RPGnet : The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Some years ago, I eagerly opened the cover of a new game I'd picked up at a convention. Immortal, and the art and setting, glossed on the back cover, made me think that this would be the game to fulfill the promise of Vampire. V:tM was a game I'd begun by loving, then only liking, and eventually the clumsy and cumbersome mechanics, along with the highly pretentious and painfully melodramatic setting, drove me to hone a fine contempt for it.

But Immortal! Beautiful and new, filled with all sorts of ominous and strange terminology. I was willing to forgive so many of the layout and production errors, and so much weak writing, just based on what this game could be. So I put in hours and hours of work, reading and really understanding the arcane system, the bizarre setting, and the obscure terminology. I carefully crafted a set of characters, and ran a nice little adventure I'd come up with over the course of a month and a half.

The result? The game was nearly unplayable. The system was so badly broken, from both a statistical and comprehensibility standpoint, I ended up discarding it near the end. The setting was complex in really unnecessary ways, and in many cases it seemed that things had been added as appendages to the world, without any attempt to integrate them into an overall mythology; just to bring some level of sanity to the game I was forced to strip many of the setting's elements away.

So it was with a fair amount of caution that I began reading Nobilis, when the GM for the game I'm going to be playing in shipped it to me. After all, it sounded much like Immortal, and I had become so skeptical of the entire concept of mythological games about vastly powerful beings.

I read it cover to cover in one night.

Nobilis is the game Immortal should have been, and thus by extension the game that Vampire should have been.

It's hard to know where to begin, but I find myself again and again coming to the Sources section, where a number of novels are listed as part of Nobilis' inspiration. And while I could cheerfully use Donaldson for kindling, there's also Gaiman's Sandman, Kay's Fionavar Tapestry and Cooper's Dark Is Rising Sequence. Somewhere suspended between these is Nobilis. It's fantasy, sure, but saying that it's a fantasy RPG is akin to saying that the Internet is a lot of computers. It misses the point. This isn't just fantasy; it's roleplaying an entire mythology. It's creating a mythology as part of the roleplaying act. Interwoven throughout the whole of the game are threads of real pantheons, real mythic events, and just enough serious philosophy and cosmology to make you want to start cobbling together your own legends. I found myself, in thinking about all the possibilities the game held, off looking for interpretations of the Sefirot, trying to find pictures of the Library of Alexandria, and looking for maps of the Caribbean in the Age of Piracy.

But all this is terribly vague, so let's get to specifics. There's the Imperators, the vastly powerful godlike beings who inhabit the cosmological space Nobilis calls Yggdrasil. Literally, I suspect, the World Ash, the tree with Heaven at its crown and Hell beneath its roots, and whole existences suspended like fruit from its branches. Part of me wants to interpret the World Ash as wholly metaphorical, but I have a feeling that the legendary scope of the game would nearly demand an actual tree, with branches as thick as whole worlds.

The Imperators are the metaphysical equivalent of angels; they're one step down from the Creator, and far above mortals. They fight a war for the very existence of the World Ash against the Excrucians, who are not your Typical Bad Guys. Certainly they're a ravening plague on existence, but their position outside the rather seamlessly put together myth-space of Nobilis makes them somewhat disturbing as antagonists. They are consistently described as being nearly as beautiful as the angels themselves, and their self-described purpose seems so much more farsighted and far-reaching than that of the Imperators. It seems to me, after some thought, that it's possible the Excrucians may be the 'good guys'. But this is left to the imagination of the Hollyhock God – the gamemaster – and what's more, considerations of Good And Evil seem to fall somewhat flat in this setting, where characters who work closely with one another can serve Heaven, or Hell, or the Light, or the Dark, or ethoi of other, stranger sorts. The Excrucians are the antagonists, so let's leave them at that.

The Imperators create Nobles, and that's the players, among others. Nobles are still one step up from the unwashed mass of humanity, raised up and imbued with a portion of their Imperator's power. Two things are particularly noteworthy about this element of the setting.

