there simply isn't a reason for the pilots to ever have a card up their sleeve that they can use to stand their ground against the conspiring forces around them.

>play a child soldier
>fucking child assassin even
>she's intentionally trying to be someone other than who she was, thus is faking being happy-go-lucky, she's the most talkative and everyone likes her IC (because they don't know how horrible she is)
Was fun.

>It can be really fun to give out the plot to the players in a way such that they get to decide how much, if anything, to tell the rest of the party.
Make sure they all have reasons to mind what they share, open discourse is unEva. Everybody needs to be worried about being reported to the conspiracy, being dropped as a pilot because they're seeing things, trying to pervert the grand scheme to their ends, something.

We have 3 players + me GM

All but one of us have seen all Evangelion media including the rebuilds.

Hmm... If it just got a bit beyond 60m I get put all of Edinburgh but the castle underwater, I'll just file that for later.

Have you read the manga?

yup, but no one else in my group has. I wanted to read the light novel NGE Anima but I couldn't find an English translation.

This. Even in the series proper, before the dummy system was introduced, the notion of pilots being expendable would've been considered laughable. The only pilot whose life was truly expendable was Rei, and even then no one else was capable of moving Unit 00. No matter the meta-reason you decide to give for why the pilots need to be teenagers, the pilot-capability factor should be exceptionally rare. Even if they are replaceable, they are never immediately replaceable. If the pilots decide "Fuck you" in the middle of an Angel attack, then everyone in the world dies. They literally hold he fate of the entire world in their hands, and once they're aware of that, they are sure as shit going to use it for leverage.

My advice for a potential AdEva GM, be prepared for the pilots to eventually try and betray Nerv, and decide right now whether or not you want to let them succeed. Nerv, by its very nature, are a bunch of patsies taking orders from people trying to destroy the world as we know it. Without even realizing, they are traitors to the very cause they pretend to champion. If the pilots are loyal to Nerv's stated goal of protecting the world, then as they learn of the larger conspiracy, they will likely come to the conclusion that Nerv's leadership is a liability which must be removed. Whoever's pulling the strings behind Nerv probably has competitors, and those competitors would probably love to endorse the pilots' rise to power so long as they have a chance to benefit from it.

Does Plugsuit Fetish doujin collection count?

Only if you're running an ERP Game. Which has potential, all things considered

This seems a good number. In my experience with the system, the number of active pilots has a dramatic effect on the action economy, since the Angels get as many turns as the players do, but only 2/3 the total "action points".

Do keep in mind, and probably warn your players as well, that this is a fan-made game, not something professionally published. You will almost certainly run into some complications while running it.

I said I'd drop in with my campaign, so here is a summary:

Following the GM book's advice, I gave the setting and metaphysics an Egyptian makeover. Evas replaced with Pharoahs, NERV replaced with ATEN, etc. The base of operations is now in Cairo.

The 2 PCs are played by my best friend and my wife, respectively, who recycled characters from our Exalted games. *Adam Jaeger* , a German Manufactured pilot who knows full well he is just one clone among many, and *thinks* he is okay with that, because "the mission comes first." *Araceli de Sol* , a Spanish orphan who learned her long-dead mother was a researcher for ATEN, and agreed to be a pilot so the orphanage could get U.N. funding. I also put in 2 NPC pilots, and hinted there might be pilots in reserve.

Behind the scenes, 80% of all characters, including the pilots, are genre-shifted versions of characters from my long-running Exalted games. The kaiju themselves are the Yozi, and the Egyptian codenames I give them are designed to obfuscate their true identities. This permeates every aspect of the AdEva campaign, including the possible endings the players might bring about.

We are 10 sessions in, and my players are only just starting to realize that something is happening beyond the usual Conspiracy, as I become more blatant with my references and cameos. If they ever bothered translating some of the NPC names, they would piece it together rapidly.

Neat. Kinda specific to your group, obviously, but neat.

Cool, do you have a campaign record I could take a look at?
Also how would I go about making a campaign record?

Some more generic suggestions, then.

Draw the pilots into factional intrigues. Seele wants to become God, Misato actually wants to save the world, Gendo just wants to see his wife again. The PCs can be recruited by a faction, and expected to work in secret to ensure their plans go off. Maybe one PC is taking Shinji's spot, and can be convinced to bring his mom back. Maybe the Manufactured pilot has secret orders to ensure Seele is not betrayed.

Think about the battles not just as "encounters" like in most DnD campaigns, but as set-pieces, like in a movie or video game. Fill the battlefield with interesting terrain that the Evas or Angels can interact with, and interesting events or conditions that might affect the fight. Maybe the Angel sets off an EMP power, and suddenly aircraft are falling from the sky, crashing and exploding all over the place (or be caught by merciful pilots). Maybe the pilots can lure the Angel into an oil refinery, and set the whole place ablaze (increasing the Collateral Damage, of course).

I use Obsidian Portal for most of my games, but for this, my friend helped me set up a webpage. It isn't finished, but give me a few hours and I'll post a link to the WIP.

