Is this the answer you want your Hollyhock God getting?
Which Member of the Endless Are You?
(Link via Turn of a Friendly Die.)
While I and my familia were hanging around The Resort, we noticed some guy just sort of walking in circles around the Lodge nursing a vodka rocks. Cursory investigation revealed that this man was in fact the International Space Station. I did what I always do in such situations, namely make sure that other people can see it too.
Since my familia all agreed that the man was actually the International Space Station, I grabbed Tony Timespawn and set about my plan. I built an orange juice stand and gave the man some orange juice in order to make his vodka rocks into a screwdriver. I also made his screwdriver perpetuate. A complete success was declared.
Feeling somewhat unfulfilled, Tony and I set about building a T-bar lift to go around the Lodge so that the International Space Station could take a bit of a rest. Unfortunately, he was unwilling to try out the T-bar. I encouraged a large woman to use the T-bar in the hopes of proving its reliability, but to no avail. An unfortunate failure was declared and I sought to drown my sorrows in strong drink.
While Tony and I were mucking about with the International Space Station, Tim and Paul and Evelyn were talking to the Power of Conspiracy, a delightful lady who had had her skin scraped off as punishment for some actions in Salt Lake. Serves her right, I say. After all, she arranged for Ted Kennedy to be run over by a car. Anyway, she was naked (albeit skinless), so I fixed the problem. I used the power of alcohol to make her look beautiful to me.
Sometime later, she dressed herself (apparently my familia had found a more concrete means of replacing her skin) and we began to discuss the International Space Station. We had been tasked with getting him back into space by Claudine, so we decided to hold a contest and agreed to the Power of Conspiracy (damned if I can remember her name)'s suggestion that she serve as a judge.
We decided that each of us would get a chance to encourage the International Space Station to resume its proper place in the world. We also decided that we should go in inverse order of rank within The Resort. That left Evelyn and I tied for no rank. Somehow a tie-break was reached and Evelyn went first.
Evelyn took the stunningly straightforward approach of talking with the International Space Station. Evelyn learned that the International Space Station was afraid of the Excrucians and thought he would be safe in The Resort, but was unable to convince him to leave.
Knowing full well the narrative impetus of these sorts of contests, I realized that it would be Tim who actually convinced the Space Station to retake its place, as he was going last. Nevertheless, I took my turn.
I gathered together a sixth grade band who was vacationing in The Resort and brought them out to the International Space Station's orbit and instructed them to play loudly. They followed the Space Station and I as we walked along and I induced a strong hangover in the International Space Station at the same time I cancelled the perpetual refilling of his screwdriver. I remarked to him that when I have a hangover I often wish I could go someplace quiet, like outer space.
I was unsure of the efficacy of my plan, as he did disappear. Sensing that I had either won or exhausted my plan of action, I produced kegs of light beer for the sixth graders. I then contacted Tony and asked him to age some of the girls to a more appropriate age (he declined, but Time helped me out) and then brought them out to an abandoned Ski Patrol shed and plied them with alcohol and certain other vices.
I'm not really sure what happened with the contest...
When Nobilis 2.0 came out we immediately adopted the Monarda Law ("The GM may never answer the question, 'Can I do this?' by saying 'No.' ") I declared that the PCs get a Dynasty Point every time they catch me in a violation.
The next session, I propounded a new regulation, the Lily Law. Lily is the flower of daring. By the terms of the lily law, the GM may, at some point, curtail long discussions about what the PCs might do. At that point, the PCs must actually do one of the things they've been allowing that they might consider doing. Nobilis is a game that presents a lot of possibilities. In early sessions, our players sometimes seemed to want to catalog an analyze every one of them in advance.
Session I
Playing the Loch Ness adventure took two three-hour sessions. Between the first and the second, I decided to stop worrying about the fact that we had never once made our goal to fit each story into a single session. (As every GM learns and relearns, it takes a lot less action to fill out a game session of a given length than you think it will. Ironically, the story after the Loch Ness adventure was the first one we fit into a single evening.)
The adventure began with a very pleasant Cammoran fellow asking the players to help the boy, Barnom, fulfill his dream of catching the Loch Ness monster on rod and reel. He allowed that Loch Ness was indeed another "familia's" chancel. He hinted that the PCs owed the Cammora a favor, and their Imperatrix, Claudine, confirmed this.
