Roleplay / Hyperspace Evangelion

From left to right: Phillip Mhaol, Ara Kim, Yuki Minase, The Paper Bag Teacher, Elidia, Anatoly Petrov, Kurumi Ishihara, Takumi Kyosuga, Azami Sicarius, Steiner Laudo

"This document- seven pages in length- is the written form of assigning to NERV to be a Pilot! You Children were all brought here, together, in this class, because you have that Potential! You can all be heroes! You can save the world, have parental issues, and probably die! ...I mean, save the world. You can save the world. Ah, how sad it all is..."

— Paper Bag Teacher

Hyperspace Evangelion is an Adeptus Evangelion tRPG Campaign running AD 3 VA's Draft 05, a Dark Heresy modification, inspired by the Shinji And Warhammer 40 K fanfiction, designed to run games in the world of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The campaign can be found on the Hyperspace Forums, created and hosted by GM Elvis Strunk, and has a wikia page dedicated to its universe and plot.

Hyperspace Evangelion takes place in what could be construed as an alternative universe in the greater Evangelion metaverse with an all new cast, drawing heavily in terms of influence and setting from the original animated source material, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and to a lesser degree, the End of Evangelion and Rebuild of Evangelion, but with a number of crucial differences and deviations from the canon universe.

Hyperspace Evangelion starts in Tokyo-3, Japan, 2020, 20 years after the Second Impact, a catastrophic event of apocalyptic magnitude that ultimately resulted in the death of nearly half the world's human population, the near destruction of the entire southern hemisphere, cataclysms such as massive geological disturbances and tidal waves in the northern hemisphere, and irrevocable changes to global climate, habitability, and weather patterns leading to the global extinction of much of the earth's native animal and plant life. What remained of Humanity following the Second Impact inherited a world that would scarcely comfort them. The survivors of the cataclysm were quickly beset upon by bizarre, anomalous life forms; Angels, the progeny of Adam, and Lilin, the progeny of Lilith, powerful beings that transcended life as modern science understood it and defied the laws of physics. Worse, Humanity was caught between the two in a proxy war between their progenitors, facing almost certain extinction, were it not for the development of the first Evangelion. A human-created weapon based on Lilin life paradigms (widely believed by the public to be gigantic robotic mechanized combat units) capable of engaging Angels and Lilin directly and holding its own in battle, the Evangelion and the organization that developed and fielded them, NERV, saved Humanity from the brink, affording human kind a second chance to fight for the right to inherit the post-Second Impact world.

The player pilots were brought in from all over the world for deployment at NERV's headquarters in Tokyo-3 to replenish the depleted Tokyo-3 Evangelion corp following what was likely a devastating Angel or Lilin attack. Here, the new rookie pilots and their one remaining veteran pilot attend the same class (on account of the lack of school-age children) at a local secondary school and live together in a communal home provided by NERV, forging bonds of friendship, discovering the warmth of love, finding space for laughter between the tears, and saving a world too far gone. And then it all comes tumbling down.

As with its parent source material, Hyperspace Evangelion is, at first glance, a relatively standard Humongous Mecha premise, complete with giant "robots", unreasonably big weapons, no taxpayer expense spared, and eldritch abominations with ill defined goals and gains. On closer inspection, however, the campaign emphasizes character studies revolving around the seven primary player characters, their intrinsic strengths and flaws, and their struggles to find self-identity, meaningful relationships, and catharsis while overcoming a gambit of challenges unique to each character and his or her backstory, including societal rejection and vilification, clinical depression, sheltered ignorance, and pathological individualism.

Technically, Hyperspace Evangelion is a collaborative writing and role play exercise between seven individual writers, each of whom was responsible for bringing a unique character with a defining set of character traits and personal conflicts into the plot and overarching setting of the campaign. Hyperspace Evangelion was met with such enthusiasm that players competed for positions in the campaign through a series of character interviews and a semi-canon role play exercise. Since its inception, Hyperspace Evangelion has also inspired several non-canon role play instances that take place in-universe, typically coinciding with real-world holidays, and several works of non-canon fanfiction.

Hyperspace Evangelion shares many (but not all) of the same tropes as Neon Genesis Evangelion. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, such basic tropes that result from common elements of the setting and associated plot elements will not be listed. This page will, instead, focus on the tropes centered around the characters and other unique aspects of Hyperspace Evangelion.

See here for more information about the canon Evangelion franchise as a whole.

