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So, at last Saturday's game I mentioned an indie RPG I came across that grabbed me and shook me and won't let me go until I do something about it. So, I'm going to tell you about it, and if anyone's interested, we can either play it in person on a Saturday when we don't have quorum for Space Opera!, or I can try to set up a play-by-post here on the forum.

The game is Bliss Stage, written and published by Ben Lehman. You'd be really hard-pressed to find an actual physical copy of the book, which is small, white and out of print -- I found a PDF copy at an online store. Basically, Bliss Stage is a game about teenaged emo kids fighting terrifying nightmare aliens in giant robots powered by love.

Okay, I'll explain.

The exact moment you read this, every adult over the age of eighteen is struck by a sudden bout of fatigue; they quietly and peacefully fall asleep and are unable to be awakened. The survivors (all children, with a select few adults kept awake by a combination of drugs, insanity, and obsession) name this peaceful sleep the Bliss, for the way the affected adults smile as they dream.

Society irrevocably collapses, and for two years the world's children try to scrape out a life in the shells of cities amongst the slumbering bodies of the rest of the human race. Gangs form and collapse, children starve and cry and die, and even if you survive all that, the Bliss gets you in the end.

And then, the aliens finally arrive in force. They appear in the cities and the countryside alike in giant, invincible robot-monster-drone-things that systematically destroy what little civilization there is left. The next five years is spent like the first two were, only with more death and more starvation and more fear.

Then, a small light of hope blooms: someone, maybe one of the few waking adults or a group of genius teenagers with too much time on their hands manages to bring down one of the alien drones and reverse engineers the technology that lets the alien pilots control the robots from their home in the dream world. What they build lets a teenager with enough courage and natural talent to manifest a robot-like dream creation built out of the weaponized souls of their friendsand lovers that can affect both dream and reality, finally allowing what's left of humanity the chance to fight back against their attackers.

And that's where the game begins. It follows the lives of a small group of resistance fighters, led by a still-waking adult and driven by hope or fear or desperation (and probably by all three). They use the dream-robots, called ANIMas (for Alien Numina Inversion Machine) to fight off the aliens' attacks and send out strike forces of their own; when they aren't fighting in their giant robots, they love, hate, and stress their relationships to the breaking point, because intimacy powers their weapons and trust makes them unstoppable.

So: Love! Sex! Giant Robots! What's not to love?

If anyone's interested, I can elaborate on the game mechanics (which are pretty brilliant and require some explaination) or the background a little more. It's very much a story-telling game that is ensemble-run rather than at the whim of a single GM (though there's still a GM that makes a lot of the final calls; her job is more to get a consensus from the players and come up with ideas when everyone is out of them than a more traditional GM role). The way characters are handled is also very different from traditional RPGs, but it's also one of the brilliant points of the system. I really want to try it out, and I think it'll be a lot of fun. So let me know what you think!

Awesome! Well, that's one smile Even if it's just the two of us, we'd have fun, I think -- we're pretty good at coming up with insane love stories on our own ;P