MoonRightRomantic

In the years since I posted this topic, I've done some more thinking on revising the summoning system.

I've looked into the French editions. While the exact rules have varied across editions, they ultimately gave each circle multiple skills named after the sefirot of Kabbalah. Each sefira allows summoning a different set of creatures. In first, second, fourth and fifth edition which creatures you could summon from each sefira was essentially arbitrary, but third edition made a valiant attempt to give each sefira a concrete theme. The problem is that the power levels in all editions are wildly inconsistent and there's no guidelines for balancing any of it. Fifth edition discarded the rules for ruptures and instead requires summoners to submit to various oaths in order to contract entities. There's also a set of five "worlds" (unrelated to the Olamot of Kabbalah and seemingly an original creation of the writers, but seems closest to the watchtowers) that summoners have to specialize in and visit in order to advance. To achieve Agartha via summoning (depending on the edition), summoners have to pass the Guardian of Binah to reach the Third Circle and must then construct/claim a fiefdom in the summoning worlds.

So I've decided to discard those needless complications and just use the elements like Sorcery and Alchemy do. The element determines what a summon will generally be capable of and themed after (e.g. fire involves force, earth involves protection, moon involves deception, air involves perception, water involves adaptability), while the scope and power level is limited by the circle. I wanted to give the circles their own logic similar to how Alchemy distinguishes itself from Sorcery, but due to a lack of progress on that front I decided to use a rule of thumb: first circle is roughly equal in power to Ritual Magic (e.g. mostly subtle effects that affect intangibles like emotions and wealth, minimum of direct damage), second circle to ~50% of High Magic (e.g. stronger influence, direct physical, psychological or magical damage), and third circle is deus ex machina territory (e.g. the Lord Principalities of the Gates being able to annihilate any person and all their colleagues, reveal any knowledge or erase all memory and record of it, or arbitrarily rewrite any person's nature; Adonai and the Five Branches of the Tree of Life would also be placed here). In order to balance this against the other two occult sciences, Summoning has additional restrictions/dangers: summoning spells must be cast at sufficiently magical times and/or places, entities require payment for their services (tangible and/or intangible), and the consequences of rupture (i.e. failing to contract the entity, violating the terms of the contract, or angering the entity), all of which scale with the circles and services offered. 

I've also divided summoning spells into several types: invocations (the target themselves displays the desired traits of the entity without it appearing), physical evocations (the entity appears before the summoner), astral evocations (the entity appears on the astral plane and communicates with the summoner through the ritual altar), field adjurations (when an entity is encountered in the field, the summoner may attempt to contract/bind it), and field abjurations (when an entity is encountered in the field, the summoner may attempt to banish/exorcize/destroy it).

As for the cosmology... I've simplified the planes to just upper planes and lower planes. Nephilim generally summon from the upper planes, whereas Khaiban summons, black summons, and Saturnian summons are called from the lower planes, and elemental beasts are generally conjured from the Ka flowing through the physical plane. The primary distinction between these elementals is that the upper planes have more ambient Solar-Ka and thus elementals can be more intelligent (I link SK to awareness, identity and will in my campaigns; without a full recap, my Nephilim are hybrids of their human soul and the elemental spirit), whereas entities summoned from the middle and lower planes generally rely on instinct or programming instead due to the increasing spiritual distance from Solar-Ka.

Kabbalists describe these planes in terms of the Olamot and Qlippoth: the first circle summons from Assiah (the physical) and Yetzirah (the astral), the second from Briah (the mental), and the third from Atziluth (the causal and spiritual). However, I'm not limiting the game rules to that tradition alone. In my secret history, summoning wasn't invented by Jesus but is the result of millennia of effort stretching through King Solomon, Helen of Greece, Melchizedek, John Dee, and so on. Different Arcana have unique Initiate Spells, such as The Hierophant summoning idealized self-images of the Godhead, The Star summoning aliens and personifications of celestial bodies, and The Devil summoning khaibans, dragons, and qlippothic demons.

There's also astral travel, which requires a lot more expansion from the brief rules we got in Major Arcana. As part of drawing inspiration from real occultism, I leave it a deliberate point of ambiguity and in-character argument whether these entities live on other planes or these entities are drawn from the personal and collective unconscious that these planes are representations of. The High Priestess doesn't have a monopoly on astral travel, but they're the best at it as part of their Arcane Techniques. Astral travel isn't necessary to advance Summoning, but is an outgrowth of the first circle that deals with the astral entities; though it can be useful as a research aid and scrying tool. Summoners go on vision quests through their own mind and soul as part of the Summoner's Quest, which reflects (and is reflected by) the collective unconscious through the magical principle of "As Above, So Below."

I'll be namedropping the Good Ministers of the Ayres, the Ars Goetia, and so on as examples of summons. However, groups will be free to invent their own summons by following the guidelines, as with the revised Sorcery and Alchemy rules. I'm not going to assign every entity to a Sefira or Realm or whatever, although roleplayers are free to do so using the Nephilim planes document from the files section Planes.PDF or Montgomery's blog post describing the correspondence between the Enochian Ethers and the Sefirot.

I want to design guides for Third Circle Quests similar to the French version, too. I'd reflavor the Summoning Worlds to use the Watchtowers in order to anchor it in actual occult practice (the resemblance to Mage: The Awakening is purely coincidental), but otherwise I think the French quests could work fine as examples.