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Hyperspace Evangelion provides examples of:

• A-Cup Angst: Yuki has complained multiple times regarding her chest proportions, comparing herself unfavorably with the other female pilots. Of course, she's only 14...
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Airborne Eva Carrier actually. NERV's carrier is a crowning achievement to engineering and taxpayer yen spent and is capable of flying the pilots and their Evas to outlaying areas for deployment. Via rocket propelled drop pods.
• All Men Are Perverts: Steiner's fantasized about masturbating over Elidia's comatose body (admittedly in non-canon fashion), Takumi is the underworld's major supplier of ill-gotten pantsu, Phillip juggles at least 3 celebrity girlfriends at all times, and Anatoly doesn't qualify to be called a man.
• Action Girl: Yuki, Elidia, and Azami all pilot gigantic, multi-story living mecha to slay otherwise untouchable eldritch abominations. Enough said.
• Apologises a Lot: Steiner; barely a single post containing his dialogue goes past without some form of apology for how worthless he is or how pointless his words are. Including his apologies.
• Artificial Human: Elidia is the world's first "Manufactured" human, a scientific accomplishment only rivaled by the extreme cost in terms of material, scientific, and monetary resources required to achieve it. While superficially, NERV maintains that the Manufactured Program is designed to provide a source of reliable and expendable Eva pilots, the truth is that the Human race faces extinction in two or three successive generations due to the after-effects of the Second Impact. Elidia, manufactured specifically to overcome "Adam's Stigmata", represents Humanity's best hope for continuity of the species.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Most Angels have a Core location that needs to be destroyed to defeat them, otherwise they tend to regenerate or shrug off damage. Some Angels have traits removing or altering the fuction of said location, and Lilin are not known to posess it at all.
• Bag of Holding: Takumi's pockets are filled with an endless supply of women's pantsu. He's also pulled a grappling hook and a live octopus out of his pockets.
• BFG: Technically all Eva-scaled firearms qualify for this description. Arguably, the Great Positron Cannon, a massive energy sniper rifle, is the largest such weapon. The recoil of the weapon is such that the Eva firing it must be in a prone position and not even Sleipnir's specialized sniper gunframe, which can tote standard 2-handed Eva-scaled weapons with ease, can carry the weapon or move it once it's been locked into firing position.
• Big Brother Instinct: Takumi has taken it upon himself (by self-invitation) to look after Yuki as an adopted younger sister... much to the idol's displeasure and exasperation.
• Bling of War: Yuki's Eva, Unit Zero, is the world's first privatized Evangelion. As such, it sports all manner of garish civilian advertisements and corporate logos. It probably even all lights up for that extra splash of publicity at night-time fights.
• Bond Creatures: Evangelion in this Ad Eva campaign are portrayed as sentient (or at least intelligent) entities with their own personalities and motivations. Each Eva has a unique affinity for and relationship with its respective pilot, no two pairings experiencing synchronization the same way.
• Calling Your Attacks: Yuki's insistence that they follow mecha tropes has led to her ripping off anime like Gunbuster when she divekicked an Angel after an aerial drop - this was broadcast across the entire city, too, due to some advance preparations on her part.
• Caped Mecha: This hasn't happened yet in the campaign, but you know it will. Looking at you, Yuki Minase...
• Cast Full of Crazy: All player characters needed to take a certain number of drawbacks, some of which manifest as mental instabilities or pathologies. As the campaign progresses, additional mental pathologies emerge as the result of accumulation of stress and "ego" damage from piloting the Evangelion and exposures to soul-rending experiences involving Angels, Lilin, Evangelion, or any combination thereof.
• Child Soldiers: The pilots are all teenagers, owing to the fact that the Evangelion cannot be piloted effectively by anyone born prior to the Second Impact, 20 years ago.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Takumi and Kurumi are prime examples of this trope, having developed strong feelings for one another during their shared childhood and young adulthood with one another as they struggled to survive in the anarchy of Japan's mountainous countryside after the Second Impact. Elidia and her creator Mathias are also an example, although their shared childhood never actually existed and is based entirely on the fact that Elidia inherited altered copies of Mathias's memories as a surrogate for the years of childhood she never lived.