This is your first real turn in the GM seat? Good luck to you, user, this is a sacred and frustrating responsibility you are taking up. My hat is off to you.

Biggest bit of advice I can give you, print out the following charts/pages: Action List, Attacks/Damage, Hit Effects (keep the Angel charts for yourself), Conditions. Pretty much all of pages 194 to 208. Keep these handy, because you and the players will look back to them constantly during a battle.

Another bit of advice for the GM is that, if you're using the rules in the GM book to create your Angels, don't be afraid to give or take a point or two in any of the different sections. Sometimes you need a little extra to give your monster a ranged attack, or you have some leftover points that you aren't sure what to do with.

Sometimes the fights don't go how you expect, but this is okay! If the Angel is getting beaten down, just take notes of what happened, and build a tougher one next time. If the players are getting shredded, you can have them evacuate before calling in an N^2 strike or a ~expendable~ brave military force to slow the monster down.

Also be aware of what the abilities you're giving do in conjunction with one another and what your PCs are capable of.
Be especially careful with tanky abilities with the first few angels, when PCs don't even have the option of acquiring methods to overcome various methods of defense. That's not to say 'don't use them', but be very careful with what you DO use defensively.
This applies to all versions of AdEva.

A differing opinion here.

The best angels kill fast and die fast. The game breaks down in prolonged combat, so use it very, very sparingly. It's better to have options to bring a dead Angel back than for it to never, ever go down.

Also, you need to think of gimmicks. If you just rely on the mechanics, you'll find that fights will quickly become the least favorite part of the game. An Angel that only exists within reflective surfaces is cooler than one that inflicts a ton of status effects.

sites.google.com/view/adeva-cairo3/home

As I said, it is incomplete, but it has some in-character after-action reports and analysis. It only really covers the battles and the characters, though. It doesn't mention the relationships and traumas the characters undergo (yet).

Here is a PDF of my notes for the first monster the players fought. It has my design notes, and at the end has my GM notes about how the battle went.

I'm not sure how that's actually differing. 'You can't fucking touch it' is never fun, ever. That's kind of a given - I was trying to point out that it's easy to do that by accident early game.
Also I was trying to go version/edition neutral

It was what we did for our campaign. The angel could be incapacitated over and over again, it was a relatively weak angel that would revive in an in-game couple of days to a week, but its core was actually in the reflection on the surface of a lake. After "killing" it twice, we figured it out during downtime in the middle of some hot drama. Of course the main body revived just in time for one last bout as we fought to keep it in place while the lake was drained. Once the lake was drained, the core finally manifested inside the angel and we killed it finally.

Stil a big difference from 'you are stuck in this fight until it dies but it won't fucking die, enjoy spending four sessions trying'

I once tried to run AdEva Borderline with my regular group using 2.5 angels.
The first session was really good since we didn't use any rules as it was just a sightseeing tour of the HQ and it's personnel.
The combat however... Hoo boy. It went terribly. Terribly in a way that I slightly feel bad about it to this day. I had to quit the session (and with that, the campaing) since running it was just too stressful.
It was 3v1 against Sachiel with one player being an OD. The very first round, 2/3 players are paralyzed by angelic fear and the Angel blasts a leg clean off while the remaining EVA couldn't do jack shit.
Now I did plan on things going sideways by having it be a simulator excercise, but the stress caused from juggling numbers and looking after the players was too much. It was like herding cats I tell you.

Damn shame since I was really into running AdEva. I had a good plot twist planned, I immersed myself in the lore, I made a (fugly) sheet for Roll20 and I even printed the whole fucking rulebook.

The system is just a whole piece of shit in any iteration.
I ought to know, I ran three campaigns, played in two and homebrewed a shitton for it. It does nothing that any generic system of your choice can't do with a little homebrew. Hell, I just took Savage Worlds, ripped the sanity mechanics from Unknown Armies, added a mechanic for using your Self to the Sanity rules and it ran better than AdEva ever did.
That's the best advice I can give: Just do that. Take any halfway generic system you like, GURPS, Savage Worlds, FATE, even vanilla nWorld of Darkness, staple Sanity mechanics on that you like (Call of Cthulhu and UA both work fine) and just treat Evas as a second set of characters.

The stuff you specifically mention doesn't happen in v3. Sachiel has no terror traits, the Critical Momentum system makes it almost impossible to blow off a limb on the first turn, and the numbers are a bit simpler.

I won't say you're wrong, but the OP said they are a new GM with a little D&D experience, and no one ever makes good homebrew systems when they have only played D&D. Better they work with a wonky system that already exists, than try to build something good from scratch.

Yeah, that's why Borderline has Fear be a rare thing and not ANGELS ALL HAVE THIS.
Fear is stupid. Always has been. Never did anything constructive, especially when spammed all over the place.
I take it that was before we had Angelgen in and I am sorry that took so long.
Which is funny, because it was BMJ specifically who said all Angels had to have some sort of Fear trait back with 2.5