Adeptus Evangelion

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Adeptus Evangelion is a Dark Heresy modification designed to run games in the world of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Symbolism, Mind Rape and humanity getting turned into Tang not included.

Adeptus Evangelion v2.5 can be downloaded here,and the GM-only supplement REDACTED can be downloaded here [dead link]. There is also an offshoot, the Borderline Edition, which can be downloaded here [dead link].

And the support forum can be found here.


Tropes used in Adeptus Evangelion include:
  • Ace Custom: The Concept Model trait for the Evangelions. It starts with two free upgrades but costs two collateral damage when it enters battle because of the cost of replacement parts.
  • Adaptation Expansion and Alternate Continuity — Game Masters are encouraged to expand on the story and mythos as they please (and to throw a curveball at those who have seen the anime).
    • It also includes elements from the various Evangelion video games, namely the Jet Alone Prime and T-RIDEN-T Land Cruiser.
  • The Alleged Evangelion: The Player's Evangelion if the player rolls poorly. It can be made by the lowest bidder or held together by duct tape (they're on the same table so it can't be both), have pressurized blood that squirts everywhere, lose bolts in battle that destroy nearby buildings, have a fractured mind, and be colored Neon Green.
  • And I Must Scream - This can occasionally happen to pilots. If your Eva is defeated, there's a chance that your entry plug will fail to eject, leaving you stranded in the middle of a battlefield... and you can probably still feel whatever it was that incapacitated your mech.
  • Artifact Title - The name "Adeptus Evangelion" referred to the fact that the game used the same system as Dark Heresy. The dev team has announced they will be abandoning this system when releasing v3 (though they are simultaneously releasing a 2.5 version that will use the DH system), but are keeping the title because it is recognizable.
  • Attack Its Weak Point - As in The Series attacking an Angels core with a critical can cause it to explode and cause masses of collateral.
  • Awesomeness Is Volatile - Synch ratio, which can change when you get hurt. More=better, at least until you go above 100% at which point it starts to eat your soul alive. Then you pass 200% and essentally attain the power of god. In less than five minutes, you will collapse into Tang. It is sure to be a Crowning Moment of Awesome, and a Dying Moment of Awesome.
  • Barrier Warrior - Played with, AT Tacticians can be used to buff and shield allies but they also get some cataclysmic powers.
  • Boss Game - Barring some rare exceptions, most fight tend to only include a single, powerful and unique ennemy, making this a rare RPG example of this trope.
  • BFG - Any ranged weapon you wield would fall under this, really; after all, the players characters are piloting 40-meter-tall mechs, so any gun you have would likely be as big as a person, or bigger.
    • Several guns are so big that even an Evangelion needs the Heavy Chassis upgrade to so much as pick it up.
    • The Great Positron Cannon is so huge that you can't even fire it if you aren't plugged into the city's power grid... three times. It's also powerful enough to shoot into orbit.
      • Also played with, Pallet Guns are woefully ineffectual since they just fire Battelship shells that are easily deflected.
  • BFS - If you get enough Weapon Upgrades you can get a Progression Sword.
  • Character Shill - [REDACTED] features rules for a thirty second advertisement produced by the party. The Supplement seems to expect the worst ...
  • Chunky Salsa Rule - With organic Humongous Mecha. Needless to say, the results are not pretty. This is a Dark Heresy conversion, after all.
  • Crazy Enough to Work - A feat available to AT Tactician's is called this. It involves using ridiculously dangerous AT abilities in intricate ways.
  • Duct Tape for Everything. The only thing keeping the Patchwork Eva together.
  • Dysfunction Junction - All the player characters, obviously.
  • Eva Fins - A handy location for pistols and Prog Knives.
  • Eye Scream - A variation of this can happen if an Eva takes critical damage to its head; the pilot will feel the damage too, which can cause anything from disrupted focus due to intense pain, to going slowly insane from the feeling of your head melting.
  • Flawed Prototype - Evangelion with the "Patchwork" Drawback, described as being made from recycled pieces, dummy bodies, and duct tape.
  • Frickin' Laser Beams - The positron rifles came back. And they have three upgrades. One that has a multi shot fuse. One that is a one-shot and is larger. Then there is the Great Positron Cannon. It is able to one-shot angel if you get lucky. Problem is you can only mount it on a heavy chassis. So you become a Mighty Glacier.
    • Actually, the description of the Great Positron Cannon, alongside the stats, imply that that is the positron rifle used against the fifth and fifteenth Angels in the show. The range and extremely unwieldy nature of it back this up.
  • Gainax Ending - Not one, but NINE of them are detailed (including the one from End of Evangelion), each one as apocalyptic as the next.
  • Godzilla Threshold - Lose a battle, and you cross this, with the UN deploying a N2 mine. Later Operations Directors can call this in, but you'll probly still need to cross it before they will.
  • Goomba Stomp - the Gravity Kick talent enables this. With high enough elevation can be Death From Above.
  • Hidden Supplies - Your city will supply you with these. Guns, ammunition, and spare umbilical power cables can be sent to the surface for the Evangelions to use.