Also, another thing I’d add is more UFOlogy and Ancient Aliens stuff a la the History Channel. The US version explained that UFOs are actually leftover Atlantean magi-tech but, aside from featuring Area 51 as a plot hook, spacecraft aren’t integrated into the secret history at all. Which is just strange to me, considering all the UFOlogy buffs saying various historical events involved alien spacecraft.

So I’d have Atlantean (and non-Atlantean) spacecraft make appearances in the secret history, past and present. Maybe have outposts in other parts of the Solar System. Annunaki living on Nibiru, stargates, pyramid ships, spacefaring dinosaurs, panspermia, that sort of thing.

E.g. an adventure hook is that the PCs discovered a buried but functional pyramid warship, but someone knowledgeable hijacked it while they were investigating. They have to deactivate it before the thief uses its onboard weapons to conquer the world. The US government shoots an Orichalc nuke at it, but its shields effortlessly block the explosion. It turns out it was build by space vampires using a Black Moon power source!

On 5/24/2023 at 3:31 PM, Ian Absentia said:

A theory and approach that I'll selfishly point out has been promoted for several decades now.  But who's counting? 😃

!i!

I’m using it mostly for practical and thematic consistency reasons. The Nephilim in the original concept are quite frankly horrifically monstrous, what with experimenting on humans even before body snatching, which is fine… but the text portrays them as innocent persecuted victims!

So I ditched the body snatching to fit with the persecuted victims bit. This removes any hint of moral ambiguity from the secret societies who are enemies of Nephilim. Sure, many Nephilim are probably guilty of war crimes in one or more past lives, but nobody’s perfect.

This does raise the question as to why Rosicrucians wouldn’t just acquire Stasis items to bond with the Ka since they’d retain their consciousness, but the short answer is that there simply aren’t enough to go around (as of Major Arcana circa 1995, a century into the Great Awakening, the ratio of mortals to active Nephilim was around 300,000 to 1). Fortunately, the World Arcanum Quest exists for those who want to bring Agartha to the whole world, so if you want to play a mixed group that includes mortal Rosicrucians then that’s probably the best choice.

On 5/25/2023 at 11:33 AM, mandrill_one said:

This is not exact: in the 5th edition, past or present "lives" ("vécus") are rated on a 1-10 scale, which is then multiplied by 10 to obtain a percentage to roll under. So, it is quite easy to devise a BRP variant, where each vécu is a "skill group" rated 1-100. Each vécu is a skill group since it includes all knowledges, abilities, skills and aptitudes that are commonly, or conceivably, associated with that vécu: e.g., a "medieval female condottiere" vécu could include abilities related to diplomacy, financial administration, accounting, sword combat, dodge, shield use, horse riding, communication skills, leadership, Italian geography, catholic religion, strategy and tactics, outdoor survival, encampment life, travel. All these skills have the same rating as the vécu itself.

I wrote that before I really understood how the 5e skill system worked. Thanks for the correction and thank you very much for the house rule! I was going to retrofit the 5e skill system onto the 3e rules, not BRP, as 3e is a better fit for the setting than BRP ever was. I find it way better than 5e too, but I digress.

In 5e all traits are rated from 1–10 or so, whereas in 3e Characteristics are rated from 1–5 (noted as adjectives, translate to Not, Little, Enough, “…”, and Very) and Skills are rated P/A/C/M (Profane, Apprentice, Companion, Master). To give the sense of longer progression similar to 5e, I’d note the 3e Skill progression more explicitly, as Skills are advanced by noting points gained via practical experience (i.e. rolling a Critical Success) or study/training.

To type it out:

P [1] A [1] [2] [3] C [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] M

The first point is a month of study/training, the second and third are six months each, and the fourth and fifth are five years each. So to master any given Skill, a character must spend a decade studying and training in game time.

I’m still transcribing and translating the 3e books, so I don’t have time right now to properly convert your suggestion into that edition’s Agartha Point scale. Since I’m using the US version’s setting, I’ll need to localize the names: a vécu becomes a “Life Experience”, a Mnemos effect becomes a “Flashback”.

Good night!

So I have some more thoughts to share.

To summarize the 3e rules:

