I really enjoyed EE, and after finding out it was based on an rp, I felt kind of inspired to make characters with these kinds of rules and campy personalities. I hope someone else does, to.
The premise would just be a high school club for people with Epithets. They work on developing their abilities, which conviniently creates a lot of room for exposition. There wont be any adventures or large scale battles unfortunately; just normal superpowered high-schoolers trying to figure out how to live their lives in an unfair world.
I want the rp to be mostly character focused. Anyone interested should spend an hour or so at least just thinking about who their character is and what struggles they should be trying to overcome. Important note here: the conflict will all be eternal or interpersonal, and because conflict is what creates a good story, everyone should focus on making characters with these conflicts baked in. I imagine each character should have a rough sketch for how their arch will turn out throughtout their days in the club.
Respones would be as short as 3 sentences to as long as 4 or 5 paragraphs, depending on context. If any violence happens, go ahead and pm whoever else is involved and discuss how the fight will end and how much people will get hurt before hand, so people know what to expect and how to navigate the event. Otherwise navigating a combat scenario with no rules will likely result in someone being upset.
If anyone doesn't know the rules to EE, this is the document that the original players made while playing. We arent using this to rp, but rules about how the world works are baked into this document, so skimming relevant sections can be helpful. Character creation in particular has a lot of helpful information.
Remember, we arent using this ruleset per se. You can just choose an epithet you want, for example. But this is the document they used to make the show, so giving it a look over helps to contextualize some things.
Note: Im new here, so if anyone with more experience could help run this or even just direct me to some good rescources I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
I'm quite the fan of Epithet Erased too as I like how the world revolved around how some people are basically being born with super powers based on words. When I discovered that it was based on a RP and they streamed it before, I quickly jumped to Twitch to see more content related to it. But said got a bit sad when I learned that they took most of the full videos of the Anime Campaign off Twitch as it would contain spoilers, but the short clips still remain and are very funny. If anything, I was pondering myself as to the idea of a Epithet Erased RP, but it would be a typical medieval fantasy setting. This is probably mostly due to D&D being one of my hobbies and recent anime I watched.
So the idea of RP involving this setting sounds okay and interested in giving it a try. But before deciding anything else, I am curious about what rules from the document should we be more aware of and what will be used if we were to play here? Although, I've tried skimming through this same document before when I searched for in the Anime Campaign wiki. So I may need some more time to read before asking anything specific from it.
@Expolar The rules document explains some rules for how epithet powers work in general. Theyre less rules to rp by in this case and more a way to get a "feel" for how character creation should work.
Hi there! Never heard of EE or Anime Campaign, but this idea sounds light and fun! I don't have much GMing experience, but adapting your own Character Sheet template is much more player-friendly.
Name Name Here
Appearance Image or Description
Age Age Here 14-18
Personality Description Here
Epithet Epithet Here Description Here
Class Make up a class name for your character!
Talent Talent Name Description Here
Passive Passive Name Here - Passive descriptor here
I've got some GMing experience but I have unstable mental health that makes it better for me to be a co-GM rather than a full GM. Gonna get working on a character.
Hello. I myself haven't seen the show Epithet Erased yet but I have watched several sessions of Anime Campaign off Jello's channel and I must admit the world and antics they brewed were quite enthralling.
As far as running an rp is concerned I've some experience both as a GM and a co-gm so I may be able to offer some assistance in that regard if you're interested. Either which way I'm quite interested and I've already got a couple characters in mind who'd fit the bill quite nicely. Just a couple of old favorites of mine which have never gotten a proper shot at this rp business. One's quite silly but with a somewhat darker backstory while the other one is more serious but has a tamer, more suburban background. Neither one's lives are perfect but they are a reasonable mix of dark undertones and fun potential for character growth and interaction.
I've got an interest in Epithet Erased. Admittedly I had been planning on running my own plot/RP before I saw this and was worried that I would be ripping it off, haha. Would it be alright if I were to run my own? I just don't want to step on your toes by any means.
Here's my CS for Babble. I modified the CS Metamore was kind enough to provide and added in some facets of the Anime Campaign document, listing certain stats more as guidelines rather than hard mechanics. A rough approximation of her design as translated out of an rpg context into a forum based free-form RP format.
Name Babble.
Appearance
Build Svelte Build.
Stamina 15.
Proficiency 35
Age 14.
Personality
She's a bag of nuts.
But perhaps that's an oversimplification. To best address what constitutes Babble's personality we'll break it down aspect by aspect.