One, the creation of the Nobles happens when the Imperator locks some of his or her essence away in the Real World, forming a Chancel, a place of refuge and an expression of his or her power. What this means from a practical character-design standpoint is that the Chancel is at least as important a character as the player characters themselves, and more than once it's suggested that much of the game will revolve around the Chancel. Think of it as a spiritual fortress protecting some aspect of the world from the Excrucian assault, and you're close; they're not just keeps, though. They're homes, and they're mythical places, and they're the source of legends. Camelot, for instance. They're somewhat like Ars Magica's covenants, in that the evolving life and saga of the place is the real story of the game, and the player characters are actors who animate that life and saga.

Two, the creation of nobles doesn't necessarily have a lot of rhyme and reason to it. Imperators are fiendishly complex beings, and the player characters have only the tiniest sliver of their spirit embedded within. Contradictions of attitude, of power, of interest are normal, it seems. An Imperator could have in her service a Noble whose Estate, or area of power, is Swords Wielded Valorously, who serves the Light and seeks to protect all humans from harm in a fundamentally Arthurian way. And that same Imperator could have a Noble in her service who serves the Dark, and whose Estate is Sharpening, and whose ultimate aim is to make every corner and edge of the world razor-sharp so that humans will bleed themselves to death on their newly-deadly world. And because each Noble has only a small part of the whole understanding of the Imperator, each would be accurate representations of one facet of their patron. Even such logical connections as Swords and Sharpening aren't really needed; one Noble could rule over all Fabrics, and another could rule over Inebriation, and they both could serve the same Imperator. They're just that complex. So in Nobilis, conflict begins at home.

So, as I've said, I'm fascinated by this game. I dislike games that attempt to restrict the players heavily. I enjoy games where everyone is profoundly powerful; it's one of the reasons I've always liked Amber, and disliked Dungeons and Dragons and its bretheren. I don't particularly have a problem with giving players enough power to shoot down the sun, or part oceans, or put a whole city to sleep only to be wakened when the beautiful girl in the high skyscraper is kissed by a true prince. A good GM can keep a game that large in scale running smoothly; a bad GM won't be able to keep even a game of Dungeons and Dragons from overwhelming him or her. Nobilis, assuming a good GM, hands the players this much power, and then some. It does so, moreover, in a way that makes it possible for players to do almost anything, without allowing them free rein over the whole cosmos. With every great Miracle comes a price, and even the mightiest Hercules-wannabe will get tired after throwing a few mountains around. I'd love to comment more extensively on the system, but until I've actually tried to throw a mountain in-game, I can't say much more than it reads well, simple and deep at the same time.

However. Where would I be without a complaint? I have really only one: Lord Entropy. Entropy is the Big Bad Imperator in charge of our Earth. He makes the laws, he enforces the laws, and he's mean and tough and has a serious attitude problem. He's also a game mechanic. He's a deus ex machina for gamemasters who need a crutch to keep unruly players in line. Much like the various arbitrary and annoying rules of Immortal, Vampire's "Masquerade", and the Quaesitoris in Ars Magica, Lord Entropy is arbitrary authority to check the vast powers of the players; a beat-em-up stick for GMs who need to say to their players "Don't disrupt my plot by killing off NPCs or 'll sic Lord Entropy on you!" Admittedly, this is tempered by the author's keen sense of the legendary and beautiful and tragic; Entropy's first rule is "Thou shalt not love another," which all by itself suggests a thousand stories and plots to me. On the other hand, I've never needed arbitrary authority as a gamemaster, and when I run games that contain such authority by design, it's usually the first thing I throw out. I suspect that were I to run a game of Nobilis, poor Lord Entropy might find himself relegated to the very very distant back of the theater. I trust myself as GM, and my players, enough to not need a stack of rules, and a threat hanging over their heads, in order to guide the plot along appropriate channels.