• Characteristics and Difficulties are divided into five levels: Not (1), Little (2), Enough (3), "..." (4), and Very (5). E.g. Not Strong, Little Charismatic, Enough Initiated, Agile, Very Educated. These are compared on the Universal Resolution Table (URT) to determine the roll under number on the 1d20 roll; this is similar to the resistance table for BRP, but using d20 instead of d100.
• Skills are measured by four levels: Profane (P), Apprentice (A), Companion (C), and Master (M). These modify the Difficulty on the URT: P worsen by 2 levels, A by 1, C by 0, M reduces by 1.
• The Ka Characteristic is measured by Initiated. The Ka-Elements are then derived from this value. Initiated has a pool of 0-10 "bullets" attached that may be gained or spent. Gaining 10 bullets means the player may spent XP or Agartha Points (AP) to increase their Initiated level. Magical damage causes the PC to lose bullets, which may or may not recover depending on the source.
• Selenim don't have Ka-Elements, but they do have a Black Moon Pool that they may spend to cast Spells. (Nephilim don't have Ch'awe in French. They may cast Spells without limit.)
• Ar-Kaim may have 2-8 Ka of any combination, but track each independently. They spend Ka bullets to cast Talents, and recover bullets through various means.
• All three types of Immortals have their own sets of Occult Sciences divided into three Circles each: Nephilim have Magic (Sorcery), Kabbalah (Summoning), and Alchemy; Selenim have Necromancy, Conjuration (Black Summoning), and Anamorphosis; Ar-Kaim have Talents for each combination of Element and Zodiac House.
• Each Circle of an Occult Science has multiple Occult Skills that are tracked independently. To master a Circle and advance to the next, the PC needs 2 Skills at M and 1 at C or 8 levels total. Each Talent is measured as its own Skill.
• Mundane Skills are increased by gaining points through rolling Critical Successes in practical experience or studying. To raise P to A requires 1 point, A to C 3 points, C to M 5 points. Each successive point takes longer to earn.
• Characters have various degenerations measured as Characteristics: Khaiba, Narcosis and Black Moon's Curse for Nephilim, Khaiba and Instability for Ar-Kaim. Other handicaps aren't represented as Characteristics.
• Meta-Characteristics are no longer persistent but must be activated and gain Khaiba or Narcosis bullets for failure. Selenim don't have Meta-Characteristics, but may curse mortals with a similar penalty by casting the evil eye. Ar-Kaim use their Solar-Ka to calculate bonuses, but spend points from the associated Ka upon failure.
• Reaching Agartha isn't connected to mastering Occult Sciences, but instead the culmination of a Quest measured like Skills. All Immortals may reach Agartha by questing for it.

To summarize character creation:

• There are three steps of character creation: Sapience, Fall, and Finishes.
• Sapience is divided into four steps: Initiation, Aspect, Occult Way, and Past. Each is noted at levels A, C or M, but with bullets (• to •••). The player is free to note all steps at Master, in which case the PC is a Figure in the setting.
  • At Initiation, the player decides their PC's Ka value.
  • At Aspect, the player selects Metamorphosis.
  • At Occult Way, the player selects how skilled the PC is in his favored Occult Science. He may also note levels in one or both of the other two.
  • At Past, the player selects how many past life eras the PC remembers. He may select 1-3, and each is noted with its own level.
  • The above steps are for Nephilim. Selenim and Ar-Kaim are structured the same steps, but they differ in many ways.
• At Fall, the player selects an Injury or Enemy (flaws, basically) for each Sapience step, noted at the same level. This balances the PC's power, while giving more flexibility compared to the prior editions' tradeoff between Ka and Incarnations or distributing skills incarnation by incarnation.
• At Finishes, the player selects the invisible history intrigues that the PC was involved in, the Stasis item, the Simulacrum, and the PC's name.

I'm still translating the books, but I'm definitely going to be using 3e to inform the development of my own rules. The rules are much simpler and easier to track compared to BRP, such as magical damage to Ka bullets (no need to keep recalculating derived Ka-Elements). Additionally, I'll incorporate rules from 4e and 5e that I feel are genuine innovations and simplifications on the 3e basis, such as

• 4e's qualitative domains for occult sciences instead of 3e's multiple skills. IMO it's easier to track Circles as single skills rather than multiple: e.g. to master a Circle and start the next you need that Technique at M.
• 4e's accounting for Assets selected at character creation (e.g. artifacts, safehouses)
• 5e's accounting of Fraternities with point values
• being able to start play with some advancement in a quest from past lives a la 5e, as opposed to starting quests only during play. Although this depends on the players' experience: for new players it makes sense to restrict quests to current play.
• 5e's replacing the long lists of skills with using Past Lives "Experiences" as skills instead. Recalling these is tied into the mechanic "Mnemos Effect" (i.e. flashbacks). (Esoteric Lore skills are still listed separately in 5e. Life Experiences cover mundane minutiae.)
• 5e's more flexible "Approaches" 5e (provided by Ka, metamorphs, or Selenim aspects!) as opposed to Meta-Characteristics linked to specific characteristics in 1-3e or skills in 4e. Although I'd still use the latter as example guidelines.
• 5e's tracking all degenerations (Khaiba, Narcosis, Shouit) with points that have persistent side-effects for the PC, rather than just some of them or having effects limited to specific circumstances.
• etc.

Anyway, to summarize my current thoughts on revising the setting, using the US version as my foundation with stuff incorporated from the French:

