Ian Absentia

Let's put this simply. Your freedom of speech and expression doesn't protect you from recrimination after dropping a bomb like strongly implying that journalists and academics are Communist sympathisers -- and the irony of employing both the tactics and language of the HUAC in doing so is not lost. And neither does declaring that you've moved on when you know full well that it may be hours or days before others may read your comments. Nor do you reserve the right to insert political commentary while directing that of others' to the editorial backwaters of the site. And, at the end of the day, how does one expect to discuss Star Wars without descending into a discussion of authoritarianism and racism? Really. !i!

Or antithetical to authoritarianism. Jesus fuck, dude. !i!

"RICH means Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis. Totally automated industry is inevitable, sooner or later, however many dinosaurs may try to block it. The cybernetic age means the wage-economy being replaced by a National Dividend economy. Folks like Douglas and Pound and Bucky Fuller have seen that coming since the 1920s. The RICH society is one in which everybody will create their own ideas and artifacts. We'll all be in the Creativity game." - Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers Of course, RAW overlooked what happened with television's supposed potential as a teaching tool, and didn't quite foresee the rise of the Internet and it's tawdry outcome. Advances in technology seem to inevitably give rise to more commercialism and more porn. Think about that when you see that robot lawnmower next. !i!

They don't feel pain the way we do. !i!

I'd almost turn that on it's end. Whereas in WoD where your characters are underdogs in a world run by overwhelming, undead secret masters (who are, as you describe, a bunch of jags), in Nephilim your characters are underdogs in a world run by overwhelming, mortal secret masters. I recommend taking a page from Ozymandias of Watchmen and its unofficial sequel, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt -- stop playing defense, and make the game about taking the reins and changing the world. As far as historical atrocity goes, I think it was clear from Nephilim source material that it's been generally a shared sin between mortals and Nephilim. By no means do I even remotely represent the final word on this topic, but: Just Say No to Enlightened Humans. Plenty of games have trod that ground smooth. Just Say No to Parasites, too, because I guess English-speaking audiences are too squicky on this subject (even though it's proven popular enough in other media). What may ultimately set the game apart from other occult RPG predecessors is the sense of alienation -- not Enlightenment in discovering that you're the epitome of what all humanity is supposed to become, but Enlightenment in discovering that you're not actually human, and peeling away those human limitations. Liberated from humanity, what will you become? Yeah, Hellraiser, but minus the gore. And, yes, one could do this with any of the WoD games (well, except, maybe Werewolf), but when you describe a product line as "games of personal horror," you're kind of front-loading players' expectations and play style. Nephilim: What Will You Do to Change the World? At the risk of sounding nasty -- Ugh, let me tell you how frustrating it was to come across statements in the Selenim translation to the effect of, "Find a situation implied by these rules that we haven't covered? Make up your own rules!" Sure, points for giving agency to individuals, but this is the difference between an official company publication and, say, a hand-wavy collection of houserules published as OGL content. Whenever possible, provide rules to improvise setting, rather than setting to improvise rules. Given some of the scathing commentary I saw from French gamers on how the English translation of the game line was being handled, I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that there was an appreciation of how the rules themselves were cleaned up. Somehow that escaped me over the years. !i!

I never got my nascent Ringworld campaign off the ground back in the day, and I think you've all put your finger on where I had a disconnect -- I should've run it essentially the same as my very successful Traveller campaign. The two games share at least one very important commonality (aside from shared source material) -- their settings are effectively without boundaries, geographically, technologically and topically. It's far more Star Trek than Star Wars. The "soft railroad' was exactly the approach that I used with Traveller -- set a general, overarching goal to put them on a path through an open-ended map, then the players plot their own course through it. Occasionally the GM has to do a little improv to drop in scripted hooks to remind them of the eventual goal, which with Ringworld will almost always involve the structure of the Ring itself or the Engineers. So, kind of ironically, the title "Ringworld" is a bit of a mislead. It's a general science fiction RPG set in Niven's Known Universe, and the Ring is just the backdrop for virtually any kind of adventure you can imagine or desire. It's almost too big to grasp, but so was Traveller. You just pick the kind of adventure you want to run this week. Further irony. While I was struggling to understand how to put a Ringworld campaign together, I resorted to making creating conversion notes from Traveller to BRP, a framework I could wrap my head around. !i!