That's a minor difference, I think, between my own philosophy of gaming, and the author's vision of the Nobilis world. On the scales of judgement, it's a microscopic dot on the bad side, versus the overwhelming number of Very Good Things about this game. Nobilis envelops and encompasses and synthesizes every human tradition, gives life to every God and Goddess and Spirit and Power and Domain, and brings them all together into a coherent whole which is darkly aberrant and exquisitely beautiful at the same time. It's the sort of game for people who want to do things on a tremendously epic scale, who want to tell new tales that could stand up with Arthurian legend and the story-cycles of every culture. Nobilis is syncretism writ large across an infinite canvas; it's perhaps the first self-consciously postmodern roleplaying game.

The meat of Nobilis is so much more than I can possibly cover in a short review. Anchors. Flowers. Miracles. The Mythic World. The Botanists. The True Gods. The teasing, exquisitely brutal flavor text. Even if you never play or run Nobilis, you will come away from a reading of it filled with ideas, and if nothing else it's worth the price for that alone.

It is, admittedly, not a game for everyone. Improvisation, narration, and a good dramatic sense are, as with most diceless games of this magnitude, almost prerequisites. A rabid pack of rules lawyers clutching their 10 sided dice and critical hit percentage tables are unlikely to be moved by the elegance of this game's system, or its setting. This is no place for a +5 Holy Avenger. But for those of us for whom the story, and the telling of the story, is still the most important part of any game, Nobilis is about as close to the ideal as any game I've seen. It doesn't have to pretentiously call itself a 'storytelling game;' storytelling nearly spills out of every word on every page.

The trend in games of late seems to be to simplify, to make more accessible; games are all in glossy formats with lots of flash and little substance, jumping on any trend the moment it seems that the collectible card game vultures may pounce. Nobilis is a game against that trend. It's all substance. It's a mature game for serious gamers. We who still see gaming as an art form of limitless potential will find Nobilis to be nearly required reading.