• I'd offer Nephilim, Selenim, and Ar-Kaim as options at character creation. Each has different benefits, drawbacks, and backstories. Mixed groups are supported and preferred: ideally 2-3 Nephilim, 1-2 Selenim, and 1-2 Ar-Kaim.
  • To summarize: Nephilim have elemental occult sciences and stasis items, but Orichalc is deadly to them and they're hunted by evil secret societies like the Templars and Black Star.
  • Selenim are insensitive to Orichalc, invisible to conventional magic detection, largely unknown to the opposing secret societies, can perform black magic, and don’t age, but cannot perform elemental magic, must feed on emotions via psychic vampirism to survive, lack Stasis items by default and cannot reincarnate without certain Third Circle Spells (so a simple bullet can force the player to make a new PC).
  • Ar-Kaim are insensitive to Orichalc, can potentially cultivate any of the 8 elements in themselves (including Solar and Orichalc), have their own unique Talents and can potentially learn any of the other occult sciences if they have the requisite Ka and teaching, but their Ka is unstable as a result, they don't have Stasis items by default and they are limited to reincarnating within the bloodline/descendants of their first simulacrum (baring certain Third Circle Spells, but these have drawbacks).
• The Immortals are no longer body snatching parasites but unions of an elemental essence, which is a mindless beast at best by itself, and a human soul that provides the awareness, identity and will to competently use its magical abilities. (Inspired by Montgomery's blog posts on the subject.) Don't misunderstand: this isn't to say that the Immortals are merely awakened humans who use their magic for purely selfish reasons like in certain other games. Nephilim is fundamentally a game about revelation, spirituality and transcendence, not simple egotism. Anyway, to summarize their origins:
  • Nephilim are created when a proto-Nephilim elemental is born in a Nexus and merges with a spiritually suitable human who enters. The human's Solar-Ka provides awareness, identity and will, but also protects the Ka from the trace Orichalc in the magic fields that degrades other elementals. Every newly born/awakened Nephilim will find sanctuary among the Major Arcana, who will link their Ka to a Stasis item. The Stasis item stores the elemental Ka between incarnations, releasing the elemental when filled and allowing it to search for a new bearer. The elemental is instinctively drawn by fate to merge with a bearer whose personality and current living conditions are suitable. Outside of a bearer or Stasis item, the elemental will eventually fall into Narcosis and steadily degrade over the following centuries or millennia until it dissolves into the magic fields. (In the French version, all Nephilim are fallen Kaim who were present during The Fall of Orichalka. All Kaim were originally germs carried to Earth by a cosmic wind, so The Star was right all along!)
  • Selenim are created in one of two ways: Nephilim may become Selenim due to contamination by the Black Moon or a deliberate sundering of their Ka, and proto-Selenim born in lands of nightmares in the lower planes may hitch a ride on a passing dreamer and merge with them to create a new Selenim. The Selenim's Ka is too unstable to survive on the earthly plane for even a moment outside of a body, and they cannot enter their Stasis item if they retain one, so they cannot reincarnate as easily as Nephilim. (This is identical to French version.)
  • Ar-Kaim are born from a Nexus like a Nephilim, but only at the moment a suitable bearer enters. It's common for these bearers to be drawn to the Nexus by instinct, as though Fate was working through them. The Ar-Kaim's Ka is forever linked to their first bearer's bloodline, so they can only reincarnate in the descendants of that bloodline, leading to the oldest Ar-Kaim essences being preserved by occult dynasties. Like the Selenim, the Ka is too unstable to survive on the earthly plane for even a moment outside of a body, and they didn't develop Stasis items for themselves, but the ritual to transfer the essence to a new bearer is known to all the occult dynasties. (This is identical to French version.)
• Although the Major Arcana of the Bohemian Tradition (as I call it) are the most organized and powerful secret societies of Immortals in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East and Oceania (basically everywhere that contributed to Hermeticism or was heavily colonized by Europe), they aren't the only ones in the world. As the campaign setting focuses on the modern United States, I will explore some of the other Traditions with representatives there: these include the Amerindian, the Afro-Caribbean and the Mesoamerican. The Mesoamerican Immortals in particular play a huge role in the backstory of the occult America: the Xibalbans (the Tradition behind the Aztec Empire) raised a Black Moon crescent that could've caused disaster before Cortez oversaw its destruction.
• The secret history is gonna be fuzzier. While I'm still using the timeline from GMC, I posit that the Immortals lack any reliable records of history prior to the rise and fall of Tarshish circa 10,000 BC. Tarshish will be the oldest past life available to PCs. The events prior to that are subject to myth and hearsay, and the elaborate millions of years of backstory the rulebook ham-fistedly shoved onto new players isn't necessary to understand the game. Although some whisper of civilizations predating Tarshish that built UFOs and such, most Immortals believe that Tarshish was the inspiration for the stories of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria and so forth. Similarly, the idea that the dinosaurs were intelligent and precursors to the Selenim is considered laughable... at least until Chariot tried to create their own Jurassic Park with disastrous results!
• The cosmology is clarified and simplified of unnecessary complexity. The summoning worlds and the subtle planes are the same thing: the PCs can project into the astral and have adventures there, consulting entities for summoning research, etc. The upper planes (from where Nephilim draw most of their summons) have Elemental Ka and Solar-Ka, so elementals may be summoned from here and may even have human-like awareness. The lower planes (from where Selenim, Khaibans, and Fraternitas Saturnii draw their summons) are heavily corrupted by Black Moon and Orichalc, and have little Solar-Ka to spare, so most summons from here are beasts or rely on programming to counterfeit intelligence.
• The magic systems and so on will follow from Liber Ka/Enlightened Magic's conceits that magic is subtle and largely invisible to the uninitiated. Metamorphosis transformations and the like are now purely spiritual in nature rather than physically altering the body, but still affect the physical world the same way (e.g. an angel has spiritual wings, but these still allow him to fly!). Elementals, assuming they're not invisible to mundane senses, are perceived as the closest mundane if unusual phenomena (e.g. the Armors of Avalon are perceived as non-magical if bizarre clothing, elemental beasts are mistaken for wild animals or more mundane cryptids). If it seems odd that elementals would be perceived as other than what they are, then consider the occult concept of the "veil of Maya"; the cosmology is tied into occultism, and the spiritual blind not seeing the "clear evidence" of the spiritual is part of that.
• Likewise, the Summoning rules would be revised a la Liber Ka and Slaying the Dragon (reprinted in Enlightened Magic) for a system more authentic to Enochian magic albeit dumbed down for ease of play. It would still use the Good Ministers of the Ayres (albeit with accuracy to their names and descriptions) and have some Kabbalah influence (which corresponds to Enochian magic anyway), it wouldn't have incoherent and unnecessary complexities like the realms/thresholds (e.g. why is a ship that teleports you across the world sorted into the Realm of Violence? Make it make sense!). At least I would aim for authentic, but I don't know anything about Enochian magic.
• Stasis items can be replaced if destroyed, but destruction still has severe consequences for Nephilim. Their link to their past lives is provided by their Stasis item, so they lose the ability to recall past lives predating their current Stasis item. This means that any given Nephilim may be much older than their Stasis item suggests. (For comparison, in the French version the Nephilim died immediately if their Stasis item was broken.)
• PCs don't necessarily recall all the past lives they experienced, or all the memories of any given past life. They can forget a lot of knowledge across reincarnations and magical injuries. Since past lives are now simplified into their own skills, it is easier to gain points in their during play and recalling more details from known past lives or recalling entirely forgotten ones. (In case the "P/A/C/M" progression seems like it would make progression too fast, I still incorporate 3e's points, so it would be more like "P[1]A[1][2][3]C[1][2][3][4][5]M".)
• The Kaim were the first generations of Immortals, who had their own awareness without Solar-Ka and could create their own elemental bodies, but most were destroyed by the Fall of Orichalka circa 100,000 BC. Of those who survived, none were heard from again by the time of Christ's birth. Kaim are not available as PCs, and their very existence is speculative among the human Immortals.

