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OBILIS THE ESSENTIALS

“TREASURE”

By Jenna Katerin Moran Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Match Girl image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Nobilis: the Essentials

~ Free Release ~ The Story of Treasure

by Jenna Katerin Moran

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Nobilis: Antithesis, Nobilis: the Essentials, and all included text, concepts, and game mechanics are copyright 2011-2013 by Jenna Katerin Moran. Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is copyright 2012-2013 by Jenna Katerin Moran. Arthur Rackham images provided by the Scriptorium and are copyright 2006 Ragnarok Press/The Scriptorium. Unauthorized copying of Scriptorium images, even if modified, merged, or included with other software, is expressly forbidden. Except as noted above, all art and presentation elements are copyright 2011-2013 by Jenna Katerin Moran; by Eos Press, LLC; or by the original artist or artists. Nobilis is the creation of Jenna Katerin Moran (formerly known as R. Sean Borgstrom). Reproduction without the written permission of one of Jenna Katerin Moran, Eos Press, LLC, or the appropriate artistic copyright holder is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, blank character sheets, and copying reasonable selections for personal use and reference only. The mention or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright concerned. This book uses fantastical and supernatural elements in its setting, for its characters, their abilities, and themes. All such elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content and reader discretion is advised. Check out Eos Press Online at www.eos-sama.com!

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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The devices of Abd-al-Rashid are undeniably masterworks—from Bahir Hibah, the book whose passages can open any portal, to Zakiyya, the mechanical odalisque whose tears are made of gold. At one time or another, many Powers have considered delving into Abd-al-Rashid’s forgotten city in search of these devices. So far, they have refrained. Abd-al-Rashid died a traitor’s death, seduced into betraying his Imperator by mortal lust, and the taint clings to his artifacts still. How would a Power dare to take them? Her peers would point and whisper, “There goes one who claims a traitor’s goods. What else might not she do?” —from Chronicles of Wonders, by Kip Narekatski

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Credits

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Written and Conceived by: Jenna Katerin Moran Cover Art by: Arthur Rackham Interior Art by: Arthur Rackham et al. Design Elements and Backgrounds by: Oliver Vulliamy Layout by: Jenna Katerin Moran

Specific Art Credits “Chibi-Jenna” (pg. 35, 40) - by CQ “Icon” (pg. 44) - by Oliver Vulliamy

Dedication For Cync Brantley, Rand Brittain, Hsin Chen, Cheryl & Joseph Couvillion, Jesse Covner, Anthony Damiani, John Eure, Dara & Anna Korra’ti, Kevin Maginn, Gregory Rapawy, Alexis Siemon, Charles Spaulding, Amy Sutedja, Chrysoula Tzavelas, James Wallis, and Raymond Wood. Special Thanks to Karl Friedrich Borgstrom, for teaching me the joy of sailing.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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Contents

What is this Book?................................................................................................................. 8 Under the Hood..................................................................................................................... 9 Mundane and Treasure Actions....................................................................................... 9 Aspect Actions.............................................................................................................. 10 Domain/Persona Actions; Imperial Actions, Bonds, and Afflictions.............................. 11 Ordinary Anchors............................................................................................................... 13 “Claiming an Anchor”................................................................................................... 13 “Possession”.................................................................................................................. 14 (Minor Errata)............................................................................................................... 14 “Guidance”................................................................................................................... 17 Wondrous Anchors.............................................................................................................. 18 Mundane Actions and Wondrous Anchors..................................................................... 22 “Claiming an Anchor” and Wondrous Anchors............................................................. 26 “Possession” and “Guidance;” “Unleashing Wonders;” “Getting Some Help”................ 27 “Weaponizing Anchors”................................................................................................ 28 “Weaving Destiny”........................................................................................................ 30 “Unleashing Miracles” and Wondrous Anchors............................................................. 33 “Getting Miraculous Help” and Ordinary/Wondrous Anchors...................................... 34 Paul Linton (order #5465578)

7 Miraculous Anchors............................................................................................................ 35 Miraculous Strengths.................................................................................................... 35 Mundane Actions and Miraculous Anchors................................................................... 36 “Claiming an Anchor;” “Possession”............................................................................. 37 “Guidance;” “Unleashing Wonders;” “Getting Some Help;” “Weaponizing Anchors;” “Weaving Destiny”.................................................................................................... 38 “Unleashing Miracles;” “Getting Miraculous Help”....................................................... 39 “Communion”.............................................................................................................. 40 “Imperial Miracles”....................................................................................................... 42 Unusual Anchors................................................................................................................. 44 Icons............................................................................................................................. 44 Spells; Collections........................................................................................................ 45 Sanctums....................................................................................................................... 46 Index of Sidebars, Errata, and Texts..................................................................................... 48

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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What is this Book? T

reasure is one of the Attributes new to the third edition of Nobilis. This is a set of design notes on how it works, why it works the way it does, and how to use it to its best effect!

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Under the Hood

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L

e t’s start with some general notes on how Nobilis works.

Mundane and Treasure Actions Mundane actions and Treasure actions in Nobilis are designed around the following premise: that if you can guarantee that part of what you want happens, • You’re more likely to succeed on the whole; • It will encourage your opposition to find clever workarounds instead of overpowering or ignoring the guarantees you have; and, • In turn, that will inspire you to find clever ways of making your guarantees more salient. None of these guarantees are necessarily firm in every case. It’s even possible that they fail for your group, in which case Nobilis is not for you. But that is why mundane and Treasure actions guarantee things like: • (difficulty 4 mundane action) this action is “effective” but not necessarily exactly as described; or • (difficulty 3 Treasure miracle) this power works as advertised but is not necessarily salient. In general, higher-level actions have better (more productive) guarantees.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

The mail service of Locus Arahiel has never failed to deliver a message. Usually, it takes a day. Sometimes, it takes a week. In odd cases, the message arrives thousands of years after its recipient’s death, placed carefully on the bone dust in some secluded valley where a monster ate them in the Age before. This meets the postthing’s obligation under Arahielan law; it is not, after all, their fault that the recipient can no longer read. —from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation, by Jasprite Sherrard

10 Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Aspect Actions Once you get to Aspect 3+ miracles, a different idea applies: that if you have to build your powers from a fundamental baseline of “humans (or whatever) can do this,” • It will encourage you to pick actions with a certain verisimilitude;

“And then I told him, I said, ‘ Yeah, but what are you going to do against an opponent who can fly?’ Zzzing!”

• It will encourage you to find clever ways to take human-similar actions rather than just declaring that something “must be” doable with Aspect somehow; • In turn, this will inspire enemies to say things like “ha! Great as you are, what can you do against someone who can punch through steel?”; • And then that will inspire you to figure out what a pulp or legendary hero does in that case, which is often surprisingly effective because people have a long history of really liking their legendary heroes to win.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Domain/Persona Actions

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Most of the Domain and Persona miracles are built around the following assumption: if the fundamental baseline and startling point for your actions is “I’m doing X with my Estate,” • It will encourage you to build a meaningful paradigm for that Estate; • It will encourage you to find clever ways to build on your basic premises and work within that paradigm rather than just powering through everything; • In turn, because clever actions tend to produce a penumbra of strained interpretations, it will give the HG stuff to work with when it comes to Excrucian attacks on your Estate.

