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Tabletop Game: Bliss Stage

This is a game about the necessity of war...
About the cost of survival...
About the desperation of sex...
About the pain of betrayal.

But more importantly, this is a game about the endurance of humanity.

About the courage of heroes.

About the power of love.

About hope for the future.

- Ben Lehman

Right now, the moment you began reading this, Humanity is devastated by an alien attack from the edges of our understanding.

It is the first blow of a terrible war. Seven years later, armed with technology you cannot comprehend and can barely operate, you will strike back.

This is how.

—Back cover copy

Bliss Stage is a tabletop roleplaying game written by Ben Lehman and produced by TAO Games, explicitly intended as his homage to Neon Genesis Evangelion and similar works. It is available at his website, These Are Our Games,

with more information at the blog and fansite Love Is My Weapon.

In addition, Tsundere Lightning was recently tapped by the original author for an official Visual Novel adaptation of the game, Bliss Stage: Love Is Your Weapon, which recently launched a Kickstarter page here

The moment the game begins, malevolent aliens afflict humanity as a whole with The Bliss, a form of stasis locking the adult population of the world into a sleep with apparently blissful dreams, leaving the child and teenaged survivors in a Crapsack World ravaged by occasional attacks by alien terror drones.

A lone, insomniac, and very probably Ax Crazy adult manages to rally the local survivors and, to their enduring astonishment, capture one of the drones. They quickly reverse engineer it into the Alien Numina Inversion Machine, or ANIMa, a machine that converts relationships into a source of Psychic Power taking the form of a Humongous Mecha: The deeper the relationship, the more powerful its weapons. The pilot of this ANIMa needs to be properly Anchored (in a manner similar to the duties of the Operators) by a "trained psychologist," usually just someone who they have a crush on.

Mayhem and extremely complicated romantic entanglements just happen in Bliss Stage - the rules very quickly turn it into either a Bittersweet Ending or something a little more disturbing.

Frequently a Crowning Moment of Awesome and Squick factory.

This game provides examples of:

Adults Are Useless - both subverted and played straight: the economy and infrastructure of the civilized world collapses without the adults, but the PCs are all teenagers and the Authority Figure is inevitably a Magnificent Bastard at best and a Jerkass at worst.
Animesque: Ben Lehman listed Neon Genesis Evangelion, Macross and RahXephon as influences.
Applied Phlebotinum - the ANIMa, big time.
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence - one of the possible results of the endgame.
Black Box - no one knows how the ANIMa work; the rulebook even speculates that the only functional part of the entire rig is a chunk of alien brain.
Black Bug Room - Where a pilot ends up if you botch a Pilot Safety/Nightmare check. The reason you need an Anchor is to prevent this from happening.
Break the Cutie - Innocent Sweethearts. 'Nuff said.
Breather Level - worked into the game in the form of Interlude Actions.
Competence Zone - Between the ages of 13 and 17. Before that you can't Pilot: after that you Bliss.
Crapsack World - No electricity. No food. No sewage systems. Aliens trying to kill you. And you Bliss at age 18.
Deconstruction - of The Power of Love.
- Though most players try to immediately reconstruct the trope. And succeed.
Deus Sex Machina - In the form of Level Up At Intimacy 5 and More Friends, More Benefits.
The End of the World as We Know It
Failure Knight - You can safely assume you are not your Anchor's first love. Or even their first pilot.
Fun with Acronyms - Alien Numina Inversion Machine shortens to ANIMa. ...Sure, Ben. Sure.
GMPC: Required in the form of the Authority Figure. In fact, if any other player has a character who becomes the Authority Figure, that player must become the new GM!
Handsome Lech - As of the beginning of the one-shot, Keenan Caine has snagged all of the girls (judging by their Intimacy scores). Depending on what names and genders you assign to the Anchors, he's also snagged a couple of the guys.
How Do I Shot Web? - The ANIMa was created six years after roughly "Right Now -" the war began in earnest after another year of deadly trial and error. And it's still very hard to control an ANIMa without the guidance of an Anchor.
Heroic BSOD - the probable result of getting to 108 Bliss in the Endgame.
Humongous Mecha - the ANIMa and the alien terror drones.
Insistent Terminology - They're a Creche and a Cradle, not a hangar and an Entry Plug, respectively.
Intimate Healing - A Stress Relief or Trauma Relief result during an Interlude.
Jerkass - Any Authority Figure, period. Some also say this about Keenan.
Kick the Dog in the continuing examples, followed soon afterwards by an attempt to Murder the Hypotenuse:
Keenan: Man, Sara is getting all girly and clingy and shit. I don't want to deal with that. Lousy lay, too.
Josh: Fuck. That. Noise.
La Résistance
Level Up At Intimacy 5 - trope namer; the only way to be effective in ANIMa combat is to deepen your relationship with your Anchor and others.
Lotus-Eater Machine - The Bliss itself could potentially be one, depending on interpretation.
Love Triangle - in the continuing examples and the one-shot. Type 4: Josh is A, Sarah B, and Keenan C. Happens a lot in actual play, too, sometimes to the point of a —
Love Dodecahedron - if your Pilot doesn't have one, they're seriously underpowered.
Mind Screw
Mission Control - the Anchors. In game, the Anchor's player acts as Mission Control and describes the terrain in combat.
More Friends, More Benefits - Previous Trope Namer. The path to More Dakka in this game is wrapping your Pilot in a Love Dodecahedron of ludicrous proportions.
Moe Couplet - Sara by Josh. Their love is so innocent. This in a relentlessly Grim Dark game.
Moe - Sara Smith from the continuing examples and one-shot.
Parental Abandonment - The Bliss in general — and Josh Preston's father, the Authority Figure of La Résistance in the continuing examples, who didn't look for him after the Bliss hit in particular.
Present Day Present Time is when the Bliss hits, while the actual gameplay takes place Twenty Minutes into the Future.
Promotion to Parent
Psychic Powers - mechanically significant combat takes place entirely in a bizarre dream-world.
108 - Word Of God has it that this is the reason the game ends when you go over 108 Bliss.
Only Fatal to Adults - The Bliss. Specifically, it's only fatal if you turn eighteen.
Relationship Values - There are six stats in the game. Three of them are Relationship Values - Intimacy, Trust and Stress. And the other three measure how screwed your Pilot is.
Rule Of Cool - the only possible explanation of why the ANIMa creates a robot.
The Power of Love - Ben Lehman's favorite way of describing the ANIMa is "It runs on weaponized love."
Tsundere - Anna Lin in the running examples and introductory adventure.
Teenage Wasteland
The Virus - The Bliss had serious overtones of this, before the before time.
This Is Not a Drill - Uttered in the example first action.
Word Salad Title - Averted; the name is a reference to the "Bliss Stage" of a relationship - basically, the psychological term for the honeymoon period.
Write Who You Know - The rules suggest naming Anchors after the players' unrequited crushes from when they were the age of their Pilot characters. It's also pointed out that using the name of someone you still know would be rather creepy, considering certain mechanics.
You Lose At Zero Trust - the Trope Namer.