And that's all I have for now. Hope you enjoyed!

Unfortunately the language barrier makes it difficult to tell what is supposed to be comedic and what isn't. The sheer surrealism of many concepts, delivered in what seems like a completely straight tone, makes this even more difficult.

I know the serious tone and mystical sounding jargon can obscure it, but when you try to describe the setting to someone who knows nothing about it then it sounds absolutely ludicrous. Especially when you include the French stuff that wasn't translated into English.

For example:

• The dinosaurs were intelligent, built their own civilization, placed a second moon in orbit, and invented vampirism.
• Jesus Christ invented a magic system that, at least in the French version, lets you summon Shai-Hulud. Yes, the giant sandworm from Dune. (The French version has several such references.)
• The player characters are wizards, immortals, Atlanteans, and a Paracelsan elementals all in one. In the French version, they're confirmed to be alien souls brought to the Solar system by cosmic winds. So they're thetans too!
• One adventure has three Aztec vampires summon a tyrannosaurus' ghost into a wickerman to stop the Knights Templar from taking over the world.
• In the French version, Alister Crowley was the reincarnation of Akhenaton and a tyrannosaurus.
• In the French version, Morpheus (the Greek god) has a palace on the Moon where he makes dreams for humanity. That is by far the least bizarre entry on this list imo.

You remember any other crazy details?

Chaosium released a new rulebook a few days after my last post: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/431991/Basic-Roleplaying-Universal-Game-Engine

The 3e rules are definitely a much better fit for the setting than the BRP rules. Particularly when it comes to things like managing Ka damage. In the BRP rules, every lost point meant you immediately had to recalculate your entire Pentacle. Under the 3e rules, your Characteristics only count the tens for task resolution, which makes bookkeeping so much easier.

What I like about the character creation is that it does away with the "spend 2 Ka per past life" rule. Instead, you just pick whether your character is an Apprentice, Journeyman, or Master in various occult things. Then you balance that by selecting an equivalent number of Flaws. So your PC could start play with Master in all steps and be a famous figure in the setting as a result (this is explicitly stated during CC), but your PC has equivalent Flaws to compensate. I find this a much better way to balance characters by comparison.

I'm thinking of hacking 3e for the US version's setting, since I appreciate the simplified bookkeeping. I haven't translated 4e and 5e yet, but I hear that 5e further simplifies past lives by condensing them into skills and having them unrated. Instead, these "experiences" apply a bonus or penalty to relevant rolls a la FATE's Aspects. That certainly sounds like it would make recalling new past lives during play very easy to adjudicate. Under BRP that's basically impossible to do.

Not to rag on BRP here. It's just that the system doesn't fit with Nephilim specifically. The setting goes against number of ttrpg conventions that are difficult for traditional systems to handle. Having past lives at all, much less recalling their skills during play, is so rare that traditional design doesn't account for it.

Coming from a d20 background, I prefer consolidation: a core rulebook which collects all rules applicable to most settings, settings released as their own supplements, etc. I also think ttrpg books could benefit from more flexible formats than PDF, such as HTML5. Those online d20 SRDs is a good example. I imagine you could create an HTML book that cross-references both the universal rules and setting-specific rules for you, without needing to repeat redundant information.

I’m currently working on a blog revising the setting. It revises the Nephilim to be a higher self that arises from the fusion of a human soul and an elemental a la Montgomery’s blog posts, in order to make them palatable to players. I’m also including Selenim and Ar-Kaïm from the French 3e.

I’m translating the French 3e books to get better rules for the Selenim since the 1e/2e “rules” are vague wishy-washy garbage. It’s been a blast so far. I’ve even translated some fan supplements from Heritors of Babel.

