The miscellaneous nature of the estates of default Imperators is something I can understand intellectually but not quite get behind. For the new campaign, I'm trying to assign every Imperator a Principle that unifies the Estates at his command. For instance, we expected to have Powers of Shelter, Stories and Fire in the new campaign. (As the preceding post mentions, we've lost a player - Fire.) Their Imperator would be the Warden of the Hearth.

It's easy enough to create NPC Imperators to this spec. The trick comes with the PCs' Ymera. My recommendation is to simply make it an explicit goal of campaign prep to come up with a group of Estates that go together somehow.

If you like that sort of thing, I mean. ("If you like that sort of thing" being the indispensible coda to all roleplaying recommendations and judgments.)

Among the Imperators I'm working on is a revised Lord Entropy, still the Lord of the Earth, whose Principle is Closed Systems. His estates, so far, are Boundaries, Waste and Bureaucracy. I'm casting about for a fourth estate that connotes remorselessness. Entropy's Laws will mostly remain the same. And he'll tell you that his motivation for opposing the Excrucians couldn't be clearer: they come from Outside. System not closed. Poor form.

Due to a scheduling conflict, we have an opening for one additional player in our new campaign. We intend to have three PCs and a Hollyhock God. The two existing players intend to play Powers of Shelter and Stories. If you're interested and

a) You live in the DC Metro area;
b) You can meet on Wednesday nights;

drop me a line at supplanter-at-highclearing-period-com.

Via the Nobilis Mailing List, this "language of flowers" site. It's actually one of a few I searched the other day, looking for the flower whose meaning is "sacrifice," hoping to use it in the name for the Nobilis mortal rules I'm working on. But neither this site nor any of the others I checked list a flower of sacrifice. What's up with that?

This one was created by Bill. It lacks Bonds, but gives an idea of how the Gift system can be used. The character's name is Cowboy:

Gifts:
Strong Like Bull: Force 9 (Simple, Local, Limited - 5 points)
Durant: Force 2 (Automatic, Self, Limited - -2 bumped up to 1 point)
Shapechange (bull, man, man-bull): Force 5 (Limited, Self only, Simple, Uncommon - 0 bumped up to 1 point)

Attributes:
Realm/HQ: 1 (3 points)

Miracle Points: 4 (3 from Durant and 1 from Shapechange

Travis was the starting fullback of the Hofstra Pride, although he left college with one year of eligibility left to enter the NFL draft. After going unselected, Travis signed with the Dallas Cowboys as a free agent. Travis was the highlight of some embarassing moments on the HBO series Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Dallas Cowboys and was released due to his poor special teams play. Travis has recently returned to Hempstead to hang out at his old college house with his buddies and try to figure out his next move.

One of our occasional site crashes happened this morning. The restore process has lost a couple of reader comments posted between New Year's Eve and this morning. My apologies.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that Hogshead transferred ownership of the product line to Guardians of Order the last week of November and the GOO website still shows next to no Nobilis presence. Still no Nobilis button on the main page. The downloads page does not include the Nobilis PDF freebies that Hogshead offered. (Hogshead's Nobilis page no longer includes links to the freebies.) Their catch-all Games page has no Nobilis on it. No Nobilis action on the GOO Message Boards. Mark C. MacKinnon's New Year's press release expresses pleasure at acquiring Nobilis and allows that copies have arrived in the warehouse now. But the "Crystal Ball" sections, discussing plans for 2003, list new stuff for just about every GOO product line except Nobilis.

So far I haven't seen an official GOO presence on Nobilist either. I know that the trinity of Borgstrom, Baugh and Wallis still maintain creative control of the line, but it would be reassuring to see at least a token corporate visit.

I'm telling myself this is because the transition happened during the holiday rush. But if there isn't a bigger Nobilis presence on the GOO website by the end of January I will officially start worrying.

So far we've got a Power of Shelter, details to be determined, and Ratatosk, the Squirrel Tale-Bearer, the Power of Stories (and cute grey rodent). Our third PC is very possibly the Power of Fire. It all hangs nicely together as a Familia and suggests real coherence for the Imperator. I get a vision of campfires and hearths, hot food and fascinating raconteurs holding their audience rapt.

I am excited.

Tony Lower-Basch of the Nobilis mailing list is starting a PBEM called Storm and Fury. Check out the website (at the link) and drop him a line if you'd like to join