It's World Trees All the Way Down.

Yes, I'm still running a Nobilis game!  And I need to gush about it a smidgen.

Our current campaign is a bit of a reboot of the game I was running when last I wrote regularly, so the principals will be familiar.  In the meantime, we played a game about a sort-of-doomed Creation staring a almost-certainly-doomed Familia of Nobles, the Powers of Openings, Awakenings, Patience and Vengeance.  That campaign (subtitled "Ashes of an Age") is a long, fun, dark story.  Remind me to tell it to you sometime.

But my players seemed really interested in going back to the characters and the campaign we never really finished.  So, we rebooted, giving everyone a chance to re-imagine their characters, and giving our new player a chance to work her ideas in.  Which didn't completely happen...

In Nobilis, the group plays demigods that each have/are one concept that actually belongs to a bigger being, called an Imperator.  The concepts, or Estates, that each player chooses help to define who the Imperator will be.  In this case (campaign subtitled "When Worlds Fall"), my returning players each rebuilt their Powers of The Dead, Tracking, and Blood, while I threw in an NPC Power of Blades.  Their boss was a giant serpent/dragon named Nidhogg, the Serpent Who Gnaws at the Roots.  But the newer player had a great idea I couldn't ignore - she wanted to play someone old, and powerful outside of the normal dynamic of Noble and Imperator.  That character would get injured, and Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - would come to rescue her.  What's left of that new character's mythic essence translates into the Power of Release, which Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - claims as his own.

Oh, and the character - the new one, old and powerful?  It's basically Lilith, Adam's legendary first wife.

I was pretty friggin' happy that this idea fell in my lap - my first Nobilis campaign dealt heavily with the origins of humanity - in that setting, I had decided that Adam and Eve weren't really created, so
much as imported from beyond Creation.  Now I have another reason to re-imagine lots of characters from that first campaign, dust them off and make them relevant for a new game.

Most stories about the Garden blame the Serpent.  The Peacock got off  scott-free. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Themes are important for lots of table-top RPGs, and maybe more so for Nobilis.  A lot of the theme comes from the Estates the players choose, but also from the Code their characters adhere to.  Codes are sort of like political parties of demigods - and this group overwhelmingly focus on Codes that talk about individual freedom in some way.  Some focus on Humanity's freedom to direct their own fates, especially if that has dangerous or deadly consequences.  Others favor every being's freedom to be exactly what they are or should be.  And one prefers focusing on how to protect Humanity, including from themselves.  We definitely range all over the security vs. freedom spectrum.  I find it compelling and fun, so I often feature NPCs that relate to that somehow.

So far these characters have a great time dealing with large plot points in the most complicated way possible.  I've always been fortunate with this group of players, because they are very good at providing more hooks just by playing, and they're all pretty great at enjoying themselves even when their characters are in trouble or pain.  I still want to stand by the idea that any roleplayer can play Nobilis - but these people make the game for me.

Sometimes literally.


Bonus Links:

• My favorite art of Nidhogg, by Ruth Taylor
• A whole DeviantArt group for Nobilis art
• Tumblr for Jenna K. Moran, game designer for Nobilis.