To start, her power has had an enormous impact on how she interacts with the world. Sound comprises a majority of how she perceives the world and also how she interacts with it. She's pretty much never not using her power over sound in any form of interaction, social or otherwise. This often makes her harder to engage as she often slips back into a outwardly nonsensical train of thought when occupied with sound. It's probably much easier to try and converse with her using non-verbal mediums of communication amusingly enough.
Her disinterest in taking the outside world seriously is also in part due to her childishness. Having had easily more than half of her childhood taken from her while she languished in a padded cell she has a powerful longing to essentially seize back what was stolen from her. Having earned her freedom for now she's largely absorbed with having fun whenever she's not simply trying to survive. Serious matters often devolve into silliness as she has very little interest in embracing negativity. While this might make her seem more optimistic there's no mistaking the scars that her life as the doctor's subject of study has left, both figuratively and literally.
Her humor can range anywhere between lighthearted fun to downright gallows humor but no matter what it is it's bound to be at least a bit surreal. While she's determined to cast off the shackles of concern for her future she's very well aware that what little freedom she holds is paid for in vigilance. Knowing that there are people looking to return her to the living hell that was the facility, her doctor included, she is quite wary and loath to draw the public's eye upon herself. While she might play at innocence her self imposed lifestyle of homelessness is just as much a defense mechanism as it is a desire to embrace the freedom she's lacked for so long.
She largely means well even in times when she's a nuisance. She holds little malice towards others though the prospect of returning to the life which broke her mind scares her which often makes her more erratic than normal. Given her lack of self-esteem she's disassociated herself from her previous identity, only ever going by the alias Babble as though it were the only name she was given. She's gone so far in removing herself from her past self she no longer even refers to the living body that is herself in first person. She identifies herself as the very sound she controls, only really referring to her actual body as a separate person even though she's willing to admit that Babble the sound and Babble the person are linked both mentally and physically. As a result of this she has also vowed never to speak with her natural voice ever again. She wants to be pleasant for people to want to be her friend and her true voice has never done anything but drive others away from her so she only communicates by generating the sounds of voices to communicate with others. Thus, whenever she is speaking it is never her voice and her mouth almost never moves since she has no need for vocal cords to convey her message.
Epithet Sound
Babble controls sound. Every facet of sound, from wavelengths and amplitudes to vibrations and sonic pressure she is intrinsically tied to everything that is sound. She controls it not through any physical medium but through her will. When she hears sound it is not through her ears but rather it is her mind perceiving the waves directly and interpreting them. Because of this all her senses interact with sound, no longer just as an audible medium but a visual and textile experience as well. She feels sound like it's an extension of herself, an ethereal limb that's simultaneously attached and disconnected from her. Unlike her own limbs however there is no instinct for controlling sound. Understanding is something to be earned.
Her limitations are the very limitations of sound itself. Much like how the potency of sound diminishes inversely proportionate to the distance it travels by the cubic magnitude the power she's able to generate deteriorates rapidly the further away from her the target location is. Just like sound itself the thinner the medium she's transmitting her sound through the weaker the effects become. The resistance of the material her sound is traveling through also effects the potency of the sound. The focus and concentration of the sound she generates affects how quickly the power of the said sound diminishes.
Naturally given the complexity of the field she controls it is fiendishly difficult to properly wield her epithet. Only after years of being victim to it's uncontrolled effects was she even able to stop it from prolonging her suffering. Her control is largely limited by her understanding of sound itself which while more in-depth than most people's understanding of sound is still fathomless miles away from her true potential.
Class Babbler.
Talent Tempo. Life tends to operate at it's own pace and Babble is in tune with the beat. With her awareness of sound she follows the rythm of things as they happen around her, meeting that rhythm and eventually stepping it up until life's dancing to her beat and not the other way around. In simpler terms her natural sense of rhythm makes her harder to hit. Past bullets and arrows, around mouse traps and broken glass, through crowds and busy traffic, she can dodge around things with relative ease and grace. If it weren't for all those pesky bones of hers getting in the way she'd be dancing in between droplets of rain during a storm but alas she's had no luck with that quite yet.
Passive
Echolocation - Able to know where all sound is within a certain radius of her. She can map out the shape of all nearby physical objects and creatures based on the sounds bouncing off their frame. She can locate things emitting sound at an even greater radius. Her perception of sound not impeded by solid boundaries like walls since she can also detect vibrations traveling through solid mediums as well as air. As a result of this however her other senses have been dulled. She has a harder time seeing things that have no physical mass but can still be seen like pictures or ghosts. Her sense of smell and taste isn't all that great either. She's also color-blind, only able to see in shades of grey.
