Reading Nobilis 2nd Edition (The “Great White Book”) and The Game of Powers

First, a brief note. This post is one that sat unpublished on my blog since 2019—one of many such posts. For some reason, after having a kid, I kept writing blog posts, but stopped publishing them. I’ve decided to revisit and publish some of those old languishing posts, because why not? They’re a mixed bag of topics, but include a lot of reviews of RPG books I’ve accumulated over the years. 

So, well, anyway, everything beneath the line is something I wrote five years ago. I still haven’t had a chance to play Nobilis, and suspect I never will get the chance, but who knows? Supposedly there will be a kickstarter for the 4th edition of the game, or at least I think I’ve seen Moran mention it. A new Nobilis-related game, Glitch, was Kickstarted a few years ago, so anything’s possible.  (I was a backer, but haven’t read it and have no comments about it yet.)

Without further ado…

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I’ve recently become interested in diceless RPG systems. I recently picked up copies of Amber Diceless Roleplaying (and its followup, Shadow Knight), but they only just arrived. However, late last year I managed to acquire copies of both the 2nd and 3rd editions of Jenna K. Moran’s RPG Nobilis in hardcover—the 3rd edition, in fact, for a song compared to the price most people have paid for it. (Someone on Amazon was selling it off for something like twenty bucks because the “slipcase” was “damaged”. Er, okay.)

This post, though, is basically notes from a read-through of the 2nd edition book—the so-called “Great White Book” pictured to the right, which is often called “the most beautiful RPG book ever made.” It’s a fair description, too: where (like many people) I actively disliked the art and layout in the 3rd edition book, I think the 2nd edition is outstanding. The interior art is a mixed bag, though some of it is amazing, too, but the real reason the GWB is so revered is the layout. There’s understated highlight art, there are big margins into which are tucked unsettling little microfiction snippets that illustrate whatever’s being discussed in the main text, there are layout shifts that reflect the type of section one is currently reading, and as an artifact the book is this big, imposing coffee-table-like book. 

If it’s not yet clear, I won’t be discussion Nobilis 3rd edition in this post. I have heard the rules revisions in 3rd edition are much stronger than the new art direction, writing style, and approach to layout, but until I’ve read it myself (or failed to make my way through it), I won’t have an opinion on 3rd edition. 

So, now: I started reading the 2nd edition rulebook about a week ago. At first it was slow going… and then it continued to be slow going. This isn’t because I disliked the text, so much as because the text is dense—far denser and more intricate than what one normally finds in RPG core rulebooks. I’ve seen people dismiss Jenna K. Moran’s writing as “drivel” and, having skimmed about fifty pages of the 3rd edition, I can see what might turn people off it, but the 2nd edition rulebook is not drivel at all: it’s extremely competent, and very well-written, as a text. Not that that makes it a light or an easy read, and not that I don’t feel daunted by the game as explained here: to some degree, I do, but that’s because of the scope and ambition of the ruleset, more than because of any reaction to the quality of the prose.  

But what did I think of it?

Well… imagine my surprise to find what is, basically, a cross between Amber Diceless Roleplaying and a World of Darkness game! Well, plus a little poststructuralism, sort of, if poststructuralism smoked a bunch of mythology and started riffing.1 

Nobilis: The Transcending, I guess? It’s got magic that feels a bit like Mage: The Ascension (at least, the way I remember that system, having only read it once a few decades ago) and bad guys who’re somewhat like the Spectres in Wraith: The Oblivion. The player characters belong to one of eight splats, and band together into “parties” that are bound to a divine authority figure (a bit like the Kindred Princes in Vampire: The Masquerade)—and certainly the relationship between Nobles and the mortals in their service is redolent of Ghouls in Vampire: The Masquerade, including the rite that turns a beloved or hated mortal into an “Anchor.” Oh, and parts of the mythic reality of the game do sort of remind one of elements of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Changeling: The Dreaming. 

