Mar 04, 2008 22:33
And unlike my last post, it is Good News, Everybody.
First, a pre-amble.
Nobilis is the game that introduced me to What Roleplaying Could Be (tm).
Nobilis is a game that came out a while ago. I found it via JD picking up the Damn Pretty Great White Book.
When Nobilis came out, I was /firmly/ in White Wolf's pocket. Especially Mage.
I rolled my eyes at Exalted. 'Too overpowered'. I guffawed at munchkining I read of online. 'How stupid; it defeats the whole purpose of the game to be able to just do anything you want.'
I ran some D&D, but found the game distasteful above about 6th level.
Nobilis is a game about playing gods. About playing Morpheus from Sandman, or Sauron from Middle Earth or Caine from Vampire. Human gods. The God of Dreams, or Darkness, or Blood. Gods that had been human, in fact, but were now charged and empowered with an aspect of reality.
It was diceless, but not deterministic. It had GMing advise, written IC, that advised that Nobles may attempt to solve their problems through the use of casually excessive force- if a building in New York was blocking their view of the sunrise, the building- or the city -could be moved. Your antagonists will not attack you- they will seek to twist what you love against you.
For every section and subsection of the book, there is a brief aside on the side of the page. These Nanofiction are some of the most inspiring pieces of fluff in existance. Any one of them could be a hook for a campaign, an inspiration for an NPC or PC, for conjouring images of awe and beauty and power.
The reason Thomas Heard knew about the victorian language of flowers was because Drew had read Nobilis. Large chunks of my more elaborate verbage are almost direct quotes or poor paraphrases of half remembered bits from the Great White Book.
It is the only game I have actually played and never tried to houserule.
Rather the opposite; I tend to try and houserule things into being more like Nobilis. The rules can be readily summarized on a single sheet of paper, and are on the provided character sheet. The book is a work of art and a thing of beauty, a coffee table roleplaying game.
Nobilis is The Perfect Game.
The Great White Book was published in, I believe, 2002. Maybe 2001, but I'm pretty sure 2002.
R. Sean Borgstrom, via the Internets, mentioned that she was working on a suppliment, the Society of Flowers.
That was, you may see, a while ago.
That was before her publisher, Hogshead, sank into the swamp.
Then her second publisher, Guardians of Order, also sank into the swamp.
Then... a great silence. A great and yawning emptiness. There were no re-prints of Nobilis. There was no society of flowers.
Today, this changed.
Rebecca has found a new publisher, Eos Press (makers of Weapons of the Gods, another game I have high praise for- not by chance, also largely her work).
She has released the first part of Society of Flowers as a pdf, 'Unlikely Flowerings'. You can buy it for $5 on DriveThruRPG. You should. JD, I know will.
Eos Press will be publishing a new edition of Nobilis. It will, sadly, not be a coffee table book, but of more standard dimension. Ms. Borgstrom has said that, inspite of this, it will be a marvel, "something wild and zhiguai, dangerous and beautiful." Endquote. Does anyone know what zhiguai is?
If you can't tell, this makes me fucking happy. :D