One variant, only slightly used:

1. Kept the attributes as-is with a single semi-exception. Why: The campaign hook was that the Gods of Ancient Babylon, or someone claiming to be them, return to earth right about now. (This is bad for Saddam and Richard Perle both, BTW.) So keeping the attributes made it easier to cost out the gods of ancient Babylon.

2. Most mortal characters would not have attributes at all. Instead they bought Gifts. (In fact, "Gifts" was to be the name of the campaign.) PCs were given ten points to spend, which will nicely equip you with a Justice-League-level character. Players _could_ buy attributes, but mostly didn't. Qualifiers:

a. It was announced that Spirit would not provide an auctoritas against anything but divine, supernatural action.
b. "Realm" was understood to mean "HQ" for super beings. You built a team headquarters using Realm points, same as in Nobilis. Actually, you don't even have to change anything. Try spec'ing out the Baxter Building and you'll see what I mean.
c. Fun thought: In Watchman, Ozymandias has a single point of Aspect.

3. Specific to our campaign: On the Where do superheroes come from? question, our answer was, "Somebody drew them." The PCs were frat brothers, one of whose friends was a cartoonist. In Babylonian mythology there exists the Tablet of Destinies, wherein what appears is true. Said cartoonist gets ahold of the Tablet of Destinies and draws his friends into the margin, in costumes, fighting crime. Before he dies.

4. Combat would work like it does in TGOP.

5. I decided against a more radical refiguring of the attributes. In that option, "Domain" would become "Metier" and could be used for things like "spider powers" and such. Also decided against splitting Aspect into the obvious Physical/Mental/Social components for the sake of the gods. We felt that we could have a very good superhero game with relatively few changes to the available rules.

6. Mind you, we felt we could have a very good _high-powered_ superhero game with minimal changes. I think you'd have to seriously reconsider our work if you wanted to do Marvel Knights stuff.

7. What about miracle points (renamed, informally, to Feat Points)? You start with zero and earn them in character creation by "overpaying" for Gifts. This includes, crucially, one-point gifts. Frex:

Gift costs out to -2 using the tables. You pay 1 point, because you have to. You earn 1 - (-2) = 3 miracle points.

You _would_ have the option of paying, say, 4 points for a 2 point gift and earning 2 miracle points that way, though in practice, people filled their MP pool from their one-point gifts. (As in TGOP, there is but a single pool for MPs.)

8. We were contemplating ways to replenish MPs more quickly than in default Nobilis. We were looking not only at restrictions, but at the possibility of Bond-based MP regeneration. (For the "mortal rules" I've been working on, Bonds work differently, though.)

Imagine Lord Entropy was replaced as ruler of Earth sometime in the early twentieth century by this guy. The poem commemorates his coronation. What is Ash Tree Earth like under his rule?

I finally nailed the layers in place. The "Opera problem" is gone, at least in Opera 6. (And I trust in Opera 7 too.) I tested the site in IE6/Win, Op6/Win and NS6.2/Win and everything stays where it should be. Looks right in Mozilla 1.0 too.

I left the content layer with a variable width (50% of the page). If you're one of those rare people who prefer wide columns, maximizing your browser will get you the widest possible text lines in Thought-Records. If yours are the type of eyes they design magazine and newspaper text for, any browser width above 800 pixels should be fine.

It's nice that Guardians of Order picked up Nobilis when Hogshead went down, and I believe that they're committed to doing a good job with the product line. But the significance of Mark C. MacKinnon's availability report (mid-January, see below) finally hit me, old retailer that I am: Nobilis missed the first Christmas shopping season after its release. That can't be ideal.

Tell me there's not a Nobilis-related explanation for this.

Guardians of Order announced on their message board last week that the GOO reprinting of the GWB "won't be available in retail stores before early- to mid-January. It's taking the long boat from Thailand..." Mark C. MacKinnon also confirms that this will be a straight reprinting of the Hogshead second printing.

New player Nate is reading the GWB and has all sorts of interesting reactions and excellent questions. I thought this exchange was worth sharing. Nate writes:

The whole Valde Bellum seems bursting with paradoxes and contradictions, but I guess that's part of the point. Example for the 'example of play' in the book -- if that shard's plan to create justice would, in fact, undermine the Estate of Treachery, wouldn't it, in equal measure, strengthen the Estate of Justice?

Here is the deeply considered reply I made up on the spot:

Maybe it doesn't. Consider:

Maybe Justice and Treachery really are opposites. BUT...

Is the sum of all Justice and Treachery a fixed quantity?