Imperial Actions, Bonds, and Afflictions Fundamentally, Bonds, Afflictions, and Imperial miracles are designed to give you a set of loosely-phrased “true” statements to rely and build upon when you’re trying to be clever. These three kinds of power have different mechanics not because they’re differently “true” a priori but because that truth is meant to be a factor in different decisions. While I will generally claim with a straight face that all of them are truths about the world, and in that sense equivalent, you can also argue that Bonds, Afflictions, and Imperial Miracles are constraints on the truth — specifically, on the truth of events that the group generates in play. In a book, perhaps, you could say that — • An Imperial miracle is like a narrator aside or prophecy: a summary of what’s “supposed” to happen or be happening. • A Bond is something that the story is trying to prove true. • An Affliction is something that the story accepts as true, to make the effort of proving the truth of the Bonds meaningful. When the story finishes, all three of them are true, but their function is different nevertheless! For instance, in the Lord of the Rings, you could say that the inherently fallen condition of people and the world is an Affliction — without that Affliction, there’d be no point in the journey, you could find someone strong enough to just eagle the darn ring to Mordor. The corrupting influence of the ring, conversely, is more like an Imperial miracle (as are its actual powers, which people Paul Linton (order #5465578)

"I am a transfinite barrier," she explained. "It is within my power to stop any finite force brought to bear. You are a finite creature; you cannot pass." "Duty obliges me to walk to the end of the world," I said, "and I feel it lies beyond this point." "Then the question," she said, "becomes: is duty a finite force?" —from The Duchess' Needle, by Emily Chen

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seem kind of wibbly-wobbly on). And the strength of the people of the Shire, and thus metaphorically of British country folk, is closest to a Bond: Tolkien is attempting to demonstrate that even in the presence of that Affliction and that Imperial miracle, a hobbit’s strength of character can prevail. How is that even possible, when people are fallen?

When there is nobody, not even a hobbit, that could throw the ring into Mount Doom? Well, if he hadn’t already written the darn books, that would be the kind of thing that your group would figure out in play.

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Affliction: “Friend to All Living Creatures” (or possibly “Dripping with animal magnetism.”) Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Ordinary Anchors

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T

his section is about ordinary Anchors — the mundane keepsakes, paraphernalia, and acquaintances that become part of your life story by way of the Treasure Trait and your Bonds.

“Claiming an Anchor” (Level 0) Every Noble can access Treasure 0 miracles, and for free, so the design role of a Treasure 0 miracle is “a basic capacity that I want everyone to have that gets you thinking in the right terms.” I want every Noble to have the option of claiming —

Well, things and people that are special to them. Even if they don’t have magical properties, even if they’re just friends and clothes and PDAs and rivals, I want you to be able to bring these things into your story and keep them there. So that’s basically what this does.

As incentive to actually claim ordinary things as Anchors, and to capture the stylistic point that the Nobilis are potentially above earthly inconveniences, claiming an Anchor and making something ordinary a part of your story gives you the option to upgrade it to something worthy of being part of your story. It’s fine if you’re the Power of Old Junk and you have a watch that’s just old junk, or whatever; but if you’re the Power of the Sky, and yet your old graduation watch is important to you, I don’t want you to feel like it’s a foolish attachment to a bit of old junk. That’s cool in play! I mean, there’s something there. But it acts against the idea of an Anchor.

An Anchor is something that makes you cooler, it’s something that shows up in legends and myths and stories of you, so I wanted to make sure that you Paul Linton (order #5465578)

“Well now,” the Duchess said, and lifted my chin. “ You are an ordinary creature, aren’t you.” “In myself, yes, my lady. But I am distinguished in the company I keep.” —from Tumbledrum, by Keiko Takemori

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don’t ever get stuck having to classify your Anchors as useless baggage that your character would be better without. That’s why your Anchors become superior instances of their type and also why I dropped the maintenance issues that might be associated with, e.g., using your Anchor cell phone on Mars or feeding your Anchored aunt.

The fact that objects and people operating without need for fuel, ammunition, or maintenance is usually going to be at least mildly funny is something I noted after the fact and tried to both emphasize and take advantage of — but that emphasis and advantage was basically adopted after the fact.

“Possession” (Level 1): Introduction Treasure 1 miracles serve a principally Doylist purpose — they’re there, at least in part, to help you be in two places at once. They’re there to facilitate your playing in one scene in Suzhou and one scene in Detroit, and with the potential power to start up another action set at the bottom of the sea if you absolutely must. There’s a range of options in how possessing your Anchors could work. There’s a spectrum of mental manipulation that ranges from total control that displaces the target’s consciousness to mentally “visiting” them and offering advice. For reasons of game tone, I’ve opted to drop the middle of that spectrum entirely.

This left two real options: kicking the target’s consciousness out for a bit is one, and visiting them without controlling them is the other. Nobilis gives you both; I offered the nastier one at a lower level both because it was available in the second edition as an independent mechanic and because I have more interest in people spending MP to reach the more ethical option than in their straining to reach the less.

Minor Errata The term Occupation is meant to be an alternate term for Possession, but this was nowhere actually stated. Sorry! Please consider it said. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

There isn’t a body of developed moral theory on kicking someone else’s consciousness out of their body and taking over. I’m not sure whether to think of it as analogous to a spiritual phenomenon, to assault and identity theft, or something completely different. So I’m going to be restrained here and simply say that Treasure 1 miracles are ethically compromising (though relatively benign as acts of possession go). Thus, I’m expecting that some Powers will refuse to use these miracles; others will secure advance permission from their Anchors; and others will be ruthless enough or . . . differently ethical enough . . . to completely ignore the issues that they raise.

“Possession” (Level 1): Mystic Links In the third edition Nobilis discarded some of the previously existing protections against game-breaking powers. In first and second edition Nobilis it was flatly impossible for one Power to edit another Power’s history, memories, emotions, loyalties, or dreams — even the most effective attacks were limited to raw physical damage and blunt psychological trauma. In the third edition, Powers instead have a fairly effective (but finite) defense against manipulative effects — you can inflict arbitrary effects on your fellow Powers but they can twist how those effects play out and simultaneously enhance their ongoing mechanical protection against undesirable effects and outcomes by taking “wounds.” I think the wound system plus player cleverness suffices to provide a defense against almost any imaginable attack, no matter how subtle or nasty. I felt reasonably confident that players could figure out something (between wounds and their own powers) to defend against even invisible, intangible, super-fast, time-traveling, inconspicuous, and friend-imitating enemies, no matter how terrifying and game-breaking the techniques they might use. But I realized that there was a category of effects that were totally imaginable and practical that I couldn’t figure out how a typical player would defend against: Attacks from really far away.

There are places in the world that are hard to get to!

That’s where the mystic link rules come from. I wanted to make sure that in the vast majority of cases if somebody was doing stuff to you, there would be something that you could find and deal with that was at least notionally nearby. I guess that in some sense it’s hard to justify.

I mean, maybe one of your Anchors is “dandelions.” You really like dandelions. You’re connected to them. They’re elevated to being as good as any other mortal weed, maybe even better, by your love for them, and they are freed of their maintenance cost as well. (That’s why floating dandelion-buds have no roots.) And if dandelions are your Anchor then you can build a specific mystic link to some dandelion growing somewhere in a city; and later on, while you’re off doing other things somewhere, if an enemy passes by that dandelion, it’s totally fair for you to use that chosen dandelion to blow a puff of absolute love and loyalty for you into that enemy face. And when that happens, it may not make much sense that they can turn around, draw their seal-sword (it’s a sword, forged from the heart of a baby seal) and stab you with it. Or turn you to stone with their Gorgon-style petrifaction ability by glaring in the dande-direction. It may particularly not make much sense — say, if they too love dandelions — that they can stab or petrify you without hurting the dandelion itself. . . . but that’s the price of being able to act from afar.

I figure that while I usually handwave that by saying “well, you’re the one who arranged for this, you justify it,” the simplest default for you to use is that your spirit is kind of lingering there over the dandelion, in situations like that, like an anime battle aura or a watchful ghost. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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“Possession” (Level 1): Defense Most Anchors have no way to defend against this technique. That said, it is possible that in the right circumstances an Anchor — even if they’re a completely ordinary person! — can take a wound to mitigate the possession effect. I’m not sure under which circumstances this would come up in play. You’re unlikely to be playing a frequently-possessed Anchor and you’re unlikely to have an Anchor that’s so interesting and well-established — so much a treasure of the group’s mindspace rather than your own — that the HG will feel comfortable having them throw off your possession. Maybe if your enemies have done something to them? Tempted them, corrupted them, or reinforced their strength of will?