Well? What are you waiting for? You need this game.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Nobilis
Author: R. Sean Borgstrom Category: game Company/Publisher: Pharos Press Line: Nobilis Cost: $28.00 Page count: 206 ISBN: 096731801-7 Capsule Review by Kevin Maginn on 01/02/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern_day Historical Horror Diceless	Some years ago, I eagerly opened the cover of a new game I'd picked up at a convention. Immortal, and the art and setting, glossed on the back cover, made me think that this would be the game to fulfill the promise of Vampire. V:tM was a game I'd begun by loving, then only liking, and eventually the clumsy and cumbersome mechanics, along with the highly pretentious and painfully melodramatic setting, drove me to hone a fine contempt for it. But Immortal! Beautiful and new, filled with all sorts of ominous and strange terminology. I was willing to forgive so many of the layout and production errors, and so much weak writing, just based on what this game could be. So I put in hours and hours of work, reading and really understanding the arcane system, the bizarre setting, and the obscure terminology. I carefully crafted a set of characters, and ran a nice little adventure I'd come up with over the course of a month and a half. The result? The game was nearly unplayable. The system was so badly broken, from both a statistical and comprehensibility standpoint, I ended up discarding it near the end. The setting was complex in really unnecessary ways, and in many cases it seemed that things had been added as appendages to the world, without any attempt to integrate them into an overall mythology; just to bring some level of sanity to the game I was forced to strip many of the setting's elements away. So it was with a fair amount of caution that I began reading Nobilis, when the GM for the game I'm going to be playing in shipped it to me. After all, it sounded much like Immortal, and I had become so skeptical of the entire concept of mythological games about vastly powerful beings. I read it cover to cover in one night. Nobilis is the game Immortal should have been, and thus by extension the game that Vampire should have been. It's hard to know where to begin, but I find myself again and again coming to the Sources section, where a number of novels are listed as part of Nobilis' inspiration. And while I could cheerfully use Donaldson for kindling, there's also Gaiman's Sandman, Kay's Fionavar Tapestry and Cooper's Dark Is Rising Sequence. Somewhere suspended between these is Nobilis. It's fantasy, sure, but saying that it's a fantasy RPG is akin to saying that the Internet is a lot of computers. It misses the point. This isn't just fantasy; it's roleplaying an entire mythology. It's creating a mythology as part of the roleplaying act. Interwoven throughout the whole of the game are threads of real pantheons, real mythic events, and just enough serious philosophy and cosmology to make you want to start cobbling together your own legends. I found myself, in thinking about all the possibilities the game held, off looking for interpretations of the Sefirot, trying to find pictures of the Library of Alexandria, and looking for maps of the Caribbean in the Age of Piracy. But all this is terribly vague, so let's get to specifics. There's the Imperators, the vastly powerful godlike beings who inhabit the cosmological space Nobilis calls Yggdrasil. Literally, I suspect, the World Ash, the tree with Heaven at its crown and Hell beneath its roots, and whole existences suspended like fruit from its branches. Part of me wants to interpret the World Ash as wholly metaphorical, but I have a feeling that the legendary scope of the game would nearly demand an actual tree, with branches as thick as whole worlds. The Imperators are the metaphysical equivalent of angels; they're one step down from the Creator, and far above mortals. They fight a war for the very existence of the World Ash against the Excrucians, who are not your Typical Bad Guys. Certainly they're a ravening plague on existence, but their position outside the rather seamlessly put together myth-space of Nobilis makes them somewhat disturbing as antagonists. They are consistently described as being nearly as beautiful as the angels themselves, and their self-described purpose seems so much more farsighted and far-reaching than that of the Imperators. It seems to me, after some thought, that it's possible the Excrucians may be the 'good guys'. But this is left to the imagination of the Hollyhock God – the gamemaster – and what's more, considerations of Good And Evil seem to fall somewhat flat in this setting, where characters who work closely with one another can serve Heaven, or Hell, or the Light, or the Dark, or ethoi of other, stranger sorts. The Excrucians are the antagonists, so let's leave them at that. The Imperators create Nobles, and that's the players, among others. Nobles are still one step up from the unwashed mass of humanity, raised up and imbued with a portion of their Imperator's power. Two things are particularly noteworthy about this element of the setting. One, the creation of the Nobles happens when the Imperator locks some of his or her essence away in the Real World, forming a Chancel, a place of refuge and an expression of his or her power. What this means from a practical character-design standpoint is that the Chancel is at least as important a character as the player characters themselves, and more than once it's suggested that much of the game will revolve around the Chancel. Think of it as a spiritual fortress protecting some aspect of the world from the Excrucian assault, and you're close; they're not just keeps, though. They're homes, and they're mythical places, and they're the source of legends. Camelot, for instance. They're somewhat like Ars Magica's covenants, in that the evolving life and saga of the place is the real story of the game, and the player characters are actors who animate that life and saga. Two, the creation of nobles doesn't necessarily have a lot of rhyme and reason to