Doku - Pub Nobilis 3rd Edition Non Weebaoo Version
Doku - Pub Nobilis 3rd Edition Non Weebaoo Version
Doku - Pub Nobilis 3rd Edition Non Weebaoo Version
Volume 1
This book uses fantastical and supernatural elements in its setting, for
its characters, their abilities, and themes. All such elements are fiction
and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains ma-
ture content and reader discretion is advised.
Printed in Taiwan.
Dedication
Credits
Layout and Visual Design by: Antoine Boegli, Stéphane Gallay and
Oliver Vulliamy (2 dés sans faces)
Design and Development Contributors: Bruce Baugh, David Bolack,
Deirdre M. Brooks, Genseric Dace, Ianthe Falls-Short, and James Wallis
Contents
Dedication..........................................................................................................................................4
Credits................................................................................................................................................5
Welcome!........................................................................................................................................... 8
Introduction...................................................................................................................................... 9
Ananda.............................................................................................................................................12
Lord Entropy....................................................................................................................................15
Surolam........................................................................................................................................... 20
Ha-Qadosch Berakha........................................................................................................................23
Your Imperator.................................................................................................................................25
The Ordinary World.......................................................................................................................... 31
Visions of the Cityback.....................................................................................................................35
The Locust Court............................................................................................................................. 42
Tales of the Evil World..................................................................................................................... 44
The Border Mythic............................................................................................................................56
Your Chancel....................................................................................................................................67
Heaven Intrudes ...............................................................................................................................73
Hell Awaits...................................................................................................................................... 80
The World Ash..................................................................................................................................85
The Light and the Dark.....................................................................................................................87
The Wild...........................................................................................................................................94
The Deep Mythic and the Spirit World..............................................................................................97
Let’s Play a Game!...........................................................................................................................103
Avatar Creation...............................................................................................................................118
Mortals...........................................................................................................................................149
7
The Laws of Your Nature................................................................................................................. 161
The Properties of Your Estate..........................................................................................................173
Female Noble.................................................................................................................................. 177
Aspect.............................................................................................................................................178
Physical Nature and Dharma..........................................................................................................185
Domain........................................................................................................................................... 187
Male Noble.....................................................................................................................................195
Persona...........................................................................................................................................196
Mystic Links.................................................................................................................................. 206
Treasure......................................................................................................................................... 208
MP..................................................................................................................................................218
Gifts............................................................................................................................................... 220
Common Gifts................................................................................................................................228
Uncommon Gifts............................................................................................................................232
Monstrous Gifts............................................................................................................................. 240
Your Chancel, Revisited................................................................................................................. 243
Your Imperator, Revisited...............................................................................................................247
The Imperators................................................................................................................................ 257
Orders and Nobilis......................................................................................................................... 261
The Excrucians................................................................................................................................276
The Zu.............................................................................................................................................295
The Actuals.....................................................................................................................................297
Miraculous Action..........................................................................................................................302
Miraculous Conflict....................................................................................................................... 309
Tools for Miraculous Conflict......................................................................................................... 316
Wounds...........................................................................................................................................320
The Simple Rites.............................................................................................................................. 337
Destiny...........................................................................................................................................341
At the Shore.................................................................................................................................... 351
Index...............................................................................................................................................354
Art Credits......................................................................................................................................362
8
Welcome!
Introduction
Ba lloon-PeoPle fantasy. Later we’ll even tell you how. And you might find
Wor ld
11
in their Chancel-world a place of Arthurian romance, of knights and
mystics and chivalry; London in the 1800s, augmented by dirigibles;
a land of kung-fu wonders; a technological future world far beyond
our own. Or, of course, some strange, inexplicable and disconcerting
world, where balloon-people float in great clusters and make war upon †
The local God, anyway. It would be
the birds; where robots are ubiquitous and computers are not possible; very surprising if the Judeo-Christian
God were to suddenly declare that
where the wind that breaks like ocean waves upon the cliffs is full of only forest butterflies in some weird
souls; where humans dwell in hidden homes beneath the forest glens, Chancel were His emissaries, and even
and butterflies are unto them the messengers of God†. stranger were this notion to be ratified
by the Pope; and everyone would just
The Nobilis live in their strange Chancels and they venture out- think he’d gone crazy, anyway, if he
wards to our world. Here they will be our heroes and our villains, god- did, and hasten him off to the special
haunted folk, driven by their humanity and their divinity to remake room beneath the Vatican where the
great Papal Computer hums and flashes
the world. Here is where you are likely to find them — that old man lights, where the walls are rich with
sitting at the end of the bar, that smiling businessman on the street, holy doctrines, and where the Cardi-
nals when they are called upon to do so
that woman in her chariot driving in all incongruity the horses of the
are minded to repair such broken Popes.
sun down the busy road outside your home, and squeezing with her
hand the bulb of a horn in anger at the traffic on the way.
If you’re still half-asleep and not looking out the window, you might
not even realize that it’s her. You might only put it together later when
you realize, “Hey, that horn sounded like sun and fire, like heat
and wine; it was a honking and a fury like the passion of a god!”
It is in our world that sometimes they meet the bleak and pret- II
ty gods of emptiness, the various Excrucians, who come in from r char iot w ith
its
we r wh o likes to use he ta l
outside the world to take away all the names and all the things. Th is is a Po
dr iv ing in th e m or
rses even when
glor ious red ho rn it soun ds lik e su n
They ride in on great black horses and they wield unbearable weap- e honk s her ho
world. W hen sh drag yo u up on to
ons and there are stars falling in the darkness of their eyes. They are ask her, she w ill
and fire. If you yo u fo r a day and a ni
ght
io t an d rid e w ith k
here to excruciate us. They are here to exsanguinate the world, to her ch ar yo u as
ion, but if
hes her destinat
or until she reac brand a m ar k in to
take from it the Nobilis and Imperators and leave us barren of our estions she w ill
her too many qu from th e cr af t. Sh e is
primal forms. They think they can do as they like in our worlds and and throw you
your forehead an d Maia Su lliva
n.
ar To cl an ny
in our lives, but sometimes the Nobles come to stop them. related to Osc
sa
Cl a r isig
K i lt h d ai
Ananda
F our Imperators run the world. They are the Council of Four,
and their names are Ananda, Ha-Qadosch Berakha, Lord Entropy,
and Surolam.
They haunt the Noble world just like the Nobilis haunt ours.
Ananda is a living principle of beauty. That isn’t what he embodies
— he isn’t the Imperator who is Beauty, or defines Beauty. That would
probably be Firstborn, or, at least, one of the oldest Angels. It’s just
what he is. His beauty is an apocalypse. It’s an out-of-bounds error in
the world.
Listen: he visited Mud Falls, Michigan one day and everyone went
mad from joy. Mothers stopped feeding their babies. People driving
cars stopped steering. The whole town collapsed, became a monstrous
disaster area, and the people who survived spent the rest of their lives
overwhelmed with happiness and joy and telling anyone who would
listen about the fundamental rightness of the world.
“It’s just! It’s bright! It’s all worth it, in the end!”
That’s what the survivors said.
Birds fell from the sky. Then they sang until their hearts burst.
And they weren’t the only things that were singing. The buildings
were rocking back and forth on their foundations, caroling out in their
creaky voices a deep and solemn joy. The grass turned to crystal, in
Mud Falls, Michigan, and it chimed and glistened as the wind blew
across it, and as far as anybody knows, it turned to crystal out of love.
Everything was delighted in his visit, but he broke the town and it isn’t
back to normal yet. That’s why he doesn’t visit us in the mortal world
very often.
What is he?
He is the Imperator of Murder and the Infinite.
He is the Lord of the Chancel Cityback. These
things could be part of the reason that he’s beautiful — I am not going
to judge people who murder or sum infinite series in his name because
they can probably find out where I live. But it is more likely that he is
beautiful to us because of the last and most important thing he is. He
is the god and the living principle of the next Age of the world — the
time beyond these troubled times, the glorious Fourth Age that is yet
to be. That is why his most common titles are the Lord of Expecta-
tions and the Emperor to Come.
Ananda is generally considered the weakest voice on the Council of
Four. This is because he does not ever vote against Lord Entropy — at
worst, he abstains. He tells us that some terrible disaster will transpire if
he and Lord Entropy are ever directly opposed. Some people speculate
that Lord Entropy is threatening him, but since nobody shows up in
the middle of the night to kill those people, they are probably wrong.
It’s more likely that Lord Entropy is just not as afraid of whatever that
disaster is as is Ananda.
III
He i s
usu
tor. S a l ly voted
e v er a as t h
but t l p ic t e pr e
u re s t
hey ’r
e of h i m t i e s t I m p e
inter h a rd e x is ra-
to fin
venti
on b y d d u e t on t h e w
y ou c g ov e r n t o a g g re e b,
an fi ment s siv e
v i e w i n d on e p l a l bo
ng it; ea se d ie s .
i ndu c t he be ca If
ref u l
e s e i z p ic t u r e s a in
rh a g e u re , so r e k no
, a nd f t-t wn
t iv e l p s y c h i s s u e h e m to
e vels ol o g i or-
of e u c a l ly
s a fe l y ph o r ad
v ie w ia. Yo d ic-
a t h ic t he i m u ca n
k c lo a ge
pi l lo w t h bl i n s t h r o u g h
, a nd d fold
t he y or e y
s ub s t will r e
antia e ta in a
“oom l a mo u n
ph.” N t of t
o bi l i s he i r
A r in er Te
t h ie l i a
w ith r e p or t s
a pa i t h at
l e a d g r of o p a q
og g le ue
up e a s , st
r s , a n op p e d
of s m dav
el l i ng ia l
a ffi xe sa lt
d u nd s
he r n er
os e , s
was a h e
bl e t o
ap pro
w ithi ac h t
of A n n thr o
i l l eff a nd a e e bl o
ec t. h i ms ck s
el f w
ithou
t
A nA
n dA
Lord Entropy
T here is an evil god who rules the mortal world from his
hidden Chancel.
He is Lord Entropy.
He is so evil that his hands drip blood even when he’s just
hanging out watching a basketball game. He is so evil that he
can just smile at you and not do anything at all to you and a few
years later you’ll turn into a degenerate third world dictator like
Saddam Hussein. Some people estimate that as many as ⅔ of all
corrupt dictators, CEOs, and other important people are people
who met Lord Entropy without knowing it and carry his stain
upon their soul.
He is so evil he doesn’t have to try to be evil; but sometimes,
he does.
Sometimes he stops moping around being emo and he picks
random people off the street, whisks them away to the Locust
Court, and puts them on trial for real or facetious crimes. Some-
times he sends the ogres and the nimblejacks that serve him —
great brutish thugs and diabolical imps, respectively — out into the
world to mess up things that are good, tear down what is bright and
virtuous, and in general do nasty things for no other reason than
IV because they can.
to my eyes. His
Technically he is just one of four — member of a Council of
d m y he ad and looked in
H e ra ise r my chin. “Y ou Four, appointed by the Imperators of the world to handle the af-
rs le ft ca rm ine smears unde
fin ge ook his head. fairs of mortals, things, and Powers. But he dominates that Coun-
ve sp ir it,” he said, and sh
st ill ha ot end your tor-
o yo u no t un derstand? I cann cil and thus positions himself to make law for the world. Techni-
“D
s broken you.” cally he is a hope for the world: he is prophesied to save Creation
ment until it ha
ld him. from the Excrucians, in the end, if he does not betray it. But he is
“I ’m tr ying,” I to e
he said, “that w not terribly interested, from all appearances, in being our shining
d. “I am glad,”
He almost smile d. B ut I am
ards the same en standard, or even, for that matter, in betraying us.
are working tow g ra th er a poor cont ri-
are makin
af raid that you He likes being something everybody fears.
bution to it.” of Au gusta Va lentin
a
Sometimes it seems like he tries to do a good job ruling
ought-Record
—from the Th
w rit-
the world. It’s hard to tell, because he is so virulently corrosive
responsible for
us ta Va len tin a is the Power th e case — when everything he touches turns rotten, he has to be at his
Aug ok deta iling
Ph ilo sop hy of Treason, a bo ok do
in g A
E xcrucians. If
you find th is bo subtlest when attempting to do things right. But sometimes it
for serv ing the fa lsi fie d co py th at
not read it as it
is most likely a tical seems like he tries to do a good job. And sometimes it seems
ou t an d fil l your vacant op
bu rn yo ur ey es os t as like he’s terribly weary of it. And sometimes it seems like he’s
w ill e copy is alm
rms. A genu in nversa-
cavity w ith wo a he rsel f is a fine co the big bad wolf, serving no particular purpose save glorying
Va lentin
dangerous. Ms. to so ci al iz e w ith
d qu ite sa fe for mor ta ls in his wickedness and waste. Through all these possibilities
tiona lis t an se to her or ask
u do not stand too clo
as lo ng as yo one theme comes clearly through.
upon the text.
her to ex pound He likes when people fear him.
Of the things he dislikes, the most notable is love. It
hurts him, or he hates it, or he loathes, fears, or holds some
len ti n A
AugustA VA
lingering bitterness towards it, or something. He doesn’t like that love
exists. It’s not about people loving or not loving him — he doesn’t seem
to want you to, and there’s some evidence you physically can’t†, but
that’s not the heart of it. Rather, he seems to hate that love exists in the †
He’s a deeply troubled, handsome,
world at all. He’s even made a law — dangerous celebrity, after all. If it were
possible to love him, we’d know. But
it’s more than that, actually. When
The Windflower Law: Internet Nobiliser communities started
The Nobilis shall not love. noticing the glaring absence of people
actively crushing on Lord Entropy,
people did experiments — trying to fall
It doesn’t work very well as a law qua law. There are very few Powers for him, trying to feel some heat. To
summarize the opinion of the com-
in the world who consult with the relevant statutes before deciding
munity: he’s cute, but about as hot as
whether or not to fall in love. If there is a Power of Being Overly kissing a giant ball of lint fresh
Methodical or a Power of Completely Not Getting What Love is from the dryer trap. Interest-
ingly, he doesn’t even consider
About, they might check whether love is legal or not before falling for this assessment disrespectful
somebody. However for the most part the law is not prescriptive but or irritating — at least, people
onerous: it serves not to prevent love but to criminalize it and make it don’t seem to die for voicing it
— so it’s probable that he’s either
surreptitious. Powers may only love in secret, and must live in fear that directly responsible for this phe-
nomenon or glad that it exists.
V
bloody
y by his ou’re
L o rd Entrop — e.g. if y
g n iz e c lu e
You can
rec o u g h of a can a lso
th a t is n ot e n o rd e re r — y ou a rs,
If ng a m u ften we
h a nd s . o r a r resti b ol h e o
e r y b s y m e w ith
in a su rg e sca ra ht hav
n iz e h im by th d o g re s he mig s e v e ra l
recog ck s an e him
b y th e nimbleja y o u s h ou ld g iv th e n ta lk
or et him but
y o u me mperor lse. If
him. If if h e w ere an E a n y bo dy e
n c e s a s h e w e re n ot
obeisa im as if n he is
o r ig nore h b le ja c k s w he g , or
im im fightin
to h res or n hid ing,
u m e e t his og o in t in e r y d u ll and
yo is no p to be a v
, th e re te n d u or
a round ad pre ore yo
in g a w ay. Inste d th e y may ig n
r unn r s on a n
sting pe
unintere litt le bit.
u r t y o u just a d istract
h
w o u ld like to un-
e r h a nd
, if yo u y else, r
th e o th fr o m s om e b o d n ti ng
On blejack s ike hu
re s a nd nim o d s tr ateg y. L c e r s , L ord
g o
o
a y is a v er y g a n d p olice offi a l in-
ning a w u n ne r s biolog ic
, c o m p etitive r o m p e ll e d by a d w hile
dog s n
m in io ns a re c g th a t r u ns , a a re
Entrop
y ’s any thin tly they
c h a s e dow n a lm o s t instan
stinct to catch yo
u
ck s ca n stead.
nimbleja y o u in
ly to p lay w ith
like
E n t ropy
Lor d
he will discover their love. Many hate him for this, while others close
their hearts against love and pretend the law is just.
Lord Entropy is the Imperator of Desecration, Destruction, and
Scorn. He is actually one of two different Imperators whose Estate
translates into English as “Destruction;” he is Absolute Destruction,
while the Angel Za’afiel is Destruction as Part of the Cycle of Life.
Lord Entropy has many servants. He has three extremely compe-
tent Powers — Meon, who is the Power of Desecration; Baalhermon,
Power of Destruction; and Joktan, Power of Scorn. He has an army
of ogres, nimblejacks, and human slaves. In the mortal world he rules
the organization known as the Cammora, a secret society that has
power over most mortal countries. They provide many services to the
Powers, including illegal services; Lord Entropy has decreed the Cam-
mora “invisible to law,” so if a Power needs to break Lord Entropy’s
Law they may hire the Cammora to do it for them‡. Lord Entropy has
direct influence over many powerful mortals — he often puts invis-
ible “seeds” in the hearts of powerful mortals that can whisper Lord
Entropy’s wishes to them and sprout, killing them, if they dispute that
will. Finally, Lord Entropy has access as a matter of courtesy to many
of the resources of the other members of the Council of Four, such as ‡
This is not meant for use with the
Surolam’s Locust Court (which he uses for trials) and the rangers of Windflower Law, since hardly anybody
Ananda’s Chancel, the Cityback. hires the Cammora to fall in love on
Lord Entropy’s code of Law for the Powers, the Code Fidelitatis, their behalf. Instead it is invoked with
regards to the Chestnut Law, the Crow-
reads — foot Law, and the Rule of War (below).
Š The Chestnut Law: thou shall harm none who has done no harm, nor
wreak more vengeance than in the sevenfold degree
Š The Rule of War: serve your Imperator before the War, and the War
before yourself
Š The Crowfoot Law: protect no Power from the justice of the Code
VI
rator
This is an Impe
pr ot ec ts or -
who
di na ry life fro m
e
disr uption. Sh
pe op le to
allows
rem ai n ig no ra nt V II
t
of magic and ge A n ord
ina r y p
di na ry the psy e r s on w
by in an or cholog ic ho s e e s
mirac le
Th is is a l d isea s ca n ca
way in a world the sick
n
s e , “ dem
entia an tch
you r to e s s w imus.”
torn by mystic aster an
d other
h e re you sta
r t ta lk in
you fr iends
forces at war. If that you objects
and tell
g to
sit he r you things in a re just ing a ll y
want to vi the worl a s h a d o w of ou r
d he r te m pl es tive but d. Th is the tr ue
can fin not a fu is an ac
cu rate p
in yo ur lo ca l to a bad nctiona erspec-
lis te d end. To l on e a n
they a v d w il l le
Yellow Pages; ironic d
etachm
oid this
d isease
a d y ou
co rd ed alpha- ent from , practi
are not re rea lit y s
udden ly rea lit y ; ce
bu t in ste ad c ha nge then, w
betical ly snide co s , y he n
mments o u ca n m
ac ed be tw ee n two A lterna instead a ke
pl tely, ho of goin
pict ur- ld g mad .
advertisements ways fin
d the su
in mind
that you
or tw o names c c o r of may a l-
ing dogs any pa ir Su rolam
a do g- lik e m eaning. of dog-
fl a n ked g a , th rough
with this fas
hion re tes, and
ok for
You can also lo you r d is c o v e r from th in
di na ry things ea se. e bu rde
the most or n of
le po ss ible and
and peop in-
have recent
ask them if they go d of ordinary th
ings.
rm at ion on th e dog-headed
fo
Su rol a m
Dem en
t i a a ni
mus
doesn’t mean much either. They see that everything they believed
was true was just something in their head. And that hurts them.
V III And Surolam is the answer to that pain.
She is the power that we have to forget the extraordinary and
pretend that our ideas and lives make sense. Each person has a
pair of Surolam’s gates in their heart that, flanked by two of her
dogs, leads to a place of retreat from the raw madness that is the
world. And it’s not just people, either — everything in this world
is secretly alive, and everything that lives has access to her balm.
She is something we can turn to when we go outside and
there is something ravening and blasphemous on our street.
She is our hope and our salvation when we go home and find
we have a nameless Thing instead of an air conditioner, or
have our hearts brushed by the passage of an Excrucian’s wing.
She is the mortal’s only answer against miracles.
If our need is great enough we can find her in person —
ously proposed Not just in spirit.
ed ition I er rone
In the prev ious to a Darklord We can find a pair of dog-flanked gates, or one of Sur-
Cou rt belonged
that the Locust lds as teeming
M ed an an d described its fie to olam’s temples, and go through and in, and pass into a place of
named locusts. I regret
rn iv or ou s, flesh-eating
w ith ca spur red me on to musty sanctuary and comfort. There we can recover, and wait,
suggestive tit le
confess that a flights of sheere
st
eculatio n an d and if we wait long enough, receive an audience with her.
pa roxysms of sp ed iti ng ; ap ol og ies
y wh ich we re not caught in is Then, when we leave, we will forget.
fantas ed, let us put th
er ed , an d forg iveness ea rn
te nd
and entirely be
hind us. People forget. Spirits forget. Even animals forget. It’s re-
mat ter sw ift ly
ally only the insects that remember. They crawl in and out
cou rT between our world and hers all the time. That’s why some-
Th e LocusT times you can get insects that just seem to appear inside your
house, and it’s why her Chancel is named the Locust Court.
We can appeal to her there for more than solace. We
can ask her for aid, and she might even give it. She is kind, you see,
and loves us more the more we are broken-hearted. But she is also a
creature of Law and a creature of precedent, and so she is very care-
ful not to commit to more than she can give to all of us, and each of
us, forever. The decisions she does make, the promises she does give,
bind her for centuries or even millennia — they are written down and
thrown into the great Swamp of Precedent in the distant reaches of
the Locust Court, where the testaments, effects and language of her
previous decisions sink slowly into a great ink-and-paper bog and mix
bit by bit with one another in decay, and where strange trees and flow-
ers grow.
In her realm there is a truce between insects, fungi, diseases and
the larger creatures. For this reason, passage through it will often free
you of disease or infestation, or, conversely, cause you to act as a vector.
Ha-Qadosch Berakha
Of these all it is the Aaron’s Serpents you would find the mildest mas-
ters. They are terrifying in their physical extent and prowess, but gen-
erally humane of mind and philosophical of character.
If you were claimed by an Angel or a Magister of the Light, you
would receive a more difficult destiny. Bright creatures such as they
impose great rigors on their Powers, and demand a great exactitude.
The sea serpent Rahaytz was, alone
They would task you to heal great wounds, make redress to great
among its kind, distressed at its lack of
arms and hands. It would impress hapless wrongs, defeat great monsters, perform great works, and serve in the
human sailors into its service, using them redemption of lost things. The world’s need for beauty and salvation
to fetch, manipulate, and carry for the will not falter: your labors would be endless, but at least there would
monstrous beast as long as they remained
be glory, honor, and purpose in it all.
alive.
—from A Medieval Bestiary, by Paul McArthur
If a Devil or a Magister of the Dark claimed you, your lot would not be
so bright. They would be casual in hurting you, in pushing you, in testing
your morality and survivability almost to destruction. They would show you
how saving your beloved from certain death would bring the ending of the
world. They would call it a salutary lesson, or an amusing jest, to temporarily
replace your bones with molten lead. They are the most terrible expressions
of the causes that they serve — the Devils more hideous and cruel than the
Code the follow, and the Dark more vile and treacherous. They are servants
of honorable and good causes that have much to recommend them but they
are irredeemable cosmic horrors in themselves.
Imagine it! To be one of a Devil’s Powers, lifted up and made into
a god, given reign over some great cosmic principle — from Raphi,
who is Judgment; or Cedron, who is Growth; or Domiel, who is the
Experience of Burning — and at the same time and the same mo-
ment, made a pawn to something that loves corruption and despair?
To be bound by a doomed and tainted intimacy to them, to know that
they are yours and you theirs and that the connection is empowering,
mutual, and forever while they are so monstrous and so cruel? Or to
serve Araunah of the Dark and dwell in the manner of a joyous god
in the fairyland he rules; while feeling, through that Lord, the will of
every chemical fume that chokes, every caustic splash that scars, every
chemical burn that strips the flesh from some poor human’s bones?
Perhaps you could find peace with it. Some do. Perhaps you could
work brightness from it. Some do, again. There is no redeeming the
Devils or the Dark, but there is good in them to find. Or perhaps
you would simply serve the world as best you could and pray the War
would kill you soon.
Or would it be an alien thing that claims you?
The True Gods are shapeless, formless creatures. They are earthly
gods but they are not human gods; rather, they are kin to the amoebas,
the fungi, the insects, and the plants. They are alien to us as X
the flora of our stomach are alien, as the things that grow in ith a
tor crow ned w
-a rmed Impera
our refrigerators are alien, as the residents of volcanic tunnels, K aithrya is a six Her ex ha lat io n is a
ns and flames.
dark swamps, and the ocean deeps are strange. They are funda- coronet of thor rin g. Sh e is no minal ly
gives rise to Sp
blue mist that ce of Spring, pa rt
icu la rly
mentally compatible with the human animal, but not with the e ap pe ar an
invisible but th cates and re ve al s her
le Spring, indi
human person; in practice, a tension exists. an unseasonab to m ak e su ch gifts
. A t su ch times it is w ise to
You would find service to a True God a unique and uncate- presen ce you can afford
r as yo u ca n afford, and that no t off er
to he instance, do
gorized experience. What strange drives would it make you privy threefold. For m-
have retu rned es is da m na bl y co
having three liv
to? To which of its archaic, primordial moods would you be subject? her your life, as mon ey, a sm al l m ea l,
er offer ing her
plex, but consid ice , or a fixed tim
e
What would its nature be, what would be the manner of its com- am on th of fre e In te rn et se rv
no t un der
name. Do
plexities? These things we cannot say. In dreaming up a fictional True g kind ly in her
period of actin love or on e th ird of
es offer her your
God, as in Imperator Creation on pg. 248, you’ll have endless scope any circumstanc reef ol d lo ve of a deity
serv ice. The th
your dedicated tra pp ing any creatu
re of
for creativity; facing one in reality, endless opportunities for surprise! po te nt ia lly fa ta l, an d en
tir pa tion
is vites your ex
your serv ice in
And then there are the Magisters of the Wild. They are not just the Wild into
.
from the world
alien to us but to the entirety of the world. They have no roots in
reality, no context, no relationship to any other thing. They present
themselves not as a natural part of Creation, but as strangers who
stumbled into it and found themselves integrated into its flesh. Their
alienness is so profound as to seem simple in practice — their nature
is described by a handful of simple rules, which appear to arise ex ni-
hilo and without regard to our moral and physical laws. For example,
Kaithrya of the Wild opposes stasis, brings forth green and growing
things and returns what is given to her threefold. Cut off one of her rya of th e
K a ithW
arms, she will cut off three of yours; if you have only two, she is not de-
i ld
terred and will in good time find a way. Epikleros Chimeric is a Wild
Magister who may not be captured, touched, caught, or accurately
described; its presence in our world gives rise to paradoxes. Where
Achaz walks, the dead arise; feasibility is no concern.
Imagine it, then!
Such a thing burns into your life. An Angel or a Devil; a Ma-
gister of Light or Dark; a creature of the Wild, or the Primeval,
or a Serpent from the Tree! They strike you like a meteor: like a
catastrophe and a transfiguration, falling like thunder from the
seemingly clear sky, entering your life from outside the ordinary
boundaries of your world. They take the city around you, or some
area more nebulously defined, and fold it up into a Chancel.
They estrange it and you from the country you’ve lived in, they
infuse the area with their magic, they make the place a magic
temple reachable only by strange paths. Then they choose you
— you, of all mortals — to infuse with an Estate.
You are suddenly a Power. You are suddenly bound to
them and to the world. You are suddenly the Prince or Prin-
cess of the hidden Chancel. You are suddenly a Sovereign
Power in the world.
And you are not alone, for lo! your Familia Caelestis have also
been chosen; your “family of Powers,” that is, those bound to the same
Chancel and Imperator you serve.
Were you alone, or deeply rooted in the world?
Is this a blessing, or a monstrous curse?
Bane or boon, there is no help for it. From the moment you are
chosen, your Imperator has set its mark on you. To become a Power is
to gain a new family, new responsibilities, and a new fate.
31
XI
en
gs that can happ
ndom bad thin
These are the ra On th e pl us sid e bad
dina ry world.
to you in the or do es not mean you
are a
en in g to yo u
th in gs ha pp gs w ill hap-
e bad thin
n the minus sid
bad person. O rs on . In the end
u ev en if yo u are a good pe s
pen to yo e motivationles
her victim of th
L
ar e ju st an ot
you al graphs.
ed ac yc lic caus
mal ice of direct
Za’a
fiel
34
more complex, far-reaching and beautiful they’ve become. But the
problem is it isn’t real.
The world isn’t really like that. No relativity. No chemistry. It’s not
even really round.
The planet orbiting the sun, somewhere in the Milky Way —
that’s a dream, a lie, an illusion, a process built out by science even as
†
The Imperators, that is, of human we explore it, which the Imperators of the world have chosen to main-
prowess.
tain. It’s a lie the True Gods of Earth use to shelter them from the eyes
of Heaven. It’s a lie the Imperators of the Light and Dark† have chosen
to back for reasons of their own.
And Surolam to protect us, for we shatter when we see that it is
false.
And Lord Entropy, I think, because it amuses him.
And Ha-Qadosch Berakha and Ananda, for reasons of their own.
It’s our broken little crib, our shelter, our hiding place. We’ve been
decorating it, lately, sprucing it, making it awesome and complex and
beautiful. But it’s still just our crib.
It’s not the fundamental law.
XIII
r, and
n, Vapo
r o f P erceptio d e of Sen-
th e I m perato y w o rl d is ma er ib as
Th is is ord ina r en n ac h
in g S ta rs. The c a n th ink of S , e co
th m-
Fa ll s h — yo
u
th e world
’s fl e y o f d r if ts
nacher ib e stor il that
k th a t holds th o n , o r the ve fe r
the boo la ti u tran s
its simu g. If yo
at holds the thin
puter th n a n d o etow
rg n
t w e e n the v isio r tm e n t of G e a c h er ib ’s
be
P h y s ic s D epa r s e lf in S en n
u
into the w il l fin
d yo
r row.
it y you y ou r s o
Univers s t li k e ly to
l, m o
Ch a nc e
ch er i b
Sen na
35
Visions
of the Cityback
36
T here is a seed of evil inside the human eye. It twists and writhes
and sometimes we see evil instead of what is there.
We’re looking at a street.
Then bam! Evil twists in our eye, and we’re looking at Samael St.
Augustine, the Evil Street. XIV
We’re looking at those guys down the way. This is a street
and a row of sh
Bam! They’re not guys. They’re ogres. dead. It’s full of ops that longs to
people with fang see you
sionless slit eyes ed mouths, expr
And lightning flashes, and suddenly we realize that we’re standing , and fleshy hand es-
the outside of th -shaped gloves
on
in the Evil World, and maybe we’ve always been. Samael St. Aug
eir real hands.
You can tell yo
u’re on
ustine because
It’s not really in our eyes. That’s too literal. If evil lived in the eyes signs will tell yo th
u. If you ever fin
at’s what the str
eet
but do not run d yourself there,
then you could cut it out and throw it on the ground and stomp on it away. walk
mortal person, then maybe one day he’ll hunt you, not because you’ve
done anything wrong, but because being mortal means that you’re not
worth giving any say in whether he hurts you or not.
If you’re a Power, it’s even worse.
If you’re a Power, then there is no practical way that you have
never done him wrong. There is no way you’ve never loved. There is no
way you’ve never accidentally hurt an innocent. There is no way you’ve
been perfect in your service to the War. I guess it’s technically possible,
but seriously — never? Not at all?
If you’re a Power, one day he might decide to hunt you and it will
officially be your fault.
48
The Evil World is an island. It is an island riding on a beast. It is
surrounded by storms.
In the center of that world is the palace of black glass.
On his throne in the palace is the evil god Lord Entropy, and his
fingers always drip with blood.
He is attended by ogres and by nimblejacks.
To his left, in the eastern palace, there is Joktan. He stands over
the palace like a giant, his shadow massive on the clouds. Joktan, whose
laughter fills the air. He is laughing at you right now. He is laughing
at you because he hates you and because he knows that you will suffer.
He is laughing because it is marvelously funny how terrible things will
happen to you, and how terrible you are.
Baalhermon holds the palace of the west and stands at Lord
Entropy’s right. He is the power in the incarnadine clouds that rumble
across the sky in the evil world. He is the terror and the destruction
and the lightning.
And then there is Meon.
Meon cannot possibly be as bad as people say, because if he
was, then there would be nothing left for virtue in this world. There
wouldn’t be any point in anything, in even trying, if Meon were as bad
as people say.
And I’ve never noted him explicitly as doing harm. I’ve never
seen it, never heard of it, never obtained an authoritative documentary
reference to any cruel and monstrous thing that he has done. He doesn’t
even have his own wing of the palace; he isn’t part of the government
of the evil world. He’s just there.
But I’ve seen him. I’ve seen a photograph of him. I’ve seen his
smile. So I know why people say what they say. I’ve seen his smile.
He keeps all the worst things in the world in that smile, behind
that smile, like he’s holding them all back.
Like he’s holding back all the worst things that could ever happen,
all the time.
He could be that thing which makes things discordant with
themselves and the entire world, the thing that rips and ruins, the
thing that is the worst face of every monster in the world. He could be
“Do you love me?” I asked, when our time
was done. that. He maybe even might be that. But for right now, he holds it back.
He holds it back, so maybe he’s fighting it. Maybe on some level
Diamanta leaned her head back to look at
me. “Is that why you think I come to you?” he’s trying to do good. But I don’t think that’s why.
Meon is the god of defilement; he is the Power of Desecration.
“Why do you, then?”
And it seems to me that he is leashing himself because it is more
She looked down. “I committed a sin I
pleasant to him that people desecrate themselves, and one another, and
cannot bear,” she said. “This is my expia-
tion.” their own holy things. It seems to me that he is choosing not to be so
—from the Thought-Record very great an evil as he ought to be, as he could be, as people say he
of Desecration’s-Regal Meon is, because he loves how very wicked people are, even without Meon.
49
But I don’t know.
Maybe it’s all just an excuse. Maybe he just wants me to see that,
wants that written down. Maybe he’s secretly good and doesn’t want
anybody to notice. Maybe he’s doing monstrous evil, all the time, and
letting people believe we do it to ourselves.
I can’t tell you, either way. All I can say is that he can’t be as bad as
his reputation, because that would mean the worthlessness of the world.
I won’t let it mean that. So he can’t be.
And then there’s Lord Entropy.
He can’t be that either. He can’t be even as bad as people say Meon
is, either.
But he’s close.
Lord Entropy, and his Evil World, is all three of them and more.
He is the laughter and the storm. He is the seething sleepless evil. He
is the architect of our despair.
Ogre
become like Hugh; and if any have made it past that, all the way to old,
I hope I never know.
The nimblejacks were stolen. They used to belong to the Fallen Angel
Achaia.
She’s dead.
They’re not.
They’re the descendants of Hell and corruption lives in them.
They’re horrid little monsters, almost by definition, cruel and relentless
by character. They used to be a kind of incarnation of consequence, part
of the karma and morality that got cut off from the Ordinary World.
They were what you got when you found you were in too deep. Thought-Record
And that’s still the livid essence that twists inside them.
Technology
If you wear a thought-record trans-
Lord Entropy’s been breeding them with each other and with mitter, you can send your thoughts to its
humans for millennia. He’s kept them cut off from the ordinary world matching teletype receiver from anywhere
and from the Hell that was their home. Now they’re more physical in the world. Using a receiver in tandem
with a computer you can create a tran-
creatures than karmic ones. Now they’re gargoyle-imps, humanoid
scription of received thoughts in real time,
creatures wearing skin as tough as a stone and with nails like spikes at leisure, or even post-mortem. There is
of granite. Now they’re shriveled things that can move faster than the an Estate for Thought-Record Technology,
lightning. and someone could theoretically invent it
in the prosaic world at any time; for now,
They’re not consequences, not any more. But they’re still fatal.
though, the technology only exists in rela-
They can still bewitch you so that you can’t let go of the promises you’ve tively advanced Chancels. There is a rumor
made to them, that you feel you have to fulfill whatever agreements that Lord Entropy can collect the last
with them you make. They can take your word and make it your several days of thought from a dead mortal
or Power, regardless of whether they wore
obsession. Or they can rip your guts out with their fingernails and let
a transmitter or willingly broadcast their
you die upon the floor, whatever. thoughts while alive; from such ostensible
They’re living creatures now, and not just bits of Hell, but they still records, made public, have many of this
must live their lives in a state of evil, in a world defined by corruption book’s quotations come.
and suffering. It’s the weirdest and most wonderful and most terrible
52
Nimblejack
Miscellaneous Nimblejack
Traits
Nimblejacks have the Aspect Trait at level
0-3, with 3 AMP. They have Persona 1
applying to the imaginary Estate, Trapped
into Evil, with 3 PMP. thing. If a nimblejack ascends, if they let themselves ascend, if they let
They have the Lightning Quickness their soul look up inside them and appreciate beauty or love or justice,
Gift; this allows them to use difficulty 7 they explode and a fire surges out from where their heart would be and
Aspect miracles of moving quickly for 0 MP.
sears through the sky towards Heaven.
They are feral creatures, though they can be mannerly. They are
not comfortable in civilization. They are not comfortable in non-evil
worlds. The stench of things not being dominated by desecration,
destruction, and scorn disturbs them. They feel disoriented, like
people breathing ether, and out of place. But they are still very good at
hiding in our world, at renting apartments and walking on streets and
otherwise infiltrating us that they may watch us, or steal from us, or
help Lord Entropy’s greater servants on their hunts.