All Frequency Reception^10^10 - When it comes to hearing none hear better than Babble. She hears not with her ears but with her mind, picking up all sounds no matter how weak the signal, even picking up wavelengths outside of the human spectrum. This is often more problematic however since without control even low sounds nearby such as the rustling of grass will cause her physical pain. She can't turn this effect off either, needing to use her other abilities to mitigate the negative effects of this passive.
Active/Toggleable
Audio Babble can create and manipulate any sound within her radius of influence. Naturally the more power a sound requires to be generated the more exhausting it is to make. It's easier to modify existing sounds than it is to create new ones but the difference is negligible at the more extreme ranges. The distance between her and the origin of the sound also influences how difficult it is for her to manipulate and/or generate a sound.
Resonance Using finely tuned sound Babble can hone into nearby objects and gradually isolate their resonate frequency. This allows her to isolate the material in question and can generate sonic vibrations within it. In materials that naturally dampen sound or are flexible enough this only goes as far as to cause it to shake around a whole lot. Materials that are brittle or possess a crystalline lattice structure however can be shattered. Things like glass, metal, ice and other crystalline structures are all susceptible given the natural crystalline lattices they form at a molecular level.
Tremolo With this ability Babble turns the focus of the sound's vibrations into the ground itself causing violent shaking of the floor and everything standing or set upon it. Similar to a miniature localized earthquake or a hard rock concert this shakes the ground to the point where everything's falling and even walking proves difficult as the floor continually falls away from the feet with each vibration.
Niente Babble surrounds herself in a blanket of silence, quieting all sounds near her down below a level humans can even perceive. Her hearing dims down to the relative upper proximity of human hearing thanks to this reduction. This allows her to brave the risk of going in places with loud noises without the fear of being blasted by noises several magnitudes beyond the human threshold. This also allows her to get about without making a single sound as all her noise is subsequently drowned by the sound of silence. This is her most common ability and she has it active to varying degrees nearly all the time since it allows her to co-exist with the world and all it's noises.
Bass Cannon Presently Unknown.
More to be discovered...
Background
At the early age of six it was a school day just like many others. She went to school, attended her classes, received her homework and tried to avoid the other students who picked on her often. This day however was not going to be just like every other day of hers.
Just as she was getting ready to head back home to her dreary household a couple of students were up to some horseplay. One of them ended up tossing a book over his shoulder which fell and hit her square in the head. It was at this moment that something in her head was shook loose. In that very instant it was as if the whole world was exploding.
Shoes stepping, phones ringing, people talking, chalk on chalk boards, lockers closing, cars driving, birds singing, hearts beating, she could hear it all. Every sound, even down to the most shallow of frequencies, could be heard at a volume beyond which any other human could ever conceive. Every foot fall was akin to the explosion of a thousand atom bombs, every voice a crashing cacophony of meteoric proportions. It all went well past the point where human ears would simply break as there was no limit imposed on the method she received each sound. If a sound so much as existed by the time it reached her it was heard at the loudest possible volume such a noise could possibly exist at. Of course there was no way to discern each sound from one another. The louder sounds overlapped the quieter ones and blended with each other until it formed an astronomically loud concert of discordant noises.
Of course nobody else could hear this. From the average spectator's point of view the girl was struck across the back of the head by a heavy book and then proceeded to collapse to the ground clutching her head and screaming in agony while writhing about.
Her parents took her to every doctor they could find. Not a single one of them could identify what was wrong. It was hard to find something that wasn't there. In the end the most they could offer was that it might of been psychosomatic, a diagnosis which offered no satisfaction for neither her nor her parents.
It was only when a certain man had overheard of the incident and sought them out did something resembling an answer appear. Invited to his office he told them that the issue was a rare and complex psychological disorder, something which could only be remedied through years of treatment in a specially equipped asylum. He offered them a choice: Keep their daughter and let her suffer uselessly for the rest of her life or hand her over to him where she could be treated and perhaps eventually cured.
Olivia (Her name at the time) could offer no counsel to her parents on the matter. She had been screaming from the pain for so long her voice was gone. All she could do was shiver in pain. In the end they chose to surrender her to the doctor. While it was natural for most decent parents to feel at least some reluctance towards parting with their child in truth she was more burden than joy for them. While their suspicions warned against the choice they couldn't help but yield to the voice of authority in the subject before them.