That’s not to suggest that Nobilis is wholly derivative, of course: I feel like there’s more post-structuralism in the magic, and more whimsy in the worldbuilding—of a brutal and blood-soaked kind, which is better than the gelatinous, allergenic glop some people pass off as whimsy these days.2) The general meta-structure of the setting definitely is distinct from White Wolf’s games from the 90s, but… given that the (mostly similar) 1st edition of Nobilis was published in 1999,3 it’s hard not to detect some degree of influence from what by then, after all, had been the dominant RPG franchise for some time.

As for Nobilis 2nd edition: when you look at the book itself, with its unusual format and its striking cover art, you can’t help but feel like you’re being promised something characteristically different from other RPGs. I haven’t played it, and can’t speak fully to that, but I have to say that the text rises to the challenge: it’s highly literate, erudite, strikingly creative, and enjoyable to read in a way that transcends its function as a vehicle for conveying the rules of a game. Moran, who penned this book while still using the name R. Sean Borgstrom, invokes Vyasa (yes, that Vyasa) and Yggdrasil alike in the first few pages, but manages to write something not constrained by Indian or Nordic or even Christian mythology.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Nobilis 2nd edition is literate and even philosophical in ways that I suspect are unprecedented in RPG rulebooks, especially considering back when it was published in 2002. I mean, I haven’t read every RPG book ever published, so maybe there’s a precedent I’m missing out there, but it feels like something unseen before—or at least, not seen very often—in RPGs. The 2nd edition unapologetically set extremely high standards for itself, and at least as a reading document, I’d say it achieves them. 

As a game, I don’t know: I haven’t had the chance to play it, and even then, anyone who games long enough knows that you can have great experiences with a bad or mediocre ruleset, and terrible experiences with a great ruleset, depending on its aesthetic fit with each player, the interest and flexibility of the group, and other factors totally unconnected to the ruleset and setting material. 

The core concept isn’t unprecedented, of course. The core idea—protagonists that are the anthropomorphic personification of some principle of reality—is an idea I first encountered (as a teenager) in Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality novels, which are an obvious touchstone. There’s some echo of the Sandman comics as well, too, and the mini-Appendix N provided in the 2nd edition book contains some surprises, and some things I haven’t read, and I was also surprised to see Zelazny’s Amber books not get included (while his Jack of Shadows, and a few other Zelazny novels are included). If you’re curious about what other familiar tropes show up, see TV Tropes for a fairly detailed rundown of tropes that aren’t unique to the game. 

The fundamental concept of the game isn’t too much of a stretch: you’re walking along, minding your business, when suddenly you find yourself invested with divine power: you become a sort of minor deity, with one portfolio attached to your person: you’re the Nobilis of the sea, say. Or, if you want to be trickier, of “waves”: if you’re clever, you’ll note that this includes sound waves, radio waves, waves on the ocean, waves goodbye, waves of mutilation, football fans doing “the wave,” and the waves in someone’s hair. Wordplay-powered magic is a part of this game, apparently. 

So, “high-concept.” The game, and the presentation. I can see why some are put off by it—I often bristle at the kinds of things some people call “high concept”—but for me, this game’s text (in 2nd edition, at least) is extremely ambitious in a good way, even given oddities that make it challenging to envision running. (To be clear, that’s not the same as saying, “It’s an excellent RPG book to read, so who cares if I ever run it?” It’s more like saying, “I like the ambitiousness of the design and the text itself, even if running it will be a challenge.”)

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Setting & Concept

The setting is pretty astonishingly imaginative, made up of a strange and heady mix of Nordic and Judeo-Christian mythology and Platonic philosophy: imagine the Platonic forms of concepts themselves were sentient, and engaged in a war against beings that essentially exist to erase concepts from existence… and then imagine being one of the tiny minority of beings that gets recruited to serve as a guard for the fortress—your world—while your patron Platonic form wages war off in the Spirit World. 

Of course, the world isn’t just divided between our world and the Spirit World: “our” world is split between the “Mythic” world and the “Prosaic” one: the former being a world where magic is true, the latter where science is. Sort of… except the two worlds overlap, and what happens in the Mythic world has repercussions on the Prosaic world, sometimes even retroactively if necessary. 