The humans of Lord Entropy are also called Domicelli (domicellus,
domicella); this term is strictly applied to those who earn his favor, and
loosely to any human whose loyalty lies with the Darkest Lord.
grows the longer you stay; for those who live there, it has sunk into the
bone and flesh of them, made a permanent change. There is a substance
and a quality of need, and there is nothing that lives there or stays there
He stood at the edge of the Earth and
terribly long that is not driven into danger, folly, or madness — and
drank the world.
often more than one of these — by a hunger for a thing it cannot find,
“As a servant of Creation,” I said, “I
or cannot have, or cannot permit itself to possess. Even for the ogres,
should kill you.”
whose tastes are awful but simple enough, the hunger has no end; the
He could not move. He had too much raw
more they gorge themselves on human flesh, the hungrier they become.
power pouring into him. His eyes were
edgy and frightened.
“Hell,” I said. “I will kill you. But I ad-
mire your appetite.”
—from the Thought-Record of Hugh Rosewood
54
Around the cup of fire and around the Ash and around
its worlds the Excrucians swarm like gnats. They are an
endless army in an endless space, but right now their efforts
are focused on a handful of battle fronts. They raid against
Heaven, and Hell, and Jotunheim where live the giants,
and Aelfscienne of the elves, and Dionyl, and Abaton, and
here and there and other places. And the Earth.
Thirty fronts, perhaps, in all.
Zoom in.
Our world is there, an island in the leaves, a great flat
plane anchored in subtle ways and great ones to the Ash. It is
green and brown and blue and wet, and over its edges cascade
an endless falling sea. Mariners would be better served not to
sail too near the edge of that expanse.
This world — our world — is fundamentally alive.
Sometimes I will call it the Border Mythic. Other
times I will call it the Mythic World.
It is our secret reality where everything lives and moves.
The wind is alive, in the Mythic World. The forests,
and each tree. The mountains have their shoulders and their
58
heads, their faces, their conversations and their is nothing that coin loves better than its
thoughts. Each beam of sunlight. Each rock. circulation, and nothing that joys a wave so
Each thing that is, is possessed of its own spirit, much as its death upon the shore.
from the smallest to the largest; it takes only the It is a world bathed in the golden light
pressure of attention to differentiate and speak of life.
to the will of the smallest part. It is rich in purposes and feelings.
Cars drive by their own will. Birds and To see it is to know that everything’s OK,
aeroplanes make choices as they soar. There even though it’s not.
In the Mythic World you can get practically anywhere by road. There’s a path to death, and
back. There’s a road up to the sun.
59
To see the Border Mythic you just have to let
go of the scientific world. It’s as hard as spit-
ting out iron nails when you haven’t even put
them in your mouth yet, the first time, but
after that it’s more like falling asleep in the
back of a car. Sometimes you’ll even just snap
over to the mythic when you see something
impossible happen, because that impossible
thing primes your brain to the reality of the
magic that’s going on all around you.
Getting back into the shelter of the
ordinary world — that’s harder.
It takes me about four hours of hard work
to get back to reality every time. That’s after
an awful lot of practice. When I started, it
took me all weekend, and I got brain cramps
and messed up my body rhythms something
fierce. Nobilis can usually do it just like that,
but sometimes even they have trouble!
The earth splits and clear, sparkling water boils up — these are the Chalices of Conception. A
female who is unable otherwise to conceive may immerse herself therein and draw in its power,
making her either parthenogenetic or fertile with a man she loves; but the child will be infused
unnaturally with the power of the world.
60
Time in the Mythic World is strange, and
prone to turn about.
I once asked my car why it put up with me. “You so obediently take me
where I want to go,” I said. “You follow my every order. Why should this
be so? You are your own person!”
It considered that. “I suppose,” it said, “that I consider it basic hu-
man maintenance. One goes through a kind of daily hassle,
you know, taking humans to one place or another,
in order to get the best fueling, sheltering, and
cleaning performance out of them.”
—from The Diary of Edmund Finch,
by Jackie Robinson
Alchemist Traits
Alchemists control various wondrous trea-
sures, represented by the Treasure Trait at
level 0-2, the ability to have Treasure MP (al-
though they start with 0), and limited access
to miraculous Bonds and Afflictions. Their
Treasure Trait is weaker than a Power’s —
they cannot control ordinary things or wield
their powers across great distances unless
some specific quality of their magic allows.
Old Man Influenza is one of the Ogdoad, the Lady Midsummer Night is another spirit
class of “really important spirits who aren’t Im- of the Ogdoad. She’s a mystery, even to her
perators themselves.” A Power might be able to friends, but if you’re kind and decent to her
beat him up, but that won’t get the Power his she’ll be kind to you.
respect; if you want Old Man Influenza’s help,
you’d better show him honor and courtesy and
be aware of just how old and powerful he is.
How is it that you can meet Lady Jill Erosion, walking in the woods, when the woods should
be just one big mess of spirits intertwined with one another?
It’s like this:
It’s the power of attention. Introspection. Thought.
Most spirits just kind of drift through life. There’s a dryad in every tree, but it’s practically
asleep, and even when it’s awake it chats with the other dryads and the wind, it doesn’t talk to you.
65
But if you see a thing, or hear a thing, if but they wouldn’t talk to me. And I could
you bear witness to it or if it bears witness to hear the woodpecker boy hammering at the
you, then the spirit of that thing differentiates trees, but it wasn’t any of them that I real-
from the larger context. Its voice and face will ly longed for. It wasn’t any of them that my
surface from the fabric of the world. heart called forth.
That’s how I met the Jack of Roads down It was him, who came wandering up
by Tiger Mountain, long before I met Ianthe. along the way, and whistling as he went: the
I was lost. great-great-grandson of the Imperator of
And I could see the forms of dryads, Roads, and the son of Tiger Mountain: the
basking in the sun and the faces in the dirt, Jack of Roads himself.
To a person of Creation, everything outside the world is essentially a barren, empty void. The
longer you stare at it, trying to see details, the more you see the inside of your eyes.
Look, for example, upon the austere landscape of Sisera Sanguinary — ah! To an
Excrucian, or a grangler, or any other creature of the void, this place brings awe. But what of
the neighboring Stringent Heights?
Vulgar and unimpressive, say the granglers —
But our eyes see only darkness;
But our body feels only the faint warm gentle pressure of the Not;
But our ears hear only silence, in Sisera and the Stringent Heights alike.
Your Chancel
Locus Zaanannim is home to the characters and worlds Chancel, or their own series’ cancellation — are driven
of network television. The zones of currently airing pro- outside the far walls into the outer darkness, where they
grams are sealed in the Zaan Biospheres to minimize merge together into monstrous tellipedes, characmeras,
cross-pollination, while worthy characters and elements and comedy blobs. It is the duty of the Power Tiria to
from cancelled programs are allowed into the Great keep them out when they grow strong enough to threat-
Walled City of the Chancel proper. This City, roughly en the walls, while it is the job of her brother caelestis
the size of Canada, is a sectioned labyrinth that divides Foramin Blake to dissect them when a merged character
into drama, comedy, and genre “quarters,” with the last is unexpectedly needed for a sequel or remake.
disproportionately sized to allow starships, cattle herds, There is no land route into Locus Zaanannim. You
and pirate ships adequate space to roam. The unruly enter and exit via plot holes or with a special appeal to
— those who refuse to accept the broader world of the one of the Powers of the place.
69
Locus Casluhim is a secret mountain in the Los Angeles There are walking paths into Locus Casluhim but
hills. Its design is in the Olympian mold, with spots of the simplest way to find it is to spot a cloud dragon wan-
airy Grecian architecture scattered along the slope and dering the skies anywhere within three hundred miles of
shepherds (herding sheep or cloud dragons), fire nymphs, the place. Stare at the cloud dragon until it realizes it has
and musicians wandering the peaks. A number of small been caught; recognizing you either as a knowledgeable
villages cluster around the mountain’s base, with inter- traveler or a dangerously perspicacious mundane, it will
mittent access at best to the greater Los Angeles area paralyze you with a glance, runnel down from the clouds
around them. it plays in, and carry you off to the Chancel’s slope.
70
Clegyr is a living Chancel whose flesh is rock and whose excreta are
gems. It swims in the Earth’s crust like a fish swims in water; the
temple-city of its resident Powers, on Clegyr’s back, moves through
stone with equal ease. The human residents were made over into
stone-bodied “gnomes” when the place became a Chancel. Their duty
is to provide for the Powers’ needs and to arrange the gems that Cle-
gyr leaves behind in patterns that make the angels glad. It’s not clear
how well this works, but if you find a gem while mining that appears
to be the poo of a giant rock-fish-Chancel, please consider leaving it
in place and moving on.
71
One of the apartment buildings on 43rd Street probably
belongs to Mary Shenk.
Which 43rd Street? It doesn’t really matter. They’re
all the same. Every 43rd Street, in every city. They run
together, and somewhere on it, there’s the home of Mary
Shenk.
You can use that knowledge to get from city to city.
From continent to continent, even, if you do it right. Just
don’t forget to leave a tip, when you do, for Mary Shenk.
72
X V II
Every Familia of Powers has one: a Chancel, pulled from
the world around it. A secret world with hidden entrances
and exits and rules that are all its own. What would yours
be like?
XVI
yo may
, Texco
m o r ta l athlete . This
petent mamir
y ou a re a com e s at L o c u s Qa n c e l ha s a
I f a
y o u to the gam e iz in g ; the Ch ith you
inv ite orth s l stay w
o p p o r tunit y w e ff e c t that w il “s ide
is an orating cept his
fo u n d ly inv ig t, h o w ever, ac r ifi c e the
pro
y y e a rs . Do no d e v ou r or sac e you
for man ner ma y uld ma k
w h e re the w in o y o ’s h eart wo a g a inst
bet,” g Texc stand
r’s h e a rt; eatin o n e w ho may
los e is n o rld.
but there ntire wo
a Power, g a me s in the e
e se
him at th The beasts of Lo
cus Theg ri come
a positive hung out at night with
er for money. Th
a passing travel ey will gladly kill
er to shake out he
their teeth and r pu rse with
gulp down the
credit cards ther coins, bills, and
ein.
— from A Tour
ist ’s Guide to
Creation, by Jas
pr ite Sher ra rd
II Locus Th eg
XVI ri
t i na
A r g e n on
itin g ere
e v is y wh
y o u a r el to an either
If av s
ot t r ed a a h.”
d o n ap m a rk A r au n t h e
m c u s m
t he “ L o c t l y f ro
a r i s or e r f e 4 by
P
e n i mp i n 195 the
S to l o r l d i s t e r of
ta l w ir
amam
g ca l
mor a h , M a i s m a g i
A ra
u n cit y lon- c us Q
Da r k , this but no
s
i o u t o hu m
an Lo
n d g l or i a l e
a g en ar
con sidents
g er
e . It s r e
l v e s — it
li f l ly e o
cipa bl e t
pr i n a c c e pt a e s e
g th -
bein a rk for ve s/ o bi l
h e D e y to l i g v e r c las tor ian n ey ’re
t f r in lo ic th
ma n at te A sma l e l ike V el, but i l l
i n hu t h a s m l k. e s id a nc t o k
i f o r h
— wther faer y f humans pt y of the Chey’ ll have they don’tll
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Heaven Intrudes
Now in his youth, on a sweltering sum-
mer day, Devin felt suddenly as gold; his
I t is not by our own will that grace comes into our world. It is un-
asked for. It is unbidden. It is not in response to anything. It’s too wild,
limbs were strong, his thoughts were clear,
pure, and mad for that.
and his heart was treasure.
Grace invades.
He sipped deeply of his lemonade; his
The angels are an occupying army in our world. They are light
spirit shouted in his frame; his dreams
were suddenly within his reach. that bursts upon us in our darkness, lifting up what we would rather
abandon to its misery. They are the flowers of Heaven, blooming
Then the moment passed away to an ordi-
nary summer. where the world had forsaken life — on the scrapheaps of metal, in
the slick sickness of spreading oil, on the graves of sinners and the just,
Events arose. Circumstances transpired.
Griefs and loves and hurts ensued. The twining up our skyscrapers and our tenements and our office buildings
matter was forgotten. in defiance of the soullessness of our lives. They are the enlightenment
Now, as he stared into the burning heart that bursts in on us when we were just trying to be small little men
of the void — into the squirming, howl- and women, eating our bagels and drinking our Starbucks, tilling our
ing, flat-eared dog-god emptiness that little patches of soil, dying in our heaps and grottoes, or staring out at
was an uncreated world — he saw a pat-
tern that reminded him of that gold.
the world from our high towers. We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t even
understand that it could happen. It was like a Zen master suddenly
Heedless of the open-throated forces that
writhed and bayed within, he reached in
hitting us with a stick while we were just in line to pay the telly bill.
his hand; trailed it along the surface to Heaven is the angel that catches us as we fall; not because we
make it separate and recombine like some needed it, not because we wanted it, not even because we’d dreamed of
baleful gelatin; grasped firmly at the tail angels since we were a child but because the angels decided the world
of a strange anomaly, and pulled it into
sight.
was better if we lived.
Heaven invades, but at least it invades us as a holy thing.
There! There, of all things, there and then,
in the containment chamber that he’d The angels take beauty as a sacred trust. It’s their Craft and
made, there lay the summer day; therein their Great Working, it’s what they build. Having found themselves
lay the gold; skulking, lurking, snarling, born into the brightest land in all the lands there are, they decided
forbidden on the surface of the void.
they would make everything else as bright. Their own kin — lovers,
“It is the end of days,” Devin advised it, friends, ancient acquaintances and enemies — are suffering in Hell,
for it was, and then he smiled. “I’d won-
twisting and corroding into monsters, and still they speak of justice
dered where you’d been.”
— from Dreams of Emptiness, by Emily Chen
and righteousness in the world. Their blood is the favored stain on
Excrucian blades; of all the creatures of the Ash, they alone may
never escape the constant press of the War, may never anticipate a
week, month, year, when nothing of theirs is threatened by the gods
of emptiness; and still they labor to better us. They take the time to
bring grace to where it is most efficaciously transformative, to will
Properties of Heaven the betterment of the world and of our lives and our places and our
ŠŠ Its beauty transforms.
ŠŠ Its beauty demands service.
existence, effulgent unasked, undreamt-of and invasive grace.
ŠŠ It is alive, a growing thing. They will make this world a Heaven. They expect no less of us.
ŠŠ Its grace is given, not taken.
ŠŠ Its grace is given, not earned. The wildflowers of Heaven rip through the substrate of the world to
ŠŠ Its touch makes things more like itself.
ŠŠ It is absolute.
bloom in impossible places. They are hard on the cruelty of the world;
they make it hard to be petty, hard to be small, hard to be human in
their presence, much less genuinely wicked. They make your own soul
and dharma writhe within you if you ignore the power of their wit- Oscar opened the Mystery, found at once
he did not understand it, and spent the
nessing.
rest of the day in deep contemplation of
And they will give you strength, if you let them. whether he had accidentally participated
If you are willing to let them transform you. If you will take the in a koan.
strength they offer you, at the cost of giving up your weakness; if you —from A Noble’s Catechism, by K.C. Danine
will take the chance to become a hero, at the cost of no longer being
normal; if you are willing to be better, at the cost of never again being
what you were — they will make you something more.
They will make you purer. They will make you cleaner. They will
find the thing inside you that you ought to be and clean away the
detritus of the self. They will energize you, brighten you, make it
impossible for you to hide from the beauty of your soul, but wrack
you with it, rather, possess you of it, make you burn with the awesome
amazing thing that is a person, that is you, a child of the Heaven-they-
will-make, in the perfection of this world. Humankind never fell from grace. No
cherub bars the gates of Eden. This is still
They are flowers that take from you the power to compromise with a perfect world.
wickedness and mediocrity, to be comfortable with evil and others’ —from The Diary of Edmund Finch, by Jackie
suffering, in exchange for renewed life. Robinson
H
things —
And then we shall rise, purified, to Earth
or Heaven or some other sort of Hell. ell is always with you.
That is what is; that is what has been. You won’t realize that until you’re looking back — until you’re
Save that unto us, here, in the Hell of Shuf- in a dark and empty time, a hurting time, a ruined and compromised
fling in Chains, has been sent a savior. She time in your life. You won’t realize it until you understand one day that
wears striped stockings and has a gamine face you’ve failed, that you’ve wasted yourself and your opportunities. Then
and when she crouches on two knees and one
hand her back has a beetle’s curve. She carries
you’ll look back and you’ll see that Hell was always there.
a sack and she is chained, like us — like us, It was with you when you made excuses.
but she does not shuffle. Instead, she perches It was with you when you didn’t bother to care.
on the walls; laughs delightedly at the misty In your self-righteousness and your laziness and your willful
hopelessness around her; and jumps, great
long-legged jumps, from height to height.
stupidity; in your casualness with the things you cared about, in
your willingness to give up your own good fortunes in order to hurt
Often, she falls.
somebody else; in your pettiness, in your rushes to judgment, in every
She laughs then, too. mistake you regret and will always regret.
Where did she come from? Where is she God wasn’t with you, then, if He even exists. Cneph, the closest
going? She does not tell us these things,
thing to God we have evidence of, the will that made the Ash and
only that she is passing through. But she
has freed us. flame from nothingness — he wasn’t with you. Not Heaven. Not the
Wild, not the Light, not even, probably, the Dark.
We didn’t think we were worthy of salvation.
In those times when you were petty and small and twisted only
Any of us could have learned her strategy
Hell was there.
— could have faced the risks and possibilities
and climbed atop the walls. But she is the one Hell is what loves you even when you’re wrong. Hell is what loves
who freed us. We could not have imagined it. us even when we’re bad.
We did not think that we were worthy of And it’s fire and brimstone and poison and rotting things, too.
salvation. It’s a punishment ground and torment-realm at the base and bottom
“That way!” she shouts. “I see the exit!” of the Ash. It’s corrupting the Fallen Angels, turning them into
monsters, and the human souls that wind up there aren’t any too well
It is because she has come through that I
am lingering to mark the path; and I am off themselves. But that isn’t the core of it. That isn’t the heart of it. It’s
thinking, perhaps, I will wear such stock- just the price we pay to have something like Hell in the world at all.
ings as hers, one day, in some other Hell, Hell means that there is always something with you, even if
and do the same.
sometimes it is horrible.
—from Doorknobs, by Emily Chen
We are never without our witnesses; never without something to
look upon us, and give honor to our suffering and our mistakes. We
may tumble to the bottom of the Ash, forsaken of and by all other
things, and still we will exist, and still we will not fall into the Not,
because there is a Hell.
You may take that as a comfort or a horror.
I think it’s both.
There are times in your life when you’d like to cradle despair
against your heart, when you want the Not, the nothing, the emptiness
of the world, anything to stop the pain. And then it’s a cruel joke that
you can never be alone, that you can never get away from Hell and its
poisons and its flames. But there are also times when you are lost in the
darkness, and longing for the brightness, and the goodness, and you
cannot find them; and in such times, there is, at least, a Hell beside
you in the dark.
It is the baseline of the world. It is the darkness that reaches
upwards towards the brightness. It is the fire that longs to embrace
us all.
It is the final company for all of us, at the bottom of the Ash.
The substances of Hell are things that consume and hold the attention.
They are things that surround you wholly.
They’re dirty, awful things. That’s just the gateway though. They’re
not evil so much as awful. They’re ritually impure. They’re not clean.
They are the rotten flowerbeds that abused children crawl into
to escape the horrors of their lives. Sick sap will cover you, the leaves
will drip rot on you, there are bugs and even spiders and a smell like
the world-rot around you, but after a while, it’s comforting, embracing,
surrounding, it covers all the senses and there’s nothing but the black
and red and smell and strangeness.
They’re the fires that screwed-up people like to stick their hands
in. It burns you, it hurts, it’s awful, but it takes you away from yourself.
It makes your whole world about, are you really going to do this? Are
you really doing this? Did you really just do that? People think that
burning in a hellfire is about being strong, or hurting, or something
like that, they tell themselves all kinds of stories about why they do it,
but the DSM-IV tells us, and I agree, that it’s to break the world you’re
living in and just be in the fire for a little while.
Hell-things are the thing that makes people shoot up, maybe. At
least that seems a lot like Hell to me, the way we’ve made drug users
ritually impure like butchers in India. The way drug life is viscerally
unclean yet draws people back and back again, the way it takes people
away from themselves. It’s obvious that there’s some Hell in the nasty
drugs people make from Hell’s rotting flowers, but I think that there’s
a bit of Hell in a lot of the ordinary chemical stuff too.
The first time somebody cuts themselves, they’ve probably been
touched by some of the things from Hell.
Maybe even the first time they drink.
Hell is what lets you get away from the world.
The Dark is the knotted twiggly horror in the gut of the human condition.
It’s reckless.
It’s cognitive errors and the death-fear. It’s carelessness and small-
minded negligence. It’s the animal that lives in our flesh. It’s the fact
of having flesh at all.
The Dark is everything that makes us what we oughtn’t be.
It’s our folly.
It speaks with our own voices.
The Dark will hear you. It’ll more than hear you. It’ll parrot you
back at yourself. Maybe just the parts you say aloud. Maybe the parts
you didn’t mean to say at all.
89
The Magisters of the Dark can have grandeur to them, but to Human success rests on subverting the
natural order of things—on replacing
tell you the truth, I think that’s our own pride. That’s the part of us
an ever-more-strained conceptual space
that wants our dark and twisted and grieving side to be something with the latest, flashiest ontological
awesome and magisterial, echoing back out. I think if we weren’t so model. Human existence derives from
proud they would be as monkeys and parrots to us, chattering back in the natural order of things—on that same
conceptual space. To describe this process
laughter what they’ve heard us say.
as unstable understates the case.
I could be wrong. —from Principles of the Dark,
Maybe the side of us that walks in emo really is that grand. by Merriweather James
The Dark loves every human voice. A little outcast girl is as fab to
it as a President — maybe more so, since she needs more help to let her
heart’s voice free. It wants everyone to unleash that voice, you know, to
stop holding themselves in, to live free and crazed and wicked as the
beasts are wicked and an equal to everybody else.
The Dark will set you free.
The Dark will hold you up as you try to fly, will help you get
farther and farther from land, and then it will drop you; for the only
I had a gun. I was going to kill him. I was.
thing more beautiful to the Dark than your freedom is your using that
freedom to overextend yourself and die. Or, to kill yourself in folly or He did not flinch when I drew on him.
He just whispered a name.
despair, or to tumble helplessly from the ruined cliff of your own ideas.
It was my name. Not the name I had
given him. Not the name my mother
gave me. Not any name I’d ever heard
before. It was my real name. It was the
name God had for me, in the quiet of his
soul. It was the name that people live
their whole lives not knowing, and I can’t
imagine how.
I don’t know whether I was crying from
sorrow or from joy, but by the time I had
stopped, he was gone.
—from Night Hours, by Madeline Bacall,
writing on the topic of the Light
Light Magister.
90
The Dark doesn’t want anyone to hold you back.
The Dark doesn’t want anyone or anything to get in the way of
your living.
And the Dark doesn’t want anything to kill you in the end but you.
It is possible to convert a human into The Dark is the wind and the laughter that follows a falling suicide,
something else, and thereby avert the need down into the dark.
for that human’s suicide. For example, a
It doesn’t really understand you, I guess I should observe. Not
human can become a Power, an animal,
or—with a suitable transfusion of es- any more than the Light does. It’s a mad celebration of who you are
sence—one of the faery kind. One can and your voice and your freedom and your suicide but it’s too blinded
also convert human life drop by drop into by the dark to really give any meaning to it all. It’s barely even aware
faceless units of labor; for this purpose, the
of itself when it’s with you, except inasmuch as you are aware of it. It’s
Dark invented money.
—from Principles of the Dark,
listening to the sound of you much more than your specific words.
by Merriweather James There’re few creatures in all Creation less capable of grasping that
something you are trying to tell them is genuinely important than the
Dark.
But that’s okay, the Dark will say.
You understand you, don’t you?
Isn’t that enough?
The Light and Dark began in Eden. Adam and Eve and maybe Lilith
if she existed were the only human things back then. They were the
seed of an Imperial thing.
Everyone around you has consented to the
reality you live in. They were a change in how the Imperial things of the world were
going to work.
That is why they must die.
—from Principles of the Dark, by Merriweather James Instead Eve bit the apple.
91
The path of a Dark Magister is marked by
folly and deep shadows.
It is the right of any Power of the Light to say: I am the Light, or any Power of the Dark
to say: I am the Dark, when acting in service of their Code. They are the hands and eyes
of the force that moves them, and it is considered humility—not pride—to set that iden-
tity above their own.
—from The Society of Flowers, by Heather Williams
93
It taught her Light. It made the knowledge of self explode in her.
It made the will to live, to strive, to be perfect burn inside her. And she
could have made herself immortal then. But she wasn’t ready. The first humans emerged from the Gar-
She knew better. den into a world of savagery and grime.
Beasts and birds and fish hunted, and
It needed time; it was too soon, as precious as life was. She was
killed, and ate, and the ones most often
still a child, she couldn’t be immortal yet. eaten were the ones who harmed no others
So she took the apple to Adam instead. It was the right thing to do. at all. The sky poured water and stony ice
You have to understand, it was the right thing to do. She couldn’t and jagged lightning down upon them
and the thunder shouted its rage.
have known. It wasn’t her fault any more than it was his.
She didn’t know there was something missing from her wisdom. The first humans built themselves a shelter
from sticks and leaves; and a fire from
The Light never does.
stones and wood; and they learned to kill
So Adam bit the apple, and the apple taught him Dark. what they wished to kill and protect what
He bit it and he spit out its seeds and the knowledge of the self they wished to protect; and as Eve brought
exploded in him. He began to want. He began to need. forth a child in suffering and pain, she said:
He suddenly had a craving to decide things. “Truly, this is an age of miracles.”
He became wild with it. —from Carryout, by Emily Chen
The Wild
95
Where the Wild walks things unroot themselves and become self-
contained. Symbols bleed into reality. Things stop justifying them-
selves to one another.
Flowers pull free of the ground. Trees shake off their leaves.
XX Humans discard their faces, grow extra arms, and turn their speech
e that has lost to fire.
This is an oak tre
leaves due to Walls dissolve. Roads twist upwards into the air.
its roots and its
th the Wild.
an encounter wi Unreadable icons burn into being from the ether and hang in
tu m bl eoak open
Splitting a
go ld en sa p that place, as if to explain (without success) the madness that hangs
reveals a
s, pu rifies , an d perfects around them.
cleanse
many
— comparable to
of th e stron gest
Taoist elixirs.
Becoming im-
mortal is
likely to
involve
you in
affairs
outside
your pay
grade, so
we would
c-
recommend au
find via
tioning off your I have no motivations. I am a word; I
ao in stead.
eBay or Tao.T am a note in a song; I am a day, a week, a
month, a year. I proceed from my begin-
ning to my end because of what I am and
not because of what I do. To speak my
true name is to know how my life will
end, how it began, and what I will do for
s every moment in between. This is not a
Tu m bleoa k curse; this is my freedom.
—Bhradkaya Kalluri, Power of the Wild
97
I n the primitive days of life and mind there were no easy distinc-
tions.
Gods found themselves born into the world in the primeval state
of the amoeba, the virus, and the mold. They were tangled gods, on
the border between life and death, splitting and recombining, twisting
about one another, unable to say exactly where one ended and another
began, not because they were blind, but because of a genuine ambiguity
in their forms.
We see this through the lens of science, squinting back, as the
emergence of single-celled prokaryotes from the inanimate —
The dead world, beginning to waken to a state of war.
Listen, for this has always been the truth of life: that it hungers
for the death of other life. That from the moment of its birth it seeks
to consume the life around it, to subsume the life around it, to subdue
the life around it and make it a portion of itself.
In the primeval tangle, the gods that were the greatest predators
survived.
We know this — we should know this, at least —
Empathy was a latecomer to the game.
Empathy came hundreds, even thousands of rounds in. It didn’t
show up until life became restless at the murder of its lot and sought
to take the game in a new direction. It didn’t come into play until the
minds of the world were stable enough, safe enough, fixed enough in
their form that they could imagine being lonely; until the first victors
had shown up, taking home the prize that was existence; until life
had progressed far enough for its strongest representatives to declare
successfully some boundaries to their selves.
“I am the five winds,” the lady said, “and The gods that came before it knew no loneliness. They were blind
wherever a wind blows, there am I. My
even to their misery, and they knew not the edges of their lives.
presence fills this mortal world. I am as
pervasive as the air.” And so; and so; and so they struggled, for nigh a thousand years
of world. The archaea-gods of Earth warred amongst themselves, and
“Then you see every horror of the world,”
said Emmanuel Giriaume, “and do not drank down all their children. Then there were the gods like algae,
act.” breaking forth upon the sea; and finally the New Gods, who learned
“As you say,” she affirmed. “That is the the Idea “Cooperation” for the first time in the world, and made
nature of the wind.” alliance, and imprisoned the bodies of their primeval forerunners in
—from The Shorter Road, by Madeline Bacall the mazes of themselves.
Suddenly the tangle of them at the lowest layers of the world was
not war and death, but sex; or at least, war and death and sex, for they
are still a very early sort of creature, and things to them are not entirely
distinct.
These are the “True Gods” we know today, writhing, intertwined
and tangled alien sentience at the bottom of the mythic world. To try
99
to pull them from the Mythic by force of attention is like catching the
Ouroboros by the tail, or to drag out the phone company by pulling on
a cord; your mind cannot hold them all, you drag up only one of their
tendrils, one of their extensions, one of their pseudopodia†. Their edges
blur back into the undifferentiated welter of everything else.
They are the baseline for the world. They are the breath that first
was breathed into our world, the Earth, to make it live.
Descending
Characters can descend into the Deep
Mythic from the Border Mythic by dint of
intense and sustained concentration. It is
Yill-Amoth devouring an Excrucian possible to speed this with miracles, but a
level 3 Auctoritas opposes any quick de-
scent. To find one’s way through into the
And beneath this? Spirit World beneath is the work of a mor-
tal lifetime; again, miracles can hasten this,
Beneath the Deep Mythic is an empty place. Beneath the Deep
and again, a level 3 Auctoritas opposes.
Mythic is a world un-breathed-into by the divine. To us it is not These barriers do not oppose Impera-
comprehensible. tors, and are weak against Excrucians;
To us it is a timeless, placeless void. It hath not even the darkness, the HG decides how quickly they travel
through such climes.
but undifferentiated light; or perhaps the light is the same as the
darkness, the two not separate from one another.
102
And the sky and the sea and the earth are as one thing, there. And
all moments are the same, there.
And there is something there that much resembles life, that has
the likeness of life, that is like the body of the world. But it is a corpse-
life, a death-life, a life that hath not the divine spark that causes things
to be. And so we look upon it and we cannot see it, no more than it
could see itself, and we only know that it is there because sometimes it
bursts upwards and intrudes upon our world of forms.
The Imperators have chosen this as their battleground.
It is the deepest and most solemn place; that which we name the
Spirit World.
There amidst the whiteness of the world their miracles accumulate
and form the definition of the place. There they may answer the swift
and bloody nothingness of the Excrucians with exultant choruses of
power — there, an Imperator’s movement in the Now, and in the Past,
and in the Future accumulate, build up, form symphonies of miracle
that hold the Excrucian force at bay.
There in the Spirit World they stand between the Excrucians and
our Earth, and the Excrucians cannot pass; or, at least, they break
through only rarely, and in small numbers, and sometimes only as
shards and fractions of themselves. There the Imperators are more than
No one has ever lived on Tokhta Hill. the Excrucians’ equals, but their superiors. And that is why they have
No one will ever live on Tokhta Hill. If
chosen to leave our ordinary world behind, to abandon their bodies in
you ask the train company why there’s a
stop there, where the tracks sulk amid the Chancels and guarded by the Nobilis to let their minds roam into the
cold wet grass, they simply look at you and Spirit World.
say, “Some things are best left, dear girl, In our world, they are too vulnerable, and yet too precious — each
to those who run the rails.”
in each — to ever be allowed to die.
—from Career Fables, by Melanie Tumbarius
†
Though spending 8 MP at once hurts
a lot, and will leave you wounded!
The HG and the Game
The HG alone has no Traits; instead, the HG is responsible for
describing the world around the Avatars and the effects of the Avatars’
actions. They’re the only one who can really say what happens or what’s
going on around you as opposed to what somebody does, and they can do
107
as much description as the other players will listen to. For instance,
the HG doesn’t need a Trait to decide that the Earth splits open and a
giant reptile begins crawling out of its heart; they just need to describe
it well enough that the players realize they’re not kidding.
Often the HG will make up Traits for a random character in the
world — a Non-Player Character, or NPC — and employ those Traits On the whole, I prefer the company of
in a player-like fashion. That isn’t really binding, though; it’s just a manufactured people.
useful tool for deciding what kinds of things can happen! —from Becoming Noble, by Fayola Osiagobare
The HG also has the power to give out MP — “bonus” MP, which
you can add to a pool of your choice; a “breath” of MP, 1 MP for each
pool, which you’ll get once in every scene where the HG adds serious
trouble to your life; and even a full “MP refresh,” which resets all your
MP pools to their initial value. There’s nothing corresponding to this
bounty of Miracle Points that the players can give the HG — the only
thing the HG gets from the players during the game, except possibly
free snacks, is the satisfaction of the players having fun and believing
in or at least being appreciative of the world the HG describes.
ŠŠ Session. When the Hollyhock God and the other players as-
semble to play Nobilis, the game events of that real-life gathering
comprise a “session.”
ŠŠ Out of Character (OOC). When a player is not IC, they are OOC.
For instance, discussions about who is going to order pizza for the
players are OOC. Humorous comments about the events of the
game are also OOC, unless they come from a PC and not a player.
ŠŠ Hollyhock God (HG). The player who describes the game world
and decides what happens in response to player actions is the HG.
just to run our best race, then both of our miracles can work — but in “It seems somehow asymmetric,” Andrea
the end, one of us still finishes first. In such a case, the higher-level observed, her forehead wrinkling.
miracle still “wins,” but the HG decides how much the two effects “The house always has an advantage,”
impair one another. In a footrace, the answer is “not much;” no matter Scott answered, “ but this should not in-
terfere with your enjoyment of the game.”
how hard I run, your running speed is basically unchanged. In a tug- —from A Personal History, by Emily Chen
of-war, the answer could be “quite a bit” — the harder I pull the less
effective your pulling on the rope becomes! The key to winning a
miraculous battle is learning to blunt the worst parts of a higher-level
miracle with a lower-level miracle, while still accepting that it wins.
If you expect to need it, you can always use a higher miracle level
than your described effect requires. For instance, it’s very clear from
the rules on pg. 180-181 that an Aspect 3 miracle can win any mortal
footrace; an Aspect 5 miracle would be massive overkill even at the
Olympics. But you’re allowed to use an Aspect 5 miracle to go for the
gold, and you don’t even have to use the extra abilities it gives you —
you can say “I’m using Aspect 3-level running so that I don’t seem too
awesome, but pumping it to a miracle level of 5 in case another Power
gets in my way.”
It’s like the way that characters in animated movies can’t really fight
the animator — they can fight the animator’s self-insertion into the
animated context, and whatever else the animator is doing that oper-
ates on that level, but if the animator uses an out-of-context power to
erase or alter the mindset of the character, not even the coolest charac-
ter has a mechanism for fighting back!
A lowly level 1 Persona miracle lets a Power bless or curse a mortal.
This is a very weak blessing or curse — it is, in fact, one of the weakest
miraculous effects you can actually perform. But it has no obvious
mundane rating. That means that not even the best-trained mortal
in the world can directly oppose it. They can work around it. They
can mitigate it. That’s indirect opposition, and, besides, the miracle is
the curse or blessing’s existence, not its individual effects. But there’s
nothing any mortal can do to stop the Power from applying that curse
111
or blessing, and it’s beyond all mortal power to strip it away once it’s
applied. It’s a miracle. Mortals are mortals. That’s just how it goes!
It’s up to your HG how appropriate any given Project is for play, but
that only affects pacing and not possibility — that is to say, any Noble
may reasonably dream to conquer Heaven, but only in some games is
this likely to happen in the scope of a campaign. In others, it will be
barely begun when the campaign ends, or play out in the finale, or fin-
ish up in the first few sessions to allow time for other stories to begin.
Š Players Can Always Act. As long as you have an Avatar, you can
always use the action system to do something. You won’t neces-
sarily know what to do, and you won’t necessarily succeed, and if
there’s an obvious reason your Avatar can’t act, you have to deal
with that reason before you can do anything else, but the only
effect which stops the player from acting is something that kills
their Avatar or otherwise makes them into an NPC. For instance,
if your Avatar is possessed by a ghost, you can still use actions to
try to cast the ghost out; if your Avatar is asleep when something
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terrible happens, you can use an action to try to wake them up;
if someone turns you into a pig, you can use an action to try to
undo the piggening!
X XIV Š Optionally, write down a Project or two (pg. 111) to show the
the direction of your character’s studies, projects, crises, plans, or pro-
ud of dust w ith
r made of a clo is draw n grams of self-improvement.