And so she was taken...
To Redrum Asylum.
On the surface it appeared to be exactly what it says on the tin, a rehabilitation and/or containment center for the mentally ill. They had their fair share of mentally ill there too. These people were treated according to the standard for psychiatric care, at least so it seemed. What the public couldn't see was that the very same building was also designed to contain and study epithet users. Built on a grant from the government the asylum itself was simply a front for them, a means of isolating these strange phenomenons from public view so they could exercise greater leeway in their pursuit for an answer to what makes them tick. The less obvious ones were kept alongside the psychologically unstable while those who were more blatantly different were kept in the subterranean levels, barred from public access. For those stuck amongst the insane it didn't matter what they told others. Who would believe someone who's a patient in an asylum?
Nobody who didn't already know the truth.
The doctor ran tests on these epithet users. The tests were designed to either bring out these hidden powers in those who had trouble manifesting theirs or to observe the phenomenons in captivity. Full brain and body scans were common practice in the asylum. At her first test when she was brought in Olivia had no idea what was in store for her. Due to the purposefully sound proof design of the test chambers her pain had subsided for the most part, only flaring up at the occasional noise from the doctor himself.
When he brought her into the room he had her hooked up to a strange helmet and had several wires stuck onto with pads to measure her body's various responses to the stimuli. At first she was measured as resting rate and it was all normal. It was the only moment of peace she was granted. Then the helmet emitted a quiet tone, the tone growing louder after each phase was documented. Her pleas for them to stop fell on deaf ears as, due to her sensitivity towards sound, the test became utterly unbearable. Even the outdoors were nothing compared to the pain she suffered from the sounds being blasted into her head through the helmet. She couldn't even pass out to escape this suffering. The test only ended after the helmet had reached a volume just below the limit of what a human eardrum could take. She was dragged from her chair and back to her room, left to lay on her padded cell's floor, her eyes too dry from crying to cry anymore.
Every tear was a tear of pain.
This continued without end for the next eight years. Every three to four days she would be subjected to these horrible tests, all designed to bring out her latent epithet so they could find it's roots. Outside of testing life was no less awful. The orderlies were largely men who would happily keep this all a secret for the power they had over the patients and a low hourly wage. There was no recourse for their actions so long as no one from the outside was watching so for a majority of the time they did whatever they felt like when they weren't actively working. Patients who were disruptive were no strangers to beatings. The doctor was fine with this since it afforded him useful blackmail material to ensure none of the staff involved would spill the truth of the asylum's real purpose to the public. Such amorality was a valuable tool in getting his men to help him subject the abnormal patients to truly horrible experiments, up to and including live dissection. All the while Babble was a spectator to it all, forced to listen to every crime against morality carried out.
In the midst of all this horror and misery was an issue of a far less ethically dark nature but still awful nonetheless. Every night the orderly on night watch would always leave the radio on all throughout the night, blasting rock music until morning. No matter how much she begged them to not leave the radio on her words were ignored. While the music was disruptive to all the patient's sleep on that wing none were more disturbed by it than Olivia. While the padded cell afforded her some protection from the outdoor sounds it did little to abate the sound of the radio. She was all but incapable of falling asleep naturally, forced to stay awake for days at a time until she simply passed out from exhaustion.
Between the tests, the sounds of human suffering and the radio keeping her from sleeping it was impossible to remain wholly sane for long. It all took a toll on her mind, loosening her grip on sanity year after year. It was this slip into madness however that started to allow her to begin seeing sound in a new light, both figuratively and a bit literally. Out of a need to protect herself from the sounds around her she started to interact with the sound around her in an attempt to silence it. Her practice was met with mixed success. At first she'd fiddle with sound only for it to come out even louder or distorted like the sound of aluminum foil being chewed. After a couple tries however she was starting to grasp just how to shrink and grow wave amplitudes.
This was just the start to her awakening.
While Olivia was starting to succeed the doctor's own success was slipping. None of the phenomenons were showing any clear evidence of the source to their strange abilities. Compared to the larger and better funded secret facilities his own operation was under-performing. He needed results and too many of his subjects were dying before they could yield any telling evidence. His frustration grew with each failure and it started to wear on his pride. He often took his frustrations out on the subjects, frequently berating Olivia, often calling her a "Babbling imbecile".