They agreed to his request. The terms of the request came up over and over again during the course of play. As the players considered various, well, dodges, they ended up rejecting them as not fulfilling their end of the bargain.
o Evolve a copycat Nessie for the boy to catch instead? Does not, by definition, fulfill the boy's desire to catch the Loch Ness Monster.
o Fish in some other loch for some other monster and just tell the boy it was the Loch Ness Monster? See above.
o Have Tom Bender drink the entire Loch and pluck Nessie wriggling from the mud? Again, that ain't fishing.
o Just cure the boy so there was no dying wish to fulfill? They considered and rejected this as well. Firstly, they learned that there was a spiritual component of the boy's illness. Second, they had absorbed enough of the ethos of Nobilis to sense that not everyone who could be saved should be saved, even from an apparently blameless fate.
In the first session, two anchors went to pick up the twins in Norway. A Power of Cold anchor, Analiese Grejbko, did duty as the make-a-wish "celebrity." This drew a peevish comment from the boy, since, while she's an Olympic skier, she's a low-ranked Olympic skier.
The boy was bitter, and his sister resentful.
The Powers did advance work at the Loch. Their goal was to convince the "familia" to cooperate in the fishing trip. They wanted to be allowed to "catch" Nessie, with the proviso that they throw it right back. The anchor they spoke to - I believe they thought her a Noble - refused the request and suggested they leave.
Much of the rest of the first session was filled out with divinations and IC discussions of possible plans. I initially described Barnom and Norma as looking very similar, except that Barnom looked a lot thinner than Norma. I was thinking "wasting disease." One of our players, though, the Power of Time, expressed a hunch that perhaps the boy's illness was that the girl was somehow draining his essence away. The player seemed to like the idea, so I rolled with it: his divination showed him that the "twins" were making do with a single soul, a condition that the boy's "death" would rectify.
I overcomplicated somewhat on the Cammora end. The Power of Evolution did a major divination - causing ferns to evolve in the shape of the Players and arrange themselves appropriately. He wanted to know what happened when the boy and Nessie meet. What I showed him was the boy sneezing. The players decided that this meant that if the boy and Nessie came together that Nessie would somehow catch the boy's wasting disease, which was true. I also decided - and this to was an in-play improvisation - that this was what the Cammora wanted, and silently ginned up a motive for their wanting to discreetly use the PCs to bump off Nessie, the baby Aaron's Serpent. This would enable them to draw off Nessie's power into the girl, Norma, and hopefully tap it.
All this happened in the first session, and it was between the first and second that I began to regret both the specific plot point and the idea of reliance on the Cammora and Lord Entropy generally. On the specific issue, I felt that adding the extra level of Cammoran treachery was not just superfluous, but actually diminished the rest of the story. A dying boy trying to catch the Loch Ness monster. His resentful sister just wishing the stupid trip and the stupid dying would get over with so she could get on with her life. Nessie's guardians trying to preotect the monster at all costs while keeping their secrets from getting out. That's a story. The Cammora plot reduced it to a conspiracy. On the larger issue, I've long sympathized with an early RPG.Net reviewer
My intention is to use a lot less of the Cammora and Lord Entropy in future play.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!
By the end of the first session, the players had decided on a general approach to the task of catching the Monster, whose nature they still didn't know for certain. Bill, who plays Tom Bender and has read more of the rulebook than any of the other players, took the lead in organizing an approach based on the Group Miracle rules. This was not an approach I had considered, but it seemed valid.
Bill figured that one approach to the problem of a boy catching Nessie was simply to view it as a high-level aspect miracle, probably 7 or 8. Since we had five players, if everyone performed a contributing level 4 miracle, the group miracle level would be 8. (Group miracle rules: Take the level of the actual miracles performed and add the number of extra nobles performing miracles. We had five players, which is 4 "extra." Subtracting 4 from 8 gave 4 as the miracle level needed.)
The end of the first session and several e-mails between sessions were devoted to figuring out the component miracles of the group effort.
Session II
It's true enough that a roleplaying adventure that goes like this
would be a pretty dull game. But that's not actually how things went. What the group miracle rules did was allow the players to think about their efforts in a coherent way.GM: Your task is to catch the Loch Ness Monster.
PC: Okay, that's a level 8 miracle. We do five level four miracles in a group effort.
GM: Okay, you caught it.
Then they only had to deal with the opposition.
But first, a wrinkle. New Dave, who plays the Power of Time, was not able to attend session 2. That meant the players had to recalculate their plans on the fly. New Dave's planned role was, frankly, suspect anyway. He had a spare anchor slot and was going to anchor the boy so as to do aspect miracles through him. The more I htought about it, the less plausible I considered his claims that his character hated the boy enought to do that. (Love was not in the picture.) We also have a hard and fast rule for the Nobilis campaign: Only those PCs whose players are present materially participate in the session. You can't use a PC as an NPC, even with the player's permission. The player can't give permission.