• Clones Are People, Too: Elidia is portrayed as a one-of-a-kind prototype Manufactured human. Ideally, NERV intends to scale the Manufactured Program towards "mass" production of Manufactured in an attempt to reverse the impending extinction of the human race due to Angelic Contamination. So far, however, Elidia is the world's one and only Manufactured human, as much a key to Humanity's immediate as well as future survival as a species. Needless to say, she's hardly the expendable clone most of the general and ignorant public believes her to be.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: Horizon paid a large sum of money to NERV in order to 'rent' an Evangelion of their own and have teen idol Yuki be the pilot. This has come with certain other caveats, like advertising, film and TV rights, interviews, documentaries, and access to certain parts of the base.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Elidia wields the Great Positron Cannon when piloting Sleipnir, an unwieldy, extremely long-ranged weapon that's capable of tremendous damage output, but that also leaves its pilot cripplingly defenseless and utterly reliant upon her teammates. The issue is compounded by the fact that her Evangelion, Sleipnir, was never designed for close-quarters combat, having tissue-paper thin armor and low survivability in general.
• Cyber Cyclops: Elidia's Eva, Sleipnir, has one gigantic, clearly artificial monoeye. Apparently the lack of depth perception doesn't hamper its function as a Sniper-Type Eva.
• Divine Conflict: Adam and Lilith, each waging war against one another by proxy, Adam through his Angelic Host and Lilith through her Lilin Horde. Humanity and its Evangelion just happen to be caught between the two.
• Dysfunction Junction: All the player characters, even Yuki (maybe), have some kind of major, crippling character flaw or circumstance that make them, for lack of better terms, poorly socializable. Particularly with one another. The issue is only exacerbated as the campaign progresses and the characters become increasingly mentally unstable and traumatized.
• Epic Fail:
  • Elidia any time she tries to sing, dance, or otherwise attempt something musically inclined.
  • Phillip getting torn to shreds in the tutorial fight by charging ahead of any support.
• Fatal Flaw: Alphabetically? Or Chronologically?
  • Yuki is hopelessly optimistic owing to her sheltered life and rose-tinted glasses. She's also physically frail to illness and injury, quite literally having a physiological flaw that's potentially lethal.
  • Anatoly is a pilot trapped by his past, unable to move on, either to find happiness and peace or to save his own life. He also has a potentially fatal genetic accident called cancer.
  • Elidia is a girl driven by high and unrestrained emotions and passions with no societal context to temper them save for imprinted memories. Most people think she's a total weirdo anyways given her background, even if she's not acting like one at the moment.
  • Phillip has a fundamental mistrust of all of humanity (unless you're an attractive female pop idol) and suffers from an inability to form, much less appreciate, human relationships.
  • Steiner suffers from crippling clinical depression and self-loathing, unable to see any good in himself or the circumstances he finds himself in.
  • Azami, like Phillip, also hedges her bets against the world, having lost the only people she ever considered family and close to her heart. Azami comes across as standoffish on the best of days and prioritizes the mission objective over any petty issues such as friendships, comraderie, and collateral damage.
• Fortune Teller: Complete with tongueless manservant, the enigmatic Madame Kou is on the barely helpful side with her lack of actual advice, instead providing only somewhat helpful sayings.
• Explosive Overclocking: The Great Positron Cannon generates so much heat after firing that attempting to fire again too soon after a prior discharge can cause the entire weapon to explode. Consistent with this trope, the GPC also uses so much power that it requires the use of two toroid fusion reactors on site (and a city's power grid if available) to fire.
• Flaming Sword: Camael, the first Angel, had the ability to strike out with flaming sword-like AT field projections, consistent with his namesake. In an ironic twist of realism, Camael never actually managed to hit anything with this power.
• Gender Bender: Elidia carries the neural patterns and memories of her male creator as the foundation for her own personality and ego, essentially a female counterpart to the good doctor with a borrowed past and "soul".
• Good Is Not Soft: Takumi is all smiles and country bumpkin charm, looking after his friends and loved ones. Despite appearances, the fellow actually has quite the affinity with an ax and is no stranger to the idea of homicide.
• Hero Insurance: You don't even want to know how much it costs to fix up the city after an Angel/Lilin fight...
• Hime Cut: Azami wears her hair as such.
• Hot-Blooded: Elidia and Phillip are prime examples, needing little excuse or provocation to enter into a no-holds-barred brawl. These two were fighting even before canon!
• Humongous Mecha: The campaign's based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. Enough said.
• Identical Stranger: Grace, an NPC encountered on one of Philip's random wanderings who seems uncannily similar to the description of one of one of Yuki's fellow teen idols, but totally isn't. Also Efta, one of the former Evangelion pilots who piloted alongside Anatoly before she left the corps, and Elidia.