Not that our world is the only world: there’s a bunch of them, hanging from the branches of the World-Ash—yes, Yggdrasil—and some of them are even written up to give a sense of the range available. (There’s everything from a hollow world to a garden filled with heavenly snakes to a world filled with red elves and white elves who mine the soil of their world, and even a world of giants. Then there’s Heaven and Hell at each end of the World-Ash; there’s the Weirding Wall that surrounds most of the whole assembly, with who-knows-what (besides Excrucians—the bad guys of the setting) beyond it, and then there’s other sub-worlds, like Cityback (a hidden urban meta-setting owned by one of the Imperators that rules the Earth and serves as “part of the metaphysical substructure of 21st century society” and houses “the ombudsmen of the modern world.”

There’s other Chancels, too—hidden domains created and owned by Imperators, those platonic form-like gods that rule and compose reality—which operate by whatever laws are desired by the Imperator who created them. It’s explicitly stated that Chancels can function like any sort of place one likes: they can resemble space opera settings, fairytale forests, and anything else desired. Indeed, later in the book, there’s example Chancels given in accompaniment to a long writeup on the different types of Imperators that exist—that is, a list of “Affiliations” to which any given Imperator can belong. Very approximately, the Affiliations (and their central concerns, roughly summarized) include:

• Hell: The promulgation of corruption and the defeat of Heaven. 
• Heaven: The survival of beauty (of a non-anthropocentric sort) and purity, whatever the moral cost.
• The Light: The preservation of the human species at all costs (including all sorts of human misery). 
• The Dark: The self-destruction of the human species (preferably by individual and mass suicide). 
• The Wild:  Individual freedom, whatever the cost.
• True Gods: Incomprehensible, because the True Gods are highly abstract creatures of pure spirit.
• Aaron’s Serpents: A diverse, but specific and somewhat “heroic,” moral code. 

And, if that weren’t Old World of Darkness splatty enough, even the Excrucians—the antagonists from outside reality—come in four splats or “castes,” with their own unique forms of miracles:

• Warmains: The shock troops of the Excrucians, they are “Tempered” by those whom they slay—especially their first mortal, Noble, and Imperator kills, as well as anyone else they respect at the time of the slaying. Oh, and they slay you out of respect… if you fail to impress them, they have little reason to destroy you. 
• Mimics: Excrucians who claim Imperatorship over Domains that they have choked out of existence, and then quietly “stretch” their Domain outward from to encompass allied concepts; for example, a Mimic who claimed Imperatorship over the Moa might expand the Domain-claim outward to large flightless birds, megafauna, etc.
• Deceivers: Doppelgänger Excrucians who impersonate Imperators and Nobles, sowing the seeds of distrust, rivalry, and strife among the defenders of Creation.  
• Strategists: The top-dogs and leaders of the Excrucians, Strategists are fanatical unmakers of reality and weavers of darkness and shadow, with a brilliant penchant for strategy and warfare. 

If you’re a Wraith: The Oblivion fan, the vague resemblance to Spectres is difficult to miss: they, too exist in castes with special arcane powers unique to each subgroup, and as servants of Oblivion are bent essentially on the destruction of all Wraithdom and ultimately all reality.  Hell, the Spectres even include a couple of castes that are similar to specific Excrucian castes, such as the Doppelgängers (which often appear wearing the face of a loved one or onetime ally, as do Deceivers and Warmains alike) and the Nephwracks, which somewhat resemble the Strategist shards (just as, I’d argue, Strategists themselves seem to resemble Malfeans). 

It’s interesting that the game never got a “monster manual” until one of those aforementioned portions of A Society of Flowers got published. This, again, seems to me like a parallel with the World of Darkness games, which also have tended to have a very limited number of antagonists who aren’t of the same type of creature as the player characters. 

It’s a rather baroque construction, this cosmology and all of its many worlds and factions, but of course one can keep things set in the “prosaic” world pretty easily: the extended example of play from this edition—which is pretty easily gotten online; here’s the copy over at the Nobilis fansite Chancel Aleph—is (interludes aside) set in the Prosaic World (at least if I remember it right), and to my surprise it includes two combat scenes, including a pretty extended one involving a private jet, several helicopters, missiles and guns, and lots of “miracles.”