I had decided that the appropriate group miracle level was 7, not 8. Thor's catching the Midgard Serpent looked like an 8 to me, and Nessie was just a baby. Here were the miracles they settled on:
o Timothy Hague, the Power of Accidents, is also Realm Boy. He used a Level 4 realm miracle in the chancel to create a superb rod and reel for the boy to use. It would fade out of existence within a day, but that was more time than they needed.
o Evelyn used a Lesser Creation to evolve a minnow into the tastiest darn baitfish a seamonster ever saw. Now they had bait.
o Paul Grejbko, Power of Cold, messed with the water temperatures to narrow the depths in which Nessie would want to hang out. That made it easier to troll for her.
o And once Nessie took the luscious bait, Tom Bender made the monster falling-down drunk.
All PCs were working through anchors, for two reasons. One: Since Team Ness had already marked two of the nobles, they wanted to be discreet. Two: more cost-effective use of Spirit MPs. The players assumed they would have to penetrate fairly heavy auctorita to accomplish these things. In fact, unbeknownst to them, they ended up with a bit of a cushion. And to make it easier to reel Nessie in, Timothy had a Russian sub crash into her.
No, there are no Russian subs in Loch Ness. The Russian sub was in the North Sea. That's what made it a Major Creation of an accident.
Warning: It looks like "so-and-so gets hit by a Russian sub" is already well on its way to campaign tagline status.
The only remaining worries were a Cameroonian maid, a retired Cuban fisherman and a marine biologist - that is, the anchors of the dead Noble, Embla. This was our first big Miraculous Combat of the campaign. We had four PC nobles working through on-scene anchors versus a single noble switching among three anchors, albeit right on top of his chancel. (The chancel is the water and lake bottom itself, not the shoreline or the air above it.) In the terms of the old DC HEROES RPG, this constituted "inferior opposition." But especially with a new game, you don't need to overwhelm the players with raw power to provide an adequate challenge.
Many miracles got tossed back and forth. The players held their own nicely. There was an anxious moment when they, wrongly suspecting that their own guide was one of the anchors attacking them, began attacking him with miracles, and they pushed the fellow close to the point of dementia animus. But the Emblans were on the point of having to really dig into their MP slush fund and unleash some major realm miracles. Before it got to that point, though, the PCs accepted a cease-fire request from one of Embla's anchors. During the parley, the PCs grew to believe that
a) Nessie really would die if the boy managed to bring him to the boat.
b) If Nessie died the PCs would earn the enmity of All Serpentkind. Not Good.
c) If they could convince the boy that he didn't want to land Nessie after all, they could plausibly claim to have fulfilled their part of the bargain with the Cammora. Doing so would frustrate the Cammora's secret motivation for the fishing trip, but the players classed that as a feature rather than a bug.
Paul vouchsafed the boy a view of Nessie by raising an iceberg under her. Evelyn managed to convince the boy that Nessie was far to impressive to kill, and that that's what boating the monster would do. Embla and her anchors were satisfied with the resolution. The PCs went home. The Cammoran managed to be polite.
I've skipped some non-negligible stuff, like Bender's intervention in the life of a fisherman who lost his son many years ago, and some pre-dawn shenanigans at the hotel. (At one point, the two most unpleasant NPCs - Young Norma and Bender's anchor - fell into the Loch and Embla spent a miraculous action throwing them back.) But overall, that's how it went.
Locus Omphalos, which bills itself as "The Nobilis Bellybutton" is a new site by Jimmy "Gregor" McKinney. Among other things, it has an interesting Variations page. I recommend you visit his site, using the links provided. Then maybe he'll see Thought-Records in his referrer logs and give us a link. (He doesn't seem to have an e-mail address I can use to beg one.) I'm adding Locus Omphalos to the links list at right too.
This is a man-behind-the-curtain account of the construction of a Nobilis adventure for our Mark I campaign, which I have chosen to call "The Scottish Play." My hope is that this will be useful to other Nobilis GMs who read this site, as well as, one way or another, interesting to the players in our campaign. You can read how it played out in this article.