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Warned of her impending possession, Valya staggered to the cupboard and took the poison down. “Not for me,” she whispered, “but for thee;” and drank —

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“Possession” (Level 1): Duration

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I want to assume that while you’re actively possessing an Anchor you are there. You’re not back at your body doing whatever. You’re not off with some other Anchor. In that moment, that Anchor is you. On the other hand, I didn’t want to have players worrying about what happened back at their body all the time. As fun as it would be to return to your body and find it kidnapped, or whatever, once or twice, in my experience, players would just spend all their time elaborately arranging for precautions to prevent that, instead. It wouldn’t just be a vulnerability. It’d be an excessive vulnerability, the kind that’s really hard to trust in a game. At least for the players I’ve known!

So instead the rule is that if something happens back at your body that you’d be concerned with as a player — something that would make you say, “Whoa, no, I shake off my Anchor-time and act now” — the possession ends. Even though you don’t really “know” what’s going on back at your body, you still get to abort the possession effect as if you did. I’ve left it unspecified and up to you what that requires. If you want to be the kind of Power who can get carried off to sea by an unexpected tide while you’re off possessing someone, or kidnapped by ninjas, or non-bindingly killed while you’re not paying attention, be that! Conversely, if you want to snap back to your body as soon as someone gives you a really good straight line, you can play things out that way as well. The rule is just . . .

It should be undesirable to forget that life requires error, and the pacing of that error is random, and the jagged peaks of great large errors are larger than a person's life. —from the introduction to The Valde Bellum: A Chronology of Excrucian Assault, Volume VIII, by Kip Narekatski

In addition to the conditions at the far end that end possession, the miracle stops when something happens back at your body that “would” snap you out of it, whatever that kind of thing might be.

“Guidance” (Level 2) Guidance is meant to be a nicer version of possession — potentially, if you like, a completely benign watching-over. Since it’s also a stronger miracle, it allows you to mix and match the two forms, watching non-coercively and then taking over for a moment when you’d like to, either at the Anchor’s instigation or your own. I feel like it is unbefitting to a Noble’s dignity to just lurk in the back of somebody’s mind, and also like a level 2 miracle should definitely be worth the upgrade if you happen to have a 0-1 Treasure rating and no moral qualms, so at level 2, when you’re just watching, you get to keep paying attention to your own body and to whatever is going on with it.

I also wanted level 2 to also be the level where you could have a real meeting of minds with your sword or soapbox derby racer or whatever — the level where you could “become one” with your treasures for greater effect. The truth, though, is: that effect is already kind of there by default with all of your Anchors, since you use miraculous Will rather than ordinary Will in Anchor-related Intentions. That’s why this effect is pretty minor: I didn’t feel comfortable giving more than an additional +1 Tool bonus and a point of Edge. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

We are waves of original purpose that strike the world of tools— signified things that enter a cosmos of signifiers; ideals that enter a world of flesh; patterns impinging upon the static relationships of the world. Languages, actions, machines, thoughts— ultimately we cannot differentiate ourselves from our tools. — Wulandari 6, Power of Authenticity

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Wondrous Anchors L

et’s say that you have a pet AI. A real AI, I mean, the kind that could go berserk and take over the whole world if there weren’t things like Nobilis and Excrucians around to stop it, the kind of AI that’s so profoundly superior to humanity in its underlying capabilities that it’s only the vague semantics of its construction that make it comprehensible at all. The kind of AI that can fab up a bunch of robotic bees in an emergency, some kind of, you know, insufficient robotic bees error kind of emergency, and send them off to help you out. The kind of AI that can set up a package to be delivered to you in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean two and a half years from now and it’ll contain just the inflatable life raft that you’ll need right then. That kind of AI. We can tell a lot of different stories, then, about you and your pet:

We can tell the story where you’re basically its pet. That’s a kind of fun one. It loves you with a kind of amused fondness, it feels like it owes you a good life, but it won’t fix everything for you. . . . or we can tell the story where it’s kind of an omni-tool, but only for the things you think to ask.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

. . . or, we can tell the story where it’s a vicious and treacherous wish-granting genie that kept its early-youth programming to obey you not out of loyalty or inescapability but because it thinks that toying with you and pretending to be your pet is “fun.”

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. . . or, we can tell the story where it’s this hapless puppy, this joyful but confused sentience who doesn’t really understand what it’s doing or what’s going on for all of the genius that it hath. . . . we can even tell a mix of these stories: you know, where now it’s one thing, now another.

And there will be some people who will hear the word “pet AI” and immediately go to one or another of these stories in their heads. They will immediately see that you have doomed humanity by virtue of creating an AI, or will immediately see that you have found a god button and nobody can ever oppose you or even think of opposing you again because (again) AI. And then there will be some who will joke about how it’s pointless and useless because machines are so literal-minded they’ll never understand people anyway, and others who’ll assume that as an AI it’s a person and there’s nothing you can do but enslave it (and eventually meet a cruel karmic ending) or free it (and thereby have it as an acquaintance rather than as a power of your own.) Different people, different stories.

You can characterize all this kind of stuff as a layer of story and genre and assumptions atop the beating heart of the basic “you have an AI” premise. Or maybe it’s better to think of it as an undergirding, a set of details, a collection of subtle features of the situation beneath the premise’s notice.

You could even say that life is work: that you have to invest in it to be the kind of person who can have a healthy relationship with someone (electronic or otherwise); that you have to invest in it to maximize the non-relationship benefits you get out of your connection with anything; and thus that there will be some people who, given access to the loyalty of an AI or a jewel that reshapes the world or an army of strange horrors, will only get themselves into incredibly awful and terrible trouble, others who will climb to the top of the world, and still others who will discover in that power a loyal and a wonderful group of friends: That it has very little to do with how the thing itself works at all!

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

“Your machine, Ms. Lovelace! Your damnable machine! It has doomed us all!”

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Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

You may be used, in gaming, to the idea that a power is defined by its effects —

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That a cold ray is what a cold ray does; that a flying car is what a flying car does; that a mirror of scrying or a fire that burns anything or a helm of transformations or a book of magic spells or a pair of ruby slippers or a crown of regal demeanor or any other of the treasures in all the myriad realms of fantasy is nothing more or less than the rules for what it does. And to some extent that’s true even for Treasure, since, after all, the operation of the Attribute is governed by its rules.

But fundamentally in Nobilis your treasures are defined by their description, and that description can be as over-the-top as you like without automatically meaning that you win at everything forever. Your description can be the kind of thing that provokes rather than resolves forum arguments. You are allowed to have bracers that make you “as strong as you need to be” and to wrestle somebody whose bracers make them “stronger than anybody that they fight.” You are allowed to have an omni-corrupting artifact or a hat that shields you from all corruption, and the level of that effect isn’t really going to be measured by a numeric clash or some rule about what trumps what. When people start talking about unlimited effects, in particular, and often even when they’re talking about limited ones, we’re not really in the realm of practical logic any more. When people talk about things like that, I suspect them of making moral arguments: Not arguments about what is, or how the world works. But arguments, on some level, about how it should. That’s what I think. You can disagree!

I think that every form of monstrous, unlimited strength is on some level a representation of something — or, at least, can be understood as such. The strength of rage; the strength of the childish impulse that says you should be able to crush, punch, leap; the strength of a pure heart; the tyrannous strength of reality that crushes fallacious hopes; the similar strength by which the wicked and the foolish always seem to win, to grind you down; or the ridiculous, fiery strength by which the bright stars in the firmament overturn that, step in from outside the framework of despair, and make things better and inspire hope. Each of these strengths is limited, of course, within its paradigm.

The strength of rage doesn’t seem like it should always beat the strength of calm, no matter how limitless it may be. Does that make sense? It’s possible that someone playing a PC wielding the strength of rage might lose perspective and believe that they can overcome the strength of calm at a time when they really oughtn’t, but even so, it feels to me like those times — when rage “really oughtn’t” beat the strength of calm — should exist out there, at least in notion. That there is something in the fabric of any strength, which is a metaphor for some other power or element, that means that where that metaphor breaks the strength also does not apply.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

As they advanced upon her, she pulled a pin from her hair; and they laughed. Then she passed her hand over it, and it became a length of gleaming steel; and their smiles turned nervous. And she passed her hand over it again, and it became a fang: one of seven fangs, each three feet long, in the maw of a creature whose eyes burned with hate. Then, they ran, and it was a pin again, and she replaced it in her hair. Weeks afterwards, I asked her whence came such a remarkable device. She gave me a puzzled look and said, “Dearest Chirico. There is such potential in any pin, if you but study the arts of war.” —from In the Service of Meloria, by Keiko Takemori

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And I think this doesn’t necessarily come into play by saying, “Oh, in this circumstance, the strength of calm can bench press X more pounds than the strength of rage.” They’re both still endless wells!