What I’m having trouble with is devising an Enochian summoning system to match the rules from Liber Ka, Slaying the Dragon and Enlightened Magic. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, read some real occult books on evocation for ideas. But I’m coming up dry when it comes to inventing and balancing evocations, as well as differentiating it from sorcery and alchemy. I don’t want it to just be “you summon an entity that casts spells on your behalf.”

Working in the Ar-Kaïm is gonna be a doozy because their shtick is that they’re Aberrant-inspired superheroes. Unlike the Nephilim and Selenim, they’re not body-snatchers either. Neither fits the subtle magic and higher self conceits I’m going with for the Nephilim.

On 3/21/2023 at 10:42 AM, Atgxtg said:

No, at the very least, they could do nothing and just leave the book as it is. That would be doing the very least. Now they could certainly choose to add in the CoC7 stuff as optional rules, but that would be doing more than the very least. In fact, anything other than tacking the CoC7 stuff on in a few pages at the end of the book, would almost certainly require re-typesetting and reformatting the book.  

Yes, but all those optional and variant rules came from pre-existing BRP games, and ones that used rules similar to RuneQuest/Stormbringer/old CoC, and ones that were mostly out of print or hard to find at the time of the BGB's release. If they added the CoC7 rules, then a strong case could be made for adding in the variant rules from all the BRP related games, such  Pendragon and Ringworld, which are at least as similar to BRP as CoC7 is. 

Besides, anyone who is fond of CoC7 can just pull it out and mix 'n match it with the BGB if they wish to get what they want. It's not like you can't port stuff you want from the BGB to CoC7. The same is true for anyone who has Stormbringer/Elric!, RuneQuest 3, RuneQuest 2, Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, etc and want's to grab something from the BGB. Everything works both ways. It a GM running Hawkmoon wants to port over laser cannon stats from the BGB, or a Stormbringer GM wants to port over stats for archaic firearms, they can.   The main advantage to the BGB was that it collected a lot of rules from older games that are no longer available, at least not in the same form, so somebody who wanted them could have access to RQ's Battle Magic, or Stormringer's Sorcery, as most of that was out of print at the time. 

In fact, with most of the older Chasoium stuff being available again, and with  RQG, Magic World, CoC7, available, the BGB isn't as valuable now as it was when it was released. In most cases you don't need the BGB to fill the gaps. What you can't get now, is stuff that the BGB doesn't cover, most of which is due to licensing, such as RingWorld. 

Ok, then release a supplement collecting those rules.

On 1/28/2023 at 1:03 PM, Atgxtg said:

Not really. CoC7 is an experimental offshoot of the BRP rules, and does some things different from all the other BRP games. If they "updated" the BGB to be more in line with CoC7 then it would be less compatible with other BRP games including Magic World and, especially, RuneQuest.

Plus. I believe Chaosium is more into promoting stand alone rules with settings rather than generic mechanics, as the former sell better.

At the very least, they could add those as optional or variant rules. The BRP rulebook already includes a bunch of optional or variant rules reflecting different settings and editions. 

I like how the 5th edition heavily simplifies the rules. Rather than separate attributes and Ka, these are condensed into the same traits. Rather than complicated past lives with associated skills, past lives are treated as skills. This would make it much easier to recall new past lives during play. Over on my blog I'm using that as a model for my suggestions to simplify the rules for the English adaptation.

With regard to the Ar-KaIm... according to the new lore they all just vanished because metaplot. It's very disappointing, but I guess it was done to appease the market that never liked them?

I'm using the suggestion from Montgomery's blog where the elemental spirit doesn't have a distinct personality due to a lack of soul/Sol and instead each of the incarnations has a distinct personality. More like the Kwisatz Haderach, Golden Path, and ego-memories in the Dune series. (Fun fact: the French version actually used "Kwisatz Haderach" and "Golden Path" several times in reference to Dune.) So you wouldn't really need the Nephilim vs Ar-KaIm distinction anymore; unless you need some unified rules for handling characters with non-standard elemental configurations, I guess. The French version was full of stuff like that, such as the rejects and grafts created by the 666 and whatever the heck the Orichalquiens were doing.

I've heard several people mention they played games from the perspectives of the secret societies fighting the evil body-thieves, and quite frankly I got sick of it. There's still the quest for Agartha, because having all those ego-memories changes your perspective on life and the universe, but I think the reframing of nephilim as sums of souls and elemental fusions makes them more sympathetic to players (even if the RPG community is hypocrites who have no problem playing cannibal cults) and makes the secret societies unambiguously evil or at best deluded.

On 9/19/2021 at 1:30 PM, RogerDee said:

Not the least of which if it was re-imagined it would allow the easily incorporation of Immortal Invisible War, Fireborn, and of course Highlander all relatively easily with some redesign.

(Sorry for the late reply.) Then it's not the same setting. It's an original setting with some inspirations from several different 90s games.

Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I uploaded a copy of the digest archives to the files section: 

On 6/22/2021 at 3:57 AM, Mugen said:

Note that one sentence in the game's decription is misleading.

"Based on the famous D100 game engine (the one that was used in the first two editions of Nephilim) (...)"