• Idol Singer: Yuki's profession before become an Eva pilot. She used this as leverage in order to get selected as a pilot in the first place - her fame and backing would remove at least some of the financial burden from NERV and potentially earn them some good PR from the backing of her parent company.
• In Harmony with Nature: Elidia has a natural affinity for all living things, ranging from plants to animals. Curiously, they seem to resonate with her on a deeper level as well. More than once, she's commented on the "songs" of living things around herself and others.
• Interservice Rivalry: The Manufactured Project and the Neo-Spartan Project, both of which compete for limited NERV funding and support and have a notoriously rocky relationship with one another.
• Killer Rabbit: One of the Lilin encountered by NERV before the events of canon was described as resembling a giant rabbit. Anatoly was one of the pilots defeated by the Lilin, leading him to develop PTSD as a result. To date, Anatoly is still terrified of the fluffy critters. Of course, having your face eaten by one the size of a skyscraper will do that to a person.
• Kiss Me, I'm Virtual: Rabbit, the AI interface who represents the MAGI, is the only character to have anything approaching a cordial relationship with Steiner. Computer Geek meets Pretty AI Girl; classic.
• Lethal Chef: Kurumi Ishihara's cooking's level of spiciness makes the Second Impact seem like a lukewarm bath.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Elidia was designed by her creator to meet and exceed certain aesthetic feminine ideals, all ostensibly to help her public image. See "All Men Are Perverts" above.
• Mama Bear: Elidia's Evangelion, Sleipnir, has a warm, protective soul and disposition towards its pilot. The lengths to which it will go to protect her are... extreme.
• MegaCorp: Horizon, which directly controls the vast majority of communications and media infrastructure and owns an impressive portfolio of controlling stakes in a large number of other corporate interests in a wide variety of industries in the post Second Impact world. Horizon's also recently gotten into the business of saving the world, sponsoring Yuki Minase, one of their teen idols, to pilot an Evangelion in a massive publicity stunt billed as a "gesture of corporate responsibility".
• Miko: Yuki is a shrine maiden at her family's ancestral Shinto shrine. She takes her duties seriously and continues to attend to her duties, time permitting.
• Mix-and-Match Man: Elidia is a genetic chimera from multiple unspecified donor sources. Enough of the process was subject to chance and random variation that both she and her creator dismiss the possibility of recreating her precisely, even if it were economically feasible to produce additional copies of her.
• Motion-Capture Mecha: Describes Philip's Evangelion (which features a cradle ala Pacific Rim that reads his physical movements to pilot the Eva) in particular, although it's possible the other Evangelion can also mimic their pilots' physical movements if needed to.
• Moving Buildings: Like its counterpart in the Evangelion universe, Adeva's Tokyo-3 features buildings which withdraw underground when under threat from Angel or Lilin attacks. Other fortress assets ordinarily hidden underground so as to not alarm the city's citizenry also qualify, doing the exact reverse when the city is under attack.
• Mysterious Antarctica: Ground Zero of the Second Impact, Antarctica is a continent shrouded in mystery, if it even still exists in any meaningful way.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Mathias, NERV's go to man for all medical, Evangelion, and technological needs. You know he's legit because of the white lab coat. The man's probably got more degrees than he has years past puberty. Also likely extends to Gerard, the other NERV wunderkind on payroll.
• One-Way Visor: Sachiko Minoru, NERV's operations director, wears a custom visor that completely obscures her eyes, leaving the woman inscrutable on the best of days.
• Only the Chosen May Ride: The Evangelion only synchronize with individuals born after the Second Impact, and only a handful of them at that. Even pilots who are capable of synchronizing with one Eva may find it impossible to synchronize with another, as evidenced by Elidia's ill-fated attempt to synchronize with Unit Zero.
• Or Was It a Dream?: Chapter 2 starts with a shared dream among the pilots which, unbeknownst to them, was a vision of actual events in the city that evening. The veracity of the dream was confirmed at the end of the chapter as one of the pilots experiences the tragedy of the "dream" first hand.
• Otaku Surrogate: Yuki's super into old mecha anime and gaming - she has name-dropped Super Robot Wars as a favorite, and stays up late at night for raids. Becoming a mecha pilot was a dream come true.
• Our Angels Are Different: The Angels from Ad Eva are strikingly different from those depicted by Judaeo-Christian religion, like those of the source material. The Lilin are also radically different from Angels as depicted by the Evangelion universe, for example, lacking the signature red cores which typify the Angels of Evangelion.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Paper Bag Teacher literally has a paper-thin disguise as he wears a paper bag over his head.