Another feature of this book is the “microfictions” or what we’d probably call “nanofictions” these days. It’s a big, pretty book with big, empty margins, but they’re not completely empty: instead, they’re adorned with flower art (as mentioned above, all from Leonhart Fuch’s New Herbal (1543)) and with these nanofictions. Some people didn’t like them, and a few occasionally rubbed me the wrong way (usually where “whimsy” felt misdeployed), but overall I think they’re a a good and interesting addition to the book.

Why am I discussing them in the “setting” section of this post? Because that’s their purpose: to illustrate a certain kind of tone to the setting, pretty often driving home how alien and incomprehensible the morality of Imperators is, or how terrifying Excrucians are supposed to be. As someone who’s struggled with the task of boiling down a fictional scene into as few words as possible, I think people don’t give Moran enough credit: the vast majority of these little illustrative “extracts” from fictional books are very effective and work well as microfiction, too. The only complaint I have about these nanofictions, generally speaking, is that the tiny font is hard to read if I’m not in a very well-lit room. 

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System

This is… interesting. I’ve spent an unusual amount of time digesting people’s reactions to Nobilis, in part because I’m curious about why some people love it so much, and why others seem to have boundless reserves of vitriol for it. One of the weirder criticisms I’ve heard is that the system is too light. 

When I hear that, I start to suspect the person making the criticisms hasn’t read the book. (At least, the 2nd edition book.) That’s because, glancing at the character sheet, it seems natural to think that this would be an exceedingly rules-light system. There’s only four “Attributes” (the analogue to what we call “ability scores” in many other RPGs) after all, where in traditional D&D there were 6, and in Storyteller system games there were 9 (plus several huge lists of skills)! Well, like in Storyteller, you point buy your rating in those four Attributes, on a scale of 0 to 5. So, yeah, this looks like it should be pretty simple… until you start reading about the mechanics.

The thing is, they’re really abstract and broad-based. The names of the attributes are also pretty abstract and broad-based, for that matter:

• Aspect: the mind and body of the character—so, yeah, it’s like most or all of a regular character’s ability scores in most games all wrapped up in one.
• Domain: which covers the power that a Noble has over his or her Estate (that is, what she’s a virtual “god” of (like, say, spheres, computer code, light, misdirection, or whatever).
• Realm: which represents a character’s bond with his or her Chancel, ability to work miracles within it, social standing among the inhabitants of the Chancel, and so on.
• Spirit: how brightly the character’s “soul” burns; a separate element of the character from Aspect, with specific mechnical implications bound up around the idea of a powerful sense of selfhood and determination… so sometimes it’ll function as a measure of fundamental willpower.

Now, I call those Attributes abstract and broad-based, but nobody should call them “vague”: on the contrary, the game text contains a pretty thorough examination of what different scores in each of these Attributes can mean, providing a couple of example character concepts for each specific possible score of each Attibute, as well as examples of miracles that could be performed at each level of difficulty for each attribute. (The discussion of Aspect alone is something like seven pages long.) Moran is thorough… and while perhaps that’s because if she wasn’t, nobody would understand what these Attributes meant, it’s still an admirable thing. 

It’s also noteworthy that two of these Attributes got tossed out and replaced in Nobilis 3E: Persona and Treasure replace Realm and Spirit. Funnily enough, an overhaul of the 2E Attribute system that profound—that half the system’s primary character attributes got replaced—hasn’t generated much criticism at all: most accounts suggest the changes are positive and make for a better system. But… I’ll save that for when I’m discussing 3E, I guess. (You can read about them here, though, if you’re curious.) 