Here is the Cosmic Pizza, and the toppings are Justice and Treachery. You can't have Justice and Treachery on the same slice - they annhilate. The pies come in a particular size, and you can order, say, half-and-half, or 75%/25% or 5:3. Then the pie is made to your order. Another way to phrase that would be that the pie is Created, and we could give that Creator a title. The Establishment doesn't sell plain pizzas, so to order more Justice is to request less treachery, and vice verse.

Now the Cosmic Pie has been baked and I sit down to it. Let's say I can't abide Treachery. But I'm no Creator of pizzas. I don't own the restaurant or even work here. I am in an excruciating position. I can't make a pizza of my own. But I can get rid of some of that awful Treachery. How? By dropping Justice on those slices.

Say I am able to bring my own Justice to the table. I drop it on a slice of Treachery. Annhilation occurs. There is now less Treachery on the pie. But there is no more Justice than there was before. Instead there's just this slice of plain pizza.

Now let's say I don't have any Justice on me. I can still do a little judicious rearranging of the ingredients before me, plucking up some Justice from here and plopping it on some Treachery there. At the end of this process, my pizza has less Justice AND less treachery.

Of course, the Excrucians would tell you that they eat everything and it will ride out of the restaurant snug in their Excrucian bellies, so if you believe them, the model is not exact. But it does show one way that weakening this with that needn't strengthen that, so there must be others. And it also makes me wonder if Excrucians get gas.

You could also say that the Excrucian nature is fundamentally uncreative, so that their actions are unable to strengthen any aspect of Creation by definition. Which is probably just a much more succinct way of saying the foregoing.

On the web, I mean. If you Google "Nobilis RPG" you mostly get pages and pages of online store catalogs, plus the occasional nugget like Nocturne's collection of all of R. Sean Borgstrom's posts to the Nobilis Mailing List.

BUT! Try Googling the rare word "Excrucian" and the frequency of personal pages among the results goes way up. Session 5 from the Metaphysicians for a Better Tomorrow campaign site. An adventure summary from an apparent Harvard campaign that you are better off using View Source to read. A link to the homepage of one of the GWB artists. A subsection of Charles Schmidt's site. What looks like a useful guide to character generation for someone's online game. (Note: Link is a PDF.)

That's just a sampling from the first couple of pages.

Schedules being what they are, we had time for another session of the soon-to-be-former campaign last night. This was a two-player/one-GM session with Bill's character (Tom Bender, Power of binge drinking and bad decisions) and Mike's (Timothy Hague, Power of Vehicular Accidents).

Having now run about a dozen sessions of Nobilis, I would say that two players is a superb number for a session. Three works fine and four is my personal upper limit. There are undoubtedly GMs out there who would be happy GMing for more Nobilis players at a time, but I find that fewer players gives both PCs and NPCs more space to breathe. But I'll confess to preferring smaller groups over larger groups for almost any kind of RPG, for the same reason. Your mileage may very well vary.

So, last night, I got to have twisted fun mangling all the news and rumors and half-truths I came across while covering the recent Capital-area sniper spree for Unqualified Offerings. We also got to play out nettling for the first time. Because our tradition of "multi-session one-session stories" reasserted itself, we did not end up having our first overt conflict with an Excrucian. These things happen.

The session begins with Tom Bender's Estate crying out to him. Also, Tom and Tim are politely asked to each knock two miracle points off their sheet. There is something wrong in the area of Washington DC. Timothy is the only other Power around the chancel and ready for action. (OOC, he's the only other player-character present. IC, the other three powers are dealing with tsuris of one sort or another.)

Tom and Tim enter DC via a resort hotel just across the river and head for a Dupont Circle bar. It's unusually crowded for a Wednesday night, making it a little difficult for Tim in his wheelchair. Tom asks the spirit inside a bottle of Killian's if anything's wrong. Not at all, the beer assures him! It further notes that it enjoys sitting in the bottle, enjoys being drunk and "enjoys coming out your whizzle, too!"

Some young guy orders a "shooter" and there's an awkward lull.

Tom chats up a young professional woman who complains that there are a lot of people from the suburbs here tonight, which makes sense, she guesses, and that the shooter guy is "just insensitive." When she begs off of Tom's request that she go talk to Tim for awhile, Tom uses a preservation miracle to intensify her and her friend's buzz to the point of sickness. They're into the hangover phase within a half hour.

Meanwhile, Tim has found a newspaper:

TENTH VICTIM SHOT IN GAITHERSBURG, the front page says. Bender asks the spirit of the newspaper to read the story aloud to him because the print keeps moving around. The newspaper volunteers to smear ink on him instead. However, when Bender declares that he owns a parrot, the newspaper offers up the entire story.