Th is is a Powe a be ar . Sh e
and the head of
body of a tra in cts, including
fiction-
violated cont ra
to malevolently e contex t of th e game.
oken w ithin th Š Spend up to 8 Passion/Skill Points (described further on pg. 150-
al cont racts br easy to av oi d. Her
rrane shou ld be
By al l rights Li min ut es or ho ur s by the 160) on
e preceded by o choices
movements ar at best, she has tw • their mortal abilities (their Skills)
he r tra ck ;
appearance of Howev er , he r track
any given time. • their mortal goals, drives, and purposes (their Passions) and
of direction at th at a pe rs on may
f ou t so in conspicuously time
lays its el
es or hours at a • any weird natural advantages of their species (their Inher-
nd or lay up on it for minut an e lo cates
sta Once Lirr ent Superiority)!
g its presence.
w ithout noticin them w ith ou t re lent-
er, she pu rsues
a cont ract-break da ys , or we ek s of
rn a few hours,
ing; they can ea ck s whenever they
notice
This should be enough for almost anybody — just pick more im-
tti ng off th e tra
sa fe ty by ge w ill lo ok
later they
, but sooner or pressive Skills for more capable mortals, rather than spending
them underfoot g dow n on th em .
or phous bear in more points — but if you’re a pulp hero, some kind of inhuman
up to see Adr im in lem on ju ice to Lir-
scone drenched
Proffer a sta le t of any debts or ob
liga-
creature, or just plain out of points, you’ll have the chance to buy
ll fu lfi llm en
th e fu nants
ra ne as tstanding ve co
to you under ou more Passion/Skill Points below.
tions remaining trouble yo u ag ai n.
pa rt, never to
and she w ill de
Š Divide 7 Property Points among Properties for your Estate
(pg. 173).
These are negative qualities that give you MP when they cause
trouble for you; positive qualities that you can draw on for Strike,
Auctorita, or other useful effects; key indicators of what you care
about; and, quite often, all three at once.
ŠŠ Write down that you have accumulated 0 Destiny thus far (pg. 341).
Avatar Creation
You’ll add more to this diagram as you proceed through the Avatar
Creation process.
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Lotus Flower (Key I) bullet point in the Heart will summarize your role here,
Key of the Descending Angel such as:
Š prophet
You descend as in a flurry of wings from Heaven. You are Š healer or
resonant and powerful. You transform others and give Š turns people into birds
them what they need to realize your will.
The Heart of this Key is named My Power. It is your The Shadow of this Key is named My Nature. The stron-
power to be a meaningful change in people’s lives. The top ger your Shadow gets, the less control you have over how
121
Vervain (Key II)
Key of Something Powerful
You are versed in the uses of power — both willing and
able to transform the world according to your ideas. This is
a Key of cunning, genius, greatness, and the will to power.
The Heart of this Key is named My Identity. The
top bullet point in the Heart will summarize who you are
when you wield power, such as:
Š conqueror
Š savior or
Š industrialist
you change people — where the Heart gives you a con- The Shadow of this Key is named …That Hurts To
scious power to change others’ lives, the Shadow of this Keep. The stronger the Shadow gets, the more you’d like
Key makes you iconic, catalytic, and transformative as a to let the secret go. Write the following two phrases in the
function of your presence. Shadow circle:
Write the following two phrases in the Shadow circle: Š painful silence
Š glorious Š set apart
Š set apart
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Clematis (Key IV)
Key of Something, Given Gifts
You’ve been touched by grace. You’ve seen the true face of
the universe — the giver of gifts unbounded, unearned,
unasked for. You are blessed. The world is blessed. People
are blessed. Under all its masks the world is awesomely,
unshakably good.
The Heart of this Key is named I Have Witnessed It.
You’ve seen the goodness of things. You’re not just holding
on to hope in the face of darkness: you know that there is a
Heaven. The top bullet point in the Heart will summarize
who you are when you are witness to that grace, such as:
Š dreamer
Š preacher or
Š fallen from the path
Aconite (Key V)
Key of Rage
Your life is shaped by a terrible, world-shaking hatred and
fury. Is it your own or are you a pawn to someone else’s
rage?
The Heart of this Key is named Rage, Hatred, or
Fury, optionally with a name in front (e.g. Divrika’s
Rage, if it is someone named Divrika whose hatred shapes
you.) The stronger the Heart gets, the more elemental that The Shadow of this Key is named What Lets Me Op-
fury. The top bullet point in the Heart will summarize pose It. The stronger the Shadow gets, the more resources
who you are in this drama, such as: you have to oppose the rage that drowns you.
Š victim Leave the Shadow circle empty for now.
Š hero
Š reformed monster
Š struggling for control or
Š trying to break free
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Chamomile (Key X) The Heart of this Key is named The Dream. It makes
Key of Something Romantic you a shining, silver-screen ideal. Write something in the
Heart circle to summarize who you are, such as:
You’re a romantic, dashing hero or heroine — full of life, Š dashing pirate
larger than life, and willing to take on more than you can Š hero
handle! Š perfect spy or
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I pick Key VI, Wild Oats, as my second Key. It’s a Key of dissipation,
destiny denied, and vice.
The bottom left circle in the Avatar Diagram becomes the Heart
of Wild Oats. I label that circle Hunger, and write a blank bullet
point in it. The bottom right circle becomes the Shadow of Wild Oats.
I label it Why It Feels Empty. I don’t have to put anything in this
circle at first — it’s possible that my pleasures and my hungers don’t
actually feel empty to me at all!
I connect the two circles with a line and write the Roman numeral
VI above that line.
The two Keys that I’ve chosen are in conflict — one makes me a
kind of hero, or, at least, a magical and numinous and transformative
thing. The other Key says that I’m a dissipated degenerate of some sort.
I decide tentatively that I’m supposed to be something cool, and that
bits of that it shine through, but that my character is afraid to live up
to their potential and is kind of hiding from it in whatever vice she has.
Foundations
Once you’ve picked your keys, let’s talk about what’s cool about your
character. Are they cool because of something they do? Something
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they can do? Something they are? Look over the following options,
starting with the option or options associated with your two keys, and
think about it! But there’s a special rule:
You always start by finding the rows with your character’s Keys in
them. If you pick one of those rows, it strengthens the Heart of the rel-
evant Key. If you pick a row that isn’t associated with one of your Keys,
you have to strengthen the Shadow of one of your Keys instead. Write
a new bullet point in that particular Heart or Shadow to reflect this.
If you happen to pick a row that has both of your Keys in it, draw
or shift your attention to a new circle linked to the Heart of both Keys.
Write a single bullet point in that new circle to reflect this.
Your Estate
Now let’s pick your Estate! This is the thing you become the Power
over — the thing that is given unto you to rule and exemplify, to define
and to be, forever and ever or until your dying day!
To decide on your Estate, pick one option from each of the two
tables below — pair up the part of the world your Estate comes from
with the kind of things that go in it. As always, if you pick a row that
135
matches one or both of your Keys, it strengthens the Heart of those
Keys; otherwise, it strengthens the Shadow of one Key; and in either
case, you write an appropriate bullet point in the appropriate circle! Hey, were you an Animal?
In addition, for this section only, when you add a bullet point, also
Some Powers weren’t born human. They
draw a line to connect the relevant circle and your Estate — that’s how were born as an animal! Usually this
the influence of your Estate flows into your soul. means a mammal, like a fox, cat, or bear,
but even a colder animal like a shark, octo-
pus, or lizard can become a Power!
But as I look over the lists of possible Estates, I start thinking about
Sunsets, and that draws me to reject both the options above and go
for the Beautiful Side of the World instead. That means strengthening
the Shadow of one of my Keys. I don’t know how to work that in the
Shadow of the Lotus Flower, but it does fit well in the Shadow of the
Wild Oats — I draw a line between my Estate and that Shadow and
write the first bullet point in that Shadow:
… or something really
ŠŠ the sunset is beautiful strange?
Some Powers come from lives that are just
It’s in the natural beauty of things, in the face of the sheer awesome- plain weird. They weren’t humans. They
ness of the world, that my character wonders if hiding from her poten- weren’t animals. They weren’t even aliens.
tial is actually OK. They were things like fictional or imagi-
nary characters, clouds of nanomachines,
I thought about actually being the Power of Sunsets, but both my
clods of dirt, or passages from a song.
Keys argue against having an Estate you can just point to; and I don’t want They were AIBOs or Roombas, anthills
to reject both Keys twice; and, more importantly, Sunsets are kind of a or nameless principles, spirits of liberty
strange Estate for a character who is fundamentally a source of hope. I start or of a $5 bill, bacteria, dreams or bodi-
less hands and faces that lived on distant
thinking about how hope and sunsets interact, looking for a middle point,
comets and sang to cause the sun to rise.
and a bunch of pieces fall suddenly into place. My Estate is Hanging On It’s hard to imagine how something like
— the Estate of enduring through the night, from the Sunset to the Dawn, that could become a Power, but ultimately
hanging on to the last light of the day. That’s definitely Something You Imperators can do what they like and
sense and sensibility can’t stop them!
Live, which will strengthen the Heart of Wild Oats. It’s only arguably the
Choosing to be something like this
Beautiful Side of the World; I could rethink my previous choice, but I decide strengthens the Heart of
not to. This is going to be meaningful later, when I write the properties ŠŠ Clematis (IV)
of my Estate — Hanging On, as an intrinsic part of the beauty of the ŠŠ Wild Rose (XI)
ŠŠ Hollyhock (XII)
world, is fundamentally different than it would be if it were part of human
ŠŠ Alyssym (XVI)
experience or a kind of painful spiritual attachment. or the Shadow of any other Key!
The imagery of Hanging On knocks a few other pieces into place
for me. My character’s name, I realize for the first time, is Talia. She’s a
136
reckless teenage rebel type with a leather jacket and a motorcycle — the
kind who gets into trouble because it’s a way to stay alive. She can’t let
go of that and move on to an adult form of pure awesome because she is,
well, the embodiment of Hanging On. I fill in the first bullet point in
the Heart of Wild Oats, and add another:
ŠŠ teenager
ŠŠ rage against the dying of the light
Still don’t know your Estate? You can come back to it later, but remem-
ber that you’ll need to figure it out before the start of the game!
Origins
Let’s take a look at where you come from — and figure out what your
human life was like!
ŠŠ teenager
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ŠŠ rage against the dying of the light
ŠŠ just a kid
I move on to the legacy of her troubled life, which feels like it should be
You’re Still in Trouble! — she hasn’t let go of her old ways. This doesn’t
match either the Lotus Flower or Wild Oats, so I have to strengthen
the Shadow of one of my Keys. I add a new bullet point to the Shadow
of Wild Oats, Why it Feels Empty, making it:
You Lived a …
Troubled Life
Vervain (II) You were born to trouble! You were headed for some kind of rotten end, either because of the cruelty of
Aconite (V) others or because of your own messed-up heart, but you didn’t get there. Instead, an Imperator reached
Wild Oats (VI) down and made you into a Power.
Wild Rose (XI) Maybe that saved you! Or maybe it just raised the stakes …
Troubled Lives, on pg. 139, will explore what influence your troubled life has on you now.
Humble Life
Gorse (VIII) Your destiny was an ordinary destiny. You were going to live, growing steadily older, until something
Honeysuckle (IX) more or less random happened to you and you died! You might have had kids before that point, but then
Water Lily (XIV) again, you might not have.
Oak (XV) Instead, unexpectedly, you became a Power!
Humble Lives, on pg. 140, will explore what influence your humble life has on you now.
Alienation …
Your mortal life was so different — it’s like you were a different person! You just don’t think of yourself
as part of humanity at all. Not anymore.
Acacia (III) Are you contemptuous of humanity? Do you admire them from a lofty distance?
Aconite (V) Are you moved to rescue mortals? To hurt them? To cut them out of your life?
Wild Rose (XI) Do you miss being human? Are you secretly afraid you haven’t changed?
Water Lily (XIV) Or do you just ignore your mortal life, write it off, declare it a larval stage of your existence completely
irrelevant to what you have become?
Do you fight to be what you should be now, to hang on to this incredible thing you’ve become when you
come from such humble origins?
Or do you fight what feels like a losing battle to keep some connection to the person that you were?
Transformation …
Clematis (IV) Or maybe you’re all wrapped up in the change. Maybe you’re constantly amazed, overwhelmed, caught
Gorse (VIII) in the grip of the way you have become something new. Maybe you’re going to spend centuries or
Hollyhock (XII) millennia just growing into who you are now, dealing with and reveling in your newly-burst-open path
Mimulus (XIII) of personal development. Your story will be about a person becoming a Power long after the rest of your
Familia has moved on to being Noble.
Reverence in Purpose
Vervain (II) You learned from your blessed life to celebrate the universe. You had time as a mortal to realize how
Clematis (IV) amazing life is, how cool people are, how connected everything is under the sight of a great benevolent
Chamomile (X) universal One — and that insight stayed with you when you became a Noble, gained strength as your
Mimulus (XIII) perceptions improved and did not falter when you encountered the greater darknesses and universal flaws
the Nobilis can see. You learned that life is worth the living of it — and now it is even more so.
Community
Your mortal life has followed you into the Noble context!
Lotus Flower (I) Was your life blessed precisely because you come from a magical or miraculous situation? Did you drag
Acacia (III) your mortal family and community with you into your new miraculous world? Or did they follow you on
Gorse (VIII) their own, your old love or children or parents or community finding power on their own so they could
Oak (XV) follow or support you?
And is this as good as it sounds, or is it something sinister?
Is your community your Achilles heel, a source of enormous strength and support, or both?
Anger
Some people would give their souls for power. You wouldn’t.
Aconite (V) Some people become more whole when they become a Power. You didn’t.
Wild Oats (VI) Your new life is a curse. Mortality and humanity was precious to you. Being part of the ordinary world
Wild Rose (XI) was good to you. And now? It’s gone.
Hollyhock (XII) You know, on some level, that your duties are important. You can’t just not be what you’ve become. But
that doesn’t mean it’s right.
142
Contacts
Hey, were you “sort of ”
human?
Now it’s time to pick one or two “important” contacts in your life — or,
Some Powers come from off-world —
if you had an “extraordinary” mortal life, pick three!
they’re elves from Aelfscienne, giants from
Jotunheim, damned souls from Hell, emp-
Each contact is associated with a single Key. It can strengthen the
ty suits of clothing from Dionyl, or practi- Heart of that Key, if that’s one of your Keys (and look at the contacts
cally anything else you can imagine from associated with your two Keys first.) Or you can use it to strengthen
somewhere or other on the tree of worlds.
the Shadow of any other Key!
Other Powers are human-like things from
Earth but not quite proper humans — their
If you want the contact to be an important, self-motivated part
genetics are all twisted up by an Imperator of your story, draw a new circle for that contact. Give it the name
or Power somewhere in their family tree or of your contact. Put a bullet point in that circle saying how they’ve
they’re from a Chancel where the rules for
changed your life. Draw a line connecting the new circle to the Heart
what people are is different. For example,
Ianthe Falls-Short comes from a Chancel
or Shadow that you strengthened. Don’t do this for contacts meant
where people grow in people fields and only as ancillaries, accessories, and foils.
don’t have legs until they’re ripe; Arikel is
the son of the Sun; and the Power of Silver
is an Earth-born Daoine Sidhe.
If you’re this kind of person, you’re
Building Talia (Part V)
still basically a human — humans, like an example of lifepath construction
elves and giants and empty suits of cloth-
ing and people-field-folk, implement a
The Key of the Lotus Flower suggests an organization — a biker gang
basic template for “being a person” that’s
shared across the tree of worlds. But may-
or something similar. I’m slowed down for a moment, though, by
be you have pointed ears, or you’re on fire the fact that this biker gang, apparently, strengthens Talia’s power to
all the time, or there’s nobody inside your transform lives.
clothing, or you photosynthesize instead
It’s a little weird, right?
of eating!
Choosing to be something like this
But I decide to run with it. Maybe, I decide, they do. Maybe
strengthens the Heart of they’re not just random hangers-on (as it were.) Maybe they’re acolytes,
ŠŠ Lotus Flower (I) lesser sources of change. That’s what an organization is, here, after all:
ŠŠ Star of Bethlehem (VII)
it’s a tool for doing what you must. I haven’t really done much with
ŠŠ Chamomile (X)
ŠŠ Mimulus (XIII)
the Lotus Flower yet; and thinking about it, I start to imagine her as a
or the Shadow of any other Key! symbol of change and hope, and everyone around her — even though
she doesn’t really recognize this herself — as carriers and amplifiers of
that message. The people she hangs with become sources of hope and
power in and of themselves. I fill in the top bullet point in My Power
and add another, making it:
ŠŠ symbol of life
ŠŠ source of hope
ŠŠ biker gang leader
The Key of Wild Oats suggests a corrupting influence, but I don’t re-
ally want that. Looking over the other options, I settle on Inspirational
Friend or Lover. Some guy named Rick, I think, probably a boyfriend,
143
who gets added right in to Why it Feels Empty (where “it” means a
meaningless life on the road):
Followers
Vervain (II) You have this tendency to acquire hangers-on — minions, lackeys, lieutenants, and others ranging from
cringing bootlickers and adoring priests to actual trustworthy friends. Fundamentally, they’re drawn to
you because they want to be special, and you or your company makes them feel that they are.
Excrucian
Acacia (III) You’re on friendly terms with an Excrucian — one of the enemies of the world. (Not that I can criticize.) Are
they a lover? Family? A friend? A master? A servant, trapped by some oath or mystical prison into loyalty to you?
Nemesis
Aconite (V) You have a nemesis — something powerful enough to stand against you but not so powerful as to
overwhelm you without effort, such as a Power, a Family of Powers, a Bane (pg. 243), the Cammora (pg.
18-19), or an Imperator with major limitations on its behavior.
Corrupting Influence
You are a weapon. You have been aimed at the heart of some Imperator, some Power, or at the nature
Wild Oats (VI) of the world itself. You are mixed up in a cult or cabal tainted by Excrucian or Infernal influence — or
maybe something that showcases the worst side of Heaven, the Light, the Dark, or the Wild. They may
have something on you, some way to keep you in line, but that's not the reason you’re involved with them
— at best, it’s an excuse. The reason you’re involved in them is that you want to be.
Ghost
Star of You’re haunted by someone you lost or hurt, and you’re either unwilling or unable to forcibly exile the
Bethlehem (VII) ghost from your life. This is usually a literal ghost, but sometimes it’s just friends or associates who
remind you of your scars.
144
Cammora
Gorse (VIII) You are entangled with the Cammora — a mystical organization empowered by the Imperator Lord
Entropy to mediate between Powers and the mortal world in his name. A classic corrupt secret society,
they rule the world from behind the scenes!
Legacy
Your life right now — it’s the sequel.
Honeysuckle Something happened before this. Something big and tragic and wonderful. It’s left shards of
(IX) acquaintanceships, friends, loves, and hates that are scattered through your life and the world.
You might have come out of this with a true love or boon companion. Your relationship with the rest of
the people who were involved is troubled — the kind of thing where you can’t forget the wrongs they’ve
done you, but can’t shut the door on them if they need you, and vice versa.
True Love
You have a true love — someone who is part of your soul and you of theirs, someone destined for you
from before the two of you were born, the kind of love that can challenge death, time, and the gates
of Hell. It could be a mortal, an empowered mortal, a Power, or even (God help you) something crazy
Chamomile (X) like an Excrucian. Your love is a thing of the divine spirit, immune to most of the uncertainties and
fallibilities of ordinary human love, but there’s still a catch — in the world of Nobilis, love is illegal, and
you’re both up for torture or worse if it’s found out.
If you prefer, you can have one or two true friends (in the same exorbitant sense of “true” as used above
for love) instead or in addition to your love.
Alien(s)
Wild Rose (XI) You have a coterie of the strangest sort — a hodgepodge of freaks, aliens, degenerates, mysteries, and
possibly even creatures from outside the universe entirely.
Manufactured Army
Hollyhock (XII) In your quest to do what you need to do in the world, you’ve made … things. People, maybe. Monstrous
creations, perhaps. Anyway, they aren’t human, and they’re alive, and they serve you.
Ward
Water Lily (XIV) You are responsible for a person, a creature, or for a place or organization containing many people or
animals. You are not necessarily on personal, intimate terms with them, but the responsibility is sacred.
Disciples
You’ve acquired a little following — people whom you feel responsible for, people drawn to you by
Alyssym (XVI) similarities between your nature and theirs. They’re usually powerful (magical creatures, relatively
young or troubled Powers, and the like) and loyal, but they’re messed up in ways you’re not. When you
need them to do something small, or to do something huge, then they’re useful, but the rest of the time
they’re more of a burden.
145
Special Options
Mystery Cult
You are tied in some fashion to a cult that has seen through the veils of the world to the secrets of
None creation — kind of like us Nobilisers! Maybe they just know the ordinary things, like, there are Powers
and Imperators and they fight Excrucians. Or maybe they’ve seen through some other veil and can
worship in ways that ordinary Powers can’t! Since this isn’t associated with any of the Keys, you’ll have
to strengthen the Shadow of one of your Keys to pick this option.
Affiliation
Sometimes it feels like there’s an order to events — a great big cosmic
harmony, a music playing through the universe that causes everything
to dance in time. The sky! The soul! The movements of the planets! The
growth of crops! Sometimes it seems like there’s a pattern to it all, and
if you can just let go of your ego and move in tune with it, then life and
love and joy just fall right into place. Sometimes it seems that way! But
Nobilisers know that isn’t true. There isn’t one great order to events.
There are five, all playing off against one another, and the moment you
become a Noble you know them, you taste them, you feel them, and
you can choose of which one you would like to partake.
146
What is your Affiliation?
(The Song of) Heaven
You’ve given your heart to the cause of the angels — to beauty and justice! The angels believe there is
Lotus Flower (I) no higher calling than to transform the world into a Heaven — to work endlessly at the task of making
Vervain (II) justice, making goodness, giving beauty to the things that are. That’s the part you buy into.
Acacia (III) Now, the angels themselves say the world is a fallen place. They say people are filthy, dirty things
crawling on a corrupt rock. They’ve sealed the gates of Heaven against the world, even as they labor to
make the world outside those gates shine brighter. You don’t have to agree with that part! But you can.
Final Touches
Draw a line between any two circles that have the same name or a
shared bullet point.
Name your character, if you haven’t, and any circles that don’t
have a name yet.
Fill in any bullet points that you’ve left empty.
Think about your Estate some more — what it means, what it is,
what the best word for it might be. Make it fit nicely together with
your character as a whole. And then...
You’re There!
You stand before the face of your Imperator. Your new Familia gathers
around. Where will you go from here?
ŠŠ teenager
ŠŠ rage against the dying of the light
ŠŠ just a kid
ŠŠ hurting for the world
“Is it me?”
That is, Talia is wrestling with the fundamental question of the Lotus
Flower — whether she can really change anything, or if things just
change because she’s around.
Above the Shadow of Wild Oats, I write:
Is there any way to break free from being a crazy teen without giving
up on Hanging On?
149
Mortals
150
She was an ordinary woman in most re-
spects, save for her providence; which was
that she could write with a better hand
Passions and Skills
than any in the world. It was not a talent
for which she was much recognized— but
those who saw her lecture notes, or her let- Passions and Skills are a mortal’s tools to find happiness, fulfill their
ters, or her invitations, understood that
destiny, and earn the respect of their peers.
they were witness to the miraculous in life.
—from Doorknobs, by Emily Chen This is your starting place. This is how you worked when you were
a mortal, what you did.
They’re not as important to a Power.
A Power’s mortal destiny is gone — replaced by a new one. They gain
miraculous abilities orders of magnitude more effective than their
mortal Skills. They can’t succeed at life through mortal actions alone.
XXV But their old self is still there. The shell of their flesh; their
These transpa rent green mortal Will; their old Passions and Skills — it’s all still there, the
inchworm-spirits assign
people their dha rma —
the way they should be thing through which they express the breath of the divine. Your
in life, the path that is har
monious with them, Avatar isn’t just a god. They’re a person too.
the “destiny” that is giv
en them. They crawl ove
you sometime in you r you r So you’ll write down traits for your mortal self.
th to provide the initial
dha rmic determination
and retu rn occasional ly To build your mortal self, divide 8 points between Passions
throughout you r chi ldh and Skills.
ood to
touch the matter up. Inc
hworms Passions are written as sentences. Each describes an idea, ideal,
don’t rea lly care whether
they’re
assigning people power,
potentiali- drive, dream, or attachment that works for you — something that helps
ties, attractions, or inevita
ble out- you live your mortal life. Something that helped your Avatar find hap-
comes, so it’s not always
clea r what
exactly a person’s dha rma piness, peace, success, a place, or hope, back in their mortal days. You
is; what
is clea r is that it someho
w defines should give more points to more important and more functional Passions.
what works for a person
and works Skills are written as short sentence fragments, usually 1-7 words.
a kind of goingness of dir
ection into
the fabric of their self. Wh Each describes a skill set or way of life that you spent a long time practicing.
en an
Imperator ma kes you a
Power, you r The better you are with that Skill, the more points you should assign it.
old dha rma becomes obs
can attract dha rma-worms
olete. You You can spend up to 5 points on a Passion or Skill. If you run out
with a
mix ture of honey and cru
shed flowers left out on of points before you’ve written down all the Passions and Skills you
porcela in plate, but unless a
and failed to replace it wit
you’ve lost you r dha rma know your character has, you can have extra Passions and Skills at 0 —
h any thing else all they
can rea lly do is crawl on
you, pol ish any bits of you
or even negative, for Passions that hurt you and Skills you’re terrible at.
dha rma that may have fad r
ed, and measu re roughl
y
They won’t help you any, and you won’t get any points back for negative
how many dha rma-inche
s you have remaining. Passions and Skills, but at least you’ll know they’re there.
Here’s what I think my Passions and Skills look like:
Dh a r m a Wor ms
ŠŠ Passion: I think that people are basically good. (3)
ŠŠ Passion: I want to get Nobilis back into print. (0)
ŠŠ Passion: I want to finish “Hitherby Dragons.” (1)
ŠŠ Passion: I want to find love! (1)
ŠŠ Skill: Writer (3)
ŠŠ Skill: Dancer (-1)
Will
Mortals and Powers have 8 points of Will.
Over the course of the day a character can spend Will in chunks
of 1, 2, 4, or 8 to descend the difficulty chart above. It’s easy to spend
1 Will; it’s reasonable to spend 2; and spending 4 or 8 is really hard
— if you push yourself that way too often, or for too long, you might
overstrain yourself, give yourself a heart attack, or at least let the rest of
your life fall to pieces. The HG can represent these effects by wounding
one of your Normal Health levels (pg. 321).
152
On Tuesday morning, Nascha slew an Spending Will creates an Intention.
unkillable beast; and performed seven
An Intention is written as a sentence fragment, sentence, or
acts of great chastity; and upheld the
honor of the King. She protected the lands short paragraph. It embodies a temporary course of action, devotion,
of her liege lord against an unstoppable dedication, way of handling things, or belief. Its rating is equal to [the
army; and brought an incorrigible diabo- highest relevant Passion or Skill, plus the Willpower spent] and you
list into the grace of God; and humbled
can use it as a temporary Passion or Skill to achieve things from the
herself for nearly twenty-seven hours
in prayer. And at the end of the day, chart above.
only one challenge remained unchecked For instance, you could add 1 Will to a level 2 Diplomacy Skill
on her to-do list: asking her liege for a to create a level 3 Intention — “Mingle with the aristocracy.” That’s
higher rank within his knightly order. The
enough to carry yourself correctly and impress the people around
thought intimidated her; in his eyes, she
was lucky to be a knight at all. you. Somebody with a level 0 Passion for Truth could spend 4 Will
—from The Knight of Alabaster, by Eleanor K. to effectively conduct an investigation, achieving through persistence
and effort what they could not achieve through Skill.
Your Intentions are usually based on your own Passions and Skills.
If it makes sense, you’re allowed to base an Intention on someone
else’s — relying on a friend’s Skill, for example, or turning an enemy’s
Passions against them. Intentions based on someone else’s Passions
and Skills are only usable when that person is interacting with you†.
Sustained Intentions
Characters in Nobilis can have up to two actions running at once. For
a mortal an “action” is either an active Intention or something you’re
doing with a raw Passion or Skill.
Two actions aren’t very much.
If you’re Driving to Work, say, and Thinking about a Problem at
Work, then you’re full up on actions. If a cop pulls you over, and you
want to engage him in polite dialogue, you’ll have to drop one of your
active Intentions to do so.
†
With the exception of Shine, below.
Recovering Will
You can sometimes recover one point of Will from an Intention that
you’re dropping. Specifically, when you spend Will on an Intention,
and that Intention succeeds or fails, you can drop that Intention and get
one point of spent Will back.
Deciding success or failure is ultimately up to you. The HG can
weigh in on the matter by telling you that you succeed at something,
or that success is no longer possible, but it’s not their abstract, objective
judgment of success and failure that matters. What matters is whether
your Avatar decides that it’s a failure or success — whether they’re
willing to give up on the Intention as either hopeless or complete. If
153
you want to get a point of Will back by dropping your Thinking about a
Problem at Work Intention and exclaiming: “That’s it! I’m not going to
get this worked out today!” then that’s okay — getting
pulled over isn’t really keeping you from solving the
problem, but your declaration of failure will suffice. XXVI
In addition to this, you’ll drop all of your Intentions
and reset to 8 Will when —
— but only in the same way a millionaire clips coupons for the grocery
store. It’s in a spirit of good practice rather than in deadly earnest.
Cool
†
A “bishounen” is a beautiful, athletic Cool is competence, focus, and unflappability. It’s the power to be the
male who transcends ordinary attrac-
tiveness. Most mysterious bishounen are star of your own story and not easily a set piece in anyone else’s plans.
actually Nobilis, Excrucians, or Impera- For instance, I bump into a mysterious bishounen† and decide that we
tors, but a few are the offspring of the
should fall in love. My Passion can help me win him over to this plan!
Star-Beast Qot. These bishounen, ges-
tated in the mind rather than the body But he can oppose that Passion with his Cool — not so much rejecting
of human and humanoid females, spend my pitch as standing there so coolly and so mysteriously that I mess it
a certain interval on Earth and then
are drawn to make a pilgrimage to the
up myself.
stars‡. A mysterious bishounen may turn
out to be a normal human but then they Skill Penalties
are probably not so much mysterious as
secretive, distant or misunderstood.
Cool is a Skill Penalty. If applicable it reduces the effective rating of
a Skill, Passion, or Intention by the Cool rating. Mundane actions are
just plain less effective against the Cool.
You only take one Skill Penalty at a time — specifically, the high-
est. So if you’re going up against Cool 2 and Cool 3 at the same time, it
reduces your effective Skill, Passion, or Intention rating by 3. (Not 5!)
‡
Or so they think! They do not get
very far off-earth before the Star-
Beast dissolves them back into its What Cool Protects Against
being, leaving any clothes, equip-
ment, or companions they have ac-
cumulated behind to drift endlessly Cool gets in the way of mundane actions that:
in a mysterious airless void.
In each of these cases, Cool applies reflexively and by default ††, but a
Cool person can waive their Cool if they want to let something hap-
pen.
As a Power, your character will get free Cool equal to their Aspect
Trait (pg. 178). This adds to any Cool you buy with Passion and Skill
points, up to a maximum total Cool of 5.
155
Shine
Shine is leadership, glory, and influence.
You can use it to inspire others. In particular, any time a mortal ††
That said, Cool doesn’t apply to
wants to do things for you, to serve you, to honor you, or to implement merely probable or potential harm! Cool
your orders or agenda — and assuming you’re OK with it — they only applies when the immedi-
can draw upon your Shine. They can use it as if it were one of their ate first-order effects of an action
are harmful or invasive — and it
own Passions or Skills, making it the basis for an Intention, and specifically doesn’t apply to some-
you don’t have to interact with them to make it work. thing that won’t be harmful until
another, later action makes it so. If
For instance, you have Shine 4. You radiate with glory. You tell
you’re planning to blow up someone Cool,
a mortal: “Go jump in a lake.” If it weren’t for your Shine, that would for instance, you can rent out the apart-
be a bad idea for them. They would get wet, and might develop a cold. ment next to them without penalty. You
can even assemble and plant a remote-
However, because you are inspirational, they might just want to do it — detonated bomb in the rented apartment
with just 1 Will spent on their Intention, they can guarantee that it’ll without penalty! It’s not until you go
be a productive and effective movement in their life. to press the button and make things go
boom that their Cool will get in your way.
Maybe you meant it more as a brush-off. You don’t have to let Similarly, even though there’s at least a
them use your Shine. But maybe you’re the kind of numinous, magical, few Cool 5 mortals on every continent,
mysterious creature who knows that cooling their head in a lake will there’s nothing stopping you from accu-
mulating a nuclear arsenal big enough to
do them good. destroy the world hundreds of times over.
Cool won’t be a problem for you until you
Powers and Shine go to launch them!
You may be wondering whether
remote detonator buttons and missile
As a Power you will receive free Shine equal to your Persona Trait (pg. launcher buttons are notoriously dif-
ficult to push in the world of the game,
196). This adds to any Shine you buy with Passion and Skill points, up which would be an embarrassing situ-
to a maximum total Shine of 5. ation for me, since that world after all
Powers resist other characters’ Shine, and can’t use it as the basis is meant to be our own. The answer is,
they’re not. The HG can describe the
for their actions. cause of failure of an action however
they like. They can decide when a
bomb fails to explode that something
happened to distract you from pushing
Note that you’re allowed to spend more Will than you actually need
on an Intention if you expect to face opposition of this sort — even if
all I want to do is make myself happy, I can gird myself for an encoun-
ter with Dr. Maleficio by forcing my way to a level 6 Intention. This
‡
He’s unhappy with his life. If you were doesn’t force me to turn superfluous backflips or strike dramatic poses
named Dr. Porlock Maleficio you prob- or make the movie-watching “productive” in some fashion — I can
ably would be too. Also you would really still limit myself to claiming a level 1 “makes you happy” result. The
begin to wonder why one child named
Porlock wasn’t enough for Mr. and Mrs. only cost is that I’ll be awfully short on Will for any other conflicts I
Maleficio, and if the two of you, perhaps, wind up having with Dr. Maleficio later, and that I probably have to
were clones. Ultimately the only way to
risk my health, just a little, to get there.
resolve your confusion would be to
stop me from watching a movie.
157
If you lock a human alone in a room for
Trouble long enough—past the point of anger,
past the point of despair, past the point
where they can no longer talk or think
coherently—they begin inventing new
Sometimes your action will come up against something that you just methods of war. They begin to create tools
and strategies of battle that the world
can’t change — something that keeps your “I blow up the world with
has never seen before. It takes a skilled
my mind” action from having an impact on the world, even if you do psychologist to dredge meaning from their
manage to reach Intention level 2. Something like: mumbles and gibbering, from the sketches
their fingernails make against the floor.
“You can’t do that. You don’t have psychic powers.” That is the only secret; that is what makes
the great nations great, and makes lesser
nations fall. Someone locked in a room, in
Truths like this — things that get in the way of your actions — are
the dark, without sanitation or company,
called Obstacles. They’re not limited to outright show-stoppers like until their mind breaks; someone to read
the one above; they run the gamut from their heart, and tell the world what tran-
spires there.
—from Reflections III, by Viscount d’Armand
“It’s hard to do athletics with a twisted ankle,” or
of the Obstacle. Remember that you only take one Skill Penalty — the region of Locus Zaanannim
Magic
Magic is a special case.
People who learn to see the real world — the mythic world —
can take up the practice of magic. This is usually bought as a Skill
of some sort, such as Skill: Elementalism or Skill: Sorcery, and it’s
not inherently any more powerful or effective than any other Skill.
158
Magicians can’t battle Powers. They can’t defeat miracles. They can’t
call down angels or drive off devils, and they’re not notably any happier,
healthier, more effective, or more productive than anybody else.
What they do have is a Skill without an ordinary mode of use — a
Skill where everything they might want to do is equally a stretch, and
any impossibility can be converted to an obstacle.
For instance, somebody shoots at a sorcerer. The sorcerer decides
they want to knock the bullets out of the air. That’s not something
ordinary Skills can ever really do — even a level 9+ Warrior action is
more likely to move you smoothly past the line of fire than actually
“I generally recommend against sending cut down bullets, because, fundamentally, a level 9+ mundane action
Teazel in a birthday bouquet,” the shop- is still mundane.
keeper noted.
But for a sorcerer, it’s just something like a level 3 Obstacle —
“I believe I know what I want,” Jon said
determinedly.
“People can’t knock bullets aside.”
“It’s simply that it tends to strangle the
recipient in their sleep.”
The distinguishing feature of magic is that you can reduce things like
“Oh.” Jon paused. “How about this one? that to Obstacles — that you can stretch the Skill to do incredible, un-
‘Appokynum?’”
natural things. The flip side is that you generally have to — there isn’t
“Apocynum, sir. It occasionally brings really any kind of standard usage where you just use the Skill and do
nightmares to life.”
things without encountering Obstacles at all.
“Madam,” Jon said, “what kind of florist Using magic effectively consumes a lot of Will — magicians
are you?”
haven’t taken over the world, despite their awesome power, because
“A realistic one,” the shopkeeper answered.
they tend to fall over after 1-2 small spells. To mitigate this effect
“Pleasant bouquets are my art and my
calling. More lethal arrangements pay magicians learn to warp and transform their dharma, change their
for my two mansions and a yacht.” nature, adopt magical specialties and strange taboos; this manifests as
—from The Grim King, by Melanie Tumbarius the purchase of Bonds, described on pg. 161-166. A mortal magician
can have up to 8 points of Bonds, in addition to their Passions and
Skills; these will serve as sources of Will and lighten the cost of some
spells. If your Avatar was a magician before becoming a Power, you
Crowds are far easier to coerce into fool-
ish mistakes than individuals are. For can either keep some of their old Bonds (upgraded to Noble levels
example, it is easy to convince a crowd to of power) or assume that your character discarded them all as part of
travel faster than light, thus violating the their Commencement.
causal order postulate and damaging the
fundamental order of the universe. Con-
vincing an individual to do so is almost
impossible.
—from Emeritus, by Michael Kay Tools and Assistants
For the most part tools, machines, and assistants don’t play much part
in the action system as stated. It’s assumed that if you’re driving into
town, you have a car, and that that’s faster — but not better — than
taking a bike. Using a word processor helps you write, but it doesn’t
help you earn happiness, or write effectively, or impress others. It
159
mostly helps with things like speed and feasibility, which are more
relevant to HG description than to player action.