Do you propose that the character's resource Ability will fluctuate with play, or that Resistance rating will fluctuate? Or both? I can see either in play, and I agree that they can add a lot to many environmental conditions, but they'd represent different axes of fluctuation. Increasing Resistance with overuse or disuse of a pivotal resource while the Ability remains unchanged represents the effects of critical use. Your standard Depletion Penalty (HQ p.p. 88-89). Changing an Ability rating represents a chronic/permanent change in conditions. Changes to Resource Ratings (HQ p. 91). !i!

As I've noted before, I've always found this odd, because a huge swath of the gaming population of the era had no problem playing the undead version of Patty Hearst. It was doubly weird that critics (doubtful that they were players) identified with the body of the character and not the consciousness, a divide that was kind of the point of the game. True. On one hand, character creation involved rolling up, effectively, a separate character for each Past Life (usually 3 to 5 in my experience), on top of sorting out your Nephilim nature and your current Simulacrum identity. It was a lot of bookkeeping that created a steep entry/impediment to play. On the other hand, it was daunting to have a character rooted in several historical eras, not all of which you or the GM might know anything about. The deep, deep backstory was supposed to be vague, poorly-recalled (if at all) and hand-wavy, so I never considered that a problem. Lesson learned: Build a game with an accessible point of entry and allow players to grow into their characters. !i!

That is the old school Chaosium approach. Especially for a "toolkit" rules compendium like BRP, a semi-annual "Companion" could represent the current trends in popular style of play with optional plug-in rules, including both new developments and some old treasures from the vault as suggested above. !i!

Yeah, but people used to like putting hydrogen in blimps, too, and that was a bad idea. !i!

Great. During which time we'll agree to refrain from using ethnic shorthand. So, how 'bout that Trade Federation from The Phantom Menace? !i!

Depends on which trilogy cycle you're talking about. You have been on the Internet over the last 20 years, yeah? And, of course, don't lean into ethnic shorthand. !i!

Know how you can tell someone is being politically incorrect? They use the term "politically correct". The only people who bother using it are the ones claiming the right to flout it. But, yeah, just try to avoid ethnic shorthand -- it invariably falls apart under even casual inspection. !i! [Edit: Of course Star Wars, from the outset, is full of ethnic stereotypes, so this digression into cultural sensitivity is entirely on-topic. Ha.]

Given the spotty quality of most monthly comics that the game attempted to emulate, it's sad that there weren't just more adventures of any kind. !i!

