From the rubble in lower Manhattan, Albert Meyers, founder of a nationally-known fertility clinic and recovery volunteer, pulls a strange green gemstone. He is the anchor of Evelyn, Regal of Evolution, who has been feeling awful all day, or maybe forever. To his mystic eye, the stone appears untethered to anything in this world. There is only the tag end of a silver cord flapping plaintively in the direction of a Spin Doctors CD, some comic books, a handful of TV shows, when they are presented.

It is a piece of kryptonite. There are no superheroes in the world, though perhaps there should have been.

Evelyn leads his familia out onto the branches of the world tree, where they are scattered by the passing of a serpent whose name they never learn. The serpent does take Evelyn to the barren stem the stone seemed to indicate. There was a world here. Now there is not.

In Valhalla, Odin suffers the presence of Tom Bender long enough to agree, ruefully, that yes, the superheroes are no more. He utters a name: Darius Susa.

You cannot buy "Darius Susa" on eBay. Searches for Darius Susa come up "File Not Found." With help from Tom Bender's anchor from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Paul Grejbko does eventually find a reference to D.A. Susa, author of The Destruction of Numeracy, about the dangers to science education and scientific understanding presented by comic books and fantasy stories.

In New York, Timothy Hague, Marquis of Accidents, finds fired DC Comics editor Lana Lang feeding the pigeons in Central Park. He presents himself as a fan. Human vanity is such that she believes him, even though her unhappy tenure as editor made her no fans whatsoever - too possessive of the continuity, too unwilling to take chances, and frankly, too batty. She breaks down and leaves. Timothy lets her go.

Elsewhere in New York, Evelyn and his anchor, Albert Meyers, discuss the excrucians and the question of whether there ever were superheroes, and whether there could be now.

In a trendy SoHo dive (sic), Tom Bender and Timothy Hague decide to get Lana Lang drunk.

And that's where the session left off.

Ok, here goes. When last we spoke, I was sitting out back of a Tokyo 7-11 drinking.

I seem to recall going back in to buy some sake. I was able to convince the sake to tell my friend Evelyn's Irish Coffee that he should buy a round of drinks for the house. A few moments later, I was back at the Resort with Evelyn and Tony.

Evelyn and Tony had made some progress toward getting our Skeleton rider ready for the Men's Figure Skating event, but in the process Senator Kennedy had been run over by an ambulance and Tim had been lost in some helicopter accident. In any event, the Skeleton guy was not even entered in the Men's Figure Skating event.

I went to the hospital and got Teddy back on his feet, then rid myself of him and hisself of me. The two of us then split up, with Teddy off to try to influence the skating judges to accept Christian Wilcox's mailed-in entry form (which, although Tony went back in time and mailed before the registration date, had just arrived).

Remembering something about Tim and a Lady of Conspiracy, I inquired with a local monk as to her whereabouts. He indicated that she had mysteriously disappeared, and I worried that the Cammorae might be in a hunting mood.

So Tony, Evelyn, and I went to talk with the Cammorae and see if we could bribe them. Feeling that I might need reinforcements, I brought along my good friends Jack and Jim. Unfortunately, something disturbing occured and I was forced to let Jack and Jim get to my head, I don't really remember the rest of that encounter.

We did succeed in getting Christian entered into the event, though. And if my hazy memory is correct, it was mostly due to Evelyn's efforts.

Our next run-in with the Cammorae occured while we were trying to fix the race. We had gotten some sort of help from the aforementioned Lady of Conspiracy, but she had disappeared. We went to see a judge, ina n attempt to bribe her, but ran into a big Cammora agent on his way out of her room. I gave hima bottle of Cognac and we shared a drink and spoke for a minute.

We managed to get ourselves invited in to see the Judge, and although our crude attempts at bribery were unsuccessful, I did manage to empower her drink so that it would help drown her sorrows.

The next day, things went well with the judge. We met up with each other twice, and I secured from her a pledge that she would rate Christian higher than anyone save the favorite (who was himself backed by one of the big Cammora).