Besides these four traits, there’s other character features, like Bonds and Anchors (which are a bit like Fetters in Wraith: The Oblivion, the mortal beings and objects to which your character has a supernatural bond) and Gifts (which are permanently-available instances of Miracles) and Handicaps (limitations on the character’s power). For each of these there are a number of subcategories with a few examples, scrupulously organized. These feel a lot like a more systematic version of the handling of Merits and Flaws in a Storyteller game. There’s also some stuff about designing a sort of heraldric flower-insignia for your character, though it didn’t strike me as truly crucial except in terms of driving home the importance of flowers in the magical cosmology of the setting—the kind of thing some groups might have no use for, and others would replace with Tarot cards, astrological or astronomical symbols, or something else entirely. 

Now, if that sounds like a lot, well… that’s not even everything: once you’ve designed the character, you have to collaborate in designing the Chancel and the Imperator shared by the “Familia”—that is, by the group of PCs. This process—also a point-buy process in 2nd edition—is pretty involved, or at least it has tons of options available. There are handy charts that summarize everything, but Moran provides very detailed writeups of what the options mean, with examples that are only slightly less-comprehensive than the player character examples.  

This is interesting, though, because of the way it involves players in deciding on major features of the campaign. They’re not just making up their own characters; they’re also designing the fantastical safehouse in which they dwell, and their boss. The equivalent, for say Vampire: The Masquerade, would have been to have players make characters, then design, I don’t know, their city’s vampiric underworld, and their most powerful patron in Vampire society. It’s a lot of leeway, but it’s also, I guess, a way of figuring out what players want the game to be about, a task that’s crucial for a game as open-ended as Nobilis.

Beyond that, there’s a great deal of system and rules explanation in the book, including a surprising amount of material on “combat” of various kinds. Given the nature of the player characters, it’s not surprising that a certain amount of that combat—especially when it’s between Nobilis characters—ends up being indirect in one way or another. Still, I thought the idea of Ghost Miracles—which, since they’re illusions, don’t actually occur, but they nonetheless allow characters to duel as if they did occur—was a really interesting one… if a little untenable. (If you’re living in a world where you’re likely to come to blows with another supernatural peer, why would you give away any secrets regarding your powers? I suppose if it’s the only way to avoid real combat, but…) That said, that’s a worldbuilding comment: as a game mechanic, it’s very a interesting trick.

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Gamemaster Advice

The rulebook is full of advice for those who would run a game of Nobilis. In fact, there’s a number of sections titled “How to be a Hollyhock God” (which, again, is this game’s term for the GM). Their usefulness varies: for example, I think anyone who bought the GWB probably didn’t need an explanation of what an RPG is… but then, everyone was doing it back in the day, and it’s only a couple of pages, so… eh, okay. On the other hand, the section on crafting compelling NPCs and on finding ways of using them in-game is really good, not just illustrative of the Nobilis setting but also of how to make characters that work well in a game. (Hell, I’d even say it could be useful to fledgling fiction authors, to be honest.) 

I guess where I land is this: while I doubt many people actually chose to make their first foray into GMing an RPG with this system, I think most of these sections would be helpful for someone who’s doing so, or who finds that the open-endedness of this system (as opposed to the inevitable, natural structure of “adventures” in many other RPGs—the dungeon crawl or the troubleshooter mission—leaves them at a loss for how to structure a play session.

One thing I found interesting is a 4-page section (one of the book’s many “How to Be a Hollyhock God” sections—the Hollyhock God is this game’s term for the GM) outlining what are startlingly modern-sounding guidelines for player comfort and “safety,” including close to everything you’d see in a progressive story game today, save the idea of an X-card.4 For me a lot of the guidelines here boil down to, “Don’t be an asshole to other players; it makes the game not-fun and people will not want to play if you do.” Of course, gamers being gamers—this is, after all, a subculture where people will shit on one another for preferring a different edition of the same damned game—it’s not surprising that, “Don’t be an asshole” needs to be clearly defined and systematized. Especially for something written in 2002, when a lot folks were still trying hard to out-edgy the competition, the four pages that Moran devoted to this are pretty solid.

