Thursday, August 8, 2019

#RPGaDAY 2019 - DAY 8: OBSCURE

The "Sir Glorious" miniature from Wizards' short-lived Dreamblade game. I never played it, and just bought the starter.
The amazing Autocratik custom dice thanks to www.chimericdesigns.co.uk
Day eight of #RPGaDAY 2019 - look we're already into the second week! Today's prompt is OBSCURE, so I thought I'd post a little about the most obscure RPG I own. Back in early 2000's (must be 2002-3) in the UK the SyFy Channel (Sci-Fi Channel as it was then, before the rebrand) announced that they were going to start showing an anime series called Neon Genesis Evangelion. Randomly, it was on fairly early in the morning and I set the video to record it. A friend of mine did that "You've never heard of Evangelion?" and figured it must be okay.

Just one episode down and I was hooked. I jumped online and discovered it wasn't released on DVD in the UK, and I headed over to Ebay and managed to import the whole series as individual volumes from Australia (whose DVD release was Region 2 and 4). I watched the lot, then the movies, bought the figures, the EVAs, the soundtracks... Ah, those days when I had a disposable income.

I loved it. It was more than just a "kids in mech suits fighting monsters" - it had serious psychological depth.

Safe to say I loved Evangelion
One of the weird things that popped up on my Ebay searches for cool Evangelion stuff was an RPG. It was in Japanese, but that wasn't going to stop me. I ordered it, and...

The Evangelion "The Descent of ANGEL" RPG.
It's pretty, but I can't read Japanese to play it. It has a summary of the last half-dozen episodes with full colour inserts at the beginning...

Summary of episodes, I know just how you feel Shinji.
At the back of the book are loads of cards and card-standees to represent the characters that you punch out (I haven't because I'm a sad purist)...

Character sheets on NERV ID cards! Nice!

Some of the cards for actions or something. Dunno. Cool though!!
The middle section of the book is black and white with cool illustrations of the EVAs, the characters, and plot points in the scenarios.


EVAs!!! Awesome.

But my favourite part is that dotted around in the book there are illustrations of the characters from the series as if they are playing the game. Like you could get Gendo to play a game at all...

Rei, that die is a bit big for the table...
And I certainly wouldn't trust Gendo to GM...
I still love Evangelion. Never tried playing a mecha game though. One day...

1 comment:

Batjutsu said...

Thanks for sharing this, I'd not seen before. That artwork! 😍