• Pimped-Out Car: Gerard's customized NERV limousine seems to feature all the necessities of civilization, including a minibar, snack fridge, entertainment system. The darned thing probably has a fishtank in it too... Eat your heart out, Xzibit.
• Rage Against the Heavens: See Divine Conflict above; what remains of Humanity has thrown its efforts behind NERV's efforts to fight back against Adam and Lilith, fielding Evangelion to meet and slay the Gods' proxies on their own terms.
• Red Shirt Army: NERV and the UN's conventional military forces who are utterly ineffective at slowing or distracting the Angels/Lilin attacking the city and who largely exist in the plot only to be wiped out and to make players feel bad.
• Russian Guy Suffers Most: Anatoly's only stated goals in life are to retire from the Eva corp and to find that special girl to be lazy for the rest of his life with. Instead he gets dumped by his previous love interest and cancer, all before the campaign even started. Tough.
• Scare Campaign: The CRG's generally anti-NERV and specifically anti-Manufactured rhetoric.
• Sensual Spandex: The pilots' plugsuits, which are just as anatomically revealing as the show's.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Anatoly, the only surviving active-duty member of Tokyo-3's Eva Corp before the player pilots arrived. By his own admission, he's only a shadow of his former self, struggling with PTSD and widely metastatic cancer. This trope will probably extend to most, if not all of the player pilots later in the campaign.
• Shock and Awe: Camael, the first true Angel confronted by the cast, wielded, among other powers, a deadly ability to generate electrical surges that had the potential to fry any Evangelion still connected to its umbilical power source. Fortunately, the pilots were running on reserve power for most of the battle as they had chosen to deploy outside the city's power grid in an attempt to prevent further civilian casualties, limiting the Angel's ability to use its power to full effect.
• Shower Scene: Elidia and Yuki bathe together (and each other) frequently.
• Stress Vomit: Elidia does this when Takumi decides to treat all the pilots to some delicious, ethically reprehensible whale meat sashimi.
• Sunglasses at Night: NERV's resident rockstar/science-geek combo loves to drive his custom limousine at nighttime with his sunglasses on. Tokyo-3's lamp posts and pedestrians are less than thrilled by the idea.
• Super Mode: Under circumstances of extreme duress, the Evangelion have the potential of going berserk, overriding their pilots' control or otherwise supplanting them and circumventing NERV's cybernetic inhibitors, allowing them to single-handedly defeat their Angelic or Lilin opponents, albeit at a devastating cost to the city, NERV, and the pilots themselves.
• Technicolor Eyes: Azami and Elidia have red and yellow eyes respectively. While not as fantastical, Anatoly, Steiner and Takumi all have green eyes.
• The Nicknamer: Phillip has an Irish nickname for just about every character in the campaign. Not that anyone (including the players) can keep any of them straight.
• The Spartan Way: The Neo Spartan Program, which trains Evangelion Pilots from displaced children, irrespective of lost youth and consent issues. The Neo Spartan program's methods are extreme and their candidates effective, if not somewhat scarred soldiers. Azami is the Neo Spartan representative dispatched to Tokyo-3 for service in the Eva Corp.
• Trauma Conga Line: Player pilots accumulate traumas that manifest as psychiatric illnesses as their piloting stress and ego damage accumulate. These effects are permanent and cannot be lost or otherwise "cured."
• Triple Shifter: Describes Mathias, who seems to literally live in NERV's laboratories and is always in some state of extreme sleep deprivation and/or half-starvation. Also extends to NERV's security staff which seem to be conveniently present 24/7.
• Uterine Replicator: Presumably describes the apparatuses used to create Elidia. Although the Manufactured Project's origins and facilities are murky, even to Elidia, whose creator deliberately expunged his own memories regarding the program prior to imprinting her with them, she's referenced on multiple occasions being pulled from "the tube," presumably the gestation apparatus she occupied during her creation process.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Niles Septimus, local Coalition for Responsible Genomics strongman, and the CRG as a whole enjoys strong and enthusiastic-bordering-on-fanatic support from a not-insignificant portion of the public, collectively becoming a thorn in the side for NERV in general and the Manufactured Program in particular.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: Elidia's eyes are an unusual, but undeniably attractive golden amber, a hallmark of her origins as a manufactured human. A number of characters have commented on this particular feature, although it may have also attracted the attention of a certain aspiring serial killer.

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