ah yes, a vision to awe all who look upon her...
y'know, she should also be the Imperatrix of Spiders... well, spiders with smoking holes in their guts, anyway.
upon the conclusion of our ironic adventure, we, being Dave and I, have the option of each taking a character point, or adding a point of stuff to the chancel. well, nothing has come to mind from either of us as to how to enhance the chancel, so if anyone else has an idea, please let us know.
This weblog focuses exclusively on Nobilis. There's a whole universe of blogs, though, about gaming in general. If the gaming blogiverse is new to you, I might suggest you start with my own favorites:
Turn of a Friendly Die: One woman's thoughts on the theory and practice of gaming - Ginger Stampley's gaming blog. (Her general blog, What She Really Thinks, is one I check several times a day.) Ginger also initiated the
Weekly Idea Sharing Hegemony - aka Game WISH. This is a group writing exercise that a lot of gamers participate in; most, though not all, with blogs of their own. From the WISH site link list you can find even more gaming blogs.
In the Shadow of Greatness - This site from occasional Thought-Records commentator Arref Mak covers all sorts of games and game-related subjects. Arref created one of the legendary Amber DRPG sites, The Eternal City.
Random Ruminations - Gamer, system-monkey and Netscape 4 hater Mike "Epoch" Sullivan runs this blog. Mike has also created a couple of indy games you can find here.
Nearly Empty Rooms and Nearly Empty Rooms Gaming Blog - Ireland's Gareth Hanrahan just got the notion to split his gaming posts off from his main blog. Gareth was a playtester for Hogshead Nobilis and I admired his contributions to a couple of other fora.
The Thought-Record of Bruce Baugh - Okay, you already know about this one. But it's a great behind-the-curtain look at the development of Nobilis in particular and the gaming business in general.
Some new sites have appeared recently.
Oyvind Gronnesby's Nobilis Wiki - What's a wiki?It looks like a collaborative site construction tool. Imagine if this site made no distinction between author and commenter and instead of posting multiple entries to a page, you created webpages that the front page would automatically generate a link to. Or something. My favorite page on this site so far is "More Ianthe Questions," which is a FAQ based on some issues that came up on the Nobilis Mailing List.
Nobilis: The Blood of the Flowers is by Thought-Records crew neighbor "White Crow Jennifer." This site will also be a combined campaign/general-interest weblog, it looks like. Only two posts so far, but I'm sure that will change.
The ifMUD Nobilis Campaign site has session logs, PC and chancel descriptions and even a sketch of the familia.
A fellow named Inky has put together a no-frills intro site with the engaging title Nobilis Intro. Apparently intended as a site for his own players, word got out. It looks like there's actually a lot of good introductory material here.
R. Sean Borgstrom's Art Notes - What she told the artists before they drew their pictures.
Visitors today were treated to an index page with nothing but the banner and sidebar on it. That's because I have MovableType set to display only the last seven days worth of items, and it's been eight days since the last item. Oops!
Tonight's messages exist mostly to put something back on the front page.
As discussed in the post below on roots of the world, I've been thinking about a set of Root Estates to use instead of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, something that hasn't been used in games or, ideally, mysticism, but that seems systematic and comprehensive. The candidate set should be rich in associations and symbolism, yet as concrete as possible. The question is what concept could meet those requirements.
The answer is on the tip of your tongue, and the middle, and the back. The Root Estates are the taste sensations:
Saltiness
Bitterness
Sweetness
Sourness
Saltiness is as real as water. Sweetness is tangible as earth. They mean things. At the same time, they suggest things. "He's a salty character." "She has a sour disposition." "These are bitter times." Certainly you could design an entire roleplaying game with these as attributes. It's easy enough to plausibly overlay the tastes on the seasons: Summer is sweet; Winter is bitter. If Summer is sweet, then autumn is when things sour. Spring is salty? Spring is the season of water and new life. Saltiness is the taste of the sea, source of life. Or maybe you prefer to associate Salt with summer, season of sweat, and sweetness with fecund spring.
The Spirit World section of the Great White Book (p. 36) tells us that "the immediate vicinity of each root attaches to an Age of the World. The game takes place during the Third Age, the Age of Pain. That pretty clearly attaches to the Bitter Root. The Second Age, dominated by the consequences of The Fall, would be Sour.
The First Age is a bit tricky. I associate it with Salt because of its newness and its mingling of joy and pain. The First Age is the soup out of which the concepts we live by will come. That makes the Fourth Age the prize to be eyed, as it will be the Sweet Epoch.
