Dominion Tank Police

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Dominion Tank Police, often shortened to just Dominion or DTP, is a 1980s action-comedy manga series that takes place in a dystopian future Japan, specifically in the city of Newport, where a cocktail of rampant air pollution and deadly airborne bacterial levels have made the air unfit to breathe and crime has run rampant. So rampant, in fact, that the city has officially sanctioned the Tank Department of the police, giving its officers free license to use armored vehicles and heavy artillery to bring the crooks down and strike fear of the law back into their hearts.

This series is /tg/-relevant mainly because it's one of several popular late 80s-early 2000s anime to get licensed by Guardians of Order, either as setting splatbooks for Big Eyes, Small Mouth or fully marketed as "The Roleplaying Game" of their respective series. Also for the identical twin catgirl android sisters.

The Setting

Basically just Blade Runner but twee.

The story of Dominion Tank Police, or just "Dominion", takes place in the dystopian future of 2010. The continuity gets really convoluted, since there are multiple OAVs and manga series that form a confusing mesh, so we'll stick to the basics here.

In the 2010 of DTP, the world is seriously ecologically fucked up. Ozone depletion, rampant pollution and unchecked deforestation have caused mass extinctions of animal and plant life, spreading desertification, and the rise of what is called "the bacterial cloud"; a swarm of mutated viruses and bacteria so thick they're now visible to the native eye, creating a toxic miasma that envelops the entire world and necessitates the perpetual usage of gas masks to survive, even though the majority of humanity has developed some resistance to the bacterial cloud - for comparison, 1-2 minutes breathing unfiltered air is about as damaging to the lungs as chain-smoking six packets of cigarettes in a single sitting. The bacterial cloud is a constant environmental concern, because based on wind conditions and the weather, it can lighten or concentrate to the point it chokes up all the oxygen in a given area. These factors have led to a massive increase in violent crime, resulting in the creation of the unrestrained and ultraviolent Tank Police to try and control the issue.

The action takes place in Newport City; an artificial island of the sourthern court of Honshu near Osaka bay, housing a megacity "grown" with the use of the biomaterials that have replaced endangered or exhausted materials such as metal and wood. The story involves traditional cyberpunk themes like secret government conspiracies involving biotech and artificial intelligence, but filtered through the lens of a slapstick cop show. We'd liken it to Patlabor with tanks instead of mecha and more ultraviolence, but that's a reference you won't get unless you're a weeaboo grognard. Newport suffers from a rampant violent crime epidemic, fueled by a flourishing drug trade in amphetamines, crack cocaine and bio-engineered drugs, making it the birthplace of the Tank Police.

The story starts with the original manga, called Dominion. In it, we are introduced to our protagonist Leona Osaki, the first female Tank Police officer and basically a shameless copy of Noa Izumi - she likes tanks. Like, she loves tanks. To an extent even one of the Adeptus Mechanicus would probably go "please stop humping the tank, you are making me uncomfortable". Over the course of the four OAVs, she intersects with supercriminal Buaku, an artificially engineered life-form and reverse cyborg (artificial brain, cloned organic body) and his two android catgirl underlings, the Puma Sisters. Buaka is investigating the mystery of his creation, which ultimately revolves in him discovering the long-concealed Crolis Greenpeace - an artificial lifeform created by melding human and plant DNA to create a living air filter capable of purifying the atmosphere... or creating a new human/plant hybrid race that will just be immune to the bacterial cloud.

This is as far as the first anime, a set of four OAVs called Dominion Tank Police, gets. The manga continues with Buaka now striving to prevent the government from forcibly converting humanity into planimals like Crolis, hoping to make them instead focus on fixing the damn damage they did to the environment first.

The second animated OAV series, New Dominion Tank Police, is set as a direct sequel to the events of the manga. Of course, since the first OAV series never got that far, it can be confusing if you haven't read it.

In 1992, the author created a second manga set in an alternate continuity called Dominion Conflict One: No More Noise, which got an animated film adaptation called Tank S.W.A.T. 01 in 2006.

The Splatbook

The Dominion Tank Police RPG is explicitly based exclusively on the content of the first four OAVs, since Guardians of Order couldn't get the license for New DTP or the manga from Central Park Media Corporation. As a warning label notes, it also bases a fair bit of its info on stuff written by the series creature in articles and notes.

So, what's in the book?

Chapter 1 is the obligatory Introduction. Aside from the expected "what's an RPG and how do you RPG" stuff, it also provides an in-depth synopsis of each of the four original OAVs and briefly covers the existence of the post-OAV DTP media (the manga, Conflict 1, New DTP, a oneshot manga called Phantom of the Audience and an artbook) and where to find them... at least, at the time of the book's printing (second printing was 1999, so you can imagine that this shit is long outta date!)

Chapters 2 and 3, Character Creation and Game Mechanics respectively, are the core of the book's crunchy material, and are where you'll find the TriStat/BESM system. Chapter 2 is most interesting for having lore profiles and stat-ups for the major characters of the original OAVs.

Chapter 4, The World of Dominion, is all about the lore, immersing the reader in the dystopian yet blackly comedic world of Dominion.

Chapter 5 is The Game Master's Section.

Chapter 6 features two Sample Adventures.

Chapter 7, Reference Section talks about the creator's published works and translates the songs from the OAVs.

Finally, there's two appendixes; one for how to make your own mecha, and one for personal gear.