Reconnecting with Old Friends · 1:59am Jul 31st, 2020
So I thought today would be a good day for happier news. Goodness knows there's enough negativity in the world and drama around horse websites. I also just wanted to let people know about a secret project I've been working on.
I haven't really posted about it much, but for a long time, I've been involved in Tabletop Roleplaying design and development. I've helped bring a couple games to Kickstarter and designed a couple of fangames here and there. Recently, I've gone all the way back to my roots.
You see, over a decade ago I cut my teeth on real game design working on a little project on /tg/ called Adeptus Evangelion. At the time, Dark Heresy was a brand-new game, and one of its most exciting features was brutal hit tables that would rip off your limbs and shower everyone around you in gore. I highly recommend all of the Fantasy Flight 40k games, as an aside.
A man named Black Mesa Janitor (BMJ, or Jan) started putting together an Evangelion-themed system around the brutal combat framework of Dark Heresy. It did admittedly also take some inspiration from a very old fanfic called Shinji and Warhammer 40k. I was in the second test campaign for the game, which lasted several years and is one of my fondest Tabletop Roleplaying memories. We were heavily involved in the development of the game, and eventually, enough changes were made that BMJ released a second edition and even a splatbook. If you want to see where my hand was in this, I estimate I was responsible for a lot of the revisions to balance in the core book (I'm a power gamer, sue me) and a lot of the extra content in the splatbook - it included extra-powerful Angels we called Archangels, and several were based on designs I used in my own campaigns.
Eventually, other projects came up (A mecha roleplaying game named Battle Century G and an SMT-themed game called Monsterpunk), and AdEva sort of faded into the background as I stopped using /tg/ and moved on.
A few months ago, BMJ started getting some of the old crew back together, and we've been working on a brand-new version of Adeptus Evangelion (Officially, this is version 4, as there was a version 3 I wasn't much involved with). We've moved away from Dark Heresy entirely in favor of a system that's 100% built around narrative mechanics and is totally original.
This week, I largely wrapped up a big section of the book on running and playing in Life on the Ground sessions, the pilot-focused 'episodes' that take place between Angel attacks. The game itself is still largely in flux, and some major pieces are in flux - just this week we realized in addition to straight combat encounters and puzzles, we needed some Angels to act as pure narrative to advance the story, especially to bridge between Story Arcs, which are something designed to pace out the Big Story of the Conspiracy and Consequences.
Once the test server is ready to go live, I'll post a link to it and the test document here on my blog, but it's been a ton of fun reconnecting with people and puzzling out how to turn vague ideas into solid rules.
This sounds really cool! I can't say I'm any great connoisseur of tabletop games, but I'd be interested to see this one.
That sounds cool! One of my old college friends, with whom I've sadly drifted apart from, was helping to design a tabletop system for the Avatar: the Last Airbender universe. It was really promising, with multiple classes for each bending type, plus nonbenders, each with different roles and playstyles in and out of combat. You could even level up into hybrid bending, like Fog or Lava. I wonder if he ever finished it.
You were part of developing AdEva? That's so cool! I ran a game with my friends... Goodness, years ago at this point. I based it in NERV Boston, worked in some Lovecraftian stuff, made full use of the custom Angel rules, everyone had a blast. I'll have to keep an eye on this next edition.
How cool. :D
Social games are fun. Glad you’re having fun making them.
5325974
I've been asked to relay a question - was your campaign the one where the science doctor from Egypt turned out to be a mask of Nyarlathotep?
Oh shit! Fellow tabletop dev here, I followed Adeptus back in the day but had no idea you had fingers in that particular pie. Very excited to see new news about it.
Colour me piqued. I have personally never touched the 40k role playing rules (Dark Heresy, Only War, etc.) myself, but a friend and myself did work to create our own "homebrew" based around the actual rules set in for the tabletop miniatures. Hearing about someone else with somewhat similar ideas albeit with greater success in implementation is pleasantly surprising.
hell yes hell yes hell yes
5325988
No, it was the one where the pilots went to Misaktonic High.