We have five player-characters. Their Nobles represent the estates of Time, Cold, Vehicular Accidents, Evolution and Benders. The Power of Benders, aka the "Chivas'-Regal," recently bought a secondary domain in Really Bad Decisions. Nobilis' GM sections make the point that adventures should be about the PCs rather than the NPCs. This is sound advice, but it's difficult to make a three-hour session "about" five characters at once. Our campaign is actually a "small emergency backup campaign," and only runs on nights when our "real GM" is not available to run our real Amber campaign. (Heh heh. "Real Amber..." Get it? Hunh hunh hunh!) In theory, we could go months between Nobilis sessions, so our idea has been that we'll construct adventures that can be completed in one evening. In practice, our adventures ("stories") have been stretching to two sessions, and we've actually been playing Nobilis at the perfectly respectable rate of twice a month.
The external constraints drive a format of largely self-contained, tightly-focused stories. The number of players militates against any given story theme simultaneously engaging every player-character's estates or projects. And in the early sessions, most players have still been feeling out the game's potential. I've also been interested in encouraging the players to take some authorial power, because since Nobilis play opportunities come irregularly and sometimes on short notice, it's too much for me to do all the world-building and story-construction myself.
Since the conclusion of the Lana Lang adventure, I've been using a rotating focus method: Ask one player to provide the theme for the next story; then, when that story is completed, ask the next player. I have told players straight out, This is your chance to shape the direction of play, so if you toss out a theme that doesn't grab you personally, you've wasted your chance.
Classic Dave, who plays the Power of Evolution, got the first theme turn, and he chose "The Loch Ness Monster."
Now comes the GM to make something of his choice. I started the same way I started the previous two adventures - sit down with a legal pad and do word association. The only difference is that instead of working from my own idea (the Winter Olympics and the destruction of the concept of superheroes, respectively) I was working from someone else's. I wrote:
and I circled the last one because I like fishing and know a little about it, and because I've always loved the Roger Zelazny story, "The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth." That story seemed an especially pertinent model: the narrator is not officially the angler, but the angler's guide. While it's the angler's desire to catch the Venusian trophy that initiates the action, the story is still very much the guide's story. What matters is how he deals with the angler's desire.What you can do with the Loch Ness monster:
kill
capture
protect
photograph
hide
sell
stock
fish
That struck me as having everything to do with "Ianthe's" advice to GMs in Nobilis, that it has to be the player-characters at the center. The player-characters would be at the center because everyone else's desires and capabilities would be fixed absent the PCs' intervention.
Once I had "fish [for] Loch Ness Monster," I still had almost nothing. So next in the notebook came Who What When Where Why. I try to write down at least the initial answers to those questions quickly. The outcome of that was
Why delicate? It was easy to decide that Loch Ness was another Imperator's chancel. I had the idea that the need for discretion would encourage the PCs to work through anchors, something they had not yet had much chance to do. So it was an opportunity for us to familiarize ourselves with one more aspect of a new and very big game. I knew I would want to populate the shores of the Loch with eccentric characters, some with secrets directly relevant to the characters' mission, some not.A Cammoran approaches the PCs in their chancel requesting a favor. Through the Cammoran equivalent of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, a terminally-ill boy has expressed his desire to catch the Loch Ness Monster before he dies. Obviously, he admits, such an undertaking is a delicate matter...
What kind of Imperator? There seemed an obvious association between Nessie and Aaron's Serpents. I immediately discarded "Nessie is the Imperator" - seemed to obvious somehow. I considered, Nessie is one of a multitude of her kind that Aaron's Serpents prize as tasty snacks. This I discarded only reluctantly.
If you're going to have game mechanics, they should not just facilitate play but generate it. (Remember, we're Amber players in this campaign! We consider game mechanics strictly optional! Though among our number are players of D&D3 and even, gulp, Rolemaster.) A couple of sections in Nobilis 2 helped do just that.
First, I've been intrigued by the section on "one-player Nobilis." From there I drew the idea that Loch Ness was the chancel of a single Noble, not an entire Familia. That Noble I named Embla. Then I killed her. That is, then I discovered the limit "Dead" in the section on limits. That meant that Embla too would be working through anchors, as I suspected the players would be. I built Embla on 30 points, and built her chancel, Loch Ness, on points equal to twice her realm score, per the "one-player Nobilis" rules. I used real points for this and did not cheat, giving the chancel two points of auctoritas (Defender's Blessing), a 25 miracle-point slush fund, a technology barrier (cameras, of course!) and the open borders disadvantage. I also paid for "Important," for reasons that will soon become apparent.
There was the big question still of, So what is the Loch Ness Monster? The answer I settled on: The Loch Ness Monster is a baby Aaron's Serpent.