It just comes into play because, in that particular case, calm wins. The system for Treasure, then, isn’t a system for unleashing progressively greater powers. It’s a system for wielding the message of your power — the moral implications of it, the meaning of it, the story of it — with progressively greater finesse. As you climb from level 3 to level 6, in particular, you’re going from:

Postulate. I have this tool, which does this thing that I’ve described. To Postulate. I have this tool, which I can use to a specific, ideologicallyrelevant effect. At level 3, your AI is a functional AI and your magical flying car . . . flies. At level 6, your AI is a part of the kind of story you want to tell, a friend or tool or ally that you can rely upon to achieve large-scale effects; your car is not just a car but a symbol of freedom: you can use it to inspire hope or to shake up the world’s status quo.

Mundane Actions and Wondrous Anchors Of course once you boot up an AI it’s unlikely to stop being a functional AI just because you stop sustaining your boot-it-up-and-run-it action. And, while there are doubtless some flying cars with good anti-theft measures, and others that run on their owner’s imagination, it’s best if a typical flying car can be stolen by someone who can then, well, fly off with it. That’s just more fun! So the truth is —

You don’t actually need a miracle to do stuff with most wondrous Anchors at all. Do you have a bottle of unquenchable fire? Pour that stuff out! It’ll start an unquenchable fire! Do you have a flying carpet? Well, get on, mutter, “Yip yip!” and (if it’s a fan of Avatar: the Last Airbender or at least of Calgon) it will probably then carry you away. Of course, here, things start to get a little tricky.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

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See, in Nobilis, it’s always possible to declare your intention to fly around on a carpet. On, well, any carpet. On anything, really. You have a package of delicious snacks? You can try to hop onto that package of delicious snacks and fly it away to the moon!

Halfway to her rendezvous in Reykjavik, Deirdre is struck by a sudden awareness that her flying carpet has neither steering wheel, gas pedal, or brakes.

And there’s really only two things that then stand between you and your shining dreams:

First, you can’t fly a package of delicious snacks to the moon. And, well, second? . . . you can’t fly a package of delicious snacks to the moon. That’s not actually redundant, nor is it a Red Dwarf reference. Rather, it’s like this:

The first problem is that it’s beyond human capacity to navigate a typical Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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snack package into low earth orbit, much less all the way to the moon. That means that Aspect isn’t going to allow you to do that without some particularly tricky reasoning and use of precedents. And that means that if you’re not going to use Treasure for this, you’re probably going to have to use your ordinary mundane Skills. However, as you may have noticed from your daily life, that leads to the second problem: for this endeavor, your ordinary mundane Skills do not suffice. (With apologies to all our nation’s hopeful snackstronauts.)

You see, a mundane Intention of the snack-flight sort is usually going to run aground on the grim grey shoals of verisimilitude. You’ll make a good attempt, an effective attempt maybe, a productive attempt maybe, but ultimately the moon is liable to remain beyond your grasp!

Of course, that is with an ordinary bag of snacks. A non-magical bag of snacks. It’s obviously a lot more plausible to do this if the bag of snacks is a magical flying snack pack, perhaps handed out by some magical translunar airline. In that kind of snacksuation —

. . . Actually I don’t want to talk about snacks once we get into actual magic here. That’s where the example was going, but, um. Now that flight to the moon is actually quasi-feasible, let’s drop the snacks thing and get back to the flying carpet or the bottle of fire. The AI. Whatever. The stuff that can plausibly work. It’s obviously easier to fly a carpet around if it’s an actual flying carpet. It’s feasible and at least in comparison to flying any other kind of carpet it’s practical. The first objection still applies, you still can’t use Aspect. And the second objection still applies, in that flying around on a carpet is still inherently kind of unfeasible and prone to Obstacles. But . . . it’s not completely out. You can do it: you have a flying carpet. Riding that thing around, whether in the air or to the moon — Even with mundane actions, that’s not out. That could happen. But —

At that point, you’re no longer in the genre of the mighty Power, commanding your potent devices. When you’ve taken Aspect and Treasure out of the equation and you’re overcoming an Obstacle to use a random magical item? You’re in the genre of the ordinary person playing with strange forces that they might or might not comprehend. This doesn’t mean the carpet blows up, of course. Not even metaphorically. There’s no reason to think that it goes particularly wrong, any more than it would if you were visiting someone else and they loaned you a flying carpet and it wasn’t even a thing.

It can be OK. Sometimes you’ll fly around on your carpet without a miracle, or you’ll unleash your bottled fire, or you’ll ask your AI for something, and that’s fine. That can be OK. Maybe the only penalty is that you can only manage a level 2-3 Intention instead of effortless perfect success — but remember that most of the time, in most of your life, a level 2-3 Intention will do the trick. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

It’s just that at that point you’re not really in control of the story at all.

At that point if the HG decides you’re in the story where the carpet falls in love with another passing flying carpet and zips off in pursuit, or the story where you keep falling off, or the story where your bottled fire rages out of your own control and burns you, or the AI does the same —

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You don’t have any power over that any more than you would if you were playing around in some enemy or rival’s lab and you did the same thing with their wondrous devices. Bad stuff might happen. Good stuff might happen. It’s all — Whatever will happen, will happen, in play.

One implication of this is that the difference between low and high Treasure doesn’t necessarily manifest in every miracle. It’s not about the fact that a Treasure 3 Power can casually activate their flying carpet right now while a Treasure 0 Power needs to spend 4 MP to really trust it. It’s that the entire relationship between a Treasure 0 Power and their wondrous Anchors is characterized by those Anchors’ fundamental unreliability, treacherousness, and their being incompletely understood, while a Treasure 3 Power can be completely casual about it. “These snacks? Of course they’ll fly. Come on!”

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

“They have wings,” Olga emphasizes, her intense stare brooking no argument. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

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The difficulty lay not in teaching the parrot to prophesy, Danielle discovered, but rather in getting the creature to stop.

“Claiming an Anchor” (Level 0) and Wondrous Anchors There’s never a real need to invoke Treasure 0 upon a wondrous Anchor — it receives the benefits of the miracle automatically. You have the option to enhance the underlying thing to being the best of its mortal kind and free it from maintenance costs, even if that has nothing to do with the Anchor’s wondrous ability — Put simply, those are the benefits something gets from being your Anchor, a part of your story., not specific to the miracle at level 0.

Similarly, whether you like it or not, your mundane interactions with a wondrous Anchor use miraculous Will: you can’t choose to deny your Anchor the benefits of its “claiming” even if you’d really like to sometimes spend 4 or 8 Will on its use. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

“Possession” and “Guidance” (Level 1-2) and Wondrous Anchors

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You may use “Possession” and “Guidance” miracles on wondrous Anchors as normal.

“Unleashing Wonders” (Level 3) You’re allowed to acquire a wondrous Anchor by hunting one down. If you want a fiery sword or a flying unicorn, well, they’re out there. Go get one! That said, the standard mode for acquiring a wondrous Anchor is meant to be via upgrade —

You take your ordinary Anchor, your friend or watch or car or whatever, and you tinker with it in your characteristic fashion in order to give it a power. This is usually something that’s metaphorically connected to your Estate — but I’m going to assume that you know what you’re doing and so I’m not going to require it to so be. “Unleashing Wonders” is also the level you use to activate and invoke the power of a wondrous Anchor you already have. I expect that you’ll combine the Anchor-claiming and the Anchor-invoking functions now and then. That’s fine. For instance, if you’re falling off a cliff and the only resource you have handy is your ordinary VW bug Anchor, it is totally reasonable to turn to the HG, adopt a Superman-like and/or entomologist pose, and say quite solemnly, “This Christmas: You’ll believe a bug can fly.”