As for her she was understanding more and more the longer she had to test different ideas. She discovered that the vibrations in her voice, the infrasound, was great for scaring the orderlies. Refining the sound so as to remove the audible aspects to the noise she was able to project a sound which was imperceptible as a sound but created the feeling of anxiety, irritation, nervousness and a subtle ghostly figure which was always just out of sight. The visual effect was a result of the infrasound causing the discs in the eyes to vibrate subtly causing such visual trickery. Between the air feeling colder, their minds becoming more agitated and their eyes perceiving things out of the corner of their vision the infrasonic waves created the very feeling of being haunted in all who heard it.
Night after night, day after day she filled the halls with infrasound. What was once an easy job had become a dread filled experience for the amoral employees of the asylum. The patients had become increasingly difficult to handle due to the fear which filled the hearts of everyone. The ghost sightings became a common rumor all across the hospital and soon hysteria was all too common amidst both patient and orderly.
The time was right.
That night when the lone watchman sat at his desk, the radio left off as he could no longer appreciate the music when the concern over the ghost which roamed the halls was ever present, she set her plan into motion. All around the night watchman the walls suddenly erupted with laughter. The phantasmal cackling filled the air sending the man into a panic. He ran, leaving his desk and fleeing from the asylum. Using her power over sound she sent vibrations through the lock of her metal cell door, wiggling the tumblers in the locking mechanism about until they finally clicked open. Pushing the door open, a greater effort for her than for others given how her body was weak from the stress and the pain she had endured, she stepped out into the hall and made her way to the orderly's desk. With access to the command console for the locks she ran her palm across all the buttons, opening all the doors to the cells across her wing of the building.
What followed was a riot as lunatics and epithet users alike fought their way to the exit, smashing at the gates to make their way to freedom. Before she could make her own way out of the asylum however a hand grabbed her by the hair. The doctor had been watching her this entire time, secretly observing her progress. With people running about all over she had mistaken his footsteps for that of one of the patients.
He dragged her behind him down the halls until they reached the operation room. He strapped her arms down and picked up the buzz saw. Having a patient who had manifested her powers quite so fully there was only one step left: To remove her brain and study it to find the neural branches developed from learning her power. He was certain that he could find the breakthrough he needed there.
Focusing on the bolts holding the straps in place she sent vibrations through the straps into the metal, wiggling the bolts free as quickly as she could. Just as the doctor was about to cut open her head her straps came free and she reflexively reached up to block the roaring blade. Instead of her cranium the saw chewed into hands, the metal rending through them. Seeing as she had suffered for so long and so much the pain was little more than a distraction, especially now as fresh adrenaline enriched her blood. Luckily for her the straps around her wrists had slowed the saw down enough that it didn't cleanly cut through her arms and into her head, allowing her the time she needed to bolt from her chair.
She ran from that room, from the doctor, down the halls and out the front doors which swung open now. The rest of the patients had made their escape, lunatics and epithet users flooding down into the city nearby. As she stepped out, looking up at the outside world for the first time in eight years, she could see smoke in the distance. No doubt the others were wreaking havoc upon the town amidst the chaos that their escape brought. She would not return to the city, at least not where she could be caught. She instead fled to the forest flanking the asylum, running past trees and over brush. Branches caught her clothes like so many tiny hands, tearing here and there at the fabric. Burs clung to the cuffs of her pant legs and thorns cut at her feet. She was hurt, she was bleeding, she was tired and her lungs burned from the effort of running for so long but she dared not stop, not until she was free from the doctor's reach once and for all.
At last freedom was hers.
She continued to walk when she could no longer run, staggering on for quite some time. She passed out only to awaken a short while later in the care of a couple hikers who had found her not far off the trail. They had done what they could, luckily for her one of them had a limited medical kit on him. Her arms were bandaged at the stumps and she had been given some water whilst she was out. She could hear the one hiker talking on the phone. He was speaking to police, calling for an ambulance.
She was not about to be taken in again, not by more doctors, not where he could find her. When the two weren't looking she canceled out the sound of her moving with waves of equal amplitude and length, getting up in total silence and running off into the woods. By the time the two noticed she was gone it was too late for them to chase her. They couldn't see which direction she had fled.
Since then she had taken shelter in an abandoned warehouse out at the edge of another city that was not too far from the one she had fled. This is where she resides, for now at least. She lives by stealing from the local convenience store, able to slip in and out without much notice much to the manager's chagrin. Not even the local police can solve this mystery.
But there's more to life than just eating and hiding.