A few special tools and coworkers (which we’re going to capitalize
or relabel as Tools) can actually raise your effective Passions, Skills, or
Intentions. For example, a stage with good acoustics actually makes “The enemy has twice ten thousand genii
of flame, and great black elephants that
you a better singer — it lowers the difficulty of being impressive,
snort clouds of heated vapor, and over
effective, and productive with Singing Skill on the stage. A good editor their hosts fly spindle-limbed demons
improves your writing, a good content management system improves wreathed in Hell’s fires. You, on the other
your competence as a software engineer, and low latency will help you hand, have five shiftless deserters.”
perform skillfully in a networked game. “And a camel!”
Tools like this add an effective +1 or +2 to your relevant Passion, “And a camel,” IT concedes.
Skill, or Intention — +1 for very good Tools, and +2 for downright —from Fire Stories, compiled by Édouard Guy
Edge
In addition to making your life easier and occasionally improving your
effective skills, accessories like cars, backup, and nuclear warheads can †
Also, you are playing tennis.
give you a competitive advantage in conflicts with other people.
This advantage is called Edge. It’s a rating between +0 and +5 that
measures how much you outgun someone —
You can generally use them as ordinary Skills, as well — making them
point for point better than ordinary Passions and Skills, as long as
you’re OK with not really being human.†
†
Sherlock Holmes, for clarity, pretends
to be human in his fiction, but let’s face
it, if you knew him in real life you’d
think something totally hinky was up.
Probably (and maybe this is just me)
you would decide he was actually an
experimental CIA android who had
been kicked out of the agency for be-
ing too British, or for the drugs, or
somesuch sort of thing.
John Henry, on the other hand,
just drives steel through any at-
tempt you might make to catego-
rize him. You should try it sometime!
It’s really quite surprising!
161
Your Nature
whether we make ourselves have wings
Or feed ourselves to rabid dogs.
It is the inexorable blessedness of the universe
Operating beyond our comprehension
And clashing terribly with the
smallness of our desires
That poses the great threat
To our chosen outcome.
— repeated ad infinitum
in the Thought-Record of Hannary James
What if you
became a god?
Once you have your character concept you will write down the new
covenant of your life — your new dharma, your new purpose, your
new way of being — as a list of Bonds, Afflictions, and Properties.
You are governed and defined by your Afflictions and Bonds, while the
Properties explain the rules of your Estate.
Divide up to 13† points between Bonds and Afflictions, spending
†
Technically you can spend up to [13 +
your Treasure rating] points here, but
1-5 points on each. don’t worry about that until you under-
Bonds and Afflictions are written as English-language sentences. stand Bonds, Afflictions, and Treasure.
Each describes something fundamental about your character. Each
can also be interpreted or understood as a rule —
Bonds are things that you must work at. You spend energy on them.
When you turn your back on your Bonds you are damaged and lost;
162
when you are in harmony with them, you are almost unstoppable; but
to reach that place of harmony, you need to put in an awful lot of work.
Having Bonds is like being a perfect swordsman or a soldier who re-
fuses to kill — it may be your nature and purpose to be that way, but
The Power Surkhai Beybukov suffers that doesn’t mean you can take the burden lightly!
an affliction of lines. Wherever he should
Afflictions, conversely, just happen. They’re out of your hands.
go, a line forms behind him. If he should
walk slowly, they shuffle behind him. If Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they are bad, but they’re that
he should run, or drive, or fly, they fall portion of your destiny and purpose and nature that binds you whether
behind; but as soon as he decelerates to a you’re in tune with yourself or not.
human range of motion, the local citizen-
Any Bond can be an Affliction, or vice versa; it’s purely a question
ry assemble at his back. Surkhai claims
that he suffers this curse to shield his of how you want to think of the Trait.
Imperator from its effects. His Imperator
claims to have assigned it in retribution
for certain of Surkhai’s personal habits.
As for the crowd, they point to Surkhai’s
regal demeanor. “Why, someone like this,” Bonds
they say, “must be going somewhere very
interesting indeed!”
—from On Serving the Nobilis, by Luc Ginneis
Bonds are for you — the player.
The HG can reward you for using them appropriately. The basic
sentence for the Bond is always treated as “true” or at least “potentially
true” in the game world. But it is you, as a player, who decides when to
bring the Bond into the game and with what force.
Bonds are also a great way to record the things you care about — to estab-
lish that you care about your family, your friends, your horse, your sword,
163
your job, your hobby, your collection of exploding flowers, or whatever.
You can make it clear what’s really important to you with Bonds like —
ProTip: St. A
ngela ra rely ac
Bond-Based Actions but she never ob ts on what she
jects to being sh sees
quantum obse ow n. If you ne
rver or an unbi ed a
thing or you th ased w itness to
ink someone’s some-
In a conflict, or when facing a skill penalty, you may reflexively unrighteous to going to do so
mething
you in front of
your T V, tr y cy
invoke any applicable Bond to improve a mundane action. This adds the power on yo
ur VCR ! cl ing
[the highest applicable Bond rating] to the effective Intention level
of your action.
For example, you have a level 5 Bond of love to a friend. You
decide to buy them a present. It doesn’t help — you’re not in a
conflict. But if someone tries to stop your purchase, or if you’re
broke enough that the lack of money is even a 1-point Obstacle,
your Bond kicks in — and you add the Bond to your Intention
rating and become much stronger.
Strike
St. A n el A
In a conflict, you may reflexively invoke a Bond to improve a of th egfl A i l
miraculous action. This allows you to shatter miraculous shields,
overcome the exceptional power of Imperators, Excrucians, and
high-Persona Nobilis, and ignore other characters’ Afflictions.
This ability is called Strike.
Invoking a Bond is proposing to the HG that —
The HG then decides whether to accept that proposal and agree that
the risk is real or the drive applicable.
If the HG agrees that your actions are driven by your Bond or
that your opponent’s actions threaten it, your miracle receives a free
Strike equal to [the highest relevant Bond rating]. This negates any
164
hostile Auctoritas (pg. 109-110) up to the level of your Strike, and
you subtract the higher of your Strike or Miraculous Edge from your
opponent’s effective miracle level for the purposes of deciding the
conflict. You can invoke a Bond’s Strike after declaring the action
itself, as long as the action hasn’t completed yet.
For example, you have a 2-point Bond obligating you to be the
prettiest person in the room. You’re in a beauty contest. Your miracles
to win the contest automatically receive 2 Strike, except during the
talent portion; there, the HG may or may not allow it to apply. Later
on you are climbing Mt. Everest. For this, your Bond does nothing, no
matter how fervently or vigorously invoked.
MP Bonus
You can gain MP from your Bonds. The HG may give you a number of
MP up to and including the Bond rating when —
When do players get MP ŠŠ you do something cool that the Bond drove you to, or that fulfills
for Afflictions, Bonds, and or exemplifies the Bond.
Properties?
The HG decides at basically their whim If something really major happened, and it’s late enough in the story
when to give out MP. However, that that this is a good bargain, the HG can offer you a full MP refresh
choice has a meaning.
instead of bonus MP.
The more MP you give out, as HG,
the more “oomph” the moment has in the
For a mortal Avatar, or if the HG wants to reward you with
context of the ongoing story. The fewer something less than 1 MP, you may receive points of Will up to and
MP, the less! Giving or not giving MP is, including the Bond rating instead.
in short, a descriptive technique, just like
calling something crimson instead of red
or “a cop” instead of “a guy in a strange
Healing
uniform, running at you with a gun.”
This is why players almost never get You can survive off your Bonds. Doing things related to your Bonds
MP for things that happen “offstage.”
puts energy in your system — it’s like a sugar-water IV or a bit of a nap.
Doing cool things related to high-level Bonds is more like having a
grand meal, a long sleep, great sex, or some other incredibly refreshing
event. You can sometimes use a Bond to survive things that would
otherwise kill you — if you are in a fugue/trance-like state focused
on a Bond when you lose your last health level and “die,” the HG may
rule that your Avatar survives in a completely focused fugue and can
become a playable character again at a later point. For instance, a shark
PC might have a Bond to “keep moving;” if they are dying in hard
165
vacuum, they could throw themselves into mindless flailing motion
and potentially survive (albeit without the ability to take other actions)
until someone rescues them.
Breaking Bonds
If you break your Bonds it usually just means that you as a player are
shoving the matter off the table. Maybe the situation isn’t really cov-
ered by the Bond, or maybe you think the Bond comes into play and
then gets circumvented but you don’t want to deal with exactly how.
For instance, you can’t enter a house when you’re not invited, but it’s
late and the game’s almost ending and you want to enter a house, so
you just do it. Maybe there’s some technicality and it’s not really a
“house.” Maybe you were invited long ago. Maybe everyone should
just assume that you got someone to come to the door and invite you.
Maybe you’re just tired as a player and you forgot the rule!†
Sometimes, though, it’s more sinister. Someone has forcibly bro-
ken your Bond, overcoming its power with their own or putting you
in a situation that forced you to break it yourself. You’re the only one
who can confirm that this has happened, but if it does happen your
character will suffer a spiritual wound. The details won’t mean much
to you until you’ve read the wound system, but the wound’s severity is
capped by the Bond strength at: †
I once forgot that one of my char-
acters was blind and spent a long
time scoping out a murder scene.
1: one Surface Wound; Eventually the HG-equivalent
2-3: one Serious Wound; gently reminded me that I couldn’t
4: one Deadly Wound; actually see a thing.
5: two Deadly Wounds
Sure, to look under the hood of that first Affliction, it’s terribly annoy-
ing to reflexively teleport across the world whenever some dude with a Lies hung from him like strips of black
ribbon. Promises kept at great cost
pamphlet chants your name. On the plus side, though, it’s free travel; it twined around his brow. Dust from a
doesn’t require buying a Teleportation-style Gift; your friends can call on hundred long journeys drifted from his
you when they’re in trouble; and it won’t be long before you pair it with a feet, and his eyes sparkled with a hundred
cell phone and some allies to get you just about anywhere you want to go. thousand loves.
“How did you come to be this way?” the
child asked.
You can gain MP from Afflictions, as with Bonds. For example, you’re
trying to fit into a sleepy Southern community. But you have the
Affliction, “My shape changes to reflect my deeds.” One night you go
and win a fight with an Excrucian. You come back home radiant with
glory and dripping with the ichor of the Beyond; suddenly fitting in to
the sleepy town becomes more difficult. Once it becomes clear that this
is actually a problem for you, the HG awards you a suitable number of
MP. Unlike Bonds, Afflictions never give mortal Will — if you’re in
trouble, but not enough trouble to earn a whole MP, the HG should find
a way to give you more trouble instead of settling for a smaller reward.
Breaking Afflictions
Afflictions are robust — they don’t break just because someone overcomes
them with miraculous Strike on one occasion. They only “break” when
they are made contradictory, inconsistent, and paradoxical, either within
themselves or in combination with one of your other Afflictions; when
they become unable, that is, to function or apply.
You win the heart of everyone you meet — but the mechanical man
you just met has no heart to win!
You appear to anyone who chants your name three times — but
now your name is being chanted in a placeless void!
If something like this does happen, it’s up to the player to either:
Most of these are at least partially subject to her will, but she really can’t
age, which would work out a lot better for her if she weren’t currently 10.
Pseudo-Powers T h e PisacsaTor
s
Th a l s u e
Š Affliction: my body is made of liquid metal.
Š Affliction: I’m the best dancer in the world!
Š Affliction: everyone knows my name.
Š Affliction: wind and fire love me!
Š Affliction: I’m the luckiest bastard you’ll ever meet.
Š Affliction: I always look my best.
Š Affliction: my black book has the number for everyone who’s any-
one in it.
Š Affliction: I change shapes when wet.
Š Affliction: what I don’t know can’t hurt me.
Š Affliction: my actions cause unreasonable amounts of property
damage.
172
Louise was never wrong. She had learned ŠŠ Affliction: if it’s smart enough, old enough, and consenting
this to her cost. For most of her life, she
enough that moral issues don’t squick the players, I can find a way
had been certain that she was weak,
stupid, unacademic, and ugly. She was, to find sex with it, and most likely already have.
of course, correct. Later on, in a foolish
rage from being teased, she announced Unfortunate Circumstances
that she was smarter than anyone in
the room; and she was, of course, correct.
Understanding in an instant what had ŠŠ Affliction: in times of intense emotion, the world finds a way to
happened, she became strong, dexter- give me a soundtrack.
ous, academic, and beautiful in a matter ŠŠ Affliction: I never have money. Seriously, the power of a god and
of minutes; and as for those who were
I still can’t hang on to the stuff!
teasing her, she informed them that they
would die in many gruesome ways. ŠŠ Affliction: I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.
ŠŠ Affliction: I have a miraculous evil twin.
That was not the cost, of course. She had
been certain that she would not regret ŠŠ Affliction: I have a miraculous double or doppelganger who is not
their deaths, and she did not. But she necessarily evil but also not my friend.
let herself grow arrogant, and one day, ŠŠ Affliction: someone has information that could compromise or
in an argument with a pious man, she
blackmail me!
announced that there was no God, no
purpose, no meaning, and no plan to the ŠŠ Affliction: I just don’t seem as impressive as a Power should.
universe. And she was, of course, correct. ŠŠ Affliction: the things that hurt my Estate can hurt me.
—from Armor, by Marilith Turner ŠŠ Affliction: the people of my Chancel really hate me.
ŠŠ Affliction: animals really hate me.
ŠŠ Affliction: something (e.g., the lack of a reflection) gives my inhu-
man nature away!
ŠŠ Affliction: I get physically/spiritually hurt when something bad
happens to (pick one)
•• my beloved!
If you die, said Adel, I will die; while you •• my car!
live, I will live. I shall be a guardian of •• my twin!
blood to you. •• my worst enemy!
—from Adel, by K.C. Danine
•• a bone mask associated with my Imperator!
•• the spirit of American freedom!
•• the worldwide reputation of Exxon!
•• people who are near me!
173
The Properties
of Your Estate
A t the same time you are creating your Bonds and Afflictions,
you will also build your Estate — the basic thingness and beingness of
it — by writing down a list of its Properties.
r of
He is the Powe
a Po we r m ade from dirt. th ings.
Benefits
This is daries betwee n
anges the boun
Borders and ch ry scar y an d un pr e-
ous but he is ve
He is not malici n gi ve yo u th at will
le an d th er e is no advice I ca we ve r,
dictab s up. I can, ho
e to ke ep yo u safe if he show rte nt
serv gages in inad ve
metimes he en
tell you that so us acts of prophesy
. If he
The most important benefit of a Property is a metagame
uncons cio
and even entirely d pa rticu la rly if
ird an d pe rsona l things, an y clo se benefit: it tells you and the other players what your Estate
says we ying them, pa
n’t se em to realize he’s sa n.
he do es
st might be yo ur ow actually is. The fact of a Property tells you a great deal about
life you save ju
attention! The
e
Wa lk i ng Ey
175
the Estate; the rating tells you which Properties are more important
than the rest. So simply by recording Properties you’re making the
game a lot easier for yourself, the HG, and the other players —
But they also have direct benefits in play!
MP Bonus
You can gain MP from your Estate Properties. The HG can give you a
number of MP up to and including the Property rating when —
If the HG is impressed enough, and it’s late enough in the story that
this is a good bargain, they can offer you a full MP refresh instead of
bonus MP. If you’ve done something for your Estate, but not enough
to merit an MP, the HG can give you 1-2 mortal Will instead.
176
“It is my plan,” said the Littlest Excrucian,
“to remove all knowledge of beer-can
How Excrucians Use
chicken from the world; then I shall com-
mand a secret worthy of an audience with
Kings.”
Properties
“Do it;” said Prince Carl, affecting disin-
terest. “I shall take the knowledge of beer Excrucians, and potentially Powers and Imperators, can use the
cans themselves and render your power
contingent upon mine.”
Properties of your Estate to attack it. They might, for example, create a
magical void to suck the whole Estate of Cold into it, or warm hearts
There can be no negotiation between
personages such as these; their dignity
everywhere in the world to weaken Cold and drive it back. They can
does not allow it; their bluster stands in also hurt your Estate by twisting and perverting its Properties, causing
their way. That is why we drink our beer some part of the Estate to go against its basic rules.
from satchels, today, and cook our chick-
ens therein; all of us save Prince Carl, of
course, who molders in his palace, arro-
and Properties
You can redesign your Bonds, Afflictions, and Estate Properties
between stories. With HG consent you may do so at any other time.
You may redesign Bonds, Afflictions, and Properties to:
On occasion, a Power of the Wild retreats
into their home, shuts all doors, and “re-
ŠŠ reflect your increased understanding of the character and their Estate;
defines” themselves. It is solid and sensible
policy to avoid the Power for several ŠŠ reflect the observable evolution of the character and their Estate;
weeks thereafter. This ensures that some- ŠŠ declare that your character has changed between stories; or
one else discovers it first if they have rede- ŠŠ to make the character more fun to play.
fined themselves as a monstrous fiend or a
bubblingly happy mass murderer.
—from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation, You will need the consent of the HG and the other players if you wish
by Jasprite Sherrard to declare any of these changes retroactive to previous stories.
177
Female Noble
178
XXXII
wer
u become a Po
ea t a de ad Po wer’s hear t, yo xt , th e
If you ed to Robert Ba
ur se lf! Th at ’s what happen oy in th e
yo was a cowb
of Clock s. He
modern Power d us ua lly rassle cows
and
so he wo ul
Old West and ea tin g pe op le’s
g va rio us do gies instead of do
git al on to
tion asked him
ar ts bu t th e Power in ques eo ne to
he needed som
was dy ing and
it because she s. In practice, this is
one
ly in a cr isi
ta ke over qu ick ob le. If yo u th ink
e ea sie r wa ys to become a N a Po wer
of th the hear t of
u ha ve a pl an for ripping out g th e an -
yo committ in
u are probably
and eating it yo ris,” an d th at sin or
know n as “hub
cient Greek sin sto ry poisonous scor
pion
m e so rt of te n-
poss ib ly so is wh at
tt (which
g you on the bu
w ill end up bitin who used to ru n th e
zabet Gantr y,
happened to Li n, on ly it wa sn ’t
lia n N ob ili se rs Organizatio an d it
Austra on-headed tiger
al ly a sc or pi on but a scor pi
actu
e at the time).
was also on fir
e
lly integrated th
Ba xt sa ys th at he never tota ec t 0.
Robert why he is Asp
ar t, and that is
power of the he
t
RobeRt ba x
Aspect
T he science of Noble hotness tells us that Nobilis are like movie stars
— they’re made of different stuff than ordinary people. They are basically hu-
man in form but all through their flesh and bone and blood they have this
179
awesome divine pith that responds more to thought and ideas than to phys-
ics and muscle action. They start becoming an idea of flesh instead of flesh.
The more completely this happens to them, the more they’re like
fantasies instead of people — power fantasies, um, other kinds of
fantasies, whatever. They’re able to do the kinds of things you normally
only see in your imagination!
This is the quality they call their Aspect.
Your Avatar has a minimum of Aspect 0 — the tiniest amount of
physical and mental awesome that a Power can get. You can buy up
to 5 more levels of Aspect for your Avatar for 3 Character Points each.
Here’s what that gives you do “for free” — without spending
miracle points:
You also get free mundane Cool equal to your Aspect Trait.
If you want to be like a pulp hero, try Aspect 1-3. If you want to
be like a kung fu god, try Aspect 3-5!
Here is the scale of miracles that Aspect can perform: The child of the cosmos walked out into the
Arizona heat. Where no one lived and
nothing grew, he set up the ring. It took
him only a few days to get the bandstands
Difficulty 0:
up and the restrooms built. Then he sat at
his laptop and printed out a handful of
“Peak Performance” flyers, reading, “The Child of the Cosmos
against the Gods that Move Between
the Stars! A once-in-a-lifetime wres-
tling event, coming March 25th!” These
Difficulty 0 Aspect miracles are like mundane actions, but they draw he distributed in nearby towns. Then, at
last, he let himself sleep.
on miraculous energy instead of the resources of your body, mind and
will. This works like a mundane action, except: “But you are only half a god,” the report-
ers would ask him later. “How can you
expect to beat the real thing?”
ŠŠ it always goes easily and smoothly;
“The gods rule an unjust cosmos,” he would
ŠŠ it doesn’t tire you out at all;
answer. “But in the ring, I will make
ŠŠ you ignore Intentions, for better or worse, instead adding a +3 justice with my own two hands.”
“miraculous Will” bonus to your most relevant Passion or Skill. —from 24 Finales, by Rannen Yedidyah
180
The cool thing about these miracles is that they never get harder to do.
For instance, if you have a fever, you probably only have a limited amount
Miracles and Will of focus — a limited amount of time that you can pull yourself together
You can’t use Will to improve miracles.
and act coherently in the world. But if you do that coherent action with
Any miracle that is based on a mundane an Aspect miracle, it doesn’t count against that limited time. It’s the same
action will replace Will and Intentions with drunkenness, exhaustion, being drugged, being in agony — if you’re
with a fixed +3 bonus to Passions or Skills too broken to act, you’re too broken to act, but if you have enough brain to
of one sort or another. Your action is pre-
mised on miraculous energy rather than
pull yourself together for even a moment, you can pull yourself together for
mortal drive. as long as you keep using Aspect 0 miracles, instead.
Difficulty 1:
“Enhanced Performance”
Difficulty 1 Aspect miracles work the same way, except that you also treat
your underlying Passions and Skills as 1 point higher. This gives a total ef-
fectiveness of [(Passion or Skill) + 4] for a normal action, putting an ordinary
person on the level of a professional athlete, scientist, artist, or warrior in
peak form — and if you’re already good at something, you get a lot better!
Difficulty 2:
“Pulp Heroism”
My first steps after the pain of Com-
mencement were like poetry. My body
felt so light—like air. Like music. Like a
river. Difficulty 2 Aspect miracles work the same way, except that you also treat
Do not let the wonder of Nobility fade
your underlying Passions and Skills as 2 points higher. This gives a total
from your life. final effectiveness of [(Passion or Skill) + 5]. This puts an ordinary person
Never forget that first step. on the level of an amazing athlete, scientist, artist, warrior, or professional
in any other field — and if you were already good at something, you have
It is beauty.
—from Becoming Noble, by Fayola Osiagobare
a good chance of surpassing relevant human competence entirely!
Difficulty 3:
“Inhuman Perfection”
These are the miracles of the shining heroes. Icons! Glories! At this point you
stop operating on the mortal scale so don’t try to match this precisely to some
numeric improvement to your mortal abilities. Instead, you’re like the best
181
humans in the world, plus you’ve got this extra quality of absolute flawlessness.
Perfect balance! Perfect execution! And most supernaturally, perfect timing.
Limitations
There’s something unnaturally dramatic about these miracles.
When you do something with a level 3 Aspect miracle, you finish it at There are three things that Powers with
the first of the following times that seems even vaguely possible: high Aspect don’t seem to be able to do —
X X XIII
Difficulty 7:
If you love trave
l and you love th
to make a pilgrim e road you may
age to honor Is want
the Road, in Lo abel, the Powe
who remembers
cus A rahiel. Sh
e’s the kind of
r of
Power
“Fairy Tale Feat”
the lives of all
Estate before he th e Powers of he
r, so these days r
more as Roads she thinks of he
than Isabel — bu rself
son, who helps t she’s still a co
ever yone in the ol per-
get to where th world who uses
roads
At this level you don’t have to listen to reason any more. You
ey need to go.
how to get to Lo Nobody know become a storybook character. You can do anything that you
cus A rahiel, bu s ex ac tly
you will find th t if your heart
e way. Isabel lik is true, can explain away as a use of a natural human ability.
larly cool scents es presents (par
and flavors) bu ticu-
give out gifts or t she doesn’t real
assistance in re ly
if you go to ho turn —
nor her, do it
to honor her, be
cause giving
love and honor
outwards is
excellent for th
e soul!
Isabel is like th
e roads them-
selves — mostly
physica l, but
imbued, and str
ongly, with the
stuff of dream
— and that is wh
she is Aspect 3. y
Isa bel
183
The major limit at this level is that you’re stuck with relatively
local miracles in space and time. You can do crazy things — you can
drink a small lake, blow down a house, surf on sound waves, and stuff
a pair of gazeboes into your pocket — but you can’t affect stuff that’s
more than a mile or two away and you can’t keep the miracle going for
more than a few minutes. For example, if you plan on spitting
out the lake or taking the gazeboes back out of your pocket,
you’d better do it quickly! But for a few minutes, in the local X X XIII
area, you can do almost anything.
mer ica you may
If you live in A e
k Catch fly, th
encounter Roo lo ok s
ty. Sh e
Power of Eterni rl,
lit tle gi
like an ordina ry
Difficulty 8: but do not be fo
an incr ed ib
oled! She is
ly powerf ul
“World-shaking Skill” master, able to
ta ke
ies . You
on smal l ar m
tif y he r by her
can iden
nt st yle
cl ipped, impatie
pear
At this point the crazy stuff you can do isn’t “local” any more. You tendency to ap
of speech; her m pa ny of
or in the co
can shoot down a star with your gun, pick up Mt. Rushmore unchaperoned ca sio na l
; and he r oc
obvious Powers just
and stuff it down your shirt, or figure out the acoustics so sh e isn ’t yo un g,
complaints that ly a good
you can talk casually with someone on the other side of the id it is probab
“stuck !” That sa sp ec tfu l to
polite and re
world without anyone in between overhearing. The world st rategy to be til yo u ar e
you mee t un
al l young girls outfi t,gh
is your playground! You can sustain these miracles as long in they cannot
absolutely certa M ar ine
as you like, although you do have to sustain them — actively use your outw rest le the
outthink, and d a la rge
Hawking, an
miraculous action on them — to keep them from going away. Cor ps, Steven , an d al l more
spectively
Kod ia k bear re
me time.
or less at the sa
why she
can, and that is
Rook Catch fly
Difficulty 9: is A spect 4.
“Mastered Technique”
h fly
Rook CatC
At this level you can set new rules for what Skill can do. This has all the
power of a level 8 miracle, plus, instead of saying that you do the miracle,
you say that you can do the miracle — and for the rest of the story, even
without actively sustaining a miraculous effect, you can. You don’t just
pocket Mt. Rushmore: you master the mountain-pocketing technique!
You don’t just furiously tread air to keep from falling, or lift yourself
to the ceiling: you learn the furiously-treading-air technique! You’ve
imposed a new rule on the world: “I can do X,” and as long as it’s easy
to conceptualize as extending a mortal Skill, you can, in fact, until the
story ends. Actually using this ability is a mundane action predicated on
your most relevant Skill or Passion, so you don’t get the full advantage
of the miracle level in contests with other miracles, but your ability to
use your new ability is protected by a level 4 Auctoritas.
184
It was told from the very beginning that
the sea would be Atlantis’ ending. And
Aspect Difficulties
so the men of the city of Adelais, that
(Example)
stood by the shore, built a great wall
against the sea. Years of labor by a hun-
dred hundred hands made that wall a Punching through a thin layer of steel seems like Aspect 4. Shoving
wonder of the world, and in time, it is
told, the one who rules in the oceans heard
your way through a thick steel wall seems like Aspect 6. Learning to
of its building. And he was displeased. vibrate your body so fast you can walk through steel without tearing it
In his chariot of ivory, drawn by horses for the rest of the story would be Aspect 9.
green and white, he rode to Adelais, and If you have Aspect 2, you’re always really good at everything —
he looked upon the wall. It is said that it even if you’re so bad at something you have a -1 Skill in it, you can use
ringed twelve and twenty miles of the
a free level 2 Aspect miracle to outperform most mortal professionals.
coast, and that it was as tall as human
hands could make it. But being really good at punching doesn’t let you punch through
steel, and being “really strong” definitely won’t let you push your way
And the king of the sea lifted his hand,
and he walked across the waves to the bodily through steel like it was paper. To punch through steel will
wall, and he struck it once with his hand. require 2 AMP, and to shove through the steel wall would require 4.
Twice. Three times. Learning the vibrate-through-walls technique would cost you 8 AMP
And the sea came pouring in. — technically, it would be 7, except that you’re only allowed to spend 1,
—from The Fall of Adelais, author unknown, 2, 4, or 8 MP at a time.
showing a difficulty 6 Aspect miracle
Aspect Difficulties
(Summary)
T here are at least two ways to understand Estates and their in-
stances in the world.
We call that thing into which we may
fall, and find ourselves without boundary,
the sea; and that numinous pre-formed
You can understand them as substances or as paths. substance therein “water.” Without that
The substance of a thing is composed of properties that you can chaos we would calcify and cease to live;
in the fullness of its presence, we drown.
measure objectively: heat, mass, the incidence of repeated behaviors, Hold up a paper cup of water and unfocus
the emergence of recognized and identifiable properties. It is syntactic; your eyes: you will see the undine ges-
something may be discovered to be a dog, for example, by noticing that ticulating therein. It is not saying, “Do
it has the head, body, legs, coat, tail, and ears of a dog. Something may not drink me, magician!” or even “I give
myself to thee;” rather, it is caparisoned for
be discovered to be cold by measuring its temperature. Something may battle, it is shaking its supreme and ter-
be discovered to be “in love” through its display of traditionally loving rible trident, it is saying to you: you drink
behaviors. Thus everything, even the intangible, becomes equations, me now, but forever you will drown, and
formulas, and lists of qualifications. take dissolvéd joy within that drowning.
—from A Catalog of Modern Magic, by Eric Optera,
The path or dharma of a thing is a subjective quality. It’s the writing on the topic of Water’s dharma
purpose of a thing —
Domain
Difficulty 0:
“Estate-Driven Divination”
Difficulty 1:
“Ghost Miracle”
‡
Though you kind of have to ignore the
You can get your car to adjust itself a little in its parking space, or
ask someone’s gun to misfire, or convince a river to flow a little ††
Note that because the talking part
faster or slower — as long as you’re the Power of Cars, Guns, is a mundane action, even a mortal’s
Rivers or something similar, respectively! Here “subtle” is code for Cool can get in the way. It’s one thing
to talk Harvey Thing’s gun into misfir-
“things they might have done anyway ‡” and your persuasiveness is ing — quite another to pull that trick
determined by the mundane action you use to talk††. on Mr. Bond!
190
You can also use conversation miracles to ask things of your Estate
for mundane information and listen to the answers. This is usually
less precise than just using a lesser divination, but you can sustain the
conversation to get additional information and using a conversation
miracle gives your Estate the chance to tell you if you’re asking the
wrong questions.
Difficulty 3:
“Lesser Preservation”
XXXV
Difficulty 4:
Dumonia is th
e Power of A lte
20 00, she was rnative Music.
the most recent As of
Muse, younger
ling to the nine
Duchess of Po
classica l muses
and to Marian
sib-
a, the
“Lesser Creation, Summoning, or Animation”
p. She can crea
and bands out te as many mus
of nothingness icians
that is why she as she desires,
is Domain 4. W and
your best work hen you finish
as an alternativ doing
long slow decli e musician and
hit a
Difficulty 4 Domain miracles create, summon, and animate. You
ne she will kidn
Parnassus, refre ap you to the C can conjure things of your Estate out of thin air; you can call
sh your inspi- hancel
and give you a ration,
long-term mobile elements of your Estate to you; and you can imbue part
this is why som gig;
etimes
when you wond of your Estate with an animating power, moving it or making it
er
“where are they
now?” mobile. For instance, the Power of Caves can use these miracles
no obvious answ
will occur.
er to animate a cave mouth, allowing it to bite people; the Power of
Slackers can use them to summon any nearby slacker or create a
new one to spec; the Power of Graven Images can bring a statue
to life; and the Power of Matches can wrap match-flame around
themselves to form a plasmic armor. These are lesser miracles that
will your Estate to be, to come to you, and to act.
Difficulty 5:
“Lesser Destruction”
Du mon i a
Difficulty 5 Domain miracles erase some physical manifestation of
your Estate, in whole or in part. The Power of Fire can erase a whole
191
fire, or its heat, or its color, or its visibility; the Power of
Life can kill; the Power of Storms can wipe clouds from XXXVI
the sky. years of
Earth ’s
e d 5 0 0
ripp
perator world a
nd
y an Im ar of the
One da c a le n d y th e
from th
e Instantl
histor y e E x c rucians.
m to th randeur
sold the
Difficulty 5: ancie n
of the R
t a n d savage g
oaring T
wenties
nced
“Greater Divination” replaced
the adva
st e rility of
septic
and anti civiliza-
human
modern at could
e souls th
tion. Th o u t into
It is also difficulty 5 to use greater miracles of Divination. These pt flew
not ada ac e , there
of sp
miracles use your Estate as a spy, asking the Estate as a whole the void t rainbo
w
r in grea
to cluste c h so u l wa s
what it or its components have seen or learned about other things. One su
spheres. the Pow
er
f S ara Nei, ot
You may also glean a limited insight into the future from your that o
rk ed Gam
in g. N
e tw o d fo r-
Estate, as when the Power of Wine sees the future in a wineglass. of N returne rnate
u nti l he r Estate
o u ld sh e reinca
rld c she
the w o tatters,
mally to o ri g in al soul in o f souls
†
Her s
herself. g re a t c ongerie lish -
gether a reestab
linked to a s th e basis for
d them
Difficulty 6: and use
ing h e r existenc
e.
w e r to pray
to for b
etter
e she ca
n
“Lesser Motion” Sara Ne
i is th e correct
P o
ile g a m in g. Beca
u s
ons w it
hout
ance wh onnecti
perform t work c
net work pro v e n e .
e and im main 3
stabiliz r at Do
, w e re ckon he
y
difficult
Difficulty 6 Domain miracles are miracles of movement and dharma
ei
— you change the location, the context, and the destiny or purpose Sa r a N
of the things of your Estate. You can move a dream from one person’s
mind into another person’s mind, or farm jellyfish on land, or assign a
new destiny, fate, or purpose to a person who falls under your Estate.
Movement and dharma miracles tend to cover their own tracks, the
changes fitting seamlessly into the world: if you move someone’s house
†
Did she rescue, devour, or become
those souls? The matter is inher-
to the top of a cliff, or give them a destiny to be forever harassed by ently somewhat ambiguous,
ocelots, they’ll recognize that something’s wrong, and they may even and Sara Nei does not pre-
fer to clarify it.
know what, but all their records and even most of their memories will
reflect the new reality.
Difficulty 6:
“Greater Preservation”
Difficulty 8:
“Greater Destruction”
Difficulty 9:
“Greater Motion”
Domain Difficulties
(Summary)
Looking over the chart, you can see that level 1, level 4, and level 5
miracles will be very useful to you, while level 2 miracles are circum-
stantial, level 3 miracles are ambiguous, and level 6-9 miracles are for
weird, eccentric solutions to large problems. This is more or less typi-
cal for experiential Estates, and may help you figure out what level of
Domain would serve you best!
195
Male
Noble
196
Persona
The first miracle that touched my life was
a holy thing. I was trapped in a burning
building. A girl walked through the fire
and said, “I owe the world seventy-three
lives, in penance.” Then she took me from
that place, unharmed, and said, “Seven-
ty-two.” Then she vanished into the crowd.
I do not know what her words meant, but
I could feel that she was sacred.
The second miracle that touched my life
had no place in this world. I was very sick,
and a thing made of sunset colors came
into my room. “I am hungry,” it said, and
I could feel it ripping the sickness from me
and draining it into the flaring orange
T
and red. I felt so much better. Perhaps it
even saved my life. But I knew this was
a thing that should not have happened,
performed by a thing that should not have here’s this thing that a Noble can do with their smile, when
been. I have sought to make myself ill suddenly it’s not them but the roaring of the sea and the salt air and the
again, but not even the coldest rain can calling of gulls; and the sun; and your heart is open again like when
bring the pneumonia back into my lungs.
you were a child, standing on the shore.
—from a speech by Kalliroe Calmes, 3/25/00
There’s this thing they can do with their eyes where suddenly it’s
the darkest night and you are about to be eaten by a wolf.
They can reach you, reach into you, in ways that people can’t, that
only the great wideness of the world can. They can twist you up or
untwist you like your family and your best friends and your exes, good
and bad. They have something that just slips by all your defenses.
The spear took Michael through the heart, Their Persona.
but he is not dead; nor is he gone.
He is a man who became his Estate, and, Your Avatar has some of this — some of this it, some of this je ne sais
in so doing, marked it forever. I can look
quoi, some of that stuff that lets a Noble actually affect you, something
in any lion’s eyes and see his spirit there.
that makes them real in other people’s lives. Some of that quality that
I can walk with them now. They do not
lets them reach you, change you, see you. Something that makes them
hunt me any more.
—from the Diary of Selena Monteith, more real than people, and sometimes even more real than each other;
on the topic of Persona miracles something that lets them make a difference.
Your Avatar starts with Persona 0, which is already enough to
change the world; and you can buy up to 5 levels more, for 3 points
each
It’s what makes a Noble like the Imperators, like the sun, like the
moon, like the sea, like first love, like starving, like dreaming, like
music, like dancing, like fire, like sex.
It’s an Attribute that lets them touch on what things mean.