“Getting Some Help” (Difficulty 4) The next stage after merely asserting the existence and the function of a wondrous Anchor is to specify your relationship with it — to be in charge of how it participates in your life. That’s what level 4 Treasure miracles are for.

The more often you’re willing to use level 4 Treasure miracles, which correlates with but isn’t totally defined by your Treasure rating, the more confident you can be that your Anchors are there for you in the way you envision them to be. I don’t know how you envision that, exactly, which makes it hard to precisely specify the benefits that then accrue.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

There was a wicked King who conquered many lands and reaped much wealth thereby. His holdings extended farther than a hawk could see and his treasure pits were filled to overflowing. He set his sights on greater and greater goals; and one by one they were achieved. One morning he woke, and no courtiers attended him. He wandered out into the halls and found his guards carting out the treasure from his pits. In the distance, one by one, new flags went up over his long-subjugated lands. “What are you all doing?” he cried. “I shall have you slain!” “I had not wished to betray you,” answered his Captain of the Guard, “and the people were afraid to do so. But the things that were yours are now needed by a righteous man.” —from Parables for Our Modern Age, by Jackie Robinson

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Stretching a Power Scaling up to level 4 also gives you a bit more flexibility on a wondrous Anchor’s power itself. This is mostly a rules trick: it’s so, if you or the HG aren’t sure if your wondrous Anchor’s power covers doing something, you can just say “oh, maybe it’s level 4?”

I mean, it’s perfectly legitimate to have Treasure 4 and yet have recalcitrant, obstinate Anchors that are always arguing with and defying you. To have magical armor that’s always breaking down. Bracers of strength with a mind of their own. A butler who will sometimes lock you in rather than let you out of the house when you’re not well. A wolf that behaves erratically in the presence of flamingos. A magic horse prone to the deepest sulks. I can’t say that it rules any of this out, nor that it does anything in specific, so I can’t say exactly what benefits a Treasure 4 miracle will have.

But I can say that whatever those benefits are, whatever that relationship is, it’ll be something that works for you.

Level 4 miracles create a . . . fulfilling, enriching relationship: a baseline reliability in the way that that Anchor is there for you, in the way in which it’s not merely physically present in your life but, well, contributing to it. The miracle, in effect, says: Postulate: I have this thing in my life, and we’re connected; I can rely on it.

In Nobilis: the Essentials, Volume 1 I generalized this to being able to say that things happen without your character’s conscious will, because if you have a selfwilled wonder then being connected to it and able to rely on it means that it’ll do things for you “on its own” in a pinch. Sometimes even amazing things. That’s just how fictional partnerships (and most real-life partnerships) work!

“Weaponizing Anchors” (Difficulty 5) Stretching a Power (continued) I wanted to make sure that every Anchor could be a reliable trump card in miraculous combat, if you have access to level 5 miracles. Thus, at level 5, an ordinary Anchor gets amazing luck and timing and a wondrous Anchor’s power stretches further. Its capability expands in an interesting fashion and it can do something new and neat. The go-to improvement is “its normal power can target metaphors, miracles, or abstractions” — but you can come up with ideas of your own! Paul Linton (order #5465578)

The next step, after an Anchor that reliably plays its part in your life story, is having an Anchor that acts as a reliable trump card in miraculous conflict — something, in short, that you can impose on other peoples’ stories. Level 5 Treasure miracles are what let you say: “look, the story I can tell with this thing is so cool it can override the narrative you’re creating with your whole life.” Claiming, I guess, supremacy of the embedded moral and narrative of your Anchor over the underlying truths of somebody else’s existence.

That claim is not specific to Treasure, you understand. It’s basically what it means in general when you make a miraculous attack. Claiming that supremacy is what a Noble is doing when they use a Lesser Destruction of Life to kill you or a Lesser Enchantment of Cats to turn you into a cat. It’s what any direct miraculous attack on somebody else, any attack that outright inflicts an undesirable effect on somebody else, is all about: “Yeah, whatever you were doing? Wherever your life was going?” snaps fingers

“Forget that noise. My will be done.”

Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

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Miraculous attacks are kind of nasty that way. You can have someone who’s spent their whole life mastering the ukulele and invoke a miracle to turn that into skill with a sword. Or vice versa! You can turn a sinner into a priest or singe a great and virtuous shounen hero into a sudden pile of ash. . . . or vice versa. Even if that pile of ash was perfectly happy living with its beloved fireplace and their children. Even if it was the ashes of the worst villain ever born! Bam! That ash’s now a hero, whatever it had been before.

A miracle doesn’t have to care about the target’s life story, you see, not unless the target is miraculous, and often not even then.

Mercutio, desperate to weaponize his Anchors, pioneers the “Sleeping-Beauty-a-pult,” launching her over the walls of rival city-states to narcotize his enemies therein.

So getting back to the topic and why you’d want to weaponize an Anchor:

It’s not that you can’t stab someone with your magic sword at level 3-4. In fact, you can even do that without using a miracle at all! But when you do that, if you do that, what happens next is going to be based on things like “your mundane Intentions” and “the HG’s picture of what the sword ‘should’ do,” not your will. Going up to level 5 is basically the difference between

• “Hey, what do you think would happen if I swung the magic sword that turns what it hits into rabbits at this guy? Let’s try it!” And • “I have a magic sword that turns what it hits into rabbits. . . . I turn you into a rabbit.” And sometimes these two statements would have worked out basically the same. Other times — e.g., if the target is partly air/ethereal/ghostly, or part-rabbit, or intrinsically resistant to change, or under a burden of prophecy that says Paul Linton (order #5465578)

30 His human always thought that Emmett was nothing more than a gun; a tool, a weapon, mindless, without a will of his own. Emmett did not mind. He was a quiet type, a utilitarian type. He liked to sit in his case when not in use. He liked to fling bullets at the targets down the range. He saw no need to speak up and remind his human that he had a mind of his own. Emmett didn’t really know how he came to be there, in the alley, staring down the darkness at his human’s brother. It had all been a whirl. His human was yanking on the trigger; an uncomfortable pressure began to build within his mind. Fire! a voice chanted in his heart. Fire! He could not help himself. Rearing back, inhaling, he spat forth a bullet like a thunderclap. Blood cried and whimpered as it splashed against the wall. It wasn’t worth it, Emmett realized. I am metal, he whispered to himself, and sank into the metal. I am a tool. I am mindless. And he was. —from Tragedies of Spirit, by Michael Kay

they’re going to rule the world one day, or whatever — the first version might not affect them. Or, if they’re a mind-melting horror from beyond, the first version might be effective, but it’ll be up to the HG and their player and not you whether they wind up a mind-melting horror bunny or a cute l’il fwuffy, even before they take a wound.

Sometimes, in short, it’ll matter. Other times it won’t. In the long run, as with earlier miracles, it’s the frequency with which you’re willing to use level 5 Treasure miracles that really matters, not their use in any particular case. Nobilis is a system where actively weaponizing something isn’t always necessary and isn’t always effective. You might not need it because sometimes you’re completely in tune with how everyone thinks things should go anyway. You might not benefit from it because your target might use a higher-level defense or take a wound anyway. But the more often you weaponize your Anchors, the more often the story that you hope to tell with them will be effectively realized in play. Ultimately, a Treasure 5 miracle says:

“So I was thinking about who’d win if I used this tool on you, and I decided that it should be me.” Does the strength of rage beat the strength of calm this time? How about the strength of modern science? Well, using a level 5 Treasure miracle backs your claim that it does with a number. (And that number is probably “5.”)

In general, the biggest practical difference between a level 5 Treasure-based attack and a level 3-4 Treasure-based attack boils down to being able to miraculously claim that you “hit” — that you can bring your power effectively to bear. If a kid has a magical whiffle bat that lets them hit like a full-force grown-up thug hitting someone with a steel bat, then level 3-4 miracles will let them do real damage when they actually hit somebody and level 5 miracles will let them beat people up.