The game is d100 roll-under, but it doesn't use BRP at all. Skills are replaced with freeform "Past lives", ranked from 1 to 10. To succeed at a task, you roll 1d100 under as "Past life" (sometimes modified by your elemental affitinies) x10. The 10s of the roll determine quality of success, and doubles are criticals (the only reason why you use a d100 and not a d10).

It's a lot simpler than any prior edition. I think that's an improvement and I think any attempts at English revival by Chaosium could take notes.

On 6/2/2021 at 12:04 PM, Ian Absentia said:

Mm-hm!  This is, in fact and deed, not "canonical" Nephilim.  Which I find interesting and validating on several levels.

!i!

Honestly, I think frontloading players with a secret history about elementals creating humanity was probably a bad idea.

On 4/13/2021 at 1:28 PM, Ian Absentia said:

Drew returns to The Game That May Never Be in a log of the 1-on-1 game he's been playing.

https://andrewloganmontgomery.blogspot.com/2021/04/nephilim-kaliyuga-session-o.html

His particular interpretation of the setting fills a number of gaps as presented in the 1994 ed.

!i!

Interesting. He describes the elemental spirit as lacking an ego, but the current life and past lives having their own egos. This is basically the "symbiote" perspective discussed on the mailing list. The only notable difference between Montgomery's take and the "awakened" perspective that I recall (I wasn't around for the original discussions and the Ex Oculis netbook doesn't shed light on matters) is that the symbiote seek out new simulacra to bond with whereas the awakened is predestined, but I don't think most players will appreciate the distinction.

Using this symbiote perspective basically breaks the canonical backstory, since the KaIm were supposed to be elemental beings with their own egos. In order to have the lore stay consistent you'd need to an additional wrinkle such as positing that the Nephilim spirits are actually a distinct species (for lack of a better term) from the KaIm who lack their own egos and instead rely on the human ego. You'd also need to add further wrinkles to account for instances in the lore where somebody is forcibly incarnated in order to suppress their will (IIRC, Heracles was such an instance) or explain how a secret society (I forgot which one had this mentioned) trying to incarnate a nephilim with the human ego in control are unable to accomplish their goals.

Sorry for the late reply, I don't visit these forums often.

On 2/22/2021 at 7:13 AM, RogerDee said:

Sun and Moon energies could be polar opposites, and Dark Moon even more so.

I think that misunderstands the cosmological constraints that Nephilim setup. All of the elements are derived from Solar-Ka, each representing a fraction of its infinite possibility. This is a key conceit of the setting from which other aspects follow.

So combat currently requires three rolls in normal situations. One percentile roll to attack, one percentile roll to defend (parry or dodge), and one non-percentile roll to inflict damage.

Are there any optional rules to reduce this further? For example, reducing combat rounds to just the players rolling defense rolls to determine how much damage they suffer?

On 7/6/2020 at 6:28 AM, RogerDee said:

Honestly i would certainly incorporate Champions Mystic World, which is essentially similar to the realms from Gurps Cabal, just more detailed.

Next I would certainly think about including Grand Grimoire for 7e, for magic, and perhaps, even Cthulhu Pulp to make the characters more cinematic, and interesting.

As I am thinking about incorporating Nephilim, as well as Everlasting Davea (Supernatural Pagan deities are a carbon copy really), and Highlander into a Buffy type environment - I certainly want different kinds of Nephilim.

So the Highlander immortals would essentially be empowered by positive energy (DnD / Pathfinder) or Alpha (Alpha Omega rpg). Vampires would be the exact opposite, meaning both would essentially be hard pressed to associate with one another. Although I did potentially toy with the idea of the Highlander immortals being a shattered elder god (Evil Author off SB and FF.net) did something similar but an Old One instead.

Daeva could be empowered through being born into a nexus, igniting the fire of their 'divinity'.

At this point, you're making an entirely new game.

I have been entertaining the idea of devising an urban fantasy game myself. I'm not married to any particular system, so I suppose I'd be okay with doing a systemless setting or compatible with multiple types of OGC systems like d20, GORE, or Action!.

There are just so many different subgenres. Gothic horror soap opera, paranormal political thriller, splatterpunk, mystery investigations, monster hunters, occult revelation...

Speaking of The Everlasting, I thought their Osirian character option was an interesting riff on Mage: The Ascension and Nephilim. In The Everlasting, anyone can potentially learn the rules' freeform magic system with the limitation that a single character is only able to ever learn a single magical tradition such as wicca, druidism, Taoism, or less conventional traditions like "techgnosticism." The Osirians are reincarnating magicians who can learn the precepts of all other traditions because they understand the meta-magic underlying all the different traditions.

If I was designing an urban fantasy setting and wanted to give my wizard characters special treatment, then that's probably the same direction I'd go in.

On 1/10/2021 at 12:47 PM, SunlessNick said:

• I'd change the elements a bit, replacing Moon with Metal.  In the Middle Ages, metal was regarded as a close balance of the four elements, and of course the Chinese system swaps out Air for Metal and Wood - that makes both workable as imperfect analogues to the truth.  All five elements being forms of matter has better symmetry. In astrological terms, Metal would tie to Saturn, while Orichalka would be reallocated to the asteroid belt - this is why it expresses of other elements.
• However, Moon would still exist as a different type of human immortal, rooted in perfection of mind and body.