There’s also the Appendices, which vary in quality: the Glossary is fine, though it’s long enough to make the “Argot” sections of Old World of Darkness core rulebooks look short and simple by comparison… but that’s what comes with a wildly divergent setting, I suppose, and I don’t have any problem with it as long as the new words exist to describe things that don’t have already-good-enough words in English. The third Appendix is a wild Timeline to the setting, with lots of unusual and surprising stuff buried in it, ranging from a war between the Old Gods and the New Gods, or the birth of the Buddha in a chancel, or the involvement of a Noble in the Trojan War.

The second appendix, though—titled Appendix B: Flowers and the Meanings—I found disappointing. It starts out good, listing a series of flowers in alphabetical order, along with Character Types, Estates, and Bridges that can be associated with them. It’s a little  overwhelming, especially if you don’t know much about flowers, but at least it’s thorough… until it isn’t: Moran lists of eighteen flowers (namely, all of those on her list with names that start with the letter A) and then stops short, reverting to a much shorter form for “Other Flowers” (and listing those that run from B to Z). Interestingly, I’ve seen a lot of people who dislike Nobilis comment about this truncated list, but haven’t seen any Nobilis fans comment about it, much less provide fan-made expansions to the list. I don’t know if Moran ever filled out the rest of the list somewhere, but while some people perhaps went out and got themselves a (probably lavishly-illustrated) reference book on the Victorian “language of flowers” or collected a few websites in which language-of-flowers stuff got indexed5, I suspect most people playing the game actually dispensed with the flower stuff to some degree. The reason I’m mentioning it is here is that the flower stuff is undoubtedly unique setting flavor, Moran didn’t really provide any advice about how it could be integrated into the game at the table… and if I remember correctly, flowers don’t really come up in the example of play… not in a significant way, at least.  

That raises some interesting design questions, at least for me: after all, the “flower” stuff is an interesting, flavorful bit of Nobilis. Flowers are used to power magical rites and miracles, and flowers are used in magical combat but also in the insignias of all Nobles. In-world, there’s almost certainly a complex system of magic that utilizes a language of flowers, a language where certain pairings of flowers would take on new meanings, and certain juxtapositions, and so on. But… well, players typically are (quite reasonably) not willing to sink in hours and hours of their time to learn the infinitude of details that their characters would have to know to be functional: someone who plays a barbarian or ranger character in D&D doesn’t enroll in wilderness survival classes for the game, and someone playing a rogue doesn’t start practicing and studying up on thieves’ cant or pursuing a hobby of wall-climbing and sneaking around town at night. Or, more pertinent: most iterations of D&D posit the existence of a “magical language” in which spellbooks and scrolls are written… but doesn’t bother to get into the details of it at all. Spell components, sure, in some editions… but only because this is part of the resource management system, something absent in Nobilis. Players aren’t expected to worry about what sort of pinecone a character would select for spellcasting, just whether one is on hand, or they’ve all been used up. (And many groups handwave away even that.) In other words, swords and magical spells in D&D are metaphors for mechanical interactions, as well as story elements… but they’re very vague metaphors, since D&D fans realistically know about as much about swords as they do about flowers. The signal thing here is that the game engine for D&D doesn’t ask them to learn about it.

Does the game engine for Nobilis demand it? Not really. I mean, a little bit, if the Hollyhock God pushes players to come up with a heraldric flower design for their character, but it’s not like every magical effect has a listed spell component, and it’s not as if people are likely to require players to list off “blooms carried.” So I think the Flower magic stuff occupies a funny space in the game: it’s sort of in-world mechanics for magic, which needs a little detailing if it’s going to work as flavor, but which can’t occupy too much importance because players will end up feeling completely lost if it does. (It’s telling that the flower-magic stuff seems to have been dropped from the game’s third edition.)

In other words, I think that’s probably why this Appendix is partial: it isn’t going to be terribly useful at the game table if it’s complete, and yet Moran probably felt a natural desire to include something on the specifics of the role of flowers in the setting’s magical system(s). I think, though, a better approach would have been to make the “Flower” stuff an optional, modular component of the setting: outline a very vague version of the flower magic stuff in the core rulebook, and then put out a more detailed supplement book that could be used by groups that wanted to make the flower stuff more central to the game. I can easily imagine a group wanting to have one or two copies of a small, handy Nobilis-specific Language of Flowers book, lavishly illustrated, to which they turn when flower-symbol stuff comes up, say, as clues in mysteries or when they catch Exrcrucians performing a flower rite against them, or things like that. I can also see other groups having no interest in it, and that’s fine too. 