it. Imperators are fiendishly complex beings, and the player characters have only the tiniest sliver of their spirit embedded within. Contradictions of attitude, of power, of interest are normal, it seems. An Imperator could have in her service a Noble whose Estate, or area of power, is Swords Wielded Valorously, who serves the Light and seeks to protect all humans from harm in a fundamentally Arthurian way. And that same Imperator could have a Noble in her service who serves the Dark, and whose Estate is Sharpening, and whose ultimate aim is to make every corner and edge of the world razor-sharp so that humans will bleed themselves to death on their newly-deadly world. And because each Noble has only a small part of the whole understanding of the Imperator, each would be accurate representations of one facet of their patron. Even such logical connections as Swords and Sharpening aren't really needed; one Noble could rule over all Fabrics, and another could rule over Inebriation, and they both could serve the same Imperator. They're just that complex. So in Nobilis, conflict begins at home. So, as I've said, I'm fascinated by this game. I dislike games that attempt to restrict the players heavily. I enjoy games where everyone is profoundly powerful; it's one of the reasons I've always liked Amber, and disliked Dungeons and Dragons and its bretheren. I don't particularly have a problem with giving players enough power to shoot down the sun, or part oceans, or put a whole city to sleep only to be wakened when the beautiful girl in the high skyscraper is kissed by a true prince. A good GM can keep a game that large in scale running smoothly; a bad GM won't be able to keep even a game of Dungeons and Dragons from overwhelming him or her. Nobilis, assuming a good GM, hands the players this much power, and then some. It does so, moreover, in a way that makes it possible for players to do almost anything, without allowing them free rein over the whole cosmos. With every great Miracle comes a price, and even the mightiest Hercules-wannabe will get tired after throwing a few mountains around. I'd love to comment more extensively on the system, but until I've actually tried to throw a mountain in-game, I can't say much more than it reads well, simple and deep at the same time. However. Where would I be without a complaint? I have really only one: Lord Entropy. Entropy is the Big Bad Imperator in charge of our Earth. He makes the laws, he enforces the laws, and he's mean and tough and has a serious attitude problem. He's also a game mechanic. He's a deus ex machina for gamemasters who need a crutch to keep unruly players in line. Much like the various arbitrary and annoying rules of Immortal, Vampire's "Masquerade", and the Quaesitoris in Ars Magica, Lord Entropy is arbitrary authority to check the vast powers of the players; a beat-em-up stick for GMs who need to say to their players "Don't disrupt my plot by killing off NPCs or 'll sic Lord Entropy on you!" Admittedly, this is tempered by the author's keen sense of the legendary and beautiful and tragic; Entropy's first rule is "Thou shalt not love another," which all by itself suggests a thousand stories and plots to me. On the other hand, I've never needed arbitrary authority as a gamemaster, and when I run games that contain such authority by design, it's usually the first thing I throw out. I suspect that were I to run a game of Nobilis, poor Lord Entropy might find himself relegated to the very very distant back of the theater. I trust myself as GM, and my players, enough to not need a stack of rules, and a threat hanging over their heads, in order to guide the plot along appropriate channels. That's a minor difference, I think, between my own philosophy of gaming, and the author's vision of the Nobilis world. On the scales of judgement, it's a microscopic dot on the bad side, versus the overwhelming number of Very Good Things about this game. Nobilis envelops and encompasses and synthesizes every human tradition, gives life to every God and Goddess and Spirit and Power and Domain, and brings them all together into a coherent whole which is darkly aberrant and exquisitely beautiful at the same time. It's the sort of game for people who want to do things on a tremendously epic scale, who want to tell new tales that could stand up with Arthurian legend and the story-cycles of every culture. Nobilis is syncretism writ large across an infinite canvas; it's perhaps the first self-consciously postmodern roleplaying game. The meat of Nobilis is so much more than I can possibly cover in a short review. Anchors. Flowers. Miracles. The Mythic World. The Botanists. The True Gods. The teasing, exquisitely brutal flavor text. Even if you never play or run Nobilis, you will come away from a reading of it filled with ideas, and if nothing else it's worth the price for that alone. It is, admittedly, not a game for everyone. Improvisation, narration, and a good dramatic sense are, as with most diceless games of this magnitude, almost prerequisites. A rabid pack of rules lawyers clutching their 10 sided dice and critical hit percentage tables are unlikely to be moved by the elegance of this game's system, or its setting. This is no place for a +5 Holy Avenger. But for those of us for whom the story, and the telling of the story, is still the most important part of any game, Nobilis is about as close to the ideal as any game I've seen. It doesn't have to pretentiously call itself a 'storytelling game;' storytelling nearly spills out of every word on every page. The trend in games of late seems to be to simplify, to make more accessible; games are all in glossy formats with lots of flash and little substance, jumping on any trend the moment it seems that the collectible card game vultures may pounce. Nobilis is a game against that trend. It's all substance. It's a mature game for serious gamers. We who still see gaming as an art form of limitless potential will find Nobilis to be nearly required reading. Well? What are you waiting for? You need this game. Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)