Next we needed a plan for taking care of the favorite (whose name escapes me, but really, it's fgure skating, who cares?). I came up with a plan that we split up, and I went to talk with Bob Costas. After looking into a passing reveler's regurgitation, I saw the evil things that the favorite (and his backer) had done on their own benders. I immediately went to Costas with the story of how he had killed a Japanese hooker at the last Olympics.

Costas was unwilling to air a story supplied by an uncorroborated drunk, and that was that. No wait, that wasn't that.

Evelyn and Tony talked about going back to Nagano and videotaping the murder. Unfortunately, they didn't think of just videotaping now and having Tony make the tape record what happened four years earlier. Actually travelling back in time turned out to be difficult to work. So I came up with another plan.

Tony's anchor was the current hooker to the favorite (and his backer). We arranged a plan whereby Senator Kennedy and his Secret Service men (with a videocamera) would walk in on the favorite killing Tony's anchor.

The plan went slightly awry, but it still worked in the end.

The only thing I still couldn't figure out was, where was Paul?

Mike (Tim Hague): anything fun or interesting happen in last night's session?

Dave (Evelyn): It's a miracle Tim is still alive.

It's a miracle we managed to succeed in our objective.

It's a miracle the PCs haven't been totally corrupted after being
exposed to the moral degradations of the Cammora.

It'll be a miracle if Tony's anchor ever speaks to him again.

We still don't know what happened to Paul. (Turned into a walrus?)

Other than that it was a straight textbook operation.

Greg (Paul Grebko): Who cares about that stuff. How'd my sister do?

Dave (Tony): Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

Greg (Paul Grebko): I don't know. It's never actually happened.

Bill (Tom Bender): Unfortunately, the most we've had of a plan was the following:
> Bender: "Alright, here's the plan. We split up. Evelyn,
you... um,... ok, I'll go find Bob Costas and have a drink
with him. Evelyn, you,... uh,... Bye!"

Greg (Paul Grebko): We're not responsible for Bob Costas dressing like he's in
Psi Corps, are we?

Bill (Tom Bender): No. The Bob Costas stuff was a little disappointing. I
never found a good way to work in the whole
Bob-Costas-buys-a-round-of-drinks-for-everyone-in-Vermont-two-nights-in-a-row
thing. On the other hand, Bob was very helpful in getting
Gregor Gregorivich out of the competition, so there is that.

Greg (Paul Grebko): That's too bad. Because that was so clearly your influence.

You can e-mail me, Jim Henley, if you convert "supplanter at highclearing dot com" into the sort of e-mail string you are used to. I won't put that string here myself for the usual spam-related reasons.

I GM the campaign and maintain this website using Movable Type. The campaign has no name so far. "Thought Records" is the name of the website, the name drawn from the rumored technology of Lord Entropy's investigators.

The comment record proves that people who do not actually play in our campaign read this website. Thank you, you folks. (Not that Arref is exactly a stranger...) I hope the site ends up being somewhat useful to Nobilis players all over.

I'm adding e-mail info for the GM/webmaster too, since I just realized it was missing.

Bill is very interested in the rulebook and play example's suggestion that players take on the roles of NPCs in scenes where their player-characters are not present. (Hm. Are they really NPCs while that is happening? My brain hurts!) Bill points out that the single drag about our Amber games is "waiting fifty minutes for your turn to come around again." How do people feel about that? Under what circumstances would you or wouldn't you feel comfortable quickly adopting a character you didn't create? (Use comments or make a new post.)

I thought that the first session's quick-cutting worked pretty well, and plan to rely on it rather than a timekeeper in the future. That opens the risk of one player or another getting neglected in the course of an evening. If you think the evening is going by and you're not getting the time to do what you want to do, please speak up then and there. We'll adjust.

My subjective impression from our single session of Nobilis (next one this Wednesday) is that involved anchors equal player activity. One thing to keep in mind is that since players in this campaign are meant to have a considerable amount of author power (to get all theoretical for a moment), you have considerable leeway to involve your own anchor(s) in events, which means you have considerable ability to set your own activity level. IIRC, the only anchor I threw into the adventure was New Dave's Valerie, whom he created for Tony. Greg and Bill added their characters' anchors into the mix themselves - I had completely forgotten that Greg's Annaliese Grebko was a world-class skier, for instance.