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The Sample Adventure

The one thing I haven’t discussed is the “sample adventure” or, rather, the sample campaign that comes very near the end of the rulebook. It’s about thirty pages long… of which maybe 20 pages of that or more is NPC writeups. (Still more shades of World of Darkness adventure/scenario writing: though it’s all interesting and creative stuff, I wonder how much I’d end up using in a game.) The last ten pages or so of this section—and the eight more pages that follow in the last How to be a Hollyhock God—provide one semi-detailed adventure writeup, along with seeds for more adventures, and a sort of overview of how Nobilis adventures can be structured and played out. The more-detailed adventure is essentially a pissing contest between two Nobles, into which the player characters get dragged, but it also includes a side-scene where the PCs must defeat an invincible giant, and a horrific antagonist called Grommet Claus which is basically an evil, cursed-gift-bearing nightmare version of Santa Claus.

It’s all fine, but given how much space is given to writeups of NPC Imperators and Nobles (including their backstories, Chancels, and more), the adventure writeups end up being a bit sparse in terms of structure. If you’ve run RPGs before—and I think that’s probably a prerequisite for successfully running Nobilis—you might not have any trouble translating all that wildness into a playable, open-ended adventure. If not, you might struggle. Or maybe not, but I’d be surprised if many newbie GMs didn’t struggle with the task. 

And that’s the GWB. It’s got flaws, but it’s still a pretty incredible artifact, and I don’t regret buying it at all, even though I can imagine it’ll be hard for me to find people to play it with very often. Maybe online? Who knows?

Now, I’ll turn to… well, scroll on:

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Interlude: Supplements That Never Happened

I did a little digging on the Wayback Machine’s archive of the Hogshead Publishing website—the publisher of the 2nd edition—and found plans not only for A Society of Flowers (the supplement that has, partially, been published), but also for two other supplements as well, each tantalizing in its own way. Here’s the text of that page:

Forthcoming Releases For Nobilis

NOTE: As of 30th November 2002, Hogshead Publishing Ltd is leaving the adventure-gaming industry. The titles below will be published by Guardians of Order.

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 FIRES OF CREATION
Authors: R. Sean Borgstrom and others. Page count TBA.
No release date set.

A collection of adventures for Nobilis.

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 COMMENCEMENT
Authors: R. Sean Borgstrom and others. Page count TBA.
No release date set.

A player’s guide to Nobilis.

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 A SOCIETY OF FLOWERS
Author: R. Sean Borgstrom. Page count TBA.
No release date set.

A Society of Flowers introduces your Nobilis character to the social order of the Powers, a courtly and traditional world hiding illegal secret societies, hidden abilities, shameful mysteries, outlandish monsters, and a culture with — quite literally — a mind of its own.

I find it fascinating that the development plans for Nobilis were so… normal. A Player’s Guide, a collection of adventures, and a setting book. Each of these, I think, could have helped the game to achieve wider popularity: the player’s guide, one hopes, would have provided a player’s-eye overview of the setting as well as advice for how to run a Noble character effectively. A Society of Flowers—which is partially available, at least, and popular among fans of the game—could have provided a lot of optional features that could be added to the setting or worked into games. And finally, the adventure book could have shown a diverse range of things one could do with the system—a criticism that was made of 1st edition, and (less fairly) of 2e as well. (3e lacks an example of play and a sample adventure, apparently, so the renewed criticism is understandable in that case.) I suspect that if these books had seen print, Nobilis could have been perceived as more approachable. Then again, it’s possible that they would have had the opposite effect: Moran could have kept on writing at the elevated level of the GWB, the format of the supplements could have been similarly daunting, and the new material might have had issues similar to the Flowers stuff I discussed above. 