We know that the Serpents hatch in the World Ash itself, and drink its sap for sustenance. But I decided that the Serpents were afraid that the Excrucians might make that impossible at some point, maybe by conquering their home of Serpenthane, and they wanted to be prepared. Loch Ness was an experiment in rearing a serpent outside the Tree itself. Experiment results: Looks like it will work, but it takes a damned long time.
That meant: Nessie was largely mindless; tentative descriptions of her as "plesiosaurlike" were wrong; Embla and her anchors would be almost fanatically devoted to protecting their charge. Since they had a big secret to protect, their chancel would have a reputation as secretive. They would not want it to get around that it was the home of but a single, dead Noble guarding one of the most important secrets of Serpent kind.
Which would make them ill-disposed to someone coming around with adequate miraculous power to actually land Nessie, even on a catch-and-release basis, because you just never know.
Our player-characters, whose chancel is Important, wouldn't know these secrets going in. The gossip would have it that Embla was a full Imperator whose familia was famously unsociable. But they would know that Chancel Embla, aka Loch Ness, was secretive, and know that the fact that they knew less about it than about other chancels was material.
Since Embla would be working through anchors, she needed anchors. I'd already created a bunch of bartenders, fishermen, biologists and hotel workers on index cards, so I picked three anchors out of the crowd. I fleshed out their stories to paragraph length - how does an aging Cuban fisherman straight out of Hemingway get to Scotland anyway? - and went from there.
I named all the NPCs, including many that are still waiting around to be used, by mixing and matching given names and surnames from the list of playtesters and contributors at the front of the rulebook.
That left the little fisher boy. I started playing with anagrams of R. Sean Borgstrom and came up with two: "Norma B. Storreg" and "Barnom Storreg." That meant the boy was now fraternal twins, and Norwegian fraternal twins at that. I was vague as to his illness, and mindful that, in a world of Nobles, most illnesses can be cured if someone really wants them to be. That meant that either his illness was not really physical, there was a good reason (to someone) why the boy was supposed to die, or both. I was also not wedded to any particular reason why the boy was so important to the Cammora.
And that was the windup. The pitch - how the story played out - will be a separate item.
The message database got corrupted again. Sigh. I have rebuilt the indexes and reimported.
Entries with parentheses are in the format Player (Character) and are out of character comments. Entries with brackets are in the format Character [Player] and are in-character comments.
Bill (Bender): Just because a whore hires a fisherman, we have to fish on Loch Ness?
Mike (Tim): Our plan would've been successful, if not for those damn kids!
Kid [Jim]: You're all lazy and none of you are real celebrities.
Analise Grjebko [Greg]: Well, if you had a better disease, you could've gotten Walter Payton.
Greg (Paul): It's not like the head of MADD hates Tom Bender...
Bill (Bender): Actually, [Bender] slept with her daughter...while driving drunk...and crashed.
Jim (HG): Are you anchoring the lizard?
Greg (Paul): This is pretty much a one-way lizard mission.
HG [Jim]: Miriam and the girl fly into the drink.
Bill (Bender): Miriam always knew that drink would be the end of her.
(Miriam is the head of MADD)
Towards the end of last game session, while pondering what to do with my 3 points, I jokingly mentioned 'Squirrels' as a potential secondary domain.
well, on my way back from the supermarket with Daniel, I was listening to 'Wait Wait Don't Tell Me,' and NPR news-quiz show. one of the items mentioned was a story about how a squirrel led police in south London to a thief's stash of stolen crockery. it got their attention running for a bit and looking back to make sure they were following. eventually leading them to a tree in which was stashed with the booty.
("a squirrel! ha ha ha ha ha" commented Daniel upon hearing this.)
seems an awefully intelligent thing for a squirrel to be doing.
perhaps it's a sign.
(i'll try to hunt down the actual story for more detail, in case anyone actually cares.)
followup... permalink? we don't need no stinkin' permalink. well, here it is.
I've added a link to the Nobilis Mailing List archives page. It's a great source of discussion of the game. R. Sean Borgstrom (author), Bruce Baugh (editor) and James Wallis (publisher) all participate, among others. Lots of good user discussion.
On the Administrivia front, I've changed the official blog title to "Thought-Records" from, um, "Thought Records." The term is always hyphenated when it appears in the Nobilis book (usually in the sidebars).
Oh by the way, and speaking of administrivia, I can get back in to MT, if you couldn't tell.
Teaser headline on MSN this morning: "Bulletproof PCs Planned." Big deal! That's like, what, a one-point gift?