“Weaving Destiny” (Difficulty 6) Sometimes you’ll have a precognitive computer, or a wish-granting engine, or an army of helpful fairies, or something, and you’ll want to unleash them to fix the world. The person running the game will normally have one of two reactions: • “Sure, whatever, you can do that.” or

• “Oh, really.” rubs hands together, contemplating impending chaos

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Those things certainly seem like they could change the world — but more likely, you’ll get into trouble!

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Then there’s the things that don’t seem like they could change the world.

Like, sometimes you’ll have a vision — a sense of how things ought to be, a sense of the deep story of your wondrous Anchor, that you can’t share easily with the group and HG. You’re certain that by going around posing with your wondrous surfboard, you can bring a cultural and economic renaissance to Canada. You’re certain that if you fire your winging machine at the children of the world (to give them wings) that it’ll improve the state of a modern education.

And it’s obvious that you can tell that story. I mean, it seems obvious to me, anyway, that you can tell a story of how somebody gave all the kids wings, and how it was a lot of trouble for everybody for a long time, but at the end of the story, for some narrative-trick reason or other mixed with some sort of heartwarming moral about how kids should be free to explore themselves and pursue the limitless skies (or whatever), it winds up producing a generation of healthier, smarter, and more thoroughly book-l’arned adults. I don’t know how to tell that story, exactly, but I’m certain you can. And while a story of somebody leading a cultural renaissance by way of a surfboard seems a little bit sillier, it’s got its own sensibility too. Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

The Lady of the Lake uses a level 6 Excalibur miracle to change the course of Western civilization.

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But the person running the game is still likely to have one of four reactions to the basic idea: • “WTF?” • “OK, you give some kids wings or whatever.” • “Sure, whatever. Cultural renaissance. I guess you’re kind of a god, so, you know. Do it.” Or • “Oh, really.”

The child of the cosmos walked out into the Arizona heat. Where no one lived and nothing grew, he set up the ring. It took him only a few days to get the bandstands up and the restrooms built. Then he sat at his laptop and printed out a handful of flyers, reading, “The Child of the Cosmos against the Gods that Move Between the Stars! A once-in-a-lifetime wrestling event, coming June 3rd!” These he distributed in nearby towns. Then, at last, he let himself sleep.

Worst of all, it’s that last reaction — the reaction that was kind of the bad ending previously — that’s really the closest to getting the HG on board. It’s that last reaction that tells you that the HG is looking forward to casting up philosophical opposition to your plan in the form of . . . I don’t know. “Raven kids” who make trouble for your child-winger, maybe? For the surfer, the boogie boarding minions of The Man (and his brother, “le Québécois Mec”)? . . . and that’s helpful, because that probably earns you a big win eventually, but it still wasn’t precisely the goal.

“But you are only half a god,” the reporters would ask him later. “How can you expect to beat the real thing?”

If you don’t like these options, anyway, what you probably want instead is the ability to push the HG to decide between these two choices:

“The gods rule an unjust cosmos,” he would answer. “But in the ring, I will make justice with my own two hands.”

• “I’m going to give you a hard time, but, well, OK, that can work.”

—from 24 Finales, by Rannen Yedidyah

• “All right, that’s happening, keep me updated.” Or

Those are the two options that mean your story for what should be happening here is actually going into force in play. Those are the two options that let you actually use your computer or fairies or surfboard or whatever to effectually produce real and positive change. Unfortunately this does take a while.

That isn’t really something I can help with. I mean, real and productive change can’t be too easy or too fast or you won’t be able to make it a part of the story of the game —

If you declare that a single iconic pose with your surfboard ushers in a new era, then you’re also turning it into an isolated comedic moment that’s easy to forget about or diminish in play. If you can’t create the links between “I did this” and “this result is transpiring” in the minds of the HG and the other players, it becomes a kind of weird tentative phenomenon that dissolves when studied too closely. Unless the game’s going pure comedy, it’s impossible to profit from actions that break the suspension of disbelief, and players are inherently more skeptical of productivity than effectiveness.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

So it does take a while. You’ll have to spend long enough working on this to make it believable — either enough IC time to make your methodology seem plausible, enough OOC time checking in with and explaining what you’re doing to ground the story of your actions, or both. And because you’re taking that time, it’s not just a single level 6 miracle —

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Often, you’ll get interrupted partway through. You’ll need to drop the miracle so you have both actions to work with in a conflict or something, before your miracle can achieve its ends, and then you’ll have to get back to it later, with no guarantee that anything’s been gained, only that you were making progress and that you would have gotten there in the end. So these miracles are kind of a pain.

But what they get you is that the HG will choose from those latter two options. They buy you the assertion that yes, you can tell that story. With your wondrous Anchor: you can tell it. Your “I give children wings, increasing their academic prowess” idea works. It is practical. It is a good idea and a good story. It’s ultimately a thing that your “wing ray” can do. Your precognitive computer can fix the economy. Your surfboard can make the culture improve. Not by the HG’s humoring you. Not in the background while the group ignores you. Not as a weird and inexplicable moment — but as part of the story that your group tells in play.

“Unleashing Miracles” (Difficulty 6+) and Wondrous Anchors There’s a scene — you’ve all probably seen it sometime or other on TV: Hitting a wall in terms of what their ordinary resources can accomplish, someone takes their magic item, or their martial arts technique, or their spell, or their robot arm, or their weapon, or whatever, and they push it farther than it was ever meant to go. If you ever find yourself needing the greatest miracles of Treasure, but the only appropriate Anchor you have to work with is a wondrous Anchor, you can push that Anchor “farther than it was ever meant to go” and unleash a superpowerful mode or effect. It is even theoretically possible to do this with an ordinary Anchor — I can’t imagine that making much sense, but if it does make sense, go to!

So keep that in mind as you read the notes for miraculous Anchors, below — all of them are also, implicitly, notes for how to play with wondrous Anchors that are being pushed unsafely far.

Don’t let that convince you to focus on wondrous instead of miraculous Anchors, though, not unless your Treasure rating is comparatively low: The capacity to push your artifacts past their breaking point, or yours, is an

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

There is nothing infinite in this Creation. Even your own power will run dry. Even the Nobilis have limits. You have a duty to the world. Never admit to these limits. Never accept them. You are a lord or lady of this Earth. —from Becoming Noble, by Fayola Osiagobare

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obvious Chekhov’s Gun for anyone, but if you do it too much it will hurt you or the artifact in question. Basically, if your dear aunt has the wondrous power to blaze up on a motorcycle and rescue you when you’re in trouble, and you get disintegrated or whatever, and you want to supercharge your aunt and have her tear through the veil of reality at superluminal speed and grab you from the shattered-glass “disintegration universe” or whatever onto her bike —

Well, bear in mind that her heart might give out afterwards. That’s a pretty superheroic act for a random barely-magical aunt!

“Getting Miraculous Help” (Difficulty 7) and Ordinary and Wondrous Anchors That said, I should note that there is one effect at the miraculous level that’s safe to use with ordinary and wondrous Anchors — It takes a level 7 miracle to allow an Anchor to reach you with its power or to reach you physically no matter where you might be. This effect is meant to let you, I dunno, grab a book from your magic library even while you’re on Mars or summon back your magic key after it falls into the event horizon of a black hole or whatever, but if you’re in the situation mentioned above, where you’re disintegrating and you want your aunt to rescue you, and if you can afford a level 7 miracle, then you can use this to get your aunt’s motorcycle to you before you dissolve without hurting her at all. It’s not as clear that that’ll actually save you, unlike the supercharged version, but it won’t necessarily hurt either of you if you try.

“Godmother, I love you dearly, but you simply can’t keep summoning me every time you see a vegetable that you don’t know.” (image is copyright The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)) Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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Miraculous Anchors S

ometimes you’ll come across a sleeping Magister in a prison glade somewhere in the deep Beyond; or a flute older than the world; a fellow Power; Fenris Wolf; a major Abhorrent Weapon; or a divinely-empowered spring, and you’ll say — “That! That’s mine! I’m taking that home with me!” I wanted this to be an option because there’s a venerable fictional tradition that I have dabbled in myself of characters who are themselves relatively ordinary (for the power level of their setting) but who can call upon great powers or friends. If you want to play someone like that, well, a miraculous Anchor is what you need!