Salty, Bitter, Sour and Sweet. That's the way we learned it in school. Turns out, though, that this system too has a Fifth Element, and for symmetry's sake it comes from China.
Umami is the taste of glutamates, such as, yes, MSG. This turns out to be primary - that is, it has specific tongue receptors and the perception of it can not be duplicated by any combination of the other four taste elements.
So claims this article, anyway, in which food editors sample chicken stock flavored each with one of the five taste sensations. You hate to see a good fourfold system complicated by reality. I find myself tempted to grasp at
Hey, how can it be a misperception, I wonder.Thirty-eight percent of the editors mistakenly identified the salt-only chicken stock as the one containing MSG. Although many people have the misperception that MSG makes food taste saltier, MSG contains only one-third the amount of sodium as table salt
A problem for the Western HG to overcome is that, since umami is a new concept outside of Asia, we haven't developed a set of associations for it yet. What would it mean to say, "You're an umami little boy" instead of "You're a sweet little boy." But umami is a taste, and therefore real. And the Family Haven article offers some insight:
Kind of earthy, is one way of putting it.In terms of taste preferences, however, 75 percent of the editors indicated they preferred the broth with the UMAMI flavor contributed by glutamate. They described the taste as "rich," "well-rounded," "savory," "full-bodied," "brothy," and "more chicken-like."
So it depends whether you want four roots or five. (I haven't decided for our campaign yet.) There does seem to be a major conceptual gain in adding an Umami Root to the other four.
An intriguing passage in the section on the spirit world in the Great White Book is the discussion of the Roots of the World - "Imperators who embody the concepts on which all three views of Earth depend [Prosaic, Mythic and Spirit - JH]. The classic set is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth..." (p. 36)
The text continues:
This is something close to an opportunity not to be missed. After all the Everway I've played the last few years I've had quite enough of Fire, Air, Water and Earth, and am every bit as over either authentic or bastardized Chinese element sets too.The Hollyhock God should feel free to change the foundational set, however.
But what a challenge! Come up with a set of (a handful of) concepts out of which you could consstruct everything else there is. Or at least, you could make the claim with something approaching a straight face. Hard job. The example given in passing - Granite, Glass, Gravestones and Gold - seems to have more whimsy than system to it. There's the Celtic triad of Land, Sea and Sky, but
o it's already hiding in plain site in Zelazny's Amber novels;
o it doesn't seem as complete as the Chinese and Hermetic element systems.
I'd like to turn over the comment section to anyone who wishes to offer candidate sets of Root Estates. I have an alternative that I've almost decided to adopt for our campaign that I'll post this weekend. (I may end up liking someone else's idea better.)
"Whyt Crow" Jennifer writes to mention that she is starting a Nobilis campaign in the Arlington/Alexandria region. She has one space available for a replacement player. From e-mails of hers that I've seen on mailing lists here and there, I suspect she is a fine GM. If you're reading this, you live in the right area and you have room in your schedule for another game, you can contact her at "whytcrow at goddessmail dot com " - once you clean it up a bit.
UPDATE: Jennifer has a gaming site and a gaming discussion board. She even avenged the sleight to "Bender Beats the Crap Out of Frank Miller" by linking to it.
Apparently this is "Fluff."
[Bender Beats the Crap Out of Frank Miller, complete.]
Big News: The, ahem, second known Nobilis blog is now on the internet - The Thought-Record of Bruce Baugh. Among Bruce's many accomplishments, he is the editor of the Hogshead Nobilis line. Of course, since Bruce has kindly linked to this site, it's quite likely you came here from there.
So a few words of introduction/explanation may be in order. I'm Jim Henley. I GM a Nobilis campaign in the DC Metro area. It's actually a GM's-night-off thing - our "real" game is an Amber campaign that's been running for not quite a year and a half now. (Yes, we play Amber and Nobilis. Pretentious? Nous? Whatever...)
We began prepping for Nobilis play in August 2001, but didn't have our first session until February of this year. We used first edition until the day we could lay our hands on a copy of HogNob. I suppose I should remove the Lucy with the football jibe from the Hogshead link in the sidebar, since they did finally get the book out.
This website is, less secretly than ever, a weblog. (Bruce explains weblogs here.) It's also semischizophrenic - it pertains both to our campaign specifically and to Nobilis generally. Particularly under first edition, there was a lot of talk along the lines of "Nice game. What do I do with it?" I thought that a behind-the-curtain look into a functioning campaign would provide at least a partial derivative of an answer.
It also has information that is supposed to be of interest to the Nobilis community generally, such as the Variant items posted below.