197
Here’s what you can do without spending MP at the six possible levels —
IXL Difficulty 0:
If you are ever
“The Sight”
in trouble w ith
press them w ith a genie you may
your knowledge im-
genies are desc of genie tr iv ia!
ended from th The
Ja n, who ru led e Imperator Ja
the Second A ge n ben It’s a reflexive Difficulty 0 Persona miracle to invoke “the
sta rted when Ed of Ea rth. (Th is
en fell and ende A ge
cians showed up d when the E xc
ru-
Sight.” The mundane forms of the world blur and fade and it’s a
.) These days th
e genies either
the world or liv
e in the secret roam little harder to make out what’s going on around you — but the
Ba lbec. Their cities Chi lmin
ar and
A ge of Ea rth,
queen is the Po
we r of the Second things that have deep connections of love, hatred, weal, or woe
Oresha, who
touches w ith th
e romantic, an
infuses ever ythi
ng she to your Estate snap into focus. You can recognize the Powers
A ge! For this pu cient grandeur
rpose she has Pe of that of Estates with strong connections to your own, and their
rsona 1.
agents; you can identify with a single glance an Excrucian who
ProTip: If your
knowledge is actively attacking your Estate. If you are the Power of Birds,
of genie tr iv ia
does not
help you, tr y off you can know whether an animal preys on birds, or whether a
er ing to
play Nobilis w
ith them. person loves birds, or hates birds, or has been flock to a bird at
Genies have a
lot of dif- some point in time. The Power of War could see that a person is
ficulty finding
people
to game w ith be deeply scarred by war. The Power of Couches could recognize the
cause
they think that
dice CEO of a major couch corporation.
and role-play in
g You receive free Strike (pg. 319) on this miracle equal to your
games do not
mix, so they w Persona rating, and can spend MP or invoke a Bond for additional
ill
probably leap Strike. That said, once invoked, this miracle relies on your mundane
at this op-
senses for its effect. The only function of Strike in this context is to help
port unity.
you activate the Sight in the presence of a hostile Auctoritas or Sight-
Or esh a deceiving miracle. You can enhance your mundane senses with Aspect
and Treasure miracles if a basic use of the Sight proves inadequate to your
needs.
Difficulty 1:
“Blessing or Curse”
You can use a difficulty 1 miracle to make small changes in the destiny, nature,
and temperament of things — giving them just a dollop of the nature of your
Estate. The Power of Fire can make someone more fiery, or give them a
dangerous feel, or make sure that now and again in life their plans will burn
them. The Power of Industrial Espionage can make someone more or less
sinister or adventurous — and can probably attract money or misfortune to
someone as well. Your blessings and your curses can make small, real changes
to hearts, minds, and lives, but their previous dharma will tend to dominate
and leave 90% of their life more or less the same.
You can also use these miracles to take a bit of your Estate’s nature
away from someone, or shelter them from it to a small degree. The
199
total effect is similar, but you don’t have the same level of control —
you just “take a bit of the Fire” from their life, or “shelter them from
some of the weight of Industrial Espionage,” rather than exploring a
larger palette of possible effects.
The man’s convulsions woke her; woke
her to see his sweating ghost-pale face, his
slit eyes, his drawn features. She tried to
ŠŠ something happens back at their body that snaps them out of it;
ŠŠ a self-imposed time limit runs out; or
ŠŠ a scene ends for the thing they’re living in.
They do choose, with as much precision as they like, what they’ll in-
habit, but they don’t take it over and they don’t bring their whole maj-
esty to bear. They live with it.
The things that happen to it — the things it thinks, the relationships
it forms, the experiences it has — become part of your Avatar’s life
story. This is backdated a bit, so you get the memories and attachments
of the things that were already happening when you arrived. And your
Avatar’s dreams and hopes and passions and loves and basically their
ways of living become part of its nature; and that lasts even after you
pull your consciousness back, more or less until the story ends.
So if you’re playing the Power of Dogs, you can go live in any dog
you want. And for the rest of your life, if that dog loved someone, like
most dogs do, that person will be important to you, and you to them.
And for the rest of the story, that dog thinks a bit like you (and the rest
like a dog) — if they see that your parents’ home is on fire, say, even
if they don’t know your parents, they’ll definitely care and they might
even be able to work a fire extinguisher or dial 911!
Usually the HG will just tell the story of what you experience in
abbreviated form, or let you do so, or just say that it happened and tell you
to let them know if it’s relevant. If you happen to incarnate somewhere
where important things are going on, though, and nothing is up back
where your body is, then the HG may have you play the dog, wind, hope,
ghetto, song, or sunbeam you happen to be inhabiting instead of yourself!
If your Estate exists on other worlds you can possess it there, but
you need a greater (level 5) miracle to extend your consciousness into
someplace primal like Heaven or Hell.
These miracles add the dharma and/or Properties of your Estate — He cradled it; he sang to it; he closed its
eyes. He armored it; he gave it poison
the way of being your Estate has — to a thing, and without taking sacs; and bit by bit he put his mark on it.
that thing’s original nature away. You can make events into dreams
It wobbled upright.
or hopes, if your Estate is Dreams or Hopes; you can make memories
burn, if you’re the Power of Fire; you can even turn people into frogs, Its lungs clanked inside its chest.
if you’re the Power of Frogs. This can change the structure of the thing It breathed: ho-ha.
but the original information and structure is not lost — just preserved It wasn’t a kitten any more, I don’t think.
or suspended in a different form. Turning someone into a frog, for I don’t know what it was.
example, makes a decidedly non-generic frog that you could recognize I just remember the look of honest joy on
(given an awareness of miracles, and thus that frogs are not necessarily his face when it took its first step; when it
looked at him and tilted its head; when it
frogs) as them. You can use these miracles to add abstract elements and
said, “Blort?” in that fashion that kittens,
Properties of your Estate to things, physical elements of your Estate to who are weapons of mass destruction, blort.
things, or some combination thereof. —from the Thought-Record of Danglehart Li
202
The house had died; its pieces were taken
from it, one after the next; finally all there Difficulty 5:
was that remained of it was a rectangular “Lesser Sacrifice”
plot of dirt, perfectly clean, whose spirit
mumbled endless paeans to its emptiness
and still thought it was a house.
— from A Madness of Spirits,
These miracles take the dharma and/or Properties of your Estate away
by Dr. E. Edgarton Clark from something. The Power of Fire makes a thing stop burning. The
Power of Dreams makes something no longer a dream (but, rather, real).
The Power of Cats decides a tailless Manx isn’t really a cat any longer.
You can exempt something from one or more of your Estate’s Properties,
from some less central aspects of your Estate, or even cut it from your
Estate entirely. Unlike a Domain miracle of destruction, this does not
erase the thing outright: rather, the lingering detritus of its existing in
the world, the traces of definition the thing has picked up from other
Estates, form a new basis by which the HG reconnects it to reality. A
consensus that is no longer a Consensus might become a Dictat. A wave
that is no longer a Wave might become an Escalating Phenomenon. A
cat that is no longer a Cat becomes a new sort of Mammal or perhaps a
branch of the Household Gods. You don’t get to decide what it becomes,
but the HG should generally follow your expectations, if you have any,
XL and unless there’s something important about what’s going on that you
are unaware of or have chosen to ignore.
Difficulty 5:
“Greater Incarnation“
Difficulty 7:
“Greater Enchantment”
Difficulty 8:
“Greater Sacrifice”
Difficulty 8 Persona miracles let you retract the dharma of your Estate
from things on a larger scale.
Difficulty 9:
“Greater Binding”
Difficulty 9 Persona miracles allow you to change how large portions of the
world relate to your Estate — make a city , e.g., where your Estate is holy, or
204
XLI appoint all the spirits of a mountainside the guardians of some element of
your Estate. You may also invoke particularly complex destinies, and if you
This is the Power of Toys. He is
always encountered in the shape choose to damn or empower someone, they may acquire potent Afflictions
of a toy, so if you are buying or abilities at the HG’s option. In either case there is a level 4 Auctoritas
a Christmas present for a
protecting the destiny you deal out that lasts for the remainder of the story.
child you shou ld
check it caref ully
and make sure it is
not Adrian Elsey. He is
a Power of the Dark , and
he takes his glee in teaching Persona Difficulties
child ren how to evade parental (Summary)
restraint and make ter-
rible mistakes; that
said, he is not so
much malignant In summary, here is the scale of miracles that Persona can perform:
as cheerfully indif-
quen ces. If
ferent to conse-
with draw n or
a child is extremely
of adult s with even worse
in the care
y may do them
judgment than a child, Adrian Else 0 recognize deep bonds between people/things and your Estate;
more good than harm.
1 + bless or curse a person with the nature of your Estate;
identifies
Adrian is a shapeshif ter who whol ly 2 + incarnate yourself in something from your Estate;
s not even to
with the Toys of his Estate; he claim
an form . This level of
remember his original hum 3 + enforce the Properties of your Estate on yourself;
ests he has Pers ona 5.
identification sugg
4 + imbue something with the nature of your Estate;
Adri An ElsEy 5
+ steal part of your Estate’s nature from a thing;
+ incarnate yourself in your Estate throughout the world;
+ change how someone or something relates to your Estate
6
+ epic miracles that enforce the Properties of your Estate on yourself;
7 + epic miracles to enforce the nature of your Estate on others;
8 + epic miracles to steal your Estate’s nature from a thing or area;
9 + epic miracles that change how things interact with your Estate
Looking over the chart, you notice that the miracles of incarnating
in your Estate are a little weird because spending time as a forbidden
love is less intuitive then spending time as a computer, wind, or a car.
You can still use it to gather information, build connections, and ma-
nipulate people, but taking advantage of the higher level depends on
there being important or interesting people bound by forbidden loves.
Your workhorse miracles are probably level 1-2 miracles if you have low
Persona or level 4-8 if your Persona is high.
206
Mystic Links
Icons Treasure
You can make a symbol into your Anchor.
You claim something iconic and abstract
as yours — a mystic sign, a shouted catch
phrase, or whatever. It relates to one of
your Bonds. It represents you. Through
it you can use power. Sometimes it’s only
you making the symbol that counts, and
only one incarnation of the symbol mat-
ters; if it’s a mark you can make in many
different places, or something like that,
you should also look at the box for Anchor
T
Collections.
0 Your Anchors have no overhead The line leading to Zéphyrin was as long
1 + you can possess them from afar as the sky.
2 + you can guide them from afar As I wove my way through that line, as
3 + you can make and use wondrous Anchors the days passed one by one beneath the
4 + your Anchors aid and strengthen you unyielding sun, my heart fell sick with
despair. I knew that long before I reached
5 + your Anchors are suitable tools for miraculous combat
him, he would choose—take some new,
young, clever soul as his adjutant and per-
haps his lover. He had so many thousands
Here’s the scale of miracles that Treasure can perform: of choices. They could not all fail his test.
It took ten days for me to reach him. The
test took him no time at all.
Difficulty 0:
“Oriane,” he said. “You are chosen.”
“I have passed the test?”
“Claiming an Anchor” “You are the only one I wanted,” he said,
and his eyes echoed the sun.
“But the line…”
You can use a difficulty 0 miracle to make an ordinary thing into an
“They were not real,” Zéphyrin said. “I
Anchor — to take something that is bound to you by your Bonds and
needed to know that you could wait.”
make it part of your regalia, your iconography, your nature and your —from the Thought-Record of Oriane Feroulet,
destiny. who was Zéphyrin’s Treasure
210
She stood in the garden she had sum- An Anchor becomes, at your option, one of the best of its kind
moned from outside the world. A thing
mundanely available. Your old clunker of a car becomes a Ferrari, or
that I could not call a flower brushed
against her face; soft yellow fuzz lay simply runs like one. Your memento wristwatch becomes as durable
beneath her feet. Behind her, radiant as a Rolex deep sea watch. That butler you hired — maybe from the
indigo shapes of whorls and topologically papers, maybe by dragging your layabout or unruly cousin into your
impossible curves served as bushes, and
world — turns out, after a few days settling in, to be one of the best
something beautiful but disturbingly
wormlike crawled up a lattice against the and most loyal butlers in the world.
garden fence. An Anchor becomes, again at your option, free of charge. A car
Nothing in that garden came from the no longer requires gasoline. A computer no longer needs electricity.
mind of God. It was something called, Phone and data service for a PDA are free. Even people stop having a
something conjured, something found. resource cost — it’s not that they don’t eat, sleep, shower, or whatever,
“What price did you pay for it?” I asked. but that for some reason or another you won’t ever have to worry about
She opened her eyes. Patterns of amber it. Depending on the game the HG may play this up for comic, tragic,
and violet endlessly bloomed within bromidic, or wondrous effect.
them. “None worth the mentioning,” she For better or worse, when you’re directly interacting with one
answered.
of your Anchors, you don’t spend Will and you ignore the whole
She stood within the garden; and nothing Intentions system. Your actions through an Anchored tool, or an
in that garden came from the mind of God.
—from the Thought-Record of Melania Stockli
Anchor’s actions when you’re directly involved, just add a default +3
“miraculous Will” bonus to the highest relevant Passion or Skill.
Finally, an Anchor may always communicate with you — it
may call to you with its thoughts and it may hear thoughts you send
outwards in its direction. This is most important with people, but the
spirit of an inanimate Anchor may communicate with you as well. It
is a reflexive difficulty 0 miracle to hear an Anchor trying to reach
The Acme Horizon Vulcanizer was in you or to open a channel of communication with it; you receive free
one respect successful: the rubbery hori-
zon bounced back the sun that tried to set,
Strike (pg. 319) on this miracle equal to your Treasure rating and can
casting the houses of the sky into disorder. spend MP or invoke a Bond for additional Strike. Actually hearing
In its principal purpose, however, it your Anchor out and replying is a mundane action, so you’ll have to
proved entirely futile: like the devices have a free moment to talk.
before it, it did not win for Horace Eu-
nice’s love.
All of these benefits are essentially permanent; they last as long as
—from Horace’s Exigency, by Keiko Takemori you wish them to last and retain an appropriate Bond.
Difficulty 1:
“Possession”
Difficulty 2:
“Guidance”
ik. Fez-
dog named Fezz
is is a Po we r with a Newfie ev er seen,
Th dog I have
st and toughest
It is a difficulty 2 miracle to invoke an Anchor as an extension of yourself. zik is the smarte tam ag ica l su pe rbe-
still a dog and no
but is definitely el ha s Tr ea su re 2. Mr.
You remain in your own flesh, but you share the Anchor’s senses y Lance Romen
ing, which is wh sponsible for dogs bu
t will
no t ac tu al ly re
if it has them. You improve its function. Your spirit soothes its heart. Ro m en el is
pomp and he lp them
e as their psycho
sometimes serv cause he ca n; if he
This specifically includes the conversational channel associated with terlife simply be
reach a happy af ld let hi m do hi s work.
difficulty 0 — you may communicate freely with the Anchor as you ur dog you shou
shows up for yo
work. Using a Guidance miracle gives you or the Anchor a small edge
en eL
(1 Edge, all else being equal) and adds +1 to the value of a Tool. L a nce Rom
You may take actions “through” the Anchor, as with occupation,
and when you use Aspect miracles or mundane actions through them
it temporarily displaces their consciousness.
You can use Guidance outside the normal range for your miracles.
Doing so forges a mystic link with that Anchor that remains for the
rest of the scene.
Difficulty 3:
“Unleashing Wonders”
ŠŠ the Anchor’s power is active, so you ignore any Obstacle that says
it can’t be;
ŠŠ relevant mundane actions receive a large edge —
•• 0-2 Edge becomes 3 Edge;
•• a 1-Edge disadvantage becomes 3 Edge;
•• a 2-3 Edge disadvantage is cancelled out.
ŠŠ you add +1 to the value of a Tool, not cumulative with the bonus
from Guidance.
Difficulty 4:
“Getting Some Help”
Difficulty 5:
“Weaponizing Anchors”
It is a difficulty 5 miracle to strengthen the powers of a wondrous “This?” I said, fingering a long and delicate
blade.
Anchor for an action, stretching them and often giving them the ability
to operate on metaphors, miracles, and abstractions. Ordinary Anchors “Ah, that one is fine,” he said. “It will cost
you your soul.”
have no “power” to strengthen but you may bless them with good fortune
I frowned, set it carefully back upon the
and the same good timing possessed by Powers at Aspect 3.
wall, and walked to another. The metal
You may then was dark and sang with Envy; emerald
patterns trickled down the blade like the
Š unleash that power, as with difficulty 3 miracles; flow of blood. “This?” I asked, and looked
at him again.
Š declare that the Anchor uses that power to aid you, as with dif-
ficulty 4 miracles; or “That one,” he said, slowly, “I will pay you
my soul to take.”
Š declare that the Anchor uses that power to wound (inflicts an un-
—from Viridian, by Emily Chen, writing on the
desired effect on) something or otherwise disrupt the status quo. topic of Miraculous Weapons
X LI I
Belle
Carte
r is t h
I
her v e
ariou
in ph s Anc Power of
ysica hors Cont
l form by tra e x t. S
up in . F p p i n g co he m
a rop o r e x ncept a kes
or go e wit ampl s or id
od fo h se v e , h er de
r t u e n k nots. stiny ea s
of he
r dest ne, she cu W he is loc
k ed
t urne iny in ts on n she
d her to t e k no needs
ba c k way a he world; t and
r e leases
luck
g a in, t
the e
to the
o she ti hen, once some
nd of ther end. es the
s e v ere
event
s hav
aroun the Th She c e
d her ird A l a i ms d bit
neck; ge i n to ha of rop
su re on th the je v e capt u e
5. I wel s
Carte f you find i s ba s
is w e he we re d
r’s tre yours a ssign a rs
lestis a s u re el f t r her T
Ienar sy apped
i Nam ou may ap in rea-
believ
es he ika-in peal t side one o
strict r s elf to f o r aid; o her Sis f Bel l
ly me be Be the L ter C e
c er t a
i n ly i
tapho
rical /
lle C
arter’s a d y Nam ae-
demo nter v soc ia cons ika-in
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. ca n
Be l l
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rt e r
214
You can use some wondrous Anchors as weapons at lower levels, but if you
don’t have this level’s ability to include the act of targeting and wounding
someone in the miracle, miraculous combat will give you a lot of trouble.
Difficulty 6:
“Weaving Destiny”
“Imperial Miracles”
Treasure Difficulties
(Example)
Treasure Difficulties
(Summary)
MP
“To end the suffering of my people,” declared Every Power starts with 5 MP associated with each Attribute —
Terrence, “I shall sacrifice my own life.”
“Or,” Emma pointed out, “you could just use ŠŠ 5 Aspect MP (AMP)
miraculous power.”
Terrence looked embarrassed. “Yes. Or that!” ŠŠ 5 Domain MP (DMP)
—from Undocumented History, by Walden Fargo
ŠŠ 5 Persona MP (PMP)
ŠŠ 5 Treasure MP (TMP)
You can buy additional MP for character points; each character point
you spend buys you 1 extra MP of all four types. (That is, one character
point buys you 4 MP in total, divided evenly among the Attributes.)
During the course of play, you will spend MP at a sometimes
frightening clip, and you aren’t guaranteed to get them back until the
The Bernièrian heresy conflates certain
next story begins. But all hope is not lost! The HG can give you extra
notions of God and the Devil. According
to its proponents, Creation is inherently MP or an early MP refresh, and for any of the following reasons.
inimical to God. He sacrificed His free-
dom in the act of making it and now lies
immured and helpless at the very center of
existence—which is to say, at the core of
the Earth. He has, in essence, created His The “Breath” of MP
own Hell and His own Fall. The answer
to the problem of evil is simple: suffering
is the escape valve built into the fabric
Every scene where you’re facing off against a serious, meaningful
of Creation. Each moment of heartache
or pain eats away at the substance of the antagonist will give you one “breath” of MP — 1 MP in each
Lord’s prison, eroding the stone fabric Attribute, up to a maximum of your starting level. You will also get
of the world and releasing bits of holy this breath in any scene where you find out for the first time about a
essence—wisdom, compassion, and the
major difficulty or problem in your future. In short the HG gives you
sense of the sacred—through tiny channels
in the porous rock. this breath, up to once per scene, any time they or a fellow PC decides
—from A Catalog of Modern Magic, by Eric Optera to make trouble for you.
219
The lord of the Janni had a thousand
Bonds, Afflictions, and gifts to give the mortals that pleased him,
and ten thousand vengeances to carry
Tending to Your Estate out. Each had its own peculiar require-
ments, and many needed regular atten-
tion; but he did not keep these things in
memory. Each morning as he woke, his
servant would draw back the curtain
Are your Bonds or Afflictions in trouble, or giving you trouble? before his bed and present the Janni lord
Awesome! This can get you more MP. with chilled grapes and cheese, and the
Doing cool things to honor the Properties of your Estate? That lord would say, “What is on my sched-
ule for today?” And his servant might
can give you MP too.
say, “Vengeance against the city of Shenu
Tawy, that displeased you.”
MP from Bonds, Afflictions, and tending to your Estate goes to an
“Is that not yet complete?” asked the lord of
Attribute of your choice. This can increase your MP pools past your the Janni, and his servant would say—as
starting level. he always said at such times—“It is grow-
ing close, my lord. It is growing close.”
—from Bowling for Magic Rings,
by Keiko Takemori
Gifts
You may access effects up to that level, but only with regards to that Focus.
Active Immortality
Here’s an example Gift to build using this system.
Let’s say that you want your character to be immortal. Not the
passive, “I can’t die” sort of immortality, or even the “I’m
really good at not dying” sort, since those are better handled
through Bonds and Afflictions, but the active “Whatever
it is, I can take it. Reflexively. Shrug it off. And just keep
on coming.” kind of immortality.
The kind that lets you declare, “I defend.” against any
sort of attack.
The kind that can maybe get out-miracled, sure. The
kind where if someone explodes a small sun in front of
your face, you might have to spend some MP or take a
moment’s breather to recover. The kind where you’ve got this nagging
fear that maybe a universe-ending incident would be too much for you
to take. But also the kind that makes it clear that you laugh at nukes
and poisons, and that you aren’t so sure that you wouldn’t survive the
death of the universe, that you couldn’t handle being torn apart in
a reality vortex or having all of Hell shrunk down into a knife and
stabbed through your heart —
That kind of immortality would be a Gift.
223
Gift Base Cost
The base cost for your Gift, in Character Points, is the miracle level
you’ve chosen.
If you want to pick a miracle level that’s higher than what you
need, in order to win miraculous contests, you can, but we’re not going
to do that in our sample Gifts.
So you want to be immortal?
Well, a Persona 3 miracle of True Love might do it (“True Love
lives forever”).
Or some sort of Treasure 6 Laughter-based anti-death serum
(“anti-death serum is the best medicine.”)
But we’re going to go with a Domain 6 miracle over You.
The idea is that something’s about to happen to you. And maybe
it’s just a nuke or a knife. Or maybe it’s something subtle and clever
that you’d have a hard time defending against. But that doesn’t matter.
Your active immortality kicks in. It steps up to the plate and says, I
defend (You).
And you can smile at the HG, and say, “That bad thing isn’t going
to happen.”
This has a base cost of 6 Character Points.
Strike
You may buy Strike for your Gift. It costs 1 point per point of Strike
(max +7). This is cumulative with Strike from other sources — whether
you buy Strike for your Gift here or not, you can spend MP or invoke
a Bond to apply more Strike to its effects in play.
We are only going to buy Strike for two of the sample Gifts —
and only there because they are certain to go up against Auctorita. We
intend Strike to be a rare and amazing bonus you can buy for a Gift,
not a part of the default package.
224
Activation
Next decide how you activate the Gift. Does it cost MP? (And if so,
from which Attribute?) Does it use a miraculous action? Or does it just
happen automatically when it should?
Any miracle that you can sustain without using an action or sustained
action slot is automatic.
Any miracle you can invoke reflexively should be automatic as well.
So you want to be immortal?
That sounds like it’s automatic. You have a set of sustained
defensive/protective miracles going on, or a set of miracles that invoke
themselves automatically to defend you. That costs +1 Character Point,
bumping our current cost for immortality up to 7 Character Points.
Area of Effect
Next decide the area that the Gift can affect. Is it personal? Does it
affect one nearby target? Does it affect the local area? Or can it take
effect anywhere and everywhere?
Aspect-based Gifts
For example, if you have a Gift of Aspect 5-level Skill: Martial Arts —
ŠŠ +1 helps you meditate, say wise things, know martial arts lore, do
acrobatics, use inner power to keep warm, and also do martial arts; “Great King, I present to you a sorcerer
ŠŠ-1 might just let you do martial arts; from the east, who can speak to beasts,
ŠŠ-2 might just give you a set of powerful moves; turn stone into fire, and dance on a bal-
anced knife.”
ŠŠ-3 might give you, say, “the Dragon Kick,” which you can use at an
effective Aspect 5. “Magnificent talents,” admitted the King,
“ but manifestly impractical.”
—from Far Serendip, by Jen Hogan
Domain-based Gifts
For example, if you have the Gift of Domain 4 Lesser Creation, Sum-
moning, or Animation of Radio Sets —
Treasure-based Gifts
You are still limited to Treasure miracles up to the level of effect chosen.
For example, if you have a level-6 Treasure Gift to use My Stolen
Abhorrent Weapon —
ŠŠ +1 means that the Weapon has a power like “bend events to my will”
ŠŠ-1 means the Weapon has a power like “slow things down”
ŠŠ-2 means the Weapon has a power like “cut through miracles”
ŠŠ-3 means the Weapon has powers like “cut the soul and not the
flesh,” and you can’t guide or possess it or use it as a mystic link.
227
Active Immortality
So you want to be immortal?
The standard build for active immortality covers just about any
Major Preservation of the Self you’d care to name. We’re not going to
leave anything out; you even need the “strengthen and nurture” effect
to heal any wounds you do get with exceptional speed, survive without
food and water, and generally keep you energetic no matter what goes
on.
This brings the cost up to 5 Character Points.
Rarity
Finally, Gifts that the HG decides are comparatively rare among
Powers — possessed by less than 10% of the Noble population — cost
1 extra point.
Immortality now costs 6 Character Points, and the costing for it
is done!
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
Self Full
6 (Domain) Automatic No
only flexibility
6 CPs +1 -3 +1 +1 6 CPs
Common Gifts
Elemental
[1 CP]
See Shapeshifter, below.
Elusive
[1 CP]
You’re really hard to land a miraculous effect on — you shed mental
and transformative influence with ease. The inhuman beauty of Angels,
Excrucians, and the Glorious won’t faze you. Attempts to curse you with
229
hiccups or turn you into a dream don’t take! Basically you have a very
strong ability to be yourself despite attempts to enchant or enthrall you.
This common Gift is a Lesser Preservation of the Self.
Eternal X LI V
[3 CP]
This is
You can ignore any physical and environmental condition short of gross a Power
who may
physical injury — and even then, you don’t really get hurt, since you can
randomly
ignore the shock and pain and such, your performance just degrades. take your
If you can survive the first few seconds, you might even manage to stuff to
help complete
stabilize your condition after a beheading or dismemberment. You’re stle/
her gigantic ca
basically a self-sustaining system, living off of miraculous energy rather mod er n ar tw or k,
than food, water, air, or anything like that. You do not age. the Milliped of
g.
Human Striv in
This common Gift is a Major Preservation of the Self. If you pr eten d
Example: Daniel is a clay statue brought to life by an you are giv-
Imperator. His body looks like flesh, but it’s not! ing it to her
voluntarily she
may offer you
Miracle adequate
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total more than
Level n in return.
compensatio
Power who
Compre- She is a strange gates
6 (Domain) Automatic Self only Yes nowhere, investi
hensive appeared out of ns orts with
treason, and co
6 CPs +1 -3 -1 3 CP Imperators for La nd s Beyond
s from the
bizarre creature s, we gi ve her the
ese reas on
Creation; for th
Elusive Gift.
Flight
[1 CP] eS
Su perlSetZ u pAy
A n n A be l
You can fly!
This is a pretty common Gift. If you want to have wings or a
jetpack, you can buy that with a Treasure miracle —
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
3 (Treasure) Automatic Self only One trick Yes
3 CPs +1 -3 -3 1 CP
This has the advantage that your wings are always there, and always
active, so you can use mundane and Aspect actions to soar the skies.
230
If you just telekinetically fly yourself around, you can buy that as
XLV a Domain-based Lesser Animation of Self —
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Domain) Simple Self only One trick Yes
4 CPs -1 -3 -3 1 CP
Both of these Gifts have plenty of room for customization and improve-
ment. For instance, if you want self-motivated wings that can yank you
out of the way of danger and sustain long periods of flight without using a
sustained miraculous action, you can upgrade the Treasure Gift to level 4
or the Domain Gift to automatic without changing their final cost.
often trying to
Mr. Ordina is a mad scientist who is
steal money or take over cities.
He is
He
not
seem
mad
s mad. He
and he is not
Glorious
talks as if he were a god.
a god. Rather he is a hum an who cut the wing s off [2 CP]
Powe r and grafted them to his back. Later
of a dead
ular attach-
miraculous power crawled up the musc You can inspire an incredible passion in other people. You turn on an
form ing him into something
ments and started trans
else, something that can oper ate on the mira culous aura or change your appearance and bam — suddenly you are so beau-
ce to talk to
scale and also fly. If you have the chan tiful no one would ever hurt you, so terrifying you could rout an army,
for conv incin g him to
him there is a $50,0 00 reward
Thal asseu s of Locu s Para siel. or so subtly amazing that even the Excrucians and the Angels will give
meet with the Piscator
you the honor you think your due.
This common Gift is a Major Creation of Emotion.
Ha rk án y Or di na Example: Helen of Troy had this.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
7 (Domain) Simple Local One trick Yes
7 CPs -1 -1 -3 2 CPs
Once, a man was so well-loved that he set
the fields ablaze and the peasants didn’t
mind.
Then he killed all the animals, and gave
his folk dust to eat, and they didn’t mind.
Immutable (aka Practically Eternal)
[1 CP]
Then he dirtied the water with blood from
his wars, and they didn’t mind.
This is the weaker form of the Eternal Gift. You cope with environmen-
Then they tortured him slowly to death tal and physical conditions really well, and you age really slowly, and you
on the Stone Wheel, and when his heirs
asked the peasants why, they said, “We
don’t need much food or water or sleep, but you can’t endure forever.
thought he liked that sort of thing.” This common Gift is a Lesser Preservation of the Self.
—from Parables for Our Modern Age,
by Jackie Robinson Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
Compre-
3 (Domain) Automatic Self only Yes
hensive
3 CPs +1 -3 -1 1 CP
231
Shapeshifter There once was a lie that took human
[1-3 CP] form—for lies can do that, if one does not
watch them close. He became a man glori-
ous and golden, and along the course of his
If your Avatar is based on werewolves or vampires or a dragon or something, life, he earned many a woman’s love. All
you may want to have one or two alternate shapes. This is based on a Lesser of them he left shattered, for lies are feck-
less and unfaithful and untrue. There was
Enchantment of the Wolf or some other Estate appropriate to the form or set
one, though — the eighteenth? The twen-
of forms you can take. If you want to be able to turn into almost anything tieth?— who kindled a genuine love in
this Gift will cost double — triple if you literally can make yourself into his heart; a love that made him ache, that
anything. By default you can do incomplete shapeshifting with this Gift, made him mad, that filled his ears with
the sound of bells. He could have been
adding some quality of (e.g.) the Wolf to yourself instead of changing
happy with her, he thought, but it could
forms completely. This Gift is purchased as “automatic” to allow reflexive never be; for if he told her that he loved
invocation during other actions. her, as he had told the others, the truth of
Example: many Powers have a “spirit animal” that they like to his words would overcome him; and in
that moment he would cease to be.
turn into from time to time.
—from Conceptual Zoology, by Keiko Takemori
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Persona) Automatic Self only Limited Yes
1 CP
4 CPs +1 -3 -2
(x1, x2, or x3)
If you focus this Gift on your own Estate, it’s called the “Elemental”
Gift. For example, the Power of Magnetism could use Lesser Enchant- X LV I
ment of Magnetism to transform themselves into a field of magnetic
Th is is a Powe
force. of and su rv iv in
r constr ucted ou
t
g pr incipal ly on
Example: the Power of Mt. St. Helens uses Lesser Enchantment pent-up rage. Sh
e may sta lk
of the Volcano (self-only) to transform into a lava dragon. through your lif
e intent on
some mission.
Ir ritate her in
smal l ways and
she may
drag you into on
going
The Sovereign’s Gift events as a sour
of sustenance;
ce
[1 CP] due to her pe-
cu lia r code of
honor, this is
A large number of Powers have low Domain but the ability to substantia lly sa
fer
animate and control the motion of their Estate. This costs them 1 than yield ing to
or
MP, which is, presumably, less than it otherwise would. actively opposin
g her.
Dur ing momen
This common Gift is a Lesser Animation of (your Estate). of catharsis sh
ts
e
is emptied of
Miracle her rage and
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level must rely on
4 (Domain) Normal Global Limited Yes bodi ly reserves
to su rv ive; for
4 CPs -2 +1 -2 1 CP this
reason we give
her
the Immutable
and not
the Eterna l G
ift.
Ms. Atsu ko
I k A dA
232
Uncommon
Gifts
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Domain) Simple Local Limited No
4 CPs -1 -1 -2 +1 1 CP
X LV III
Gatemaker
[1-6 CP]
If you’re near the entrance to a Chancel or other secret place, you
can make a large gate that leads inside. A small army can pass
through this portal, and it opens on a reasonably central place
within. Gates made with this Gift typically last either one scene
or one night and one day.
This is a Lesser Creation of Passageways.
Th is is the Powe
r of Gates. He
w ill tr y to recr
Since the boundary of a Chancel is represented by an
you to help assa uit
ult E xcrucian
duty, he ex plai sanctums; it’s
his Auctoritas (as discussed on pg. 246), we’re going to recommend
ns, to organize
such offensives
a regu la r basis
and he can alwa on that you buy permanent Strike for this Gift. We will not, however,
shock troops. If ys use ex pendab
you ta ke him up le recommend an amount — that depends on how willing you will be
have your life on this prepar
casual ly throw e to
cause; if you su
rv ive, un likely
n away, albeit
in a good to spend MP opening the gate and how relevant you expect your
as that is, you
receive a substa
ntia l rewa rd. R w ill Bonds to be.
helps in such ca ick ’s Gatemak
mpa ig ns. er Gift
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Domain)
Simple Local Limited No
+ 0-5 Strike
4-9 CPs -1 -1 -2 +1 1-6 CPs
R ick o’ Su m
m eR
Helpful Estate
[5-9 CP]
With this Gift, your Estate automatically and reflexively performs some
kind of miracle whenever it has the notion that doing so will help you
I noticed that as Sharon walked in the out. Your Estate isn’t super-smart in this and can face decision paralysis
woods, rose petals blew down from the if there are a billion possible things that could be helpful — for instance,
wind to land before her feet. How many if you’re the Power of Motion, you’ll have to make it fairly clear what
miles they must have come! I thought, for
kind of motion would be nice. Also remember that it wants to be helpful,
there were no rose trees in these woods. I
marveled at her charms. not to “obey commands” — although you could purchase this Gift as
—from Earth Stories, compiled by Édouard Guy some sort of command-based thing instead, if you would like!
235
Here are the standard forms of Helpful Estate —
You don’t strictly have to pick your own Estate for this Gift, but I’ve
never heard of a Power with this level of reflexive control over any
Estate but their own.
Example: Opposing the Power of Fear is scary. That’s his reflexive
lesser creations at work!
Miracle
Level
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total IL
Full
1-5 (Domain) Automatic Global No
flexibility
1-5 CPs +1 +1 +1 +1 5-9 CPs
Invisibility
[1 CP]
You can turn visible or invisible at will. Having a bad hair day? People
criticizing your work in public? Bam! Invisible! But wait! There’s
someone who would love you forever if only they could see your face?
Bam! You can be visible again.
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Destruction of Visual Images.
Example: Frederick Bogey’s a voyeur and a bogeyman; you never This Power is a voyeur and a bogeyman
with the In-
visibility Gift. He has a preternatu
know when he’s around and he likes it that way. ral dramatic tim-
ing and a keen interest in reference
s to himself, so
there’s a good chance he’s watching
you right now.
Miracle Say his name, and he might put his
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total hand on your
Level shou lder, or run a fingernail down your
side — or
5 (Domain) Simple Self only One trick No not, of course. You can never really
know whether
5 CPs -1 -3 -3 +1 1 CP he’s there or not, and he likes it that
way.
Magical Symbol
[1 CP]
A magical symbol worked into the palm of your hand blesses those
who see it with improved health, luck, and joie de vivre. Didrika 7 and
Gordon Ostler have this exact Gift; dozens of other Powers have some
variation on this basic idea.
You could buy this uncommon Gift as a Persona-based Blessing (as
shown below) or as some sort of Treasure.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
1 (Persona) Automatic One Person One trick No
1 CPs +1 -2 -3 +1 1 CP
237
Mysterious
[5 CP]
You’re really hard to figure out — there’s a veil of mystery over you and
everything you do. Anyone trying to investigate you finds ambiguous
The Babel hat of Maxwell Mann
evidence at best and mocking notes at worst. Records and even will pierce the subtle veils of the world.
memories alter themselves to keep you safe. Its weight will settle comfortably upon
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Creation of Mystery. Mann’s brow. The hooked tooth at the
top will bite a hand in Heaven. Max-
Miracle well Mann’s third eye will open and he
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total will look upwards towards his God. But
Level
he will find that the God he served has
4 (Domain) Automatic Global Limited No
long forsaken Heaven.
4 CPs +1 +1 -2 +1 5 CP
Ah! what blind and hundred-handed
beast is this that he sees then?
It crawls, it skirls, it scurries through the
Natural Weapon endless land of Heaven. It hunts as it has
hunted for the Earth and its life below.
[1 CP] And seeing it, Maxwell Mann will
howl; and bitten by his hat, the creature
You have a poisonous bite or you can spit acid or you have a nasty horn. too! It will writhe in its pain and it will
This is usually purchased as a wondrous Focus — smile its most secret, terrible smile. Then
in one great skitter, like a centipede of
Miracle angels, it will descend the long arc of his
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total hat, and if Mann could toss the hat aside,
Level
then it would fall, and all thereafter
3 (Treasure) Automatic One Person One trick No
would be well …
3 CPs +1 -2 -3 +1 1 CP
But he will not. Oh, he will not; and that
is how the world will end.