  • Humongous Mecha - Well, duh. In addition to the Evangelions themselves, there's also Jet Alone, the Jet Alone Prime, and the T-RIDEN-T Land Cruiser, in Prototype, Interceptor and Artillery flavor. There's even rules to pilot a T-RIDEN-T instead of an Eva, which has its benefits (no Synch Ratio difficulties, unlimited amount of Structural and Weapon Upgrades) and its costs (only the Skirmisher and Pointman careers are open to you, no AT or Biological powers, limited selection of melee weapons).
  • Hilarity Ensues - In the new GM supplement you can have the players hold a dance competition starring the Evangelions, have a sports match with the Evangelions, or have the pilots create a 30 second commercial for a sponsor.
    • The dance competition one has actually happened in at least one campaign that doesn't use the supplement. Said game also had a pop idol pilot's EVA backup dancing for her.
  • It Runs on Nonsensoleum - The scientists haven't really figured out what an A.T. field actually is.
  • Ludicrous Gibs - In the manual, there are 8 consecutive pages of critical hit tables and nothing else. Then there is one page with a short paragraph about how angels respond differently to critical damage than Evangelions (since Angels lack pilots), and then there are 8 more pages of critical hit tables. Some of the entries are things like "your Evangelion's head explodes so violently it becomes shrapnel and damages anyone else nearby."
  • Mecha Expansion Pack - In addition to the standard B-Type armour you can also equip your Evangelion with A-Type (Aerial combat), C-Type (Deep sea combat), D-Type (Magma combat, like the one Asuka used against Sandolphon) and E-Type (Outer Space combat).
  • Mind Rape - the GM supplement [REDACTED] allows you to RP this.
  • Mundane Utility - Using the Evas for a Dance Competition, or for sports. Supposedly it's to get more data on Synch Ratios but really?
  • Nerf - many things were nerfed and buffed in version 2.5. Skirmishers are less of a Game Breaker, AT Powers aren't as expensive, making the AT Tatician less useless, and the Story-Breaker Power Dirac Breach was severely nerfed.
  • No Endor Holocaust - Averted HARD. There's a whole system of subsidiary damage called "Collateral Damage", and it reflects just how badly the surrounding terrain is screwed up after the fighting is over—the higher it is, the less system upgrade points you get as a result, as your organization spends more and more of its budget on fixing the damage. Taken to its extreme with Jet Alone; its Nuclear Powered trait means that if it takes critical damage to the body, there's a 50% chance (5 or less on a D10) that it'll melt down. It does no physical damage, and it stops Jet Alone but the players inflict 100 Collateral Damage on the battlefield. Jet Alone Prime, meanwhile, goes off almost exactly like an N2 Mine, thanks to having an N2 Reactor.
  • One Hit KO - Averted using the Fate Point system. In any situation where the pilot would die, they can permanently sacrifice one of their fate points for a miraculous survival. Angels can do this too, so you can't win with a single lucky shot.
  • Power Gives You Wings - One of the uses of an S2 Organ in V2.0 is a set of six insectile wings that allow you to fly.
  • Properly Paranoid - The "Paranoid" asset. Yes, asset. Not drawback.
  • Spell My Name with an "S": The A.T. Fields are termed "Absolute Territory" fields in the handbook, as opposed to the opening of the show which hints they should be called "Absolute Terror" fields. The justification the book gives is that Angels use the A.T. field to define what space they can influence the laws of physics in, while humans use a much weaker A.T. field to define the body they house their soul in.
  • Splat - Background and Career. Each background is based on one of the main characters; as well as all but one career
  • The Beautiful Game: The GM Supplement [REDACTED] includes rules for Evangelion scale Soccer/ Football matches.
  • There Are No Therapists: AVERTED! However they can only help you so much. Made more useful in 2.5, where now you can either reduce insanity by 3 points/month or drop it down to the nearest multiple of 10 (from 68 to 60, 99 to 90, so on). So now Insanity is less of a one-way street, but it takes a while to recover.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Referenced by the Borderline Edition in their description of the Linear Rail Accelerator Cannon:

When new, experimental technology proves to be wildly successful as a weapon, the most natural progression is to then build the biggest gun one can possibly make out of it. The simply named "Linear Rail Accelerator Cannon" is just that; a heavy weapons platform borne out of mankind's instinctive desire to push the limits of practicality in the name of overkill.

  • Too Awesome to Use: Anything that needs you to burn fate points. You are permanently deprived of a fate point that could have saved you from death later on, and it's hard to earn new ones.
  • Total Party Kill: The Mass Production Evangelions and Keter, from the [REDACTED] supplement, seem to be designed to do this.
  • Tournament Arc: This is possible in the GM supplement as well.
  • Traveling At the Speed of Plot -The Evangelion Carrier Plane literally has a listed speed of "As the plot demands".
  • You Didn't Ask: Weaponized by the Operations Directors; some of their talents specifically rely on the other people not asking what they have been up to. One of them allows them to show up in person to save one of the other PCs as long as they haven't done anything location-specific in the last 10 minutes; another allows them to modify one of the city's buildings into a rocket-turret structure, and neglect to mention which building until he decides to use it, at which point it is retroactively decided that he had picked that building ahead of time.