# Bliss Stage tags: #game/rpg/bliss-stage ![[Bliss Stage (cover).jpg|600]] **Bliss Stage** is Ben Lehman's 2007 vision of what happens when an alien apocalypse and the raw emotional life of teenagers get shoved into the same cockpit. Seven years after a world-altering event called the Bliss put humanity on its knees, a ragtag resistance of kids pilots **ANIMa** — dream-fighting mecha — into a shared dream world to take the fight back to the invaders. Its real engine isn't the giant robots, though; it's the relationships holding those pilots together, because in Bliss Stage your capacity to fight is measured in who you love, how much, and whether holding onto them is going to break you first. ## Setting The Bliss came, the world shattered, and now it is rebuilt in miniature: a resistance group, somewhere near where you actually live, of at least ten or so survivors led by a still-waking adult — a figure from the before-times held in half-sleep, speaking through the dreams. The survivors have a creche of ANIMa and the means to operate it. Into that cramped, desperate community the players slot teenage **Pilots** and the **Anchors** who keep them grounded, and the group decides the texture of it all: what the aliens look like, whether the dream world is a mirror of home or a stranger place, how the survivors scrape by. It's a game about fighting an enemy that outnumbers and outclasses you, told through the people who are all each other has left. ## Mechanics Bliss Stage has a gamemaster — but a deliberately gentle one, whose primary job is facilitating consensus and running the resistance's authority figure rather than arbitrating fate. A campaign is a string of short play units called **actions** — each roughly one important thing, two to five minutes of focused scene — sorted into **Mission** (dream-world combat), **Interlude** (relationship scenes in the waking world), **Briefing**, and the resolution actions that wrap a story arc. ### Values Everything runs on two families of score. A **pilot**'s values are **Terror**, **Trauma**, and **Bliss** — the damage a war in the dream world inflicts, and the grim fuel it generates. Every **relationship** carries its own set: **Intimacy**, **Trust**, and **Stress**. - **Intimacy** (1–5) — the depth of physical and emotional closeness, charted level by level from *Names and Eyes* up through *Touch and Mess*, *Blood and Spit*, and finally *Sex*. Intimacy only ever rises, and it's the pilot's power in combat. (This is the chart that birthed the hobby's "Intimacy 5 is Sex" shorthand.) - **Trust** (1–5) — the relationship's durability, whether it can take the strain of the mission or the betrayal of the waking world. Let Trust drop to zero and the relationship is **destroyed**. - **Stress** (0–6) — the running damage the relationship has absorbed. When Stress exceeds Trust, Stress snaps back to zero and Trust ticks down one. A destroyed relationship yields the pilots involved **Bliss equal to three times the relationship's intimacy** — a cold, terrible payoff: the deeper you loved, the harder your grief fights. Non-pilots don't get values; they just get **Harm**, and a character who's harmed and then harmed again is killed. ### Pilots, Anchors, Hopes Player characters are made from **pilot templates** — the age-coded archetypes like the **Innocent Sweetheart** (13), the **Eager Young Soldier** (14), the **Devoted Lover** (15) — each with pre-assigned relationships and a special ability. Anchors are the non-piloting figures who support them from the real world. The table also sets the group's **Hopes** — a short list of what the resistance is fighting for, one fewer than there are pilots — and a Hope cannot be fulfilled until the game resolves it, which quietly sets the campaign's scale of what's even possible. ## Editions - **Interim Stage** (2007) — the PDF edition, produced September 2007 (the text is copyright 2005-2007), by Ben Lehman from Nostalgia Studio. *This is the copy in the library.* - **Ignition Stage** — the earlier/original print edition of the game, out of print and a collector's piece. - The game was an Indie RPG of the Year runner-up and won an Indie Game Design competition award in 2007; a **revised/print** edition is not in the collection. ## References - [Game Summary and Editions | RPGnet RPG Game Index](https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=7985) - [Bliss Stage at TAO Games](https://www.tao-games.com/bliss-stage/) - [Buy Bliss Stage — Indie Press Revolution](https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Bliss-Stage-Interim-Stage-PDF.html) > [!note] Editor's Note > > I'm not even going to front. This game may have been the best convention pickup game I've ever run, bar none. The setup phase is pretty heavy and it would probably be far wiser to come to the table at a convention with pregenerated characters and relationships. But having gone through that, the players all knew what their characters wanted from each other – and why they weren't getting it. > > This game is literally the source of the trope *["Intimacy 5 is Sex"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LevelUpAtIntimacy5)*, and it's well-earned. > > There's nothing quite like it. I just wish that it had been properly finished, even though the *Interim* version is completely playable. > > Go buy it.