Miraculous Strengths The line between what a wondrous Anchor and what a miraculous Anchor can actually accomplish is drawn principally in the players’ minds. A wondrous Anchor is something that’s meant to sound cool and cinematic — “beware! My striped socks contain inside them all the chill vast greatness of the frozen north!*” It should have the same cachet as one of your more descriptive miracles. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Also, my feet!

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A miraculous Anchor, on the other hand, is meant to be impressive even in the context of the game. It’s meant to be the kind of thing that even a Power is supposed to be nervous about facing. It doesn’t have to outright terrify, but it should have the same cachet as a whole character — or possibly a little more. That’s why these miracles are so expensive. Even for a god, having another god in your pocket is a pretty big deal. And if it’s something bigger than a god that you’ve got tucked away in there, then it’s an even bigger deal! That said — in practice, if your socks have “the divine cold that preceded existence” in them or “the heart of the Power of Ice themselves!” it’s not specific how much more powerful that is than “all the chill vast greatness of the frozen north.” The difference is really just a matter of expectations management: there are going to be effects that divine cold can produce, and conflicts that it can win, that ordinary cold (however extreme) cannot. If that seems a small matter — if you find yourself thinking:

The child proposed that the fairie’s actions were unjust: criminal, even, according to the standards of the time. The fairie sat, for a while, deep in thought, then answered: “If others speak well of it, it cannot be a crime.” —from Void Stories, compiled by Édouard Guy

“Just expectations management? Nothing else? That’s all?” — well, remember that the only thing a player can actually meaningfully do in Nobilis is shape their vision, and the other players’ vision, of what happens in the game. In Nobilis, the ability to declare that something is a big, epic effect is a power in itself: it changes the narrative. It’s going to depend on the story you’re telling how impressive it takes for something to be epic, and while I don’t encourage you to develop the kind of wildly inconsistent and variable powers that you see in long-term comic and serial canons, I don’t think it can be 100% avoided. Or maybe it can? If so, please do!

Mundane Actions and Miraculous Anchors Using mundane actions with a miraculous Anchor plays out pretty much like it does for a wondrous Anchor. Do you have a miraculous Anchor? Is it, well, around and “usable?” Then you can use it with mundane actions. . . . probably. Sort of ? Maybe? Usually, see, you won’t. Usually that’s not the point. Usually, when you’re coaxing it with mundane actions, you can’t get more out of it than you’d get from it if it weren’t an Anchor, anyway; maybe even less, because — having given you whatever loyalty it’s given you that lets you invoke it with high-end miracles — it’ll usually feel less of an obligation to be nice to you or tame in other ways. It’s really up to the HG’s portrayal, but there’s a kind of default where selfPaul Linton (order #5465578)

willed miraculous Anchors mostly hang around being lazy or go off and do their own thing when you’re not miraculously invoking them; and where “inanimate” or animalistic miraculous Anchors are mean and treacherous unless it’s obvious that you’re really in desperate need.

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A friendly miraculous Anchor might step up to the plate for you even without a miracle when you’re out of MP, but if you’re just conserving MP don’t expect it to do all that much.

“Claiming an Anchor” (Difficulty 0) and Miraculous Anchors Again, you’ll never need to use this. Miraculous Anchors already receive the benefits of this kind of miracle. I do feel kind of weird about that, to be honest, because why should you be able to upgrade a random Excrucian or whatever by claiming them as an Anchor? But I didn’t want a weird kind of mechanical outcome where everyone would say, “Oh, you always want to start with an ordinary or wondrous Anchor and upgrade it to a miraculous one because that’s strictly better than taming something miraculous in its native state.” So . . . really, you should try not to emphasize these benefits. Improving miraculous Anchors by claiming them is weird. But the benefits are there!

“Possession” (Difficulty 1) and Miraculous Anchors Similarly, you’re perfectly capable of possessing a miraculous Anchor. I don’t want you to lose that power when you upgrade a wondrous Anchor, and I don’t want upgraded miraculous Anchors to be better than naturally-acquired ones — So, while you can make an argument that randomly possessing your new Anchor Lord Entropy is kind of a problematic concept, it’s feasible. It’s level 1! That said — There’s nothing about claiming someone or something as an Anchor that intrinsically reduces it to being your minion, staff, or supporter; and miraculous Anchors, unlike ordinary and wondrous Anchors, tend to have ways to oppose miraculous effects. Lord Entropy, for instance, is Immortal; you’re going to need Paul Linton (order #5465578)

The angel who bears the name Omer faithfully serves Heaven; but when he wears instead the name Ônekā, his only service is to Hell. —from On the Creation of Humankind, by Luc Ginneis

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lots of Strike or miraculous Edge to have even a chance of possessing him, and then he has resources for both resisting the attack and absorbing it into a wound.

“Guidance” (Difficulty 2) and Miraculous Anchors I wanted to call your attention to Guidance miracles as something that can actually be pretty awesome with a miraculous Anchor. It’s one of the few cases where I kind of wish you could make an Anchor out of a PC, because two Powers sharing a body and working together in a really tough conflict sounds kind of neat.

“Unleashing Wonders,” “Getting Some Help,” “Weaponizing Anchors,” “Weaving Destiny” (Difficulty 3-6) and Miraculous Anchors These abilities don’t work with miraculous Anchors at all. Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com)

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

The spirit of the Grail reminds Sir Galahad that he cannot Unleash its powers with anything less than a level 6 miracle.

“Unleashing Miracles” (Difficulty 6) This is the level of miracle you’ll need to take some potent force you discover in the world, some Noble- or Imperial-level thing, and bind it to you as an Anchor. It’s also what you’ll need if you want to permanently upgrade an ordinary or wondrous Anchor to the level of the miraculous — if you want to bathe your fiery sword in the heart of a star or adorn your trapper keeper with the wings of fallen angels or dip your motorcycle-riding battle aunt into the River Styx, thereby making her invincible (save for a single spark plug, by which you held her and it up,) this is the level for you. Finally, once you’ve claimed a miraculous entity for an Anchor, this is the level of effect that you’ll use to release your new Anchor’s miraculous power. Now, strictly speaking, if you’ve claimed a Power or Imperator or whatever, it “should” have a number of different abilities and not just “a” power. I mean, just imagine someone had claimed your PC as an Anchor — it’s amazing how many hundreds of different things you could probably have done for them! . . . but that’s too complicated. That’s making your Anchor into a character and playing them as a character or as a backup character — that’s putting you in a position where, just because you’ve claimed the Serpent of Radar or Iolithae Septimian or Attaris Ebrôt Appêkâ as an Anchor, you have to completely detail all their powers and care more about them than your own. That makes sense to some degree if they’re an important ally or main character, but they’re not. Not as an Anchor anyway. As an Anchor, when they’re wearing their metaphorical Anchor hat, they’re a presence in the background of your story. They’re part of your regalia. They’re a single-purpose tool. That purpose could be “go win this fight for me” or “invoke incredible awesomeness for me and rain down fierce judgment on my enemies,” but it shouldn’t be sets of situation-specific tactical instructions like “OK, I want you to spend 2 MP to invoke a Lesser Creation of Thus-and-Such, oh, and OK, pair that up with a mundane action to do this . . .” So! You pick a power when you get an Anchor like this. You pick the thing they do, when you call them up. That’s what you can unleash with a level 6 miracle.

“Getting Miraculous Help” (Difficulty 7) On first read this power probably seems like a direct parallel to the difficulty 4 ability. It isn’t quite. Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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“Unleashing miracles,” as I’ve said, does a single thing. It can be a pretty broad, cool thing, but it’s a single thing. You can imagine that you’ve contracted your Anchor to do this one thing for you, and when it comes to anything else — Well, that’s like asking an avenging angel to edit your book. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But that’s not what an avenging angel is for!* So the biggest thing that you get when you step up to difficulty 7 instead of 6 is that instead of doing that thing they do for you, instead, they do something helpful. Maybe they don’t actually have anything all that helpful that they can do, in which case this is kind of sad. But if there is something else useful they can do, this is what it takes to motivate them to do it. This is also the level where you get to have your Anchors show up from just about anywhere; as noted above, if you’re silly enough to feed your Anchor to the maw of an endless void-beast, or if you ascend bodily to Heaven and once you get there realize in horror that you’ve forgotten your cans of gel, or, well, if anything happens that separates you too thoroughly from your Anchor, this level of miracle is what says: “No worries.” snaps fingers “Bam! It’s here!*”

“Communion” (Difficulty 8) And they’re bitterer about this fact than you will ever know.