All of the victims have been shot outside of bars, liquor stores or restaurants that serve alcohol. There's a sidebar story about "the sudden sobriety of the suburbs." (One of Tom Bender's bonds is easy access to alcohol.) And the hot new rumor, they learn, is that the killer or killers are muslim terrorists acting on a jihad against booze.

This will not do, from Tom's perspective. They travel to Gaithersburg by cab and visit the scene of the most recent shooting. The beer bottles in the window heard the noise and saw the guy fall down, but they thought he was just drunk. (They prefer to watch what's going on inside.) Tim does a lesser divination to locate the scene of a recent accident near the crime scene, where a car knocked over a mailbox. The mailbox is still damaged, so he's able to do a major divination on what the mailbox might have seen. What it saw was a white van with two East Asian men, one driving and one dismantling a rifle. (Nobilis: Where the White Van is Real!)

Back at the chancel, Tim runs the records on the white van and finds that it was purchased by two men in Newark, Delaware the month before the shooting spree started. The men, Park Lee and Anson Dobler, gave the same address. They also learn more about problems afflicting their Familia brethren. Paul (Cold) Grejbko's sister, and anchor, has had a horrible accident on a ski lift in Germany. Evelyn (Power of Evolution) is still dragging because of all the pedophile scandals plaguing the Catholic Church. And Tony Timespawn is trying to deal with a difficult situation out in Utah: his anchor, the prostitute Valerie, has turned state's evidence against Francis "Scars" Puchelli, the mobster who is also Tony's uncle.

Everyone, it seems, is suffering assaults to their bonds. (Except, actually, Timothy, Power of Accidents. That comes up later.) The PCs are cheerfully requested to each remove another miracle point. (OOC: The PCs are suffering the one-point penalty for each nettling of their Familia members.)

In Newark, Anson Dobler turns out to live above the not-terribly-elegant Asian imports store that he owns. He's clearly ex-military. Tom Bender gets him talking by getting him to have a sip of rum from a flask, making him drunk off the sip with a preservation miracle, then making him a talkative drunk with a change miracle.

Anson Dobler allows as how he helped a guy named Park Lee, but Lee came personally recommended by his old friend Ezra Hubbard. Dobler indicates that Hubbard is a superspy type who has retired (maybe) from the CIA and could, if he chose, write "the secret history of the 20th century."

Hubbard lives in McLean, of course. Tom and Tim knock on his door. (The PCs also took the public tour of the CIA building, but that can be passed over.) Hubbard is an old man, still trim, with a military bearing. He seems to recognize Tim.

He is invisible to the Sight.

Verbal fencing ensues. Without admitting anything, Hubbard offers to "make some calls" about the sniper case and meet back with the PCs later. He suggests a Vietnamese restaurant in Arlington. Tom Bender tells him to go there and "buy a round for the house" when he's ready.

Back at the chancel again, Timothy (aka Realm Boy), runs Ezra Hubbard through the Chancel's register. Recall that the Chancel is Important, because Powers and Anchors who need some R&R from the Valde Bellum vacation there. Ezra had indeed stayed there in the past, and was listed as the anchor of Barbara Niederlander, the Power of Conspiracies.

Barbara has been a recurring character in the campaign. She was last seen heading off to bed with Tim at the end of the Adventure of the Manned Space Station. Tim had also sought her help in the group's very first adventure at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Her efforts on their behalf apparently got her flayed alive by Lord Entropy, but she hadn't seemed to hold a grudge.

Bender enters the restaurant when Ezra Hubbard buys a drink for everybody. Bender can do that. Hubbard is visibly disappointed that Tim isn't there, but Bender's travel power is self-only. Tom Bender prays to Tim, who comes the long way. It's tedious. Tom and Ezra eat while waiting. Ezra drinks only water. Later Tom will realize that, because Ezra bought him a drink, Tom may not harm him. Tom will regret this.

As Timothy enters the restaurant, the small TV by the cashier station carries a report that there has been another shooting victim, in Bowie, maybe thirty miles away. This interests the PCs a lot more than Hubbard's confidential report that "the shooters are working for a splinter cell of Al Qaeda based in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia." Even when he claims that the cell is headed by one Darius Susa, whom they know for an Excrucian or Excrucian-Shard, the PCs seemed, well, not so interested in the report of a man who was clearly part of a plot to nettle most of their near and dear.

At one point, Dorothy Niederlander possesses Hubbard and says, directly to Tim, "I thought you'd be here by now." Here, she says, is the empty quarter. But Tim keeps his focus on the moment. Knowing the area of the most recent crime and having had a vision of the white van, he causes it to wreck with a lesser creation. Tom, using another of his travel powers, wakes up next to a woman in Bowie. Just at that point her husband is waking too, so Tom leaves the house at speed. He hops into the man's car and...wrecks it. Tom was not meant to drive.