I can't say I'm a fan of changing Moon to Metal. All the symbolism doesn't work as well with Metal: the proximity to Earth and Water, the associations with darkness and nocturnal creatures, reptiles because they shed their skin, madness and biological illness, dreams and illusions, etc. Not to mention, each of the elements already has correspondences with particular metals (e.g. gold w/ Sun, silver w/ Moon, lead w/ Saturn).

There's no occult or philosophical basis for it, I don't think. The classical elements were descriptions of how the world was composed, whereas the Wuxing are about phases of process and change. Furthermore, the Nephilim pentacle is already arranged basically the same as the Wuxing pentacle.

But YMMV.

On 1/10/2021 at 12:47 PM, SunlessNick said:

Black Moon and Selenim would be character options - both humans and Nephilim can become Selenim, though humans need the help of an existing one.

The French version would go on to introduce various other options: Nephilim "cruxim" with only four elements, Selenim "graftees" with additional elements grafted on, Nephilim "rejects" with their lunar branch blackened, rumored "Necronim" who had all six elements including moon and black moon (and could incarnate in corpses?), and the Ar-KaIm who had Solar-Ka and Orichalka and potentially all the rest. There were several factions (not arcana) that dealt specifically with this like the 666 and Orichalquiens. (Basically, the French version was weird.)

I think we could stand to introduce a more standardized way of handling various combinations of elements.

On 1/10/2021 at 12:47 PM, SunlessNick said:

• Some humans would be able to awaken one of the Nephilim elements in themselves, and practice a degree of sorcery without having to resort to stuff like elixirs.
• And some humans would be able to awaken their Sun, which grants them an air of spiritual authority and influence.  When you hear about people having mana, or farr, this is where it comes from.
• Regular humans or members of secret societies would be an option too.

The Secret Societies sourcebook introduced rules for the Mithradites who had more refined Solar-Ka that gave them some mystical abilities over other awakened mortals, and the Fraternitas Saturnii who had rules for cultivating Saturnian-Ka within themselves and casting Saturnian spells. The book gives only a little detail on the Cultes des Ghoules, but in the French version the Selenim are able to infect mortals (both the living and the dead) with a connection to the Black Moon field using their necromancy.

Again, this could probably be standardized. As a collective character option, you could call mortals with awakened ka "Bohemians" after a similar character option in the French. Maybe give them their own Minor Arcana or Chimerical Arcana, since the English version doesn't have minor arcana. (Credit to ganonso for the idea he presented on rpgnet and spacebattles.)

On 11/28/2020 at 8:56 AM, RogerDee said:

A good example of this could be a version of Highlander immortals which would fit really well into Nephilim.

You mean the immortals that battle to the death with katanas in order to consume each others' souls until the last survivor becomes a god?

If so, then I don't think that's a good fit at all.

Nephilim isn't about narcissistic demigods violently duking it out for control of the world like in World of Darkness. It's about revelation and transcendence. The characters are reincarnating immortals. They've lived many human lives. They've been monarchs, peasants, prophets and more. They know humanity more intimately than it knows itself. Eventually, all immortals decide to pursue the Golden Path to Agartha, to become bodhisattvas. Even the Emperor Arcanum, which is focused entirely on accumulating temporal power, believes that temporal power is merely a means to that end rather than the end itself. 

Or, to put it less pretentiously, BECMI with Indiana Jones instead of Aragorn.

I found discussion of nephilim/simulacrum relations in part two very interesting. However, I feel there are two problems with the way Andrew explains this.

Firstly, the game itself actually does a fairly poor job of explaining how a nephilim character actually thinks. The nephilim aren't explained as human beings married with an elemental power, they're explained as reincarnating elemental spirits. The very usage of the term simulacrum ("an image or representation of someone or something. an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.") is inherently dehumanizing. While this sort of alchemical marriage thinking might be easy to grok for someone who is already familiar with the hermetic conception of daimones, it won't be familiar to the vast majority of RPG players unless it is explained in the text itself. That's why the fandom has been debating it since the beginning.

Secondly, the way the game is structured where you have to create a bunch of past lives at the beginning is a big barrier to new players. I think it would have made things far easier if player characters could recall past lives during play. This would also give the player more time to develop the lives of these past incarnations and give them more relevance, perhaps working with the GM to work them into the events of an adventure. The GM could also create past lives for the player characters and reveal them during play while tying them into the events of an adventure. IIRC, the French version of the game apparently included a mechanic like that.

On 9/8/2020 at 4:47 AM, Mugen said:

I honestly wonder what is the incentive to play this version of the game over Mage:the Awakening, which is also a game focusing on occult mysteries, and not the metaphysical game that is Ascension.

Except, obviously, if you dislike the WoD/CoD rules, which is a perfectly fine reason to play another game.

The secret societies are more concrete antagonists than the Seers of the Throne. They have concrete goals relevant to the nephilim themselves: hunt down nephilim in order to drain their blood or transform nephilim into homunculus slaves.

On 9/8/2020 at 4:47 AM, Mugen said:

Ar-Kaïm were not well-received in France, where they were seen as an unnecessary excuse to play "manga/anime" (Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac, essentially) characters in a setting that originally focused on occult inquiries over violence and fights.

I think they were introduced as a way to have simpler characters, and not a problem with the concept of spirits living in human bodies, which was never a big concern for french players.

Fair enough. I still think it would be interesting to explore the concept of immortals who (potentially) have all eight elements or otherwise non-standard arrangements.