“Angle for that cloud! I keep a spare parachute there!”

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

This level of miracle is another form of expectations management — it doesn’t do something so much as re-enact a dramatic device. This is the power you use when it’s time to say: “Wait! We combine our powers!” or “Let’s do this together!” or “I pour all my life energy into the magic I invoke!” It does the kind of things that that does. The main reason that this is useful relates to the Nobilis style of problemsolving. When you’re dealing with cosmic affairs and metaphors, often the most important quality of a plan isn’t “does it overcome this checklist of potential obstacles;” it’s: “does it sound good? Is it the kind of thing where it’s satisfying to have it win? Is it the kind of thing that inspires the HG to come up with interesting obstacles and hitches and interesting results on a success?” Communion’s power is simply that it contributes well to plans like that. That said, you can re-interpret it with slightly more rigorous mechanics as follows:

“Communion” (Difficulty 8): A More Rigorous Description

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You can invoke Communion to supercharge the powers of an innately miraculous Treasure by admixing them with your own power, whatever that might be. This power is normally a deliberately shapeless deus ex machina — it solves the kinds of problems that you’d think, in a story, flooding something with the power of your Estate would solve. If you’ve claimed a super-strong ogre as a treasure, and you’re the Power of Storms, then maybe this lets your ogre project their strength through bolts of lightning. If you’ve claimed Iolithae Septimian as your Anchor, and you’re the Power of Truth, then maybe this can evolve one of the Lies that she “made” true into something sacredly True and Honest instead. If you’re a sailor-suited warrior of love and justice, and you have a magical grail, maybe you Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) can use this to flood the grail with love energy and bring a bunch of dead people back to life or redeem the hosts of Hell. It does stuff in short that is like, well, that. A more specific version of this effect, if you or the HG would rather nail it down precisely, is an absolute force obeying two rules: 1) it must substantially alter the situation in your favor, even given the miraculous and imperial forces in play, and 2) it temporarily expands the powers of the treasure in question in a fashion that evokes your Estate and your character themes, evokes your relationship with that Anchor, or just generally “floods it with miraculous power.”

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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“Imperial Miracles” (Difficulty 9) What this level represents, most of all, is the pinnacle effect. It’s intended to mean “an ultimate, cosmos-shaping invocation,” and be used for exactly those things an ultimate, cosmos-shaping invocation of an Anchor would be for. If you have Treasure 1-4, invoking Imperial power is meant to be a campaign-shaping turning point; if you have Treasure 5, then it’s less amazing, but still the kind of thing that happens at the start of, or facilitates the climax of, a major story arc. Mechanically speaking, at this level you can invoke an Imperial miracle. You can take some aspect of your Anchor’s miraculous power and turn it into a kind of wish or prophesy effect — An effect that’s perhaps more vague, slippery, and HG-defined than a typical player action but which, most importantly, supersedes rather than contends against traditional miraculous effects.

On Imperial Miracles Imperial miracles are slow. I didn’t want the HG to have to spend all their time explaining why your Imperator isn’t solving your problems for you, or even (in fact) solving most of their own. Unrelatedly, terrifying rituals that you have to get to and stop in time, or have to protect until they finish, are a useful and evocative trope. For both of those reasons, Nobilis 3 makes it pretty explicit that an Imperial miracle takes time. Sometimes it can even take months! Having access to Treasure 9 is a lot like having a spare Imperator or two around, but it’s not meant to be better than having a spare Imperator or two around, so these effects are still going to be kind of slow. Plus, it’s your Anchor that’s evoking the Imperial miracle, with your guidance, so you don’t have all that much fine control: Slow, and not entirely in your hands! When I looked into his eyes, I saw the radiance of God. I could not refuse him, for all that his requests were vile. I knew that there was a higher purpose to them. I knew that it was correct to serve him. God willed it so, and the angels sang alleluias to that will, and the universe shivered with the rightness of it.

—from the statement of Father Sebastian Capobianco, 03/25/00

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

That said, these miracles are a reasonable part of any long-term strategy; if the HG is on board with what you’re doing, these miracles can have a powerful short-term impact; and in the more general strategic sense they scale with the Imperators and Excrucians in your game — The scarier the gods and horrors you contend with, the more powerful emulating their abilities will tend to be. If a typical Imperator, Mimic, or Deceiver speaks Imperial miracles in a few hours rather than a few months, then that’s what you’ll probably be able to do; in some sense, your willingness to invoke Imperial miracles either limits the powers the world can throw against you or lifts you up to the transcendent levels of your foes.

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Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) Paul Linton (order #5465578)

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Unusual Anchors T

he default Anchor is a person or a thing — the giant fox that you ride around on, your laser rifle, your best friend, or your faithful retainer. Here’s some notes on Anchors of a different sort.

Icons Your character might have a mark or symbol that represents them — I imagine something easily inked, easily drawn on a wall or a person with a swirl or a paintbrush, that denotes a place under the character’s aegis. Nobilis handles symbols like this as a kind of Anchor: make a mark like that, attune to it, and it becomes something you can see and act through later on. If you want a collection of marks that do different things (e.g. bless or freeze the area affected), then you can upgrade the marks to wondrous or even miraculous Anchors.

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

45 Spells Your Anchors give you access to a collection of idiosyncratic wondrous and miraculous abilities. I figure that while the rules have a system like that anyway, I might as well also let you use it to represent having a collection of “spells” or “special moves.” A collection of spell Anchors isn’t really that much more conceptually useful than mortal magic, but if your magic is a deep part of how you work as a Power, then maybe it’s a good idea! Note that the spells are likely to be very personal, with each one being tied to you by a Bond and having the potential (at level 4 or 7) to invoke itself on your behalf.

I don’t know if it’s meaningful to “possess” or “guide” spells with your level 1-2 miracles — realistically, spells like this live in your head or in a hidden substrate of the universe or something anyway. But if Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) that makes you feel a little cheated, maybe your spells have a secondary life as “spell beasts” or “spell people” that live somewhere out there in physical or quasiphysical form when they are not being invoked. Alternately, possessing and guiding a spell might help you shape its power once you’ve invoked it!

Collections The original idea for collective Anchors came from icons. I realized that if a “mark” was your Anchor, then it could be drawn in many different places; it was a single thing, but also a collection. I wrestled with that for a bit trying to find a definition of an Anchor that would rule that in while also ruling armies out. Then I realized that there wasn’t all that much reason why you shouldn’t have an Anchored army. Or a network of spies. Or a collection of twelve magical blades, as a single Anchor, rather than being twelve. In one sense it’s a problem, in that it’s pretty easy for this to get out of hand. You have too many Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Water breathing spells may enjoy a bracing spot of jazzercise when they are not in use.

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things you want as Anchors? Just stick them all in a pile! That’s your Anchor now! It helps some that you still need a relevant Bond, but whether that actually matters will vary from character build to character build. That said — I actually kind of trust you. I’m pretty sure that you’ll know when your heart treasures an army, when it treasures a single soldier, and when it treasures a soldier, a banner, and the subdivision responsible for logistics. I think it’s probably easy to get confused on this during character creation, when you’re just kind of vaguely gesturing in the direction of what your Anchors should be, but later on? In play? You’ll know the difference between twelve magical swords that are a single Anchor, twelve swords that are twelve Anchors, or even twelve swords that are somehow 2-3. The only real restriction I want to impose is that it can take you a bit of prep work to “get to know” a particular Anchor from a large collection closely enough to possess, guide, or otherwise invoke it from afar.

Sanctums I wanted to have some sort of sanctum rules under Treasure from more or less the beginning. It’s actually pretty difficult, though, because as cool as having a magical place is, most of the “powers” that a lair or fortress gives you in fiction tend to