Ha! No worries. I accidentally resuscitated an 8-year-old thread by responding to a 3-year-old post. Any follow-up within a calendar year is positively prompt. To be clear, you're referring to Shannon Patrick, right? Not Shannon Appelcline. Ugh, multiple rolls to achieve a single goal. This sort of thing has been the bane of roleplaying for ages. As a "mini-game," it only works if interspersed among a narrative. HeroQuest, which is explicitly narrative, has its extended contests and even those were re-jiggered and simplified from the original to the 2nd edition. Taking a page, generally, from HQ, if the drama lies within the process of racking up those situational bonuses individually, go for an extended contest (or something very much like it); if the drama lies only in the eventual result, go with a simple one-roll contest and a broad description. Here, you're seeing the exposed surface of the less-than-unified approach to adapting Nephilim to the English language. Under early editorship (c.1994-95-ish), there was only the translation notes from the core rules, so you have some from-scratch and hog-wild ideas seeing print, like Saturnian magic, Black Fire-Ka, and Templars with 30-round clips of Orichalka bullets as standard issue. Later developments (under different editors, c.96-98-ish) had the benefit of reference to more translation and popular opinion, and still free reign to deviate as wished or needed. It's fair to say that any future reboot would benefit greatly from its own, unified, and unique approach to re-envisioning the Nephilim cosmology and interpretation of the occult sciences. Regarding my approach to the Selenim magics, tenebrae was, in fact, going to track closely to Ka-vision (though Ka-vision was certainly up for revamping) and Black Summoning was going to generally cleave to the the existing summoning rules, though drawing on a different stable of entities. Necromancy pretty much needed to be its own, new thing, and the Imago was another matter entirely. Why no Black Moon Alchemy or Black Moon Sorcery? Limited imagination, I'm afraid -- I wasn't looking past the translation, and maybe I should've. The Selenim had so much else going for them, and besides, they could always still cast traditional multi-Ka magics using elixirs. Yeah, we weren't sure where we were going to go with that one. The concept was very close the the "ghouls" of Vampire: the Masquerade, and no one was eager to re-tread that ground. Early (and essentially uninformed) opinion was largely dismissive of the Selenim as a manqué of WoD vampires already. I really loved the concept of them as Nephilim who sacrificed their spiritual nature to save the rest of their kind, and was eager to take it in that direction. Today, I'd be inclined to take it in yet another direction still. So many questions, indeed. !i!

Also, Taoist "elements" is kind of a translational misnomer. They're seen more as influences than physical substances. So it's not a matter of being made of wood, but being like unto or affected by the nature of wood. !i!

Arguably, superlatives and hyperbole are how others would describe a character, or how you'd describe yourself, whether or not it's an objective and definitive statement. That's part of the fun of HQ, depending on how you run your game (i.e., a world-building question). Thus, Fastest Woman Alive 17M4 can be interpreted in your game as: Fastest Woman Alive...until proven otherwise Fastest Woman Alive, as dubbed by the local and/or national media Fastest Woman Alive, in my own (not-so) humble opinion Fastest Woman Alive, definitively, full-stop; the next highest stat in the game can be no higher than 16M4 (Personally, I'm a fan of Running Guy's declaration from The Tick: "I run faster than ten fast men!") As a superhero trope, it's a classic staple of debate and contest, with plenty of heroes and villains claiming the title of Strongest of Them All, for instance. Let them all claim the same title, then let their stats in play establish who's who. How many issues involving a knock-down, drag-out between The Hulk* and The Thing* have been predicated on this very argument? !i! [Edit: *For the record, I'd give The Hulk higher strength stats than Ben Grimm, but I'd let Ben augment with strategic/tactical skills to a near standstill. That said, I'd let The Hulk eventually augment with Blind Fury 10M7 and call the fight in his favor...as usually plays out in the comics.]

But is Aether an actual element or a medium? Hah! !i!

Whoa, hey. This slipped past me a couple of months ago. I'm curious -- considering that only six elements were noted in the original edition (seven, if you count the unpublished Selenim book), which eight elements would you identify? Solar Air Earth Fire Water Moon (Black Moon) (???) There are actually several different directions I might take this, including the apparent overlap of elements identified in Western occult/philosophical traditions (which aren't always in perfect alignment) with those in Asian traditions (which are also not always in alignment), and reconciliation of the deviations between the two. !i! [Edit: Right, I missed your reference to Saturnian magic from Secret Societies, which is kind of an inverted Solar element rather like how Black Moon is sort of an inverted Moon element.]

"That which is not dead..." More cross-title pollination. 👉🐱👈 !i!

And...there it is. !i!

I believe you're answering your own question, though perhaps laying blame at the wrong feet. !i!

If this is how you really feel, you're working with either the wrong medium or the wrong audience. It's a broken pitch. !i!

It's not a matter of science so much as a matter of dogma after 612 ST. !i!

And perhaps the two could share possession of one of St. Alban's fingers. !i!