Still, I’d like to have seen those books: of all the reasons for saying it’s a pity Hogshead got out of the game in late 2002, I think one of the most compelling laments is the fact that these supplements, even if they had been written in full, could never have came out—well, none except a couple of sections of A Society of Flowers. Of course, I’m assuming Moran (and the other contributors) were on the way to getting them done, and would have completed them: who knows? The only part of the story I know next is about the distributor and the publisher that followed: Guardians of Order destroying its warehoused copies of the GWB when it ran out of money; Eos-Sama and the well-documented rigmarole of Nobilis 3e. Of course, one outcome of all that is that Moran wrote and published Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine—a game that seems like an alternate version of Nobilis, except built for running slice-of-life manga/anime-flavored stories. Chuubo’s seems to have achieved greater success than Nobilis ever did, and for its fans this was a great outcome… but snce I don’t feel attracted to slice-of-life RPGs or manga/anime, I can’t help but wish those 2nd edition Nobilis supplements had eventually seen the light of day. 

In the end, only one completed supplement actually saw print: The Game of Powers, to which I’ll now turn. 

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The Game of Powers: The Live-Action Supplement for Nobilis

This is a book that’s much easier to get ahold of than the GWB, and one also can easily find recommendations for it by anyone who is an enthusiast of 2nd edition Nobilis. It’s not strictly speaking all Moran: the contributor list is actually a little longer, and includes some people I don’t know about—like E. Deirdre Brooks and John Shockley—as well as more familiar names, like Mikko Rautalahti and Gareth [Ryder-]Hanrahan. 

I’m not wholly convinced it’s necessary reading for someone who isn’t running a Nobilis LARP. There are, though, four reasons why it might interest someone. 

The first is that it presents an alternate—and apparently simplified—resolution system to the game. Right on the back cover, it suggests that this needn’t be used only in LARP, but can be used to replace the original resolution system in tabletop groups. One could consider it a rules-light version of Nobilis, I suppose. 

Second, it introduces something called “Social Miracle Points,” which is something that didn’t exist in the GWB but which The Game of Powers suggests will be explored more in A Society of Flowers. That’s a supplement of which only the first couple of sections were ever released: they came out long ago but, being new to the game, I haven’t yet read them… so I don’t know whether Moran ever got around to this mechanic again. 

The third and fourth reasons why The Game of Powers might interest someone are the sections by Gareth Hanrahan (which provides general advice for someone running a game of Nobilis, tabletop or LARP mode alike) and the adventure scenario by John Shockley, which I’m pretty sure would run just as well in a tabletop game as it presumably would in the Live Action type game. The setup of the latter, the scenario, is very basic, but with enough twists and turns that it would probably work reasonably well as a LARP; played at the table, the HG would probably want to have more subplots and twists and turns ready to go, but I think it’d work pretty well at the table too.  

In any case, these two sections were the ones I found most compelling, though I can also see myself giving a player E. Dierdre Brooks’ “Blossoming: Portraying Nobles and Imperators” mini-essay if they were struggling to adapt to the game. 

In terms of presentation, the book sized like a typical RPG rulebook (rather than like the unusual-sized GWB) and is quite quickly readable and digestible. But even within those constraints, it’s just as pretty as the core rulebook, with the layout being as similar as possible given the difference in page size. The cover feels like a perfect complement to that of the GWB, though partly that’s because of judicious use of image-cropping. (The complete “Ophelia” bust has a very different visual effect, as you can see at the end of this post.) I especially like the art by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, and think it would have fit perfectly into the core rulebook. Personally, I think the only really fumble here is the organization: the internal structure of the chapters feels a little bit off somehow. (Something that, from a brief perusal of the 3rd edition of Nobilis, is perhaps something Moran struggles with.)

So, ultimately, I think it may not be required reading, though if you can get it at a reasonable price, as I did, it’s probably worth a read-through. 

Once I finally get around to reading the sections of A Society of Flowers that have been released, I’ll post something in a separate blog post, but I’ll also add a link here in case anyone stumbles onto this post and is curious about the partial supplement.