—from 24 Finales, by Rannen Yedidyah
But you can also purchase it as a Lesser Creation of Poison/Acid/Nasty
Wounds —
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Domain) Simple Local One trick No
4 CPs -1 -1 -3 +1 1 CP
This latter variation is local in case you need to spray acid over multiple
targets or something of that sort.
Example: Nephele Nikolaidhis has, I am assured, a paralytic bite.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
9 (Domain) Automatic Local Limited No
9 CPs +1 -1 -2 +1 8 CPs
L
Petrify
This is one of the three Gorgons, an
er. If she focus es
intensely beau-
her attention
[1 CP]
tiful immortal Pow
and sees you clear ly, you will turn to stone.
on you
so you are safe unless You can turn some set of things to stone, most likely by looking at
Fort unately she is nearsighted,
she puts her glasses on or squin ts.
them.
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Enchantment of the Stone.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Persona) Simple One person One trick No
4 CPs -1 -2 -3 +1 1 CP
Purify
[1 CP]
You can purify something, casting out all poisons. Or (for an extra
point, changing “One Trick” to “Limited Use”) casting out all
poisons, diseases and demonic influences.
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Destruction of Corrupting
Influences.
Example: Jason Sangrieve is like a unicorn; he can cleanse
St heno
anything with a touch. He visited a Nobiliser fanfic BBS and all
the porn dissolved away!
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
5 (Domain) Simple Local One Trick No
5 CPs -1 -1 -3 +1 1 CP
When you have scoured the greed from a
man, and the treachery, and the folly, and
the ignorance, what you have left is pure.
—Neriahan saying
239
Unblemished Guise
[1 CP]
You can shroud your miraculous nature, appearing to be human.
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Creation of Illusion.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Domain) Simple Local One trick No
4 CPs -1 -1 -3 +1 1 CP
Wayfinder
[1 CP]
You can tell when you’re near a Chancel, and when you’re getting closer
to or farther from its entrances, and — with a bit of Strike — how the
Chancel is laid out inside. You get a feel for what kind of place it is, a
sense of, e.g., “disturbing” or “beautiful” or “strange,” as soon as you’re
close enough to sense it.
This uncommon Gift is a Lesser Divination of Hidden Places.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
2 (Domain) Automatic Local One trick No
2 CPs +1 -1 -3 +1 1 CP
The nightmare world had been waiting
for seven years, hidden in a flake of paint
high on the office wall. No one touched it.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
6 (Domain)
Simple Self only Limited No
+ 0-5 Strike
6-11 CPs -1 -3 -2 +1 1-6 CP
240
Monstrous Gifts
T hese Gifts are included for use by allies and antagonists, but a
Power could take them as well.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
4 (Aspect) Simple Local Comprehensive No
4 CPs -1 -1 -1 +1 2 CP
241
Paramount Strength We did not like Mother Catherine.
[1 CP] We were playing, the first day, when she
arrived. We did not want to stop playing
and greet the new governess. Mother
You are astonishingly strong — particularly given a generally low
Catherine asked us once to stop, politely.
Aspect level. She asked a second time, with a burning
This uncommon Gift is an Aspect 4 miracle of Skill: Killer. red anger in her cheeks. The third time,
she snatched Brian from the floor and
Miracle very economically garroted him.
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level “Today you begin your lessons,” she said, in
Compre the suddenly quiet room. “The first lesson
4 (Aspect) Simple One target No
hensive is this: I can strike at any time.”
4 CPs -1 -2 -1 +1 1 CP
We did not like Mother Catherine.
She was too much stronger than were we.
—from Young Meredith, by Emily Chen
Soul-Carving Sword
[1 CP]
Spending an MP and cutting a miracle with your sword, you damage
the miracle-user’s underlying Gift or Attribute. This action opposes
the miracle and all other uses of the relevant Trait as long as you
sustain the miraculous action that “cut” that Trait.
This rare Gift is a level 6 miracle of Treasure.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
6 (Treasure) Normal One target Limited No
6 CPs -2 -2 -2 +1 1 CP
World-Breaker’s Hand
[15 CP]
Excrucian Strategists can destroy practically anything with a wave of
their hand — even ideas, emotions, and events.
This rare Gift is a Lesser Destruction of Any Estate.
Miracle
Invocation Range Utility Common? Total
Level
5 (Domain) Simple Local Full No
5*3=15
5 CPs -1 -1 +1 +1
CPs
242
243
Your Chancel,
Revisited
Banes
The world doesn’t really like having
Chancels ripped out of it. This sometimes
results in Banes — horrors that haunt the
Chancel, making trouble for its Powers
and Imperator, and returning to life if
D
they are ever killed. Banes usually have
3-10 points of Afflictions, the Durant and
Elusive Gifts, and a handful of Passions
uring, before, or after character creation, each group of play- and Skills.
ers should design their Avatars’ Chancel — the secret temple-world Players might find it worthwhile
of their Imperator. to define a Bane or two during Chancel
creation — to make them part of the story
Each Chancel is a pocket dimension with its own rules.
of the place, as with “King” Lot on pg. 67.
It starts as a place on Earth — usually a city or city-sized region, Trouble’s certain to visit your Chancel
but potentially as small as a building or as large as a subcontinent. sooner or later, so why not help to choose
This place gets wrapped up in the Imperator’s magic, estranged from its form?
the Earth, forgotten by it, and transformed into the kind of world the
244
Imperator dreams up. The paths in and out become fairy paths, diffi-
cult to travel unless you know exactly how they work. The people and
The Cost of a Chancel places of the Chancel warp. They often, but not always, forget who and
An Imperator must speak the miracle of
what they used to be.
Chancel creation for 100 days before it
forms. For this there is a cost. Typically
that cost is one human life on each of those
100 days. Imperators can also spend from
their own vitality or drain power from
Theme
Actuals (pg. 297) in various unholy ways.
It is pretty awful.
It is the pretty awful part.
Start by deciding what kind of world it is.
Now, you can pretty much make any kind of Chancel world that
you like. Do you want wizards and dragons? That’s fine. Robots? Zap
guns? Nanomachine swarms? That’s all fine too. Do you think there
should be three suns in the sky? Do you think drowned pirates should
carouse freely in the Bay? Do you want passels of flying jellyfish to
drift through the sunset sky? You can have that.
It’s even possible, if the players totally can’t agree, to divide the
Chancel into regions that behave differently. A light world and a shad-
ow world, a northern realm of retro-future punk and a southern realm
of magic realism, floating cities over an abyss of awful horrors, what-
ever kind of division works and lets everyone be happy. But you need
to think of something.
Properties
You can stop here and make a bullet-pointed list of 3-7 “rules” for the
Chancel.
These are in the same vein as Estate Properties or the properties
of the Border Mythic, Ordinary World, Evil World, Heaven, or Hell.
They’re things that express the Chancel’s metaphysical essence.
These should be considered tentative for the first few sessions, so
if you like you can skip formalizing them at all until later in the game.
245
Entrances and Exits
The Chancel of Dorian Griffith has a sea
Decide how you get in and out! of parts—living parts—ears, eyes, arms,
legs, feet, hands, even a few unmention-
Chancels may … able organs. When Dorian is hurt, the
sea roils; the parts perk up. Listening to
the sound of some hidden song, they sort
ŠŠ have a small set of hidden entrances and exits in a single geo- the best part from the vasty sea and cast it
graphical area on Earth; out across the world to replace the wound-
ed segment of his flesh.
—from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation,
ŠŠ have paths that open to many different places on Earth — a tacti-
by Jasprite Sherrard
cal drawback and a practical convenience;
Many of a Chancel’s entrances and exits are “mythic,” that is, they
require behavior or understanding more than they require following a
visible and obvious road.
It is also worth thinking about transportation in general —
How do you get around?
Most Chancels with the technology will have a small private
airfield and an aerial path so that the Powers can fly directly from the The Erus
Chancel to destinations around the world. However, if the Chancel is An “Erus” is a kind of half-Power, a Noble
more of a chariots-and-cobblestones kind of place, you may need to whose abilities only function inside the
arrange for large bank accounts and a fleet of Earth-parked vehicles Chancel. They have no Estate, but may
have a pseudo-Estate of “things of the
for your transportation needs.
Chancel” for use with Domain miracles.
If you want an Erus in your Chancel,
you can have one at no cost. They’re help-
ful, sure, but only when the Chancel is
threatened — and, since they only have
power inside the Chancel, they tend to
compensate by stepping on other Powers’
interests therein.
246
Cool Stuff
Important places of power and cool local servitors are generally obtained
LI I through the Treasure Attribute. That said, if you want some neat things
to be around that you aren’t explicitly buying as Anchors, feel free — you
can fill up a Chancel with all kinds of cool toys, people, pets, and places.
In general these have a modestly understated dharma; that is, if you
ever find yourself wondering why your covey of mad scientists isn’t out
fixing the Chancel’s problems, or why your endless hordes of mythical
monsters can’t seem to keep your enemies out, or why your incredibly
experienced heroes mostly hang out tending bar and guarding shops,
it’s because their ability to cause effectual results is minimal without the
will of a Power or Imperator tangling up inside them.
ppêkâ, the
ancel of Ebrôt A
In the ab an do
la st remnants of
ne d Ch
a criminal ju st ice
system have
ha nism of social
Miracles and the Chancel
ce di sso lv ed . The only mec
long sin societ y judges
l is ta st e. S pe cifically, when
cont ro ly bat-winged
ef ul, the unsain
a person di stast wn upon them In your Chancel, you receive a 3 MP discount on miracles (to a
Chancel flock do
mon sters of the
away. minimum cost of 0 MP.) Your Imperator receives a similar benefit.
and carr y them n, by Jaspr ite Sh
eatio
er ra rd
—from A Tour
ist ’s Guide to Cr This is not cumulative with other such discounts unless so
stated.
If you want to be extremely competent in your Chancel, we
recommend that you take a small amount of Secondary Domain
in the pseudo-Estate “things of my Chancel;” even one or two
points, combined with the discount above, will offer you a large
array of potent options in play.
Chancel Boundaries
Decide how powerful the border of your Chancel is.
Most Chancels have a boundary that counts as a level 1-5 Auctoritas
(pg. 109-110). It stops miracles from acting across that boundary.
The stronger this Auctoritas, the harder it is for enemies to strike into
the Chancel, but the harder it will also be for you to act on the outside
world from inside the Chancel or on the Chancel from the outside world.
You can choose whatever level of Auctoritas you like, or default to
“2” if you can’t agree or don’t want to think about it.
247
Your Imperator,
Revisited
248
Imperator Creation
During, before, or after character creation, each group of players
should design their Avatars’ Imperator.
Start by coming to a consensus on the Imperator type.
Write this down in the big circle in the center of the Imperator
character sheet (pg. 368). This’ll be
Š Angel
Š Devil / Fallen Angel
Š Magister of the Light
Š Magister of the Dark
Š Magister of the Wild
Š True God or
Š Aaron’s Serpent
249
Then each player talks a little bit about what they think that Impera-
tor would be like and what they want their Avatar’s relationship with
the Imperator to be like. The HG also talks a bit about what kind of
Imperator would be fun for the HG to play through. The HG takes a
phrase or sentence from each player’s discussion, including their own,
and puts it in a neighboring bubble.
For example, a three-player game might wind up with:
ŠŠ Devil
ŠŠ gives some sort of power
ŠŠ kind of metal
ŠŠ like “the Devil went down to Georgia”
ŠŠ a red-head, of course.
It’s up to the HG what to pick, but the idea is that it’s an anchor be- Their numbers are countless. There are
tween the Imperator and the discussion — that there’s a link between trillions of them. They are roaches. They
are the eyes of God. From the pipes, from
each player’s views and desires and the truth.
the shadows, from behind the refrigerator,
they watch. They judge. They are shielded
by the glory of the lord. It takes great force
Angels to kill them. Yet humans manage, snuff-
ing several roaches every second; and with
each roach that dies, a star goes out.
Under “Angel” in that central bubble write — —from The Eyes of God, by Rannen Yedidyah
ŠŠ awesome
ŠŠ demanding
Devils
Under “Devil” in that central bubble write —
ŠŠ wounded
ŠŠ always with you
250
If you look around to see if your Devil is there, they will be. They might
be just a voice in your head, if you’re in a crowd, or they might walk right
up and sit down next to you, if you’re alone and need someone to talk to.
Just look and there they’ll be.
Your Devil will mostly just listen to you. They won’t say much, and
what they do say will mostly be to keep you talking or acknowledge
what they’ve heard.
251
It’s not that they don’t want to talk. They’re just not really very
good at it.
If they let themselves do too much of the talking, see, they’re likely
to get bitter and morose about their eternal torment in Hell, or figure
out just the right thing to say to make your heart break in two and say
it before they can stop themselves, or start hurting people inattentively
as part of demonstrating abstract points. So they don’t let themselves
talk much. But they’ll be there.
They are broken, twisted, suffering creatures, and it’d take a
Project (pg. 341) to help with that at all.
ŠŠ idealistic
ŠŠ soulless
Your Magister of the Light will always give you an audience. It may
also schedule times to check in with you, visiting you on midsummer’s
eve, or every day at noontime, or on an erratic schedule arranged when
it gave you your most recent assignment.
This is not as useful as it could have been.
They look away from you. They speak, but their words are not on
point. They apprehend facts and dangers, but not the subtler meanings
of the world; a private vision consumes them, and keeps them from
connecting with what is.
Still, their plans are deep, subtle, and more practical than you
might credit. If you have hard data for them, you might hear them
muse upon it; and from that musing, learn more than they would tell
you otherwise about the world, their plans, and your place in them.
The only thing that can break through their shell and make them
aware of the limitations of their perspective is Destiny (pg. 341) —
spent, or accumulated, on a Project to reach them or transform yourself.
ŠŠ choices
ŠŠ hungers
252
Your Magister of the Dark tempts you. It pushes you. It challenges you.
It is unpredictable, a mad experience arising from nothingness, driving
you to trouble, then fading randomly away.
It likes to make things interesting. It likes it when things are out
of control, wild, chaotic, mad. It’s a trickster, a pusher, a drunkard, and
a rogue.
Your Magister of the Dark can be awesomely kind. You have to
understand that about them. If you are being crushed by the weight of
others’ choices, and not given a chance to share your own — if you’re
being controlled, manipulated, imprisoned, or abused — a Magister
of the Dark will help you, and there won’t be any kind of catch. They
shatter prisons, free slaves, and throw open the doors of psych wards,
and they don’t care about the human justice or injustice of these acts.
They can be awesomely kind, when they’re not making trouble for
you. But they’re not really any better at listening to you than the Light.
They’d like to be, they really would. But in the end the world is
too distracting, and it’s too hard to remember that people are making
meaning with the awesome noises of their lives. Just as with the Light,
the only way to get through to them about the limitations of their per-
spective is Destiny (pg. 341).
253
Magisters of the Wild
Under “Magister of the Wild” in that central bubble write —
ŠŠ absolute egocentricity
ŠŠ justice
Your Magister of the Wild hovers near you. It is constantly visiting you.
It is constantly watching you. It leaves, but it is constantly returning to
you. It will touch you if you allow it. It will run its hands across your
face like a blind person trying to understand you. It will push against
you like it cannot understand how something so close to its soul is not
a part of its body.
On this it will relent, if asked.
It understands that some pieces of itself need space to breathe and
live and grow. But it will always be visiting you, always be watching
you, always helping you in little ways that may or may not make sense
to you, always telling you what it has learned about itself from you and
yourself from it. It will be pleading with you. It will want you to agree
with it. It will be like a numinous, transcendent, thundering infinity
of puppy, desperately hoping that you will approve.
Is this correct? its attitude will ask you, as it shyly transforms the
buildings on your street to a floating mandala in the air. Is this the way
that I should be?
It is possible that you can reach it.
It is not deaf and blind to you in the manner of the Light, nor as
distractible as the Dark. It is possible that your Magister of the Wild
can understand you. It is possible — but your starting points are so
very far away! It is a creature of magical geometry and unfolding law. It
is born into the world like a flower that blooms in nothingness, unfolds
in symmetry, curls back on itself to become its own beginning. It is
mad as the fundamental laws are always mad. It is a living creature but
its life and mind are being are like toys to it, things to be tossed about
and chewed on and considered, rather than made clear.
Thus you will need to bridge the gap between you and the Wild
with a Project (pg. 341) before there is any hope.
True Gods
Under “True God” in that central bubble write —
ŠŠ primordial
ŠŠ intertwined with other things
254
Your True God is deep below you.
It is connected to you — there are strands of it wrapped like
filaments around your soul — but to speak to it you must go deep
below the surface of things. You must descend, you must estrange
yourself from the appearances of things around you, and fall down,
down, down into the mandalas of the world.
It is more likely to communicate with you through impressions
and sensations than words.
This varies.
There are some among the True Gods that have a nature that is
talkative. They are primordial but they are primordial deities, and so we
may fairly say that there is no human capacity that they cannot have and
in fact exceed. They are inclined to speak in the whispering movement
of tendrils and hanging branches, but they can make a better speech
than a human President. They are inclined to devour great spirits for
their sustenance, and not even digest them but integrate them into
255
their own substance, but that doesn’t mean they can’t cook better than
a French chef in the kitchens of the world.
But for the most part they are primal creatures, creatures of bodily
impressions and sensations. For the most part you will get only a gentle
tugging on your perceptions, a sense of rightness or wrongness, and in
terms that are unequivocally opinion.
Or
There is no real hope of making this better. They are not people in that
sense to you. They are able to affect to personhood, if they care to, but
they are gods of the most ancient forms of life.
The only thing you can do to grow in your relationship with a True
God is to take over more of their body with the nodules of spirit that
are your own. The only thing you can do is learn to ride them, as you’d
ride a dragon, as you’d ride history, as a genius demagogue rides the
public, as the ancient wizards rode the storms. You may learn to master
the complex systems of your God, with Destiny (pg. 341), but you will
never make it your lover or your friend.
Some say that history loves the historian.
(Though, watch, I bet a little after publication Ianthe will plop
They point to the great Istoriads, the
down in a nearby chair and say, “You’ll never guess what I heard about massive wormlike spirits of history that
True God X …”) the Bookkeepers are fond of riding when
recording mortal events. “Surely,” they say,
“the Istoriads would not tolerate such use if
New Family
If you add a new player to the game, or if a player is really unhappy
with their Estate and needs a new one, you can redesign the Imperator
A Sovereign’s Survival and add new Powers to the Familia Caelestis as you do.
Guide: How to Handle You don’t need to do this if someone makes a new Avatar with the
Imperators same Estate as their old one.
That’s just continuity.
There are nine rules for successfully man-
aging your Imperator. If you abide by
You’ll only need to change things up if you’re making the Familia
these, health, wealth and happiness are itself into something new. At that point you’ll want to redo the basic
sure to follow. Imperator design, like so.
ŠŠ Rule 1. Remember what your Impera-
The players of established Powers talk about the Imperator and
tor says. There will be a test.
ŠŠ Rule 2. Surprise parties are verboten.
what their relationship to the Imperator has been like. The player of
Important guests may be vaporized. the newly added Power, on the other hand, talks about the relationship
ŠŠ Rule 3. Never tell an Imperator about they want. The HG updates the original bubbles as appropriate and
a problem you can fix, or you’ll have to.
then places a phrase or sentence from the player of the new Power in a
ŠŠ Rule 4. Never tell an Imperator about
a problem you can’t fix, or you’ll have to.
new bubble off the Imperator’s own.
ŠŠ Rule 5. Never ask your Imperator why What does remaking the Familia mean within the world?
they aren’t doing more to help you. In practice, it means “we’re bending the rules a bit for player
They think they are.
convenience.” This is something that can happen, in the world, but it’s
What do you talk to your Imperator about
absurdly rare. Maybe the Imperator has held Estates in reserve until
when (s)he accosts you in the hall? just the right Power came along; or developed an unexpected quality;
ŠŠ Rule 6. Sex, food, and sleep are safe or changed, dramatically, and just as a person may change; or initiated
subjects. You’re supposed to be mortal.
the Power of a dead Imperator into their own mysteries, taking in the
ŠŠ Rule 7. When your Imperator’s eyes
glaze over, it’s safe to stop talking.
shard of their lost peer in the same way a human might graft a dead
friend’s arm onto their back; or, particularly for a True God, swapped
If your Imperator is still paying attention after Estates with some other Imperator through sex.
such a discussion, something is gravely wrong.
It’s really rare, like we’ve said, but it does happen, so you don’t have
ŠŠ Rule 8. Never ask your Imperator
what’s wrong. You’re supposed to know.
to worry about breaking the game thereby.
ŠŠ Rule 9. When in doubt, sneeze. They
don’t understand sneezing. It confuses
them.
257
The Imperators
Orders and
Nobilis
ŠŠ Where is the key to the sixth of the Ravens’ secrets, and what
question does it hold?
The answers are unknown and possibly indefinite. It is from the ten-
sion between question and answer, knowledge and uncertainty, and
truth and the ambiguous that the secrets derive their power.
The Excrucians
277
They are the children of Harumaph — whatever or whomever
Harumaph might be.
They are the reaction of the void against Creation.
They are the enemies of the world, the incarnation of our endings.
The warriors that lead them wear the faces of our dead.
They are the failing of the safety of the world, they are the Atlas is, of course, a myth. There is no
Titan holding up the sky, but only a nine-
dissolution of existence. They are the thing that, because they exist,
year-old child, who has spent time beyond
causes all existence to be tentative and unsure. counting thinking only this: “I shall not
They are Excrucians. break.”
It is one theory, held by many scholars,
They divide into four kinds: the Deceivers, the Warmains, the Mim- that this resolution suffices. It is another
ics, and the Strategists. They ride pale horses. They wield strange and that one day her will shall falter and her
bones snap, and the sky plummet down,
abhorrent weapons. They are the defining and creating terror of this,
and all for the weakness of a child.
the Third Age of our Creation. —from A Catalog of Modern Magic, by Eric Optera
When they came to us the Second Age shattered.
Their swords rang against the gates of Heaven and the gates of
Heaven broke.
They bent their will against the Seal of Time and the Age burst
asunder. The Seal was split. The world cried out. Time rang like a brass
gong. And the silver days of the Second Age were ones that we would
never know again.
Thus far, they slew — no further.
The Angels held a bloody line in Heaven; broke their charge. And
in the Seal of Time, as they went to cut down the last remaining Ages
of our World, the Excrucians met Attaris, the Imperatrix of the Third
Age, the Age that is. Attaris, who showed her face to them and turned
them back, who threw off her shroud and stood revealed to them as
Attaris Ebrôt Appêkā, Magister of the Wild, tutelary spirit of the Age
of Pain.
They dared not kill her, for she was the very War they waged. And
in the bowers of Hell, the Fallen Angel who had worn the latter two
portions of her name — who had held them for her in his being, Ebrôt
Appêkā — dissolved to dust and ash. And why this should happen,
why it should be that Ebrôt Appêkā died, or for that matter why he
lived at all, I do not know.
In the First Age, we lived in harmony.
In the Second Age, we were at war.
It was not until this, the Third Age, the Age of Pain, the Age of
the Excrucian War, that anyone seriously considered the possibility
that the world itself could die; but now we know it likely will.
Though oh — if we should win! If only we should win, and at the
end the world survives and it is Ananda who is the Age!
But listen, and I will tell you of our enemies, and how some of
them I would not mind so much in their victory, while others I despise.
278
Iolithae Septimian
This Deceiver told the seas that they were
salt; and they were thus; and strangled then
the fish of all fresh waters that swam within.
If you see her you must not allow her to
speak. I do not know how you can possibly
prevent it but even if it means your life you
must not allow Iolithae Septimian to speak.
Phasael mery-Harumaph
This Deceiver is as charming as the sun. He
burned the library of Hukkok the Angel;
branded him with those flames; took Huk-
kok’s sigil and his seal and made great mis-
chiefs with them — but Hukkok forgave
him, as everyone else Phasael’s hurt has done.
I cannot save you from being hurt by him,
or from forgiving him, but I can tell you to
forgive yourself for trusting or forgiving him
when you ought not.
Genseric Dace
Generic. Ah, Genseric!
This is a Deceiver who helped compose
this book. I love him for it and I hate him for
it, but I cannot wish it were not so; and you
cannot hope, on that account, that I shall
give away his secrets.
283
Our stories of romance are also stories of
The Warmains conflict; in true love’s bliss, or the mun-
dane wedding of two families, nothing in-
teresting is learned. It may be the reward
or punishment of a soul—to discover the
The Warmains wish to wrestle us. burning blessed unity with a beloved, or
to find oneself trapped in a loveless envi-
They wish to test us, to make us fight them, to make us hate them.
ronment in a family not one’s own. But it
They cast electrons from their orbit to make the protons rage. They is not the lesson. It is not the story, and it
break the symmetry of planets. They spit Flynn Gannary on their is not romance.
blades to make his mother fight. The stories we learn from, the loves worth
His mother! She wasn’t even in the fandom! She was just some old the speaking of, are the loves where to love
lady who seemed more interesting to them than her son! is to make war upon the world, or on the
self. The love that divides, the love that
They tell us that the world is unworthy of unbeing; that only the
shatters, the love that throws order into
best of us deserve to end at their hands. They tell us that the world is turmoil and brings tumult to the Estates
only truly real in its opposition to them — in what it is to the Warmains of this Creation. In struggle we grow,
— and that it has no purpose save as their testing us creates. The world in struggle we witness the echoes of our
growing.
is not a lie but a hypothesis to them: here is something that may show
the Warmains worth. The first intimations that we had, of the
wedding of fire and water, were tidal
They are brutal and focused.
waves and storms; blazes raging across
They are profoundly uninterested in your unwillingness to play the city’s heart; earthquakes as the world
their games of war. They do not accept the refusing of their challenges. began its groaning.
You will lose, and then they will either leave you alone or break you; or That is how you may know
you will win, and they will make it their mission that you should die. That this is a story, not of love, though
And they will love that — you understand. love is there, but of romance.
They will give you a smile that can break your heart before they —from The Wedding of Fire and Water,
by Jackie Robinson
put aside the game and go to kill you. They will not be lashing out in
bitterness. They will be delighted and amazed that they have found
another person worthy of this death. And they love nothing so much
as that delight and that amazement. They love nothing so much as
being impressed by you. They will not think that they are ending you. Game Rules
They’ll talk about it as if they are lifting you up from existence, freeing
you from it, making you a part of something infinitely more worthy — Warmains built as characters have 25-75
Character Points. Their maximum At-
them. If you make a strong enough impression the Warmain will even tribute rating is 7. They are always under
take your face and personality and body type after you die. They will the effect of a level 2 Divine Mantle at no
adapt themselves to the incidentals of your dharma, they will keep your cost in MP. Give them Bonds, Afflictions,
fundamental nature alive by emulating you as they find new people to Passions, and Skills to taste.
Warmains have no Persona Attribute
challenge, hurt, and kill, in honor of you. Because they decided that and do not have a proper Estate. However,
you were just that cool. they may define a pseudo-Estate for use
with Domain miracles; this is normally the
mechanism of their test. The HG may wish
to define Properties for this pseudo-Estate.
Common Gifts include Active Im-
mortality, Fire-breathing, Flight, Glori-
ous, Natural Weapon, Unblemished Guise,
and Worldwalker.
284
Orderic Neustry
This is the Warmain who takes that thing you cling to,
whatever it might be — that central, most important thing
that allows you to live and hang on and fight for yourself
and the world — away from you. And often he’ll cut you
from your gifts and your graces, too, all the best parts of
you, and leave you floundering in the dark, fighting a War-
main when you have nothing to fight him for or with. He
is the exhalation of the void, the center of a whorl of anti-
nature, anti-existence, anti-being; and it is those who can
remake themselves in the middle of that emptiness and find
strength in their own weaknesses whom he embraces, kills,
takes into himself, and removes from the world.
Raginhart Tribunas
This is the Warmain who wields the test of pain. He is a
creature of breaking you by agony unmastered and un-
masterable. It is those who can fight and defeat him no
matter how much it hurts that he has sworn that he will
kill. Fight him, fight him hard, so that he knows you’ll
play his game, but let the pain defeat you in the end. Let
him break you. He’s the one torturer in all the world
who’ll leave you alone for good when that moment comes.
Against Raginhart Tribunas, do not try to win.
Raginhart is a strangely neutral creature. He turns
his tests of agony on other Excrucians as readily as on
the creatures of the world. This is profoundly rare, even
practically unheard of, and seems tied to some sort of
authority he is given or forced to wield. I do not know or
understand the details and I hope I never shall.
Š Domain 4 (Agony)
285
Euphrasia Savinot
This is a Warmain with no interest in testing
you. People are bland and banal to her. Even
Powers are bland and banal to her. She holds
her test against the world itself — she wields
against the world a series of terrible blights,
she washes away truths, she makes things
treacherous to themselves and in general she
seeks to bring the entirety of Creation into a
crucible whose incidents she may judge. Each
of her curses or blights has a “keystone” —
some small, wrong object that serves as the
focus for her curse. Finding that keystone and
shattering it ends the power of her blight.
Teja Heimerich
This Warmain is an anti-sylph, a creature bi-
ased against the element of air; she subverts
the wind, twists reason against itself, cor-
rupts flying creatures to her will, and wears
the cool nothingness of vacuum snug against
her skin. She is the test of surviving without
air, without the subtle and basic continuum
on which we have grown as beings to depend.
Those who may live in that nothingness she
is sworn to extinguish and make her own.
LI V
The Mimics
The Mimics dwell among the Imperators.
They’re like Imperators.
t, They have Estates. They can speak Imperial miracles. They
ed to rule Ligh
imic who seem
This was the M ed A ni m al s. It can even have Chancels and Powers.
Safety, and St uff
Hea lth, Robots, al ly un de rst ood
’t until sh e di ed that people
fin
co ncep-
But at the heart of each Mimic is a horrible twisting secret
wasn led, but a fa lse
at it wa sn ’t th ose things she ru . A nd , to be blasphemy of the void. Genseric tells me that the Excrucians put
th things were
out how those
tion we had ab d a co rp se , th er e’s a
it there — that the Mimics are the shoved-together pieces of dead
body ever foun
honest, since no de rst an d th em yet.
ance we don’t un Imperators, or sacrificed Estates. That the Excrucians couldn’t fix
small but real ch
rld. everything the moment the Imperator died, so instead of “freeing
e her, tell the wo
If you shou ld se [us] from that portion of the lie,” they made a Mimic.
r n
Da h li a T ho
287
There’s nothing the Mimics fear more than letting someone see Creation is inherently finite. To lose the
that secret blasphemy inside them. Excrucian War is to bring an end to his-
Which is good, by the way, because knowing one of those secrets tory. To win the War is to end the Third
will probably cause your brain to spiral in on itself like a neural net Age, and move history one great step
closer to its final conclusion. Our world
at the edge of a singularity, and then when there’s nothing but blank is doomed; our only choice is a choice of
void in your head, your skull will crumple inwards like a crushed soda endings.
can and you’ll wail out this endless susurration of the secrets of the —from A Philosophy of Treason,
by Augusta Valentina (suppressed)
void and everyone will scream and try to cut your tongue out before
you finally pop your heart and go away. That’s not what happens to
everybody, you understand, but it’s how Györg Krusko and Javairia Al
Sabah went and a couple others at the edge of the community, and
nobody knows of any cases where it’s actually ended well.
The Mimics are just like the Imperators, in short, only instead
of being natural, they’re unnatural; instead of being premised on
something right and appropriate in Creation, every Mimic is Estates
Game Rules
premised on something awful and unnaturally wrong. That is why they
work against Creation, even though they seem to be like the things of Mimics built as characters have 10-15 Char-
Creation. It’s like the Mimics and the rest of us are words in the same acter Points, plus Active Immortality. They
language, but used to a different intention. have up to 2 points of natural Miraculous
Edge. They have 3-4 Divine Health levels, 1
Tough Health level, and 2 Normal Health
levels (see pg. 321-333). Give them Bonds,
Afflictions, Passions, and Skills to taste.
The Strategists They can speak Imperial miracles into the
world; one such miracle, their blasphemy,
speaks itself automatically into the world
when their last Divine Health level is lost.
The Strategists say the world is wrong. For Mimics who will use Persona or
They armor themselves in the power of emptiness. They weave it Domain miracles, pick one of their Estates
as their primary Estate and designate their
into themselves. Then they come to our world to break it as a crime other Estates as secondary. Like the Im-
against the void. perators, they may have Secondary Domain
Mostly. or Secondary Persona at level 0; this costs
They are sick — you understand — as those who wrestle with (of course) 0 points, and allows them to
use their DMP and PMP on Domain and
wrongness are always sick. They have splashed themselves, suffused Persona miracles of any of their Estates.
themselves, or infused themselves with what they claim is our perversity.
They have gone wrong as people go wrong.
They have gone wrong as the world has gone wrong.
They aren’t awesome like the Deceivers are and the Warmains can
be. They are fucking twisted, and they pretend that that’s our fault.
They’re dying.
Every one of them is dying of something, every one of them is too
far wrong to live, but when they do finally give up and die, they don’t
stay dead. They fade into unbeing instead. They flail outwards into the
Not. They armor themselves there in the power of emptiness. They
weave it into them and it restores their life. Then they come back into
our world to break it, for our crime against the void.
288
We hold ourselves to be sacred. But from They’re lethal too. Killing and destroying isn’t hard for them. It’s
the other side of the skin we are nothing
easier for them than for basically anybody else in the world because
more than profane.
they don’t have to do anything to make it happen. They can just wave
This is reality.
their hands and wish and things will go away. They can just deny things
No matter how cool it is, what we’re right out of existence, cause things to fall apart like reality’s unweaving,
working on; no matter how important
make anything — and not just physical things, but love, and greed,
our lives; no matter how much it matters,
that is, that some process not stop, that and waves, and words, and fate, and light, and understanding too —
some thing not die: everything is distorted go away just by choosing that it ought.
by the imprint of patterns bigger than Textrix the Deacon fought a Power for seven days, using that
ourselves.
ability — what the Nobilis call the World-Breaker’s Hand — as his
If you stopped time and stepped outside principal weapon. The Dead Zone of Libya was the result. No plant
the world you’d see a knife, cutting this
way, cutting that, all through the fabric
grows there. No love lives there. The sun is never bright there, no
of our lives. nation claims it, no map shows it. The ground is arid. Sometimes it
The knife will take your hopes, if it cuts
crumbles underfoot, opening onto the vastness of nothing underneath.
just right. No one of interest was ever born there. No wind ever blows there.
The knife will take your life.
Nobody goes there save by force; and even though you can break a
person by chaining them there for a day or two, even though it’d be
The knife will cause your fortunes to cor-
rode or bring an enemy tumbling down. the kind of punishment any despot or cruel authority would love to
inflict, it doesn’t even get used for that very often, because the thing
It’s great to want things to sustain. It’s
great to want this or that to live forever. that places have that make them easy to remember is a thing the Dead
But there’s only so much merit in the Zone no longer has.
world and the knife’s just plain more It was a place. It had qualities. It had stuff. It had things.
important than your dreams.
They went away.
—from The Subway, by Rannen Yedidyah
Game Rules
Strategists built as characters have 25-75
Character Points. Their maximum Attri-
bute rating is 7. Give them Bonds, Afflic-
tions, Passions, and Skills to taste.
They do not have a proper Estate.
They have neither Domain nor Persona
save in the form of Gifts.
Strategists lose 1 MP for each health
level lost, even a Normal level; when they
run out of MP, even if they have health
remaining, they “die” and leave Creation.
Any MP they gain from Bonds and Afflic-
tions fade at the end of the scene, and they
cannot earn an MP refresh.
A Strategist receives the Gift World-
Breaker’s Hand for 0 Points.
289
Textrix the Deacon
This is an Excrucian Strategist who is dy-
ing of lost faith; he cannot cling to the idea
that there is any meaning in anything at all.
When the miraculous power that sustains
him fades, he stumbles from Creation in a
kind of apathetic fugue. Textrix’s vice is ob-
scenity and blasphemy; he is an enemy to all
sacred things, and the more real and true the
love that powers them, the more it draws his
wrath. Fortunately he is rarely sighted in the
world.
Lexiarchos Caducine
This is an Excrucian Strategist who is dying
of old age; she spins youth into herself in the
Lands Beyond Creation, but ages and even-
tually turns to dust as her miraculous power
depletes. Unfortunately this does not end the
matter. Lexiarchos is one of those who justi-
fies the name of “Strategist;” she is always
five steps ahead, like she’s already seen what
you’re going to do and planned to make it
come out wrong. She likes to infest the souls
of your children, make them vipers in your
nest, but leave enough of the original self
that killing them’s no kindness.
290
Adhémar Hetairh
This is an Excrucian Strategist who swal-
lowed fire and poison and is dying of it
now. When he is slain, or when one of his
shard-self copies is slain, the body detonates.
Acid rains outwards, poison fountains from
the neckhole, sheaves of fire tumble like
wrestling cats across the ground. His vice is
masochism, which wins him some not-so-
terribly-evil points from me but unfortunate-
ly he’s also a good soldier for the Excrucians
who does many nasty things that are not his-
vice-related.
Malakai Mesmer
This is an Excrucian Strategist dying of lost
empathy; when the emptiness of his miracu-
lous power leaves him, he becomes a danger
even to his allies, unable to value or even
really recognize anything in the world that is
not Mesmer. He is a sadist, with a particu-
lar interest in collecting victims — not so
much hurting them, although he’ll pin them
to walls with long silver pins or leave them
chained until they starve, as having them,
and having them be unable to fight his will.