We have a category system that may make it easier to find what you're looking for - see the sidebar at right (unless you used Netscape 4, in which case you've already given up).
Administrivia - You almost certainly don't care about these posts. It's updates about the site itself or yadayada about mechanical details about the campaign (meeting at so-and-so's house, e.g.)
Devices: Operating Nobilis - This is supposed to be a general audiences category. It includes stuff on the rules, GMing (playing, possibly), links to newly-discovered Nobilis sites and the like.
E-Mail the Webmaster - How you can get in touch with me, where you != spambot.
Fluff - Fluff isn't bad! It's just...fluffy. Fun and games type stuff.
IC: Logs - This is campaign-specific, "this is what happened" stuff. This is a group blog - all the players in our campaign have accounts - so some items are by players rather than the GM. For folks interested in "How one Nobilis group does it," this is worth your time. For folks not interested, give it a miss.
NPCs: Records - Campaign-specific. Our Imperator, Chancel and - well, that's all so far.
OOC: Commentary - Also campaign-specific. This includes talk about the campaign, by players and GM. It also includes some long - I won't say "substantial" - items I've written that use the example of our campaign to talk about GMing Nobilis specifically.
PCs: Records - Honest. Sooner or later this will include a handy list of all player-characters in our campaign. Right now, almost nothing.
Understanding Nobilis - An essay on gameplay, the Rwandan genocide and the supernatural, not necessarily in that order.
Variants - Playtime. Things to do with Nobilis beyond the rulebook. The first offerings are "Double-One Player Nobilis" and "Single-Player Nobilis Minus One."
Welcome - Items like this one.
Archives by Date - When I started this site in February, I had a notion of using a blogging tool (Movable Type) to make a website that didn't actually look like a weblog. I lost interest in that goal and added the date archives over the weekend. Using the date archives you can read all entries for a month, in (reverse) order, regardless of category.
Being a blog, this site gets updated at least several times a month, so come back!
Also, if someone were so kind as to mention this site's existence on the Nobilis mailing list, I'd be very grateful. (I haven't signed up since I can't handle the traffic.)
Psst! Classic Dave! They're talking about your estate on the Nobilis Mailing List. The post that starts the thread is by a grad student in biology. Several responses from there.
In addition to posting some new material for a general audience, I've done some maintenance that should improve the site experience.
o Added two new categories, "Fluff" and "Variants." Fluff is not bad! It's just...fluffy.
o Modified archive pages so they have the same layout and sidebar info as the main page. For some reason Movable Type does not do this by default.
o You can now view comments from the archive pages and even add comments.
o Combed all existing entries and recategorized where appropriate.
o Added date-based archives. You can now review items by month.
The two steps immediately above should solve the problem some of you had with being unable to find posts you needed.
I resisted date-based archives for awhile because of a bizarre impulse to see whether one could use Movable Type to create and manage a website that didn't look overmuch like a weblog. I've kind of lost interest in that experiment. I do want to continue to tweak the Category list to make the site as useful as possible for people not in the campaign that provides much of the volume of material here - I want them to be able to find the general-interest variant and gameplay material.
I'm currently mulling ways to redo the link list too.
My initial misunderstanding of the section header, "Single-Player Nobilis" (see item below), continues to tantalize me. Could you somehow "play" Nobilis by yourself - that is, as a solo participant - and still have it be recognizable as a game? (Borges, thou shouldst be living at this hour!) I'm not talking about running a character through a solitaire adventure designed by someone else, but something wackier - you would play your character, resolve the action and determine the course of the adventure itself on your own. Oh, and it must be recognizably a game too, not just the writing of a story. Oh, and it should be fun for you.
Tall order, and I haven't filled it yet. The closest notion I've come up with is this:
Create a Noble, your player character. Create his chancel, his Imperator etc.(I have a very unfinished game in my notebooks that aimed to do this more formally. The intro includes the tongue-in-cheek passage, "This is a special kind of game called a role-playing game. One participant, the "player," creates a fictional alter ego he controls called the player character. The other participants become "game masters.")Start a weblog for this character. Post about his personal projects, his view of his estate, his relationships with his anchors, his code. Enable a Comments function.
Tell people about the weblog. The "Hollyhock God" arises from the player/blogger's selection among comments. Commentors suggest directions for the character's activity; the player, by posting, instantiates a plotline from the comment(s) he finds most intriguing. Commentors suggest continuations and complications; the player chooses the ones he likes. And so on.
It's sort of interactive fiction. It also has a very gamelike element. It de facto reverses the default player/GM ratio and commitment level.
This is not, of course, "single-player Nobilis," since it relies on a community of commentators/readers to assist in the direction of play. The Quest for true "single-player Nobilis" continues...
As much as there is in second-edition Nobilis, there may be even more potential to explore beyond it. One of the rulebook sections that most intrigued me is the section called "Single-Player Nobilis." This section is not actually about single-participant play, but about one-PC/one-GM campaigns. To recap, Borgstrom suggests:
It's all pretty intriguing. But one-PC/GM games make some of us, on the meta level, nervous. So the following proposal doubles the fun.o Strip the thematic content of the game down to a single focus related to the PC's character conception. (Makes sense...)
o You get to go more deeply into the ramifications of the single player's character and interests than you do in a larger group.
o You're the only two people available to entertain each other, which is a challenge.
o There is an important background/mechanics change: In single-player Nobilis, Imperators "invest Nobles individually. Imperial bodies never leave the Spirit World. Powers create their own Chancels. Each receives twice their Realm score in Chancel Points (see HogNob p. 136). The PC Power can still consult with their [sic] Imperator, but has complete autonomy in Chancel design and management." (From HogNob p. 23.)
In Double Single-Player Nobilis, there are two PCs and one GM. A single Imperator invests two Nobles. The Nobles enchancel themselves individually exactly as in the single-player rules.
During campaign prep, players and GM kick around ideas. (This is the most crucial stage.) Come up with an Imperator/Estate/theme complex that excites all three participants. The players together choose estates that fit together interestingly - or, of course, interestingly fail to fit together. Most likely there is a strong element of rivalry, but also a mutual indispensibility. Gauche oppositions like Fire and Flood would work, or Youth and Age; more whimsical pairings like Fish and Fowl or Trees and Birds are also possible.
Here's an example:
I daresay a GM and the players who came up with those characters could find ways to amuse themselves. And I'm sure any three engaged, compatible users could come up with a concept they would find at least as full of potential.The true god, Janus, invests two Nobles.
Dorothy is the Power of Irony. In her chancel all is bright, urbane, sharp-edged. She rules reversals of expectations, and rules them with cool gaze and the slightest of crooked smiles. Her hair is perfect. She despairs of her dithering twin, who looks as much like her as possible under the circumstances. The circumstances are that he, Hopkins, is the Power of Paradox. He is tousled, and seems to own no shirt or pair of pants that is not frayed - strange when you consider that, on inspection, his garments are not frayed at all. His chancel is trackless, overgrown, fecund. (And, of course, next door to the chancel of his sister.) The phrase that comes most easily to the lips of his people is, "On the other hand." Negative Capability is his estate; he rules all pairs of things that are simultaneously and incompatibly true (or simultaneously and incompatibly false).
If you ask him, he will tell you that his sister's is a crippled domain indeed, since an irony is nothing but a failed paradox - it tries to be two things at once; failing, it settles for becoming its opposite. If you ask her, she will explain, with no little exasperation, that paradox is gutless - an irony-in-training that quails before the leap it must make to fulfill itself in reversal.
The meta advantage I see is that by adding one more participant to the single-PC variant, each participant now has twice as many people to be entertained by. There should be fewer "dead air" problems. And yet the group is still small enough and focused enough to allow fairly deep play with the issues out of which the group has decided to make its campaign. (Some of the most enjoyable game-play I ever experienced was a James Bond campaign I ran for exactly two players in the early 80s. I doubt that a larger group can attain that level of mutual attunement.)
Surely the most important use for Nobilis is educational. Specifically, our schools could use the game to teach important nuances of vocabulary. Have an in-class game where players take on the role of the Powers of Irritation and Aggravation, Hysteria and Hilarity etc. As the kids work their domain miracles the teacher, in the role of Hollyhock God, allows the ones that show a correct understanding of the problem word to work, but rules miracles based on an incorrect understanding as failures.
Oh yeah. Kidding."I do a lesser creation on him so he's just not sure any more if he really wants to destroy the world."
"Sorry, it fails. That would be creating ambivalence, which is outside your domain."
"Yeah, you're the Power of Ambiguity, dummy! I'm the Power of Ambivalence."
"Oh, right. Then I make it unclear whether or not he's already destroyed the world."
"Very good, Timmy! How many miracle points do you have...?"
The What's Your Inner Flower quiz seems too appropriate to pass up.
(Link via Turn of a Friendly Die.)
"Powers who are artists are not part of the estate of Artists," she intoned, clearly having gotten her hands on first-edition Nobilis at some point.
"Powers who are warriors are not part of the estate of Warriors," she continued, and so on through the litany.
"Don't you see why I have to kill you?" she asked then. (She was the Power of Irony.) "We Powers are ourselves not part of the elements of Creation. And who comes from outside Creation? The Excrucians, of course. We already know about so-called Mimics. But it turns out...[she almost said "ironically"] we are just deeper-cover mimics. We think we're upholding reality when we're actually programmed to destroy it. Only I was in a position to figure this out.
"Evelyn," she said to the Power of Evolution, "you know that one of your own capabilities is to destroy the things of your estate. Why do you think that is? We're the enemy!"
"Why don't you kill yourself, then?" Evelyn asked her.
"I have to be last."
This was our second single-session story. (That's two in a row!) Timothy Hague's personal project is to end pedestrianism. As the Power of Vehicular Accidents, this strikes him as a perfectly reasonable thing to do. His most determined opponent in this matter is Emily, the Marchessa of Stairs. The Power of Irony, hopelessly insane but also enterprising, hoped to use the antagonism to trap as many deep-cover Excrucian mimics (aka Nobilis) as possible and destroy them for their own good. There were two PCs attending on this real-life holiday eve, so two non-allied hostile powers was plenty of opposition. Evelyn and Timothy played tag for much of the evening with anchors of Stairs and Irony before being lured back to Irony's demesne in the chancel of Familia Janus.
For this adventure I had fun creating Gifts for NPC Powers. The Power of Irony, Dorothy Polara, got a Gift called "I'm Rubber and You're Glue," essentially an automatically-activated lesser creation of Irony on hostile attacks. It works like it sounds. The Power of Stairs got a somewhat flashier gift that hasn't been revealed yet.
Instead of luring Timothy Hague back to her chancel along with Evelyn, Irony got his anchor Crystal Hague instead. Crystal ended up sneaking out the back way, where she encountered Irony's brother, the Power of Ambivalence.
"Do you want to leave?"
"Eh."
"Cause you can stay, or go. With the right attitude."
"Whatever."
Evelyn eventually managed to alert Irony's fraternal twin, Paradox, who was Not Amused by his sister's...misprisions.
Assuming, of course, that they were misprisions.
The Power of the Dark - Changed the text color to a far-more-readable black from MovableType's default grey.
The story after "Scottish Play," was the first we managed to fit into a single evening's session. (Huzzah!) Mike, player of Timothy Hague, the Power of Accidents, got to pick the theme for that one. All he said was The International Space Station. As it happens, he had also just bought Tim's Realm score up to 4, and we hadn't had an in-chancel adventure yet. So naturally I wanted a story about the International Space Station that took place within the PC's chancel. Which is a ski resort. (And dude ranch. With beach access.)
SO! The PC's chancel is Important. (Why? They paid for it!) We've decided that since it is a resort, it's a place where Powers, but especially anchors can go to unwind when they're getting weary of the Valde Bellum. Plus assorted other mundane and mystical revelers. SO. I decided on the approach Bill outlined in his Bender-centric recap below: The Space Station is on vacation. That is, its spirit form appears in the chancel and doesn't want to leave. Since I felt the conspiracy angle overbalanced the previous adventure I was determined to have no wheels within wheels within wheels this time. Just your typical lonely, frightened space station, an attractive, engaging - if skinless - woman (Power, actually), and a contest: Get the space station back into space and get him to stay there.
Things I wish I had done better department: In my early notes, the Space Station was depressed at the halting progress of Manned Spaceflight and afraid that he was a prime target for the Excrucians. In actual play, the first component of his malaise almost entirely disappeared. That made the space station less engaging. Also: I realized the contest had "narrative structure" problems. Bill's post alludes to those too. I meant to have an NPC suggest a "pre-contest" to determine turn order.
Things I did that you might not have done, and I might not do again: Timothy, aka Realm Boy did indeed win. I let him use his Realm score as authorial power to find an appropriate ally within the chancel (The Power of Manned Space Flight, who acts and talks exactly like Flashheart from Blackadder). Needless to say, the Nobilis rules do not explicitly define Realm as in-chancel author power. The player seen his opportunity and he took it. It was getting late in the evening, and the players didn't seem to have an unhealthy investment in who actually won the contest, so I let it work. I've been encouraging the players to take more authorial initiative anyway, so this was a chance to put some force into the encouragement.
The Power of Manned Space Flight was the first high-Aspect character the players had the chance to deal with. He found the Space Station in line for you-know-which-ride at Disney World, and simply threw him back into orbit. This didn't represent a non-player character upstaging the PCs because in doing this, he was acting entirely along the lines that the player character intended him to act.