At this point, Tim decides gifts of travel are cool. He finds Tom's wreck using a lesser divination and, with an effort, does something he has never done before: goes there. (OOC, Mike had three character points unspent and bought this new gift in-game. He can now appear at the scene of any accident anywhere.) They slip past the police roadblock and find the van. Bender fills the van with booze bottles before it can be searched thoroughly (lesser creation), and makes the killers drunk and stupid so they're easier to find. They manage to catch up to the killers just as the police surround them. Bender causes a rookie cop to make the bad decision to open fire. As both crooks are loaded into the ambulance, he raises their blood alcohol level to the point where they'll be dead by the time they reach the hospital. It will be very hard for people to continue believing that muslim terrorists were launching a New Prohibition with two drunken Korean men killed in the act of committing the murders.

Tom got back the two points he had lost when the Bowie shooting happened as soon as the crooks were bundled into the ambulance.

And that's where the session ended. Still to be dealt with: Barbara Niederlander and (supposedly) Darius Susa in the Empty Quarter; why Barbara decided to nettle everyone in Claudine's Familia except Tim, and the perhaps unfortunate fact that Tom Bender and Barbara have also shared drinks.

The players used some inventive combinations of miracles this session, particularly Tim's successions of lesser and major divinations and Tom's preservation miracles. It was fun to watch them pursue their quarry. I'll remember these characters fondly in after times.

As you can see, things are different around here. Readers can now follow Thought-Records either as a blog or as something more akin to a news site. (Think of us as ESPN.Com for the Game of Greater Powers.) The last couple posts were really intended to provide content for the new Welcome Page, which you've probably already seen.

The site redesign is almost complete. I have to nail down the three layers with absolute positioning and play with the color of title text a bit - I probably want to recover the color we had over the weekend and now I've lost the value. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to navigate in your preferred format.

Now is a good time to update your bookmarks if you plan to follow us in blog view, though.

Also, if you're getting any really odd formatting in blogs other than NS4.x, please let me know. I know that the sidebar drifts a bit in category view, and that it's too far down in Opera for Windows. But if there's something weirder than that that you're seeing, I'd like to hear it.

Note: A happy side effect of completing the redesign project is that posts about the redesign project should cease soon. Nevertheless...

Do I rock, or what?

Thought-Records was the internet's first weblog devoted to Nobilis. A weblog is a website frequently updated with dated entries. Thought-Records contains both campaign-specific and general interest posts, frivolous items and - we hope - items of substance. The site is organized to allow you your choice of approaches to it:

Blog view - get the whole stream of activity in weblog form; that is, in the order in which it was published. This is the "raw" version of Thought-Records.

Traditional Website View - If blogs are not your thing, or not your thing yet, this portal is for you. It's a site index page that mimics the organization of traditional websites. It contains a link to each category archive, plus item-specific links to the five most recent articles in that category. Topping it all off is a list of the five most recent items in all categories.

Campaign-Free Blog View - Some people like gaming blogs, but hate reading about other people's campaigns. If you follow the campaign-free view, you'll avoid the "What happened last Wednesday" posts. You may also miss "This is the cool thing we've decided to do with anchors" posts that you'd otherwise enjoy.

If you normally read the campaign-free view but want to dip into campaign-specific stuff, you can click the appropriate category archives in the sidebar. The monthly archives mix campaign and non-campaign items in date order. There are no campaign-free monthly archives.

If you're new to Thought-Records, and new to weblogs, you might want to start with trad view and start following the blog version once you've found everything of interest in the categories that appeal to you. Or you may want to stick with trad view forever. The trad site index dynamically updates as new content is added, so even if you stay trad, you're covered, particularly if you check in frequently. We recommend blog view for

o Players in our campaign
o People who like weblogs
o People who want to make sure they don't miss anything.

Some items may appear only in blog view, because of the way our Categories system works. Those will be throwaway items. But they may also be kind of fun.

To see old items in blog form, click the appropriate Monthly Archive in the sidebar.

Thought-Records is a fan site aimed to enhance Nobilis purchasers' enjoyment of the game. Nothing in this site is intended to challenge the copyrights and trademarks of the owners of Nobilis. All Thought-Records articles are copyright by individual author.

Nobilis is a roleplaying game of hidden reality, designed by R. Sean Borgstrom, edited by Bruce Baugh and published by Guardians of Order. Player-characters take on the role of what we might call "replacement gods." Each Noble cares for and embodys an element of reality - e.g. Night, Forests, Roads, Music - while the Greater Powers of Creation deal with an invasion from...beyond. Antecedents include Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness and Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, among many others.

Nobilis is a beautiful book and a beautifully-functioning game.