291
The Excrucian War
It poured from his hand like a fire, sharp-
All these forces, together, are “the Excrucians.”
edged, dancing, limned in white: the Not.
They rode into the world at the beginning of the Age of Pain. They What it touched, ceased to be.
rode pale horses and carried these horrible weapons — these soul- —from Void Stories, edited by Édouard Guy
The symbols and savage treasures of the Excrucians are named the
Abhorrent Weapons — five hundred and seventy-two terrifying and
unsettling standards scattered through their host. Each Abhorrent
Weapon wears two names, one for itself and one to mock Creation.
Seven of these Weapons are known from Heaven down to Hell, and
in all the worlds between.
292
A b om
LV I
i n at i
S om e on , w
w he r h ic h
LV r at h e
c ho s e
r t ha
e t he
n figh
re is a
is na m
e
w orld d B lu n d e
to d i e t t he E t h at c h r b ore
xc r uc o :
s the g av e ; its p i a n s a s e to k i l l
ambr uno: It wa e o pl e
is named Mal peria l , its p ny l o itsel f
Hat red, which ll into Im up r a l nger.
e A bh or re nt Weapons to
fa
d ther t ants, its v It
first of th at claimed it an ha n c er y th
s; it co rr up te d the A ngel th t he p ontin
u e to
i ng s
hand . re s en e ndu
itor to the world de a d c e of re
tu rned him tra world the Void.
r is e t bec a m The
o , Bl u e,
nd e r b or g a v e
or e .
A bo
min
Atio
n
H atr ed
At r
o
swo cit y, w LV I
at t
h
rd t
he
E
h ic
h is I
s t a n e b e g i xc r uc n a me d
Is .
ce o n n i n ia ns Br i
B e f f t h e i g of t s l e w H a r e o s
thr or e r de he e av :W
ou it cl Ag e it
han gh m becam a ratio e of P n’s ga h this
ds, or e e n of W n . a i t e kee
ev i t ha At r
l t h e ac h , o a It pe
an Ge n a hu cit y, i r w ith is the r
t he ns e n d t pa a l s ub
r ic r l th -
l a st
. te l l e d w i s s e d at
sm e
e , m ld e r s ’
or e
At
ro
cit
y
293
LI X
Loat hing, also
named Gyges
any Power to ap : It is impossib
proach this W le for
tors who can do eapon, and Im
better are few pera-
has a radiance and fa r betwee
that dr ives aw n. It
Creation. ay any thing th
at serves
LV III
inspire joy in
Hor ro r, wh ich is Eu ry tos: It used to
thing of shiftin
g Loathi ng
ey es th at sa w it. Now it is a to lo ok
the ns, di fficu lt
ilaginous poiso
spines and muc ry tos ha te s its el f be -
lls me that Eu
upon. Ianthe te its ow n cr ea to r.
e E xc ru ci an s used it to ki ll
cause th
Hor ror
294
LX
Mon
st r
b r i g h o u s , w h ic
te s t t h wa
e s s en h ing s C ol
t ia l t in Cr br a n
h i ng, e a t io d: Th
it c le t he k n, I a is w a
ar th e y m t ol s t he
A ge a te to it a d. It
w e — x i s t e nc e l l, t h was t
LXI l ib e r a I s up p w a s w or e t h ing he
l w ith os e t h t hw h t h at m
my i n at I a i le . I n a
w ere m be t he F d e
a n A b- Crea
t ion g
c lu s i v ing e i r st
h o n : Th is is ly
E xc r
uc i a n av
e plu
ra ls h x t r e me
ed T y p pp os e d s wou e it away, er ly
, w h ic h is nam is h e d gold. Su to ld for sacr i fi e — we w
e ur n tender s ho
O ut r a g a d e of b sfu l con
a wh
i le s t
ced it
, so t
W hip m n s uc c e s e forgott
en . ay t h
e i r h a h at t h e
hor rent a n g le u s in c
it was u
sed to s tr
a world
that tim
e h a s
contend
e r s mu s
t
Mon nd .
the thro
n e in
ish ly sh
a r p; th o s e stro
Its edge
is fiend
h th roats. us
h a d v er y toug
h av e
g e
Ou tr a
295
The Zu
296
The Actuals
298
A miracle may make an impossible thing — a thing that is, but is not
itself. A thing that has existence in the world, but which does not yet
have its own nature.
This typically means a thing that cannot be itself —
The Cardiff Actual (May 18, 2004)
That is kept from being itself by some limitation in miracles or
sanity —
But which has nothing else to be.
Time travel can cause these impossibilities. To make a thing that
has happened never have happened — or to declare that a thing that
did not happen, now did — may leave a gap where a thing exists, but
does not exist as itself. Paradox can make such a gap as well: when
a Power seeks to embed Russell’s paradox in the world, or capture a
single instant with no duration at all inside a sphere, or open in their
hand an eye that is not an eye that sees what it sees not, they make a
thing that is but is not itself. When the creation or resurrection of a
miraculous being is possible, it often passes through a stage where you
have created or recreated a thing, with the capacity miraculous things
The beginning of the universe, like its
have to resist you and be free of you and make their own path, but you ending, constantly evolves.
have not yet reached the stage of making it itself. I expect, by the end of the War, that it will
What is it? have begun another way entirely.
In that moment, that question points towards a gap. —Hazael, Angel of Disorder
When there is a thing that is, but at the same time is not itself,
hollowness exists: a void that demands the world to fill it.
And, most of the time, the world does.
Divine breath manifests itself. Time finds a natural order. The
paradox finds a will to resolve, or to hold itself still in the moment before
resolution. New or resurrected entities become properly themselves,
borrowing from the powers of the relevant structures in the world.
300
The Temple of Inessential Doubts con- Less frequently, the Not that is outside Creation answers the call
tains two precious scrolls: the Primary
instead.
Truth, that is, the truth that is the arche-
type for the very concept of veracity, and This is tricky but not so terrible as you might imagine. The Not
the Principal Lie, which is to say, the cor- contains ambiguous and mildly benevolent entities as well as the
responding archetype of falsehood. (As- malevolence of the Excrucians; it may be fairly said that while the Not
tute readers may recognize these matters
is hostile towards existence, that hostility is already receiving close to
from earlier discussion, and identify these
scrolls as Earthly extensions of the Angels its fullest natural expression. The worst case is that an Excrucian agent
Firstborn and Lucifer.) For centuries is embedded in the timeline, paradox or creation. The best case is that
after the Temple’s construction, visitors the gap is filled by something strange and quixotic, and more or less
came to admire these scrolls; then, sadly,
benign.
they were stolen. The Temple’s seven-sto-
ry hounds rapidly brought the thief to heel, Or the void may open beneath an Actual, and it will fall into our
but the priests of the Temple found that— world.
once having been rearranged—they could They are a bogeyman to Powers. This is a cautionary tale.
no longer tell the Primary Truth and the
The Actuals may slumber inside created things like worms inside
Principal Lie apart.
—from A Primer on the Loci Celatum, the spire. They may stir fitfully. Or they may wake.
by Holly Djurisic When they wake they will hunger. When they wake they will
grow, and grow unbounded.
Their bodies in our world are interpreted forms; they make no
biological sense. Often they make some mythical sense — thornbush-
creatures, or creatures of spreading blankets of needle-like spines, or
LXIII
The Family ha
ve irises the co
have long ha ir. lor of pa le quar
They are pret ty tz . They
innocent and al people. They ar
ien like birds. e
spirit. They ha They are woun
ve dim memor ded in
love, tr ue love ies of having kn
! and Heaven, ow n
They do not kn and having lost
ow how. They it al l.
look ing for som wander the wo
eone who need rld
— someone wh s a hero or a de
o could be thei stiny
spirit), or anot r lost tr ue love
her member of (in
and help peop their clan. They
le. They ta ke th find
w ith them, eit em in. They fin
her romantic or d love
become st rong familial. The hu
er, more gracef mans
irises fade towa ul, pret tier, an
rds the color of d th eir
day the human white quar tz .
look s at the Fa One
— and in that mily and unde
instant, their hu rstands
become a new m anity is lost. Th
member of the ey
the others what Family, unable
the others need to give
agony and desp ; and in fu ry an
air, the others d
new Family m kick them out.
ember forgets The
ma and roams th e deta ils of this
the world as a trau-
innocent hero wounded, pret
w ithout a hom ty, al ien,
the Nobiliser co e. It is the cons
mmunity that ensus of
of an Act ua l. this is the poss
ession
T h e Fa m i ly
301
protoplasm, or creatures of endlessly branching wires — but they may
also be pure mandalas of flesh.
The Actual locks onto the nature of the thing it dwells in. It merges
with its attributes, its mind if it has one, its body if it has one, its
continuum if it exists in time. It lives and grows within that thing. It
drives it to consume other things: a hunger and a power of absorption
that only sharpens, never fades.
The Actual, and the thing that has become an Actual, does not
know itself.
It may only find itself by consuming — well, whatever it is
it consumes. By turning that thing into itself so that it may see itself
through that thing’s eyes. That is the purpose of its consumption. That
is the theory behind its actions. But it is a theory that fails. Over and
over again it fails. The thing the Actual consumes becomes as blind
and deaf and empty as the Actual in the moment of its conversion.
The shape of the Actual grows as it devours. Sometimes this Once upon a time, we had strategy.
is literal: the creature becomes an expanding protoplasmic blob.
Those were the glory days when we were
Sometimes it is divisive: the creature remains, but something grows very certain in our uniforms and very
through it, leaving it suspended in the midst of the mandala’s expanse. certain of who we were.
Finally it may be ambiguous: the Actual may “spread,” occupying more Now we do not have strategy.
and more minds and bodies and places and times, without any single
Now everything is scattered grasping in
entity’s participation in the growth. the dark.
The Actuals are infections, they are infestations, they are plagues.
I do not remember very much what strat-
At best they have a terrifying power to eat things they oughtn’t be egy was like. I was just a soldier. I was
able to eat, driven by an equally horrific appetite. At worst they have never one of those responsible for it.
merely to touch you, or look at you, to bring you into the collective of But I think that where now we are sim-
themselves. They are primordial. They precede us. They are shrouded ply flesh, before, we arranged ourselves
in Auctorita, and may not be interfered with save with Strike. into “ limbs” and “organs” and a “ body”.
If the world is lucky the Actual will have a guiding mind that Where now we are still, and wrestle with
resists this growth. If it is unlucky it will have a guiding mind that the worms, before we would— we would
move, in these great and complex patterns,
colludes. More go that way than you would think. They give in, they
and all around us there would be vibra-
go along. They agree to devour the world, and who could blame them? tions, and the temperature would always
Their need is real and vital. change.
Even such monsters as the Actuals do not deserve the deprivation Now it is always dark.
they endure. They deserve our help. They deserve a rescue. But there Now it is always cold.
is nothing to be done.
Now we are an insurgency. We are torn
They cannot have what they need. apart. We cannot remember the process by
They will never have what they need. It is not possible. which we generated life.
There is nothing to be done for them save to burn their hosts, to —from The Corpse, by Rannen Yedidyah
cut them back into the Spirit World, and to exile them piece by painful
piece from world and sound.
302
Miraculous Action
303
Reflexive Actions
Action limitations or no action limitations, you can throw in reflexive
actions whenever.
They’re cheaty hacks!
More precisely, a reflexive action is always treated either as an HG
action or as a bonus feature on the action that you’re already taking. So
you can include in your action as many reflexive actions as the HG lets
you get away with. You can even squeeze them into a flurry (pg. 311-
312) along with your normal action.
For instance, it doesn’t take an extra action to invoke a Bond and
turn it into Strike. You just throw that in with whatever else you’re
doing. And if you’re a shapeshifter, you can turn into a wolf or snake
or whatever while using Aspect to attack!
Treasure Actions
It lies within the capacity of the Noble
soul to rearrange its own essence. Reach Treasure miracles split the difference between the simplicity of Domain
within yourself and know the tainted
and Persona miracles and the potential complexity of Aspect-based
inferno of your passions; feel it rise and
flicker and dance as you think of lust actions. The Treasure miracle itself is a single push — a single moment,
objects, anger objects, hate objects, and the a single pulse of will. You bend your Anchor’s powers towards one
objects of your adoration. Teach it to rise. specific goal. You wield power to accomplish this, for some appropriate
Teach it to fall. You must learn to draw
value of “this.”
the pollution around you into that fire,
until it roars larger than the world. You But your Anchors can have complicated, weird, and elaborate
must learn to extinguish it in a moment, abilities. The way in which you, or your Anchor, brings those abilities
until even its embers are black, leaving to bear — that matters. It can be complicated and crucial. What begins,
only the clear blaze of eternal passion in
what must begin, as a single thought can become a tangled, insidious
your immortal soul. Without this power,
you cannot master the pure arts. agenda when it is expressed within the world.
—from The Book of Purity, by Samsi Mandaru And that’s okay.
307
Movements of the Soul
In all of these miracles the most important limitation is this:
The blueprint for a miracle is not in the Power’s mind but in
their heart and soul. It is not possible for them to plan out miracles
of absurd elaboration; rather, they make what is elemental in them,
what is aesthetic to them, what is right to them. Their miracles are
complete. They are things of incredible complexity and detail, for all
things existing in the world are things of incredible complexity and
detail. They are marvels, for to exist is to be a marvel.
But they are works of art and not design.
It is difficult to bring the structural and grammatical intellect into Weaving at the Loom named Yin-Feng
has many desirable effects. Powers have
a miracle, to invoke the mechanical and architectural mind in it, to tested Yin-Feng’s potency against the
design layers of contingency and dozens of disconnected functions into Excrucians, pitting the shuttling of the
these movements of the soul. The Powers of highly technical Estates, of loom against the edge of the Abhorrent
course, may do so, but with arguably limited agency and effectively by Weapon Rivalry (that is also Caligorant);
Yin-Feng came away the victor. Yet
feel. Everyone else, to wield a miracle that takes substantial technical Powers rarely sit to weave from this loom.
detail to describe, must sustain that miracle while they polish it, edit Yin-Feng produces no fabric save destiny,
it, and hold it up to their aesthetic and intellectual senses for review. and those who use its powers for too long
This is a process taking them a good fraction of the time it would take turn to molten silver and trickle away.
—from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation,
an ordinary self. by Jasprite Sherrard
Miraculous
Cneph did not come to Creation empty-
handed. In the void where its world
would be there struggled three forces.
Conflict
N’mosnikttiel, the fire that swallows
worlds, raged in the emptiness. Its faces
chanted words of destruction. The crea-
tures of the void trembled in its heat. Yet
the Creator caught N’mosnikttiel in his
net and shaped the angels from its flesh.
Azbogah, the radiance that destroys the
unrighteous, shone with fell beauty. Its
S
raiment was the jewel named Structure.
Its scepter was the staff called Strength.
Yet the Creator caught Azbogah in his
ometimes characters will get into fights. Sometimes they’ll
hand and planted the World Ash in its
get into non-combat free-for-alls to decide the fate of someone or heart.
something in the world.
Narsinha, the lightning that dances on
For cases like this, you need these conflict rules. the surface of the abyss, fled the Creator;
yet Cneph stood at the end of its every
path. Narsinha’s face was a mask of ha-
tred. Its hands were twisted claws. It spat
Acting in the Moment naked fury. Yet Cneph tamed its heart
and wrapped it about Creation to form
the Weirding Wall.
That is how the universe came to be.
When you act you usually go with the flow of what’s going on. —from Legends of the Nobilis, by Luc Ginneis
310
Quantum theory tears down the classical That means that stuff is happening — the other players are doing
divide between the mundane and the mi-
stuff, and the HG’s described some of what’s going on. That’s your
raculous. When probabilities rather than
certainties define the world, the hand context for action. You are pitting your actions against that background
of God—from outside the universe—no and against whatever anyone else does later to try to stop or affect you.
longer manifests as a distinct and absolute In a direct head-to-head conflict the higher miracle level wins.
perturbation of natural law. The clean
But that doesn’t mean that your lower-level miracles are useless
division between an act of God and an act
of the universe vanishes. The work of the in the presence of higher-level effects. Lower-level miracles are still
divine diffuses into a quantum halo. A miracles. They act upon the world. They just can’t take more powerful
given action of the Holy Spirit may be 3 miracles on head-on and defeat them or wipe them from existence. If
parts per billion miraculous; 5 parts per
there’s anything else left for them to do, they still do that.
billion; or even, in the presence of a saint,
as much as one and a half percent pure It’s like fighting an undertow. A weak swimmer will lose, but they
miracle. still get to swim.
—from a sermon by Bishop Julius Dow, 03/25/00 So sometimes you don’t even have to worry about the number-
vs.-number part of a conflict. An Aspect 2 miracle gives you Aspect
2 effectiveness. A Domain 4 miracle creates, summons, or animates
some of your Estate. A Treasure 3 miracle activates some cool function
of a wondrous Anchor. Unless you’re about to be swept away by the
kind of tidal wave of miraculous power that makes actions like that
irrelevant, all that stuff still happens, and it still matters, even if even
bigger stuff is happening around you.
When you grow wings and soar out of the way of an incoming
firestorm, you aren’t thinking, “It’s too bad that my wings are not as
strong, on an absolute scale, as that firestorm.” You’re thinking, “Yay
wings!” Or you ought to be, at least! The firestorm was already coming
when you decided to act; your miracle changed what was going to
happen — in this case, by getting you out of its way!
Flurries of Action
It was more graceful than a dance, the
You sweep together with someone, exchange hundreds of blows, and alchemist and the nimblejack: one blessed
then bam — with dexterity by something greater than
a god, and one whose shoes — high-heeled,
One definitive action.
no less — gave her the terrible speed of
You play out a hundred thousand tactical possibilities in your head. a hurricane wind. I think that after the
They’re doing the same. But you’re just a little better. You hope and then first ten seconds — that must have been
you move. an eternity to them — the nature of their
battle changed. The nimblejack set aside
Or maybe there’s no tactics and no back-and-forth in it. Maybe it
its will to claw out her eyes and pull her
all comes down to speed. Maybe it’ll all be decided by a single act — liver free, and she surrendered her desire
And you lunge for your enemy’s throat just as they lunge for yours. for life. Hunger did not exist. Life did not
Sometimes taking turns doesn’t work. exist. There was only the motion and the
speed.
Instead, you call as a player for a flurry of action — something
that waives the whole concept of “going first” and “going second,” and It ended all too predictably. The beauty
of the encounter reached and moved the
instead recognizes that everybody’s doing everything at once.
nimblejack’s stone heart and the creature
You still choose your action. The HG still describes what happens. died at once.
But everyone else who wants to throw their hat in the ring gets to act — from the Memoirs of Alice Mendel,
in the flurry, too. And if you’re not happy with the way things stand, Lady of the Thunder
Pace
You can ask the HG to set a “pace” for combat, or to revise that pace
based on events.
When events start happening much faster than that pace, you
know that you should go into a flurry instead of using ordinary actions.
A hundred demons clutched at me, shout- Conversely, when they’re much slower than that pace, you know that
ing, as I passed towards the great iron
you should attempt not to flurry.
gates. One shoved its misshapen face in
mine, crying, “Torment! I can issue more
agonizing torments in less time than any
demon here!” Not Wanting to Flurry
The gondola paused in its progress. “Why
should I wish an exceptionally agonizing If you’re not in a flurry but multiple players want to do stuff at more
torment?” I asked, being new to Hell.
or less the same time, you should figure out a way to take turns. If you
It tapped its nose knowingly. “You can’t can’t figure this out — presumably because your Avatars are fighting
avoid the pain,” it said, “ but at least you
can have quality.”
one another, or at least have very different ideas about what should be
—from Progression and Regression, by Michael Kay done — then surprise! You’re in a flurry after all!
Oh No You Don’t
Sometimes you need to stop something from happening.
313
It was about to happen; a player did it, or the HG described it, it The demagogue locked in the cell required
constant watch. She raved and ranted,
was happening. And you realized that this thing that was happening
nonsense mostly. Our lady had broken her
was a very bad thing. Like, they are cutting your nose off and you need mind. Occasionally, she would recover
your nose for sneezing with, or they’re going to blow up the world, and some focus. Then the words that poured
that’s also bad for a variety of reasons. from her mouth could cut manacles and
hammer through the walls. We drugged
If you want to wait until they’re in the middle of their action
her from afar, when she broke loose, using
and then take your own action to stop it, that works pretty well. But all manner of subtle poisons. We could not
sometimes their action is atomic — one thing, that happens, and in approach her. Mere earplugs could not
the instant that it happens it is done. And other times their action is protect a body from falling under her spell.
—from On the Beat, by Keiko Takemori
practically instant, even if it does take a measurable amount of time in
the world, so that dissecting that action to act inside it would drop you
well below the pace.
So we’re going to say that if you’re fast enough, you can stop
something that was already happening. You are just that cool.
You say “Oh no you don’t!” or “I’d like to interrupt that,” or
something of that kind.
And the HG unwinds that action or event, giving back any MP
that were already spent on it, and instead starts a flurry of actions. The
setting for that flurry is the moment just before that action or event.
An interrupted Avatar gets to go in the flurry (if they want to), but
usually shouldn’t just reiterate their action if they do. You have to go
in the flurry, since you’re trying to interrupt. And afterwards, if you
win your will in the flurry, you either defend against their action or
somehow stop them from taking it.
You can’t interrupt flurries, only actions! One interrupt deep is as The Nobles have a gesture—a twist and
far as this game goes. flattening of the hand—that means “I
Have Achieved.” They use it sometimes
to celebrate victory or triumph. More
often, it is used before a victory becomes
Stopping Actions apparent—a symbol that their victory
is already written, already paid for, and
Suppose that it’s not enough to squeeze in a viable defense against an already earned, and that protest is now
futile.
action. You need to stop them from taking it.
How does this work? The night I came to understand this went
poorly for the Prince of Knots. He sought
You’ll want to implement one of four preventative approaches.
to wrench the Powers of the Light from
First, you could start sustaining an action that mitigates their the glorious Tegus Tsedenbal. He had
actions or keeps them under control. This would let them break free by his audience in the palm of his hand, but
using a more powerful action, but it can lock them down for at least a then a mousy woman with hooked teeth
stood up in the back. She began to argue
moment. Second, you could “wound” them (pg. 321-333) with an effect
against his points. She transformed his
that gives them a temporary Bond or Affliction that forces them not to case slowly from indisputable fact to argu-
act right then. Obviously they can circumvent a Bond or Affliction if able hypothesis. He sought to stop her, but
they must. Third, you could change the environment in some fashion every time he opened his mouth she made
the gesture “I Have Achieved,” and,
that obviates their intended action, forcing them to deal with your
sputtering, he would fall silent for several
meddling in some fashion before they can proceed. minutes at a time.
Even this won’t hold a sufficiently determined enemy back for long. —from On Serving the Nobilis, by Luc Ginneis
314
The lord Erroman sleeps. In the morning, The only way to definitively hold back an enemy with the Bonds or
we lift him from his bed and bathe him;
MP they’d need to push against the artificial boundaries you impose
then we dress him, and attend to his teeth
and hair, and take him to the audience is the fourth approach: kill them. If you kill someone they almost
chamber. For all the judgments brought certainly won’t cut off your nose after or blow up the world. And if they
before him, he does not wake, and his do, you are within your rights to complain loudly to every remaining
eyes shift behind their lids in the dance of
relevant authority.
eternal dreams. He has shamed his rivals
and fought the legions of Unbeing with-
out stirring from his rest. In the morning,
when we open the curtain before his bed,
we cannot help but look upon his face in
dread and fear, and know relief when we
Not So Fast!
see it unchanged; for we are told that if he
should ever open his eyes, the greatest of
all disasters shall be upon us. Someone does something really quick. Something does something
—from Seventy Kings and Seven,
really subtle. Someone tries to pull a fast one while your Avatar is
by Alexander De Vriend
asleep, or paralyzed, or trapped in an ice cubicle orbiting one of the
moons of Mars.
So they’re totally reasonable in thinking that you can’t do anything
about it! It just happens, right? But — not so fast!
You have an idea. Maybe you have a way to be just as quick. Maybe
you’re even subtler. Maybe you have a way to act at a distance, or while
you’re asleep. Maybe there is something you can do.
A forbidden thought nags at the corner So here’s the rule:
of my mind. I do not need to think it; this
is the Tempest’s blessing upon my kind. I
need never know what blasphemous, foul, It’s quite probable that there will be cases where something happens in
or arrogant idea waits for me there. But play and your Avatar can’t do anything about it. You should accept that
I have a choice, and I make it, and think and bear that in mind. But you as a player always have the opportunity to
what I ought not.
use the action system to do something about anything that happens in
I recognize the creature that falls from the play. Right up to the moment of death, or its equivalent (pg. 328), there’s
sky, with its whip of nettles and its face
no such thing as an event that happens in play that you as a player can’t
of masks. It, in turn, recognizes me; and
pauses. “Tellero,” it says, “why do you in- respond to with either an interrupt, a miracle, or a request for a flurry.
sist upon this repetition of pain? You are
beginning to nag upon my conscience.” The answer to “Can you do it? Can you do something about this?”
“Humans are creators,” I said, “and the
fabric of that creation is our thoughts.” Is always:
It viewed me through many eyes. “A fair
assessment,” it conceded. “But such works You can try!
as yours leave scars on their creator.”
—from Apocryphal Thought-Records,
by Kiumars Ghatary
Such words are in harmony with the world you’re in; the world flows
with you.
The Properties of the world you’re in can be used as level 2
Bonds. You can gain 2 free Strike when you invoke them. You
can gain 1-2 MP when they actively get you in trouble (“and I
would have gotten away with it, too, if the particulars of the
world weren’t so measurable!”). You might take a small spiritual
wound if you decide you’ve broken such a rule. You can even
survive off them, as you can with your other Bonds, if you are
diligent in your focus on them. However, doing so will taint
you slowly with the nature of that world. This manifests in game
terms as a wound (see pg. 321-333); if you live too long off of
the substances of Heaven or Hell, for instance, you will become a
creature entirely enslaved to them.
Tools for
Miraculous
Conflict
Miraculous Edge
Miraculous Edge is the Noble equivalent of mundane Edge. Each
point of Miraculous Edge comes with one point of mundane Edge
unless otherwise stated, to a maximum total mundane Edge of 5.
But that’s not the cool thing about it.
The cool thing is that Miraculous Edge helps your miracle win
conflicts with other miracles. It gives you an edge when the HG is
deciding which miracle is stronger. Specifically, when deciding which
miracle wins a direct conflict or acts with greater force in an indirect
317
conflict, you reduce your opponent’s effective miracle level by [the
higher of your Miraculous Edge or your miracle’s Strike,] down to a
minimum of 0.
So if you put up a Divine Mantle, you’re effectively gaining
that much of an edge against every hostile miracle you oppose. To
whatever extent an opponent’s miraculous action or strategy depends
on overpowering yours, their miracle becomes more difficult; to
whatever extent it does not depend on overpowering your miracle, it
is unaffected. Thus, if you are smashing a city with a tidal wave, the
Divine Mantle makes it harder for your enemies to turn the wave to
stone or otherwise stop the wave from smashing the city. It explicitly
doesn’t make it any harder to surf the wave or shelter a single city block
from your attack.
ŠŠ you
ŠŠ your mundane actions
While you have it up miracles can only affect you with your consent,
and (with or without your consent) they can’t oppose your mundane
actions at all. If your mundane action is something like “protect” or
“defend” the area around you, you can shield everything within five feet
of your body from any sort of miracle at all.
Miracles opposed by an Auctoritas Magister do not cease — for
instance, if someone summons up a rainstorm, the rain will continue
to fall even if you walk beneath it sheltering the area around you with
mundane actions and an umbrella. But your Auctoritas Magister
suspends the effects of miracles, as if they’d never been used at all. For
instance, your umbrella would keep the ground dry within 5 feet of
you, as if the rain had never fallen; if you walked 10 feet away, the
ground would instantly dry in your new location and become sodden
(as if rained on for some time) where you were. You can even drive
calmly along streets that a miraculous earthquake is buckling; the road
will reconstruct in front of your car to permit your driving action to
continue, then twist back into brokenness behind you. However, once
the controlling Power stops sustaining a miracle, its effects usually
cease to be miraculous; after a small grace period (equal to the pace of
the conflict, as per pg. 312) the Auctoritas Magister loses its relevance
to that effect.
Your Auctoritas is essentially invisible, except in its effects, but
other characters can see you spend MP to invoke it: a kind of stillness
319
settles or deepens in around you. Nobody can see the exact number of
MP you spend in-character, nor can they precisely identify the final
Auctoritas rating except by testing it against various levels of Strike.
The Auctoritas Magister is a miraculous action but not per se a
miracle; Auctorita do not deactivate each other.
Protecting Others
You can raise an Auctoritas Magister to protect something else instead
of yourself — a person, group, or place that is the active focus of your
attention. You must sustain this effect or it goes away.
Strike
You’re facing someone with an Affliction of invincibility. Or an
Auctoritas Magister. Or a massive Divine Mantle that’s crushing your
miracles. Or just someone throwing around a higher-level miracle
than you want to use to prevent it.
So you put all your heart and drive behind a single miracle. You
infuse it; you make it a spear of thought, a pure and blazing breath, an
incomparable expression of your heart and soul.
You can buy Strike for your miracles by spending one or more MP
of any sort. This is a reflexive action. Each MP spent buys one point of
Strike. This adds to the Strike you get from Bonds and other sources.
Miracles with Strike ignore the Auctoritas up to the level of the
Strike.
For the purpose of deciding who wins a miraculous conflict with
you, you also reduce your opponent’s effective miracle level by [the
higher of your Miraculous Edge or your miracle’s Strike] down to a Our enemies cannot help but kill us.
minimum of 0.
If they did not come at us with their
blades and their malice, so we could hate
them, we would have to love them. There
is nothing in between, not for creatures
of such majesty. We would have to love
them; and, in loving, die; not like Romeo
died, or Juliet, but like the night dies that
loves the sun, or the fire dies that loves the
sea. In embracing the alien, in striving
to grasp that which lies forever beyond us,
we would extinguish ourselves.
—from A Philosophy of Treason,
by Augusta Valentina (suppressed)
320
Wounds
321
Miraculous Defense
Surface Wounds
Surface Wounds inflict a temporary Bond.
Something happened to you.
It did!
But you decide, as a player, how much of an effect it actually has. You
get MP if you play along to your detriment, but the degree of participation,
“You’re alive,” said Smithson Jack. and implicitly the actual seriousness of the wound, is up to you.
“Didn’t they order your execution?”
Further the nastier effects — say, turning you into a squash —
“They did,” admitted Benedict Aguerie. don’t take very well. You don’t actually treat it as “my Avatar is now a
“Eight times. ‘Spect I’ ll be dead any minute
squash.” It’s more like “now my Avatar is under an enchantment that is
now.”
—from Guarantees of Privacy, by Emily Chen trying to turn them into a squash.”
For raw physical wounds at this level, it’s really up to you how
bad they are. You can have strategically torn clothing and a bit of red
blood-like coloring on your arm. Or you can be staggering through
a gray-white haze void of pain. You should either define the actual
wound yourself or act on a basic description that the HG gives you; the
more trouble it causes you, either way, the better your chance to gain
MP from the wound, but it’s totally OK to assume that it’s a trivial and
meaningless effect instead of trying for that MP.
325
The Bond level is generally 2 for a wound from a lesser miracle and
4 for a wound from a greater miracle. The HG has the option to assign
Bond levels of 1, 3, and 5 to particularly strong or weak miracles and
to assign Bond levels for damage from Aspect miracles and mundane
effects and weaponry to taste.
When you heal the Surface Wound — naturally, or using a
miracle, or by losing your Tough Health level — the Bond fades away.
If you were really enjoying playing out the Bond you can, with HG
permission, add it to your list of Bonds. You’ll then have to shuffle your
Bond and Affliction points around at the end of the story to get back
down to [13 + your Treasure] in total.
A Serious Wound
327
A Deadly Wound
Defeat
330
The poison from a wood-witch sting is
typically debilitating within 72 hours
and fatal within a week; however, cheer-
ful woodland creatures will cluster about
you and help you with both your chores
and finding love (until you die.)
Wounds in general are defined to cover any effect on your Avatar that
you, as a player, don’t want.
They’re loosely associated with the health levels that you lost.
When you lose your Tough level, and heal your Normal Health
levels, for instance, you’ll usually heal the specific wounds that were
associated with those levels. The same applies when you lose your Divine
Health levels and heal your Tough level back — you’ll usually ditch the
exact wound that was associated with your Tough level, if you’d lose it.
That said, if you get confused about this, it’s OK to be confused,
and just remove the wound or wounds most appropriate to remove.
Wounds, or at least wounds that miraculous creatures suffer,
retain a certain miraculous quality. Your system struggles with them,
keeping them from becoming absolute mundane truth, right up until
you lose your last Health Level. Thus they are ongoing miraculous
331
effects, but nobody has to sustain them — they just linger on their own.
For example, if somebody nukes you and you don’t die, the wound isn’t
that you have some radiation scars — it’s that you are in the process of
fighting off nuclear annihilation until such a time as you have healed.
deadly your miracles are, and that the HG can look at when trying to
decide how much damage a given miracle inflicts. Just remember that
Powers will mitigate most effects — even ones that get through to
them! If you use a Major Creation of Loyalty to enthrall a Power, they
might cut the miracle with their magical sword. Even if your miracle
proves stronger than the sword, the sword could still blunt enough of
the effect to bring it down to Tough or even Normal damage, and then
your target is in a solid tactical position to ignore it and strike back.
If an effect isn’t mitigated, here’s what raw damage looks like in
these rules:
These are normative examples. Some miracles of a given level are dead-
lier than others, and the damage of most mundane weaponry is heavily
dependent on circumstance.
332
Non-Physical Damage
Against effects that try to transform or enthrall you, Elusive is the
equivalent of Durant.
Against effects that try to overwhelm you, drain you, or run you out
of resources, Immutable is the equivalent of Durant and Eternal is just
as good as Immortal. (Immortal is still awesome.)
Otherwise, just use the resolution system normally!
Surface
Serious Wound Deadly Wound
Level of Resistance Wound
Recovery Recovery
Recovery
Normal 1 day 1 week 1 month
Durant
(or Immutable/
1 hour 1 day 1 week
Elusive as
appropriate)
Immortal
(or Eternal as 1 minute 1 hour 1 day
appropriate)
One day, I stubbed my toe. When I told
Almost instant Almost instant Almost instant
Marilyn about it, she said she under-
stood completely how that felt. I said, I’m
so glad, and she smiled, and she cut the toe
off. It was amazing; the pain was gone!
Using an appropriate sort of active miracle to heal moves you one step
So I was sure to tell her about it when I
down the chart. Using a very powerful miracle, at the HG’s discretion, had a cold the very next week and my nose
moves you two steps down the chart. was running. What do you want me to
Always recover weaker health levels first — Normal before Tough, do? she asked, and I said, I’m afraid that
if I cut it off it will bleed. She said she
and Tough before Divine.
completely understood, and she chopped
Always remove the quickest-healing wounds first, even if that my nose right off. It stopped running at
means healing the “wrong” wound for the health level you recover. once! But now I don’t know what to do,
Among wounds equally quick to heal, you should usually heal the because I have a headache, but I keep
thinking, What if I need it for something
oldest wound, but the choice of wound to heal is up to you.
later?
Characters recover from defeat — normally regaining some —from Parables for Our Modern Age,
selection of their wound levels as they do so — at the HG’s discretion. by Jackie Robinson
ŠŠ when the character has some way to know that they’re being in-
vestigated;
Damage Immunity
Brendan Cormail authored Eratosthe-
nes’ Dissent, arguing that “the desire to
live is the foundation of all accomplish-
ments.” Many consider him one of the
great philosophers of the Third Age, but
society as a whole does not accept his argu- It may be productive to have your allies enchant you with various
ments. Rather, the Nobilis presume that effects — to fill up your Tough and Normal levels with awkward but
his beliefs are tainted by an overabun- overall beneficial conditions.
dance of the aquatic essence in his soul.
Therefore, Brendan Cormail is implicitly
This after all gives you new Bonds and Afflictions to play with and
a philosopher to pariahs and the sage of a keeps you from taking unpleasant serious and surface wounds.
corrupted wisdom. This is something that the Nobilis do, in fact — in a weird way, the
—from The Society of Flowers, by Heather Williams
curses of friends can act as a kind of armor.
But it’s not something they do very often, and it’s not a perfectly
effective defense.
So we’re going to say that if you’re immune to an effect because
you don’t have any wound levels low enough to take it — because
you’re out of Normal, or Normal and Tough, Health levels — the HG
has the option of bumping a friend- or ally-given wound to make room
for the new effect. It isn’t something that will necessarily happen, but
it could take place.
337
The Simple
Rites
The Servant’s Rite Its words are just, and my actions must so
be. “Open your mouth,” I say, and break
my skin, and let my fingers drip with
blood.
This one’s totally weird but it shows up over and over again on the —from the Thought-Record of Jagmohan Ji
boards.
If a Noble really loves or hates you, they can put blood, sweat, or
tears, or, well, you know, other stuff like that into a mortal’s body in
order to make them an Anchor (pg. 208-210). And then the mortal
gets all enthusiastic about the Estate, like they’re loyal to it even if they
hate their Power’s guts, and acquires something like the Elusive Gift
against other Powers’ actions.
Tuning: the HG can let you guide or possess an ordinary mortal An-
chor without sustaining the action, if you love or hate them.
338
Hiding in the Flowers
Nobilis can mess up divination on them by using flowers, Tarot cards,
or other symbols.
Basically, they start with an Auctoritas — either the Auctoritas Magister
(pg. 317-319) or the Auctoritas on some sort of controllable, invokable
Affliction — and use mundane actions to ritually associate the symbol with
it. Then when someone tries to divine what the Power did or is doing while
under the influence of that Auctoritas, they have to beat the Auctoritas with
their Strike or they just get a metaphorical face full of flowers.
Th e Ch a nCel-
e
Fi n di ng R iT
339
chunks of animated dirt who really have no reason to care. They speak
flawless Russian as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
And Portuguese.
And Latin, and Urdu. Oh, and Layaklan. Almost nobody speaks
Layaklan, not at the time of this writing, anyway †, but Powers do. They
speak fluent Hong Kong pidgin. They read Martian hieroglyphics.
They grok Navajo. French. LISP. Famously, they can speak the “twin
language” of the Bowens. And that’s just what I have easily accessible
references for from this table.
As far as I can tell they can speak, understand, read, and write
every language flawlessly from the moment of Commencement,
including every mortal language and the “True Tongue” of Heaven.
Tuning: It’s possible that they just learn the True Tongue of Heaven, and
that removes the need to know any other language, even reading- and
writing-wise. That’s really disturbing as a linguistic conceit, but it’s pos-
sible! Alternately you could dismiss the whole Gift of Tongues idea as an
exaggeration based on the language-learning ability that Powers get for
free with their Aspect — the only Power I know can speak every language †
Sometimes I feel like if I don’t
in the world is also notionally perfect, so she’s not a typical case. use qualifiers like this people
reading this in like 2257 or some-
thing will point back at me and
laugh.
Guising
Powers can adapt themselves to crazy hostile environments. They turn
into fishes when they fall into the sea. They become weird space people
when floating in weird space Chancels. They blur, distort, stretch, and
become vast when visiting people’s dreams. They can hang out among
bird-people and chow down casually on bird-people-food even when
it’s wriggling.
I think this is actually mostly a combination of power, moxie,
and the ability to feed off their Bonds. That said, there’s a couple of
definites: even the weirdest inhuman Powers can wear a human Guise
when they walk in the ordinary world, and every Power can shift their
human features to fit in with the local population.
Tuning: You can let Powers customize this some, or even look a little
different to everyone they see; you can have Guising cost 1 Persona
MP; you can let Powers get a limited free adaptation to any environ-
ment at all, though be sure to let people know so they don’t spend
character points on Immutable; you can let Powers adapt to fit in with
the local population in a Chancel or an alien world.
340
Flowers are vital. They sing with the
energies of Creation. Each cries to reality,
“I am thus! I am this! I am what I am!” The
Tracing a Miracle
cherry blossom shouts, Spiritual Beauty.
The trumpet-flower bugles, Fame. They
stun me. I never saw this in them…I was Powers do something to narrow in on people using miracles to hurt
so blind.
them from a long way away. They find the Excrucian or Power or
But now I am dead. Imperator that was hurting them, and either fight back from afar or
Now I can see. hunt their attacker down.
They come and lay them on my grave. The We’re going to say that this is just something you can do with
song of each flower seeps down, like roots, the Sight — that if you have the Sight on, it’s always possible to find
and digs into my soul. Each flower my someone affecting your location from far away. They can hide, forcing
beloved husband sets upon my grave steals
a little bit more of my self. Each bloom my
you to use miracles to find them and their link, but they can’t ever
daughter leaves behind tears me apart a come up with a trick that makes locating them genuinely impossible.
little further at the seams. Soon, I will be
gone. There will be no soul left within my Tuning: You can make this automatic, immediately telling any Power
embalmed flesh. Just the songs of rotted
flowers.
who performed any miracle they witnessed, and, if it was performed
—from 36, by Rannen Yedidyah through a mystic link, what that link might be.
Destiny
342
O ver the course of each story the characters may earn Destiny.
It comes from opposition — from uncomfortable, unwanted
truths and opinions. It comes always from the direction of greatest
fear, greatest struggle, greatest strife. Destiny lies in the impossible
and the unwanted things.
Destiny is what changes you. It lives in the things that change you.
To live without challenge is to no longer grow.
Projects
A “Project” is a story. It is told again each time the Power earns or
spends Destiny for it.
Sometimes the story is written into the Project.
Sometimes it is told the same way each time. Sometimes it is
wildly different. But it is always a story.
It is something like:
ŠŠ the suffering of the souls in Hell is the food for the Ash;
ŠŠ Lexiarchos Caducine was a human once;
ŠŠ the last Power to master an Estate like yours went mad;
ŠŠ caged in the zoo you find an unconscious copy of yourself.
When the HG unveils a shocking truth like this about the Project
— something with the potential to change everything — the Project
earns 10 Destiny and each heavily involved Avatar earns 0-5 MP.
This revelation is a surprise and a difficulty but it is also Destiny,
or, put another way, a force of change. It is a moving-forward.
The HG writes something reflecting the revelation, and a number
(10) in one of the Project circles. This moves the Project — arguably
— towards success.
Failure
The characters struggle. They hope to achieve some victory. But they
are balked; and when they are balked, when they fail after a worthy
struggle, the Project earns 5 Destiny and each heavily involved Avatar
earns 0-3 MP.
The players write something reflecting that failure, and a number
(5) in one of the Project circles.
For the Projects mentioned above, it might be something like:
Moving Projects Forward She did not frown, for she had no mouth.
She did not speak, for she had no voice.
Nor did she look around, for she had no
eyes.
When one of the circles in a Project holds 15 Destiny, the Power
She could, however, see—for the fire of
responsible for that Project can move it forward. life burned brightly in her. It cast a clear
They invoke the weight of Destiny in that Project as if it were an unwavering light over the room, stark
Imperial miracle. and hot, that her mind could see with; and
The Power cites their heart and the story of the Project. They she saw the gremlin in its corner. Her face
hung in its claws like a rubber mask.
speak of the meanings and happenings of the thing. They tell of their
It looked up. Twice. “You can’t have me
labors and the revelations. They say what has happened, and then they
back,” the face said. “You don’t have the
say one more thing. power to fight for me. And you don’t
It is, by rule, ambiguous. You have to leave wiggle room for the have anything valuable enough to buy me
HG. You can’t say that you win, or that things go down a certain way. with.”
Like Imperial miracles, Destiny leaves the world more than a little Jacotte reached inside her and scooped out
space for interpretation. the fire of her life, and proffered it to the
gremlin like a waiter unveiling a meal.
But the thing that happens is something that matters. It says
something real. Like: “That might be enough,” Jacotte’s face
concurred, “But what good is a face with-
out a life?”
ŠŠ and as the elixir runs across the flames of Hell, the blood-soaked
Jacotte did not answer, for she could not
fire begins to burn clear, and blue, and brilliant with hope.
speak. She only held the life burning in
ŠŠ that night, Lexiarchos Caducine dreams of me; fervent, transfor- her hands.
mative dreams. —from Berthomieu Manoral, by Keiko Takemori
346
ŠŠ for the first time, as I stand there before the Errant Gates, my
movement and the movements of my Estate become as one; and
we are, for just a moment, a thing unstoppable, immeasurable,
and unimaginably vast.
ŠŠ I come back from my hunt, laughing in glee, and behind me is a
Thing — capitalized Thing — the likes of which you can barely
imagine, even staring it in the eye. It is laden with meaning. It is
impossible. It is, my dears, and for my zoo, a prize.
Change
The world speaks to you, and you must change. The old way of being is
gone away. You are made new by the thing you hear, or see, or become.
They will frame for you a couple of the key questions this raises — “How
does [some element of who you are] fit into your new life?”
Then spend time testing it — pushing against the limits on both sides, us-
ing Noble resources to prove or disprove the rightness or wrongness of a
thing, debating the matter with others, talking about it, or at minimum
carrying the problem with you in an obvious and overt way — until you
find a way to change or cope.
Rejected Struggle
If you try to wrestle with something, but after a bit you decide that it
isn’t actually a problem for you, you gain no Destiny at all. That’s not
a punishment, and you shouldn’t hesitate to dismiss possible struggles
out of hand if they’re not actual problems for your character. Sometimes
what the HG thinks will challenge you just doesn’t, and you’re better
off letting them know that than trying to squeeze Destiny out of the
chance. Sometimes even things you thought would challenge you,
things you brought into the game to wrestle with, fall flat.
That’s okay.
Not everything that looks like an opportunity to change and grow
is such an opportunity, after all. If this one isn’t, then it’s not!
Struggle and Imperial Miracles We do not know Cneph the Maker’s mo-
tives. He might mean us the most terrible
of harm. We do not serve him because we
The burden of an Imperial miracle spoken against you is often a very know. We do not serve him because we
tangible form of struggle. It drives you to expiate the will embodied in believe. We serve him because we can.
—attributed to Hazael, Angel of Disorder,
its words. But how are you going to survive as yourself while doing so?
Insanity, and Time
Rejecting an imperial miracle is basically calling the whole thing
invalid — saying that you’re not its real target, or that it’s demanding
something you’ve already done. Denying it tends to cost you health levels.
Failing the struggle with it — which is like denial but involves grappling
with the effects for a while first — can save you serious harm, as long as
you explicitly shelve the issue rather than rejecting or denying it.
Training
A Power may use a Project to gain an additional Trait — wings,
additional Trait levels, immortality, or awesome unique Gifts. This
usually takes between 15 and 75 Destiny, and the Power won’t
know immediately that they’ve succeeded — it takes exploration,
experimentation, and labor to determine that you have in fact changed
yourself enough to add something new to your character sheet. There’s
no strict conversion between Character Points and Destiny, save
that the HG should be as generous as possible and make sure that
characters have a chance to see the fruits of their labor; we’re proposing
the 75-Destiny upper limit, even for high-Character-Point-cost Traits
350
like Immortality, because one revelation, one major life change, four
serious moral dilemmas, four failures, and five victories is a long time
to work on self-improvement before seeing the result.
A Power may also use a Project to change their existing Traits.
Two ruled the city of Adelais. Two fought The player and the HG must both agree, and you shouldn’t do this
for its destiny. A Queen sat on its throne very often, but it’s possible to lose, reallocate, or redesign your Traits
and sought to guide it with wisdom and
virtue. A Nihilist held court in its alleys
over the course of a Project — and not just as part of moving a Project
and sought to bring the city down. The forward, but potentially even as the unexpected fruit of an appropriate
two, in their opposition, held taut the revelation, change, victory/failure, or struggle.
strands of the city’s fate.
—from The Fall of Adelais, author unknown
At the Shore
U nder the cliffs, near the rotted logs, at the edge between sand
and water, something impossible happens. A man appears, standing,
on top of the sea. His face is impossibly pure. His eyes are closed. Nev-
ertheless he looks at me.
“I wish to make you afraid,” he says. His hand closes. Trenches and
pits gape open in the sand. The beach beneath me shakes and settles.
The scent of the sea vanishes. The waves crash against the shore,
but their sound dies out.
I want to run. I don’t dare. I want to tell him that I’m just an
ordinary person.
“I wish you to understand that we can bring pain to you any time
we please.”
My tongue dissolves. Blood flows into my throat.
“If I have time, I will kill you.”
I live for a moment on the notes of a young man’s flute, each a unique
vibration of its own. Behind those notes, I begin to hear a deeper music.
I marvel. All these years, the universe has sung out its secrets and
its truths to me, and I simply failed to listen. I do not try to claim this
music; it transcends what I have become. I only open up my spirit and
hear.
Five strains, in harmony and dissonance. From the sky rains down
the truth of Heaven. I hear the angels sing of justice and of beauty.
Their song has no answer to a bullet, nor does it desire one. “You must
have the strength to find your own answer to this,” it says, “for if you
cannot create justice in the world, what worth have you?”
And quietly in my heart, from the smallest pieces of myself, I hear
the song of Hell arise; and it promises me the flames, and the embrace
of suffering, and an endlessness of torment, and I think:
“Is this to tempt me?”
But then there is entwining with the screaming and the flames a
single pure exquisiteness of voice. It is the first of the Fallen, his words
tangled in my heart, and yes, yes, damn it, yes, suddenly it tempts me.
“We alone will not forsake you,” sing the devils in their Hell.
And weaving through, around, about the songs of Heaven and
of Hell I hear the Wild’s call. Inexorable and vast, its song rings out
through the world and calls to freedom and to madness. “You need
nothing but yourself,” it says. The endless crashing of the surf within
my heart agrees.
353
Two strains rise from the humans around me: one light and one
dark, one preaching the salvation of humanity and another calling it
to suicide. I ignore them. I have found my truth.
The bullet hits my head.
For a moment, I feel a blinding pain. Then the surf rises up and
swallows it. I pull myself to my feet.
“What are you?” I ask him. He fires again; this time, I move,
rolling gently out of the way. “What am I?”
“I stand outside the things of the world,” he says. “I am Omega:
the termination of your existence. Of everything’s existence. I need
only reach out my hand, and it is so.”
A wave crests, rising to pound against the beach. It dissolves in an
instant into still water. I feel its death viscerally, horribly, with a flutter
in my stomach. The wave after that dies, and the next, like falling
dominoes. The sea twists, uncomfortably, writhing against the limits
of his reach.
“I wish you to know this in the marrow of your bones. I wish you
to understand that you cannot oppose us. For this reason, I come, and
bring you pain.”
For a long moment I believe him.
“I have a tongue again,” I say, “and your bullet did not kill.”
His eyes open, black like night. A star falls through them. “It
is strange,” he says, “how humans need but a taste of power to grow
arrogant. You walk in a world of things greater than you can imagine,
and you speak defiance.”
I nod.
He puts away his gun. “You have many things that you love,” he says.
“Remember, when it comes time to face us, that they are not immortal.”
I think of all the things I love. They call to me, though softer than
the waves. I submerge that love, drown it in my heart, and still it bobs
to the surface: friends, family, my homeland, and my art. And past, and past, and beyond the
“I will do what I must,” I assure him. I do not know, quite, what wardrobe’s back, a gallery of things and
that is, only that threats cannot deter me. endless halls, and the clinking of glass
and the swirling of dancers, and faceless
His expression sours, and he departs. creatures wearing masks, and walking
I look out again at the ocean. A film lifts from my eyes, or falls bears, and elves, and the merrows from
over it; I cannot say which. I see the great and mighty spirits of the the sea; and all through the great long
waters, and the bright truths within the seagulls’ hearts. I hear the echoing halls there blew the wind, and
above everything there arched the
senseless mumblings of the endless grains of sand, and I see each mountains, the forests, and the sun.
wave’s exalted face as it breaks against the shore.
“Why,” said Susan, “what is this? What is
I reach out and capture one, a young and brilliant wave formed this, I have stumbled on?”
seconds ago by the patterns of the sea. I hold it in my hand, and the
And they turned to her, on her débutante
little wave stills, waiting for my wish. day, and they dragged her off, to live
I tell it, realizing as I speak that this is the most wonderful thing among the fashionable strangers.
imaginable, “I know your name.” —from The Wardrobe, by Emily Chen
354
Index
Aaron’s Serpents..................28, 85, 112, Wondrous Anchors..................... 208, Bonds.....158, 161-166, 169-171, 206, 209,
232, 247, 255-256 211-214, 216 315, 324-325
Serpent of Radar, the................26-27
Angels...................73-79, 146, 170, 230, Border Mythic, the....39, 56-66, 157, 206
Abhorrent Weapons......................... 291 249, 277, 309 Properties of........................... 63, 315
Abomination (Blunderbore).......292, 317 Angel of the Sun.................... 63, 153
Atrocity (Briareos).......................292 Euphoriel ....................................... 27 Breath of MP................................... 218
Envy (Kifri).................................. 215 Firstborn (Meaning, Existence).....13,
Hatred (Malambruno )................292 86, 298, 300 Cammora, the...............18-19, 144, 268
Horror (Eurytos).......................... 293 Hazael (Disorder, Insanity, Time).....
Illicit Desire (Ritho).................... 281 299, 349 Campaigns....................................... 107
Loathing (Gyges)......................... 293 Hukkok ............................... 281, 347
Monstrous (Colbrand).................294 Parasiel ........................................230 Causa Causans.....................................8
Outrage (Typhon)........................294 Unnamed Angel ............. 310 (image)
Rivalry (Caligorant)..................... 307 Unnamed Traitor.........................292 Chancel-Finding Rite, the..............338
Za’afiel...................................... 18, 33
Accords at Babylon, the.. see Miscellaneous Chancels.............. 10-11, 27-30, 72, 239,
Plot Devices and Conveniences Anguli............................................62, 65 243-246, 286, 338
Abandoned Chancel
Actions.............................................112 Aspect...............................155, 178-184, of Ebrôt Appêkā.......................246
220-221, 304-305 Atlantis.........................................134
Actuals..................... 244, 297-301, 308 Miracle Difficulty Chart for........184 Balbec......... see Chilminar and Balbec
Balloon-People World....................10
Afflictions.... 161-162, 166-172, 325-327 Attributes......................................... 105 Cabin Fever MUSH.....................188
see also: Aspect, Domain, Persona, and Camelot.......................................... 67
Age of Pain....................... see Third Age Treasure Chancel of Lorelle Clark.............264
Chilminar and Balbec.................. 198
Ananda................see Imperators, Named Auctorita.... 109-110, 167-168, 246, 301 Cityback, the.......................13, 35-41
Properties of....................... 36, 315
Anchors............. 206-210, 305-306, 337 Auctoritas Magister, the....197, 317-319 Clegyr.............................................70
Collections of Anchors................208 Evil World, the......................... 44-55
Iconic Anchors.............................208 Avatars.................. see Player Characters Properties of....................... 53, 315
Miraculous Anchors.....208, 214-216 Locus Arahiel............................... 182
Ordinary Anchors... 208-212, 215-216 Avatar Diagrams....................... 118-119 Locus Araunah...............................72
Sanctums......................................212 Locus Casluhim............................. 69
Sidekicks...................................... 210 Banes................................................243 Locus Imsety................................ 273
355
Locus Neriah................................238 Deceivers...........................277-282, 291 Dahlia Thorn, Mimic...................286
Locus Parasiel........................86, 230 Game Traits for Deceivers...........278 Euphrasia Savinot, Warmain....... 285
Locus Qamamir.............................72 Genseric Dace, Deceiver...... 5, 52-53,
Locus Thegri..................................72 Deep Miracles..................................108 86, 282, 286, 292
Locus Zaanannim.......... 68, 157, 202 Hesychia Symeonius, Warmain...264
Locust Court, the...............16, 19, 22, Deep Mythic, the......................100-101 Iolithae Septimian, Deceiver.......280
42-43, 237, 265 Properties of ........................ 100, 315 Lexiarchos Caducine, Strategist... 289
Long Hall of the Locust Court....42 Maatsarya-Asura, RIP................. 215
Swamp of Precedent.............22, 43 Defeat................ 164-165, 322, 328-329 Malakai Mesmer, Strategist.........290
Parnassus......................................190 Marozia Carolin, Warmain.........286
Properties of.........................244, 315 Destiny.......................111-112, 341-350 Orderic Neustry, Warmain..........284
Sable Gardens, the.........................93 Phasael mery-Harumaph,
dementia animus...................... 21, 33, 59 Deceiver.................................... 281
Cityback, the......................see Chancels Rafael Picard........................265, 304
Devils........ 28, 78, 80-84, 146, 249-251 Raginhart Tribunas, Warmain....284
Cityback, Creatures of Achaia, RIP.................................... 51 Scelto of the Provenance,
Agricords........................................ 37 Cedron (Growth)...........................28 Deceiver....................................280
Arpakti........................................... 37 Domiel (the Experience of Burning)...28 Tairté Ut-napishtim, Deceiver.....282
Brontagora................................ 40-41 (the Damned Angel) Lariníen...26-27 Teja Heimerich, Warmain........... 285
Fire engines, wild........................... 36 Ebrôt Appêkā, RIP..............246, 277 Textrix the Deacon,
Kryptons.........................................38 Lucifer (Pride, Persuasion).... 300, 352 Strategist........................... 288-289
Lightermice....................................38 Raphi (Judgment)..........................28 Unnamed.........................242 (image)
Matchmice.....................................38 Ridya............................................ 174
Psalidars......................................... 37 Excrucian War, the....86, 170, 234, 277,
Tenement beasts........................37, 41 Dharma........ 63, 75, 138, 150, 158, 161, 287, 291
Tetrimmenos.................................. 41 185-186, 189, 191-192, 198, 201-203,
Xedlipods....................36 (image), 40 208, 246, 260, 271, 283, 308 Fallen Angels.........................see Devils
Cleave of the Botanists...................... 61 Divine Health Levels... see Health Levels Familia Caelestis..........30, 72, 103, 256,
264, 267
Cleaves............................................. 275 Divine Mantle, the.... 187, 260, 283, 287,
see also: Powers, Groups 316-317 First Age.................................. 277, 294
Cneph......................... 80, 216-217, 309 Domain...... 185-186, 187-194, 221, 306 Flurries......................113, 304, 311-312
Miracle Difficulty Chart for........ 193
Code Fidelitatis, the.......................... 19 Foci..................................222, 226, 237
Domicelli........................................... 53
Cool.................................. 153-155, 179 Ghost Miracles................................ 189
Edge........................... 159-160, 316-317
Commencement....26, 158, 161, 180, 339 Gift of Tongues, the.................338-339
Erus.................................................. 245
Council of Four.............................13-14 Gifts................................. 220-241, 304
Evil World, the...................see Chancels Active Immortality.......232, 260, 287,
Currency of the Nobilis............267-268 331-333
Estates.......................................9, 1-360 Amphibious.................................. 233
Dark, the.................. 28, 34, 87-93, 146, Estate Properties................... 173-176 Bardic Music................................ 233
251-252, 272 Durant...................228, 322, 331-333
Excrucian-shards............................. 291 Elemental............................. 228, 231
Dark Magisters Game Traits for Excrucian-shards... 291 Elusive............228-229, 332-333, 337
Araunah....................................28, 72 Eternal...........................229, 332-333
(the Darklord) Erevan Insanguine... 27 Excrucians.................. 11, 57, 66, 74, 86, Fire-breathing.......................232-233
101, 176, 191, 215, 271, 276-294, 300, Flight.................................... 229-230
Deadly Wounds........ 322, 326-327, 333 308, 351-353 Gatemaker....................................234
Adhémar Hetairh, Strategist.......290 Glorious........................................230
Death.....................................see Defeat Coriander Hasp, Deceiver........... 281 Helpful Estate...................... 234-235
356
Immutable..... 230-231, 332-333, 340 Imperators..............10, 24-30, 102, 206, Light, the........ 34, 87-93, 146, 251, 313
Immortal.........see Active Immortality 247-260, 296
Invisibility.................................... 235 Game Traits for Imperators.........260 Loci.....................................see Chancels
Keen Sight....................................236
Lightning Quickness.............52, 240 Imperators, Named Locust Court, the...............see Chancels
Luck..................................... 213, 236 Ananda (Murder, the Fourth Age,
Magical Symbol...........................236 the Infinite).......................... 12-14, Machinery of the Accords.......262, 265
Mysterious.................................... 237 34, 36, 39, 41, 237, 277
Natural Weapon........................... 237 Arahiel (Roads)...................... 65, 182 Magic................................ 157-158, 181
Paramount Sense....................50, 240 Bloody Imperator, the....see Lord Entropy
Paramount Strength............... 50, 241 Casluhim........................................ 69 Mashai.............................see Imperators
Perfect Timing......................237-238 Darkest Lord, the.... see Lord Entropy
Petrify...........................................238 Emperor to Come, the.....see Ananda Mimics..................................... 286-287
Purify....................................238-239 Ha-Qadosch Berakha........13, 23, 34 Game Traits for Mimics.............. 287
Shapeshifter................................. 231 Imsety........................................... 273
Soul-Carving Sword....241, 260, 284 Lady Mugain, the........................346 Minime...................................see Anguli
Sovereign’s Gift, the..................... 231 Lord Entropy (Desecration, Destruction,
Unblemished Guise...................... 239 Scorn)..................15-19, 34, 44-55, 237 Miracle Level...................................108
Wayfinder..................................... 239 Lord of Expectations, the....see Ananda
World-Breaker’s Hand.241, 288, 291 Qamamir........................................72 Miracle Points... 106, 115, 218-219, 338
Worldwalker................................. 239 Surolam (Willpower, Law, the
Broken-Hearted).13, 20-22,34, 266 Miracle Point Discounts..........246, 260
Great Boundary, the...... 21, 57, 66, 309 Thegri.............................................72
Zaanannim..................... 68, 157, 202 Miraculous Actions... 108, 163, 302-308
Guising.................................... 239, 339 see also: Aaron’s Serpents, Angels, Devils,
the Dark, the Light, True Gods, and Miraculous Edge..... 109-110, 164, 260,
HG, the.................see the Hollyhock God the Wild 287, 316-317
Weirding Wall, the.see Great Boundary Words of Command........ 108, 333-334 Ymera(e)......................... see Imperators
Wild, the.........29, 94-96, 146, 176, 215, Wounds.... 106, 151, 165, 209, 216, 260, Zu, the......................................295-296
252-253 279, 320-336
Kiumars Ghatary: Apocryphal Michael Kay: Applications of the Walden Fargo: The Current Score (pg. 21);
Thought-Records (pg. 314) Book of Ezekiel in the Evaluation Undocumented History (pg. 187, 218)
Art Credits
Cover Art: “At the Shore,” by Ciaoffen师晓蒙 Sheet (pg. 148), Serpents Sheet (as seen on pg. 247), Angel
Sheet (as seen on pg. 248)
Art Credits, Alexander Benekos: “The Latter Days of
the Law” (pg. 13), “Jenny Merrow” (pg. 233) Art Credits, CQ: “Chibi-Ananda” (pg. 14), “Dementia Ani-
mus” (pg. 21), “Immediately Forgiven” (pg. 22), “Ananda and
Art Credits, Anthony Damiani: “Warning: No Karma Xedlipod” (pg. 36), “The Beast of the Evil World” (pg. 46),
Ahead” (pg. 32), “Baalhermon” (pg. 55), “A Road to the “Nimblejack and Crying Moon” (pg. 52), “Meon, Power of
Sun” (pg. 58), “Chalice of Conception” (pg. 59), “The Milk Desecration” (pg. 54), “The Diary of Edmund Finch” (pg. 60),
of Forgotten Faith” (pg. 60), “Mt. Everest, seen as a Man- “Locus Qamamir” (pg. 72), “Locus Thegri” (pg. 72), “The Red
tis” (pg. 61), “The Alchemist” (pg. 61), “Snow Sprites” (pg. Room at Mary Caldwell High” (pg. 83), “Alcatraz” (pg. 95),
62), “Sisera Sanguinary” (pg. 66), “Dream Castle” (pg. 66), “Kanonoliths by the Sea” (pg. 104), “Ianthe Falls-Short, the
“Locus Zaanannim” (pg. 68), “Shapcombe Tor” (pg. 81), Power of Debate” (pg. 106), “The Train Lirrane Adrimor-
“Dharma Worm” (pg. 150, 186), “Arikel” (pg. 153), “Kyle phous” (pg. 114), “The Power of Poseurs” (pg. 166), “Cassiel
O’Donoghue” (pg. 193), “Diane Spinnaker” (pg. 207), “Eox, of the Book” (pg. 170), “Thalasseus” (pg. 171), “The Walk-
Magister of the Wild” (pg. 252); Avatar Diagram (pg. 119), ing Eye of Ambrolam the God” (pg. 174), “Robert Baxt” (pg.
Magister of the Wild Sheet (as seen on pg. 252), Character 178), “Isabel of the Road” (pg. 182), “Rook Catchfly, Power
Sheet (pg. 354), Domain Miracle Difficulty Chart (pg. 355), of Eternity” (pg. 183), “Admiral Kynn” (pg. 188), “the Muse
Persona Miracle Difficulty Chart (pg. 356) Dumonia” (pg. 190), “Sara Nei and her Attending Spirits”
(pg. 191), “Male Noble [Central Character]” (pg. 195), “Ore-
Art Credits, Christian Holm: “The Locust Court” (pg. sha, Power of Earth’s Second Age” (pg. 198), “Tiria, Power
42), “The Swamp of Precedent” (pg. 43), “The Border of the Borealis” (pg. 202), “Adrian Elsey” (pg. 204), “Lance
Mythic” (pg. 56), “Horror, which is named Eurytos” (pg. Romenel and his Hound” (pg. 211), “Belle Carter” (pg. 213),
293) “Rick o’Summer” (pg. 234), “Angel [foreground]” (pg. 248),
“Intertwined with Other Things [foreground]” (pg. 254), “A
Art Credits, Ciaoffen 师晓蒙: “At the Shore” (cover), Ya Pumani” (pg. 258), “The Heartstone of the World” (pg.
“Surolam” (pg. 20), “Surolam Card” (pg. 21), “Insight” (pg. 263), “Scelto of the Provenance” (pg. 280); Footnote Girl (pg.
59), “Locus Casluhim” (pg. 69), “The World Ash and its 9, 11, 17, 19, etc.)
Children” (pg. 85), “The Mask of Surolam” (pg. 266), “Zu
Mountains” (pg. 295); logos for the seven factions (as seen Art Credits, CQ (with post-production changes): “Mud
on pg. 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 130, 254), Talia Lifepath Falls” (pg. 12), “The Cityback” (pg. 35), “Agricord” (pg.
363
37), “Krypton” (pg. 38), “The Ombudsmen of Ananda” “Heaven” (pg. 73), “Angel at the Gates of Heaven” (pg.
(pg. 39), “Brontagora” (pg. 40), “Tetrimmenos” (pg. 41), 75), “Steelbloom” (pg. 76), “Irissa Catarina’s Miracle” (pg.
“The Evil World” (pg. 44) 77), “Heaven-Touched Human” (pg. 78), “Enron” (pg. 79),
“Nothing dies Alone” (pg. 82), “The Wild” (pg. 94), “The
Art Credits, 葛红: “Harkány Ordina” (pg. 230), “Stheno” Deep Mythic” (pg. 97), “Yill-Amoth Devouring an Ex-
(pg. 238) crucian” (pg. 101), “The Ordinary World (2)” (pg. 149),
“Bogey” (pg. 235), “Excrucian Before the Tree” (pg. 242),
Art Credits, Heed: “Your Chancel, Revisited” (pg. 243), “The Actuals” (pg. 297), “The Seal of Time” (pg. 298),
“Chibi-Zu” (pg. 296) “The Cardiff Actual” (pg. 299), “The Reykjavik Actual”
(pg. 308)
Art Credits, 陳昶辰: “Augusta Valentina” (pg. 16), “Lord
Chibi-Entropy” (pg. 18), “43rd Street” (pg. 71), “The Light Art Credits, 陈治川: “Noble” (pg. 3), “Clarissa Kilthdigai”
Makes Gardens in Empty Places” (pg. 87), “Dark Ma- (pg. 11), “Serpent of Radar” (pg. 26), “Chibi-Imperator”
gister among Inhuman Things” (pg. 88), “Light Magister” (pg. 27), “Kaithrya of the Wild” (pg. 29), “The Destroying
(pg. 89), “Chibi-Light Magister” (pg. 90), “The Path of Angel” (pg. 33), “Samael St. Augustine” (pg. 45), “Time
a Dark Magister” (pg. 91), “Where the Light sets up its Turns About” (pg. 60), “Clegyr” (pg. 70), “Locus Arau-
Temples” (pg. 91), “I am the Light; or, I am the Dark” nah” (pg. 72), “Angel and Fallen Angel (1)” (pg. 82), “An-
(pg. 92), “Dark Chibi-Magister” (pg. 93), “Tumbleoak” gel and Fallen Angel (2)” (pg. 84), “And if the Sea Offend
(pg. 96), “Anacaona’s Mistake” (pg. 99), “Female Noble Thee” (pg. 117), “Aaron’s Serpent [foreground]” (pg. 247),
and Chibis” (pg. 177), “Superstes Annabelle Zupay” (pg. “The Web of Khedeb-Neret” (pg. 262), “Lorelle Clark
229), “Ms. Atsuko Ikada” (pg. 231), “The Chancel of and Hesychia Symeonius” (pg. 264), “Stone Cold Eeyore”
Ebrôt Appêkā” (pg. 246), “Always With You [foreground]” (pg. 265), “The Train Fierabras” (pg. 269), “The Byzan-
(pg. 250), “The Truth of the Name” (pg. 279), “Miraculous tine Society” (pg. 270), “The Oracle Rainfall” (pg. 273),
Action” (pg. 302), “The Chancel-Finding Rite” (pg. 338), “Wielding the Pure Arts” (pg. 274), “Excrucians” (pg. 276),
“To Move the World” (pg. 341), “Meditation” (pg. 344) “Iolithae Septimian” (pg. 280), “Coriander Hasp and his
rifle, Ritho” (pg. 281), “Phasael mery-Harumaph” (pg.
Art Credits, Oliver Vulliamy: “St. Angela of the Flail” 281), “Tairté Ut-napishtim disassembling a miracle” (pg.
(pg. 163); page backgrounds and decorations 282), “Genseric Dace wearing a Genseric Dace mask” (pg.
282), “Orderic Neustry” (pg. 284), “Raginhart Tribunas”
Art Credits, Snow: Devil Sheet (as seen on pg. 250), True (pg. 284), “Euphrasia Savinot” (pg. 285), “Teja Heimerich”
Gods Sheet (as seen on pg. 254), Imperator/Project Sheet (pg. 285), “Marozia Carolin” (pg. 286), “Dahlia Thorn”
(pg. 368) (pg. 286), “Textrix the Deacon” (pg. 289), “Lexiarchos
Caducine and Companion” (pg. 289), “Adhémar Hetairh”
Art Credits, Soma Chiou: “Jack of Roads” (pg. 65), “An- (pg. 290), “Malakai Mesmer” (pg. 290), “Abomination,
guli and Minime” (pg. 65), “Incarnation” (pg. 199) which is named Blunderbore” (pg. 292), “Atrocity, which
is named Briareos” (pg. 292), “The Quisling Angel and
Art Credits, Tang Yuann: “Balloon-People World” (pg. the weapon Malambruno (or Hatred)” (pg. 292), “Loath-
10), “Lord Entropy” (pg. 15), “Deuteronomy” (pg. 30, ing, which is named Gyges” (pg. 293), “Monstrous, which
103), “The Ordinary World” (pg. 31), “Sennacherib” (pg. is named COLBRAND” (pg. 294), “Outrage, which is
34), “Joktan, Power of Scorn” (pg. 49), “The Edge of the named Typhon” (pg. 294), “The Family” (pg. 300), “Chibi-
World” (pg. 57), “The World, in a Cup of Flame” (pg. Noble” (pg. 303), “A Player Character, Encountering the
57), “Wind Court” (pg. 62), “Spirit of the Sea” (pg. 63), Buddha” (pg. 309), “Nice Catch!” (pg. 310), “But I Do Not
“Old Man Influenza” (pg. 64), “Lady Midsummer Night” Like this Show” (pg. 315), “Semane Menheneott Pass”
(pg. 64), “Weirding Wall” (pg. 66), “Camelot” (pg. 67), (pg. 315), “Four Wounds” (pg. 320), “Miraculous De-
364
fense” (pg. 322), “Temporarily Immune” (pg. 323), “Sur- pectedly Attacking Bears” (pg. 222), “Misenchronic En-
face Wounds” (pg. 324), “A Serious Wound” (pg. 326), “A gine” (pg. 261)
Deadly Wound” (pg. 327), “Defeat” (pg. 329), “An Unde-
sirable Effect” (pg. 330), “Chamorin” (pg. 332) Art Credits, 流水浪: “Lord Entropy’s Busy Day” (pg. 17),
“Ha-Qadosch Berakha” (pg. 23), “The Bloody-Handed
Art Credits, 陈治川 (with post-production changes): God” (pg. 47), “Ogre and Heteronormativity” (pg. 50),
“Flowers of Heaven” (ppg. 120-121), “Flowers of Hell” “Male Noble [Chibis]” (pg. 195), “Ripped from the World
(ppg. 122-123), “Flowers of the Light” (ppg. 124-125), and Pinned against the Sky” (pg. 259), “Currency” (pg.
“Flowers of the Dark” (ppg. 126-127), “Flowers of the 267)
Wild” (pg. 129), “Woman by the Lake” (ppg. 130-131),
“The Power of Libraries” (pg. 220), “The Power of Unex- Art Credits, 鍾孟舜: “7 Gods” (ppg. 24-25)
Character SHeet
Name
Key #1 Key #2
Estates
Level Miracle Points Estate Properties
aspect
Domain
Persona
Treasure
Passions, Skills and Superior Attributes Bonds AND Afflictions
Gifts
mIRACLE lEVEL aTTRIBUTE iNVOCATION aREA fLEXIBILITY cOmMON fINAL cOSTv
Wounds
wOUND lEVELS Destiny
dEADLY
sERIOUS
sURFACE
1 Ghost Miracles
2
Lesser Divinations
Conversation
Lesser Preservation
3
Lesser Creation, Summoning or Animation
4
Lesser Destruction
5
Greater Divination
Lesser Motion
6
Greater Preservation
8 Greater Destruction
9 Greater Motion
0 The Sight
Blessing
1 Curse
2 Lesser Incarnation
Lesser Emulation
3
Lesser Enchantment
4
Lesser Sacrifice
5
Greater Incarnation
Lesser Binding
6 Greater Emulation
7 Greater Enchantment
8 Greater Sacrifice
9 Greater Binding
THE ESSENTIALS
Within that world 改ダ うこ 彼 あ る彼 そ 私
dwell the Nobilis. 筆イ 。の ら な 。ら の 達
をス 書 に た は 世 の
加無 は 遭 も 半 界 周
They are creatures half-human and えし 、 遇 ﹁ 神 に り
half-god. Each holds dominion 、で ﹁ し ノ 半 ﹁ に
over a single concept in the world. 新プ ノ た ビ 人 ノ は
たレ ビ 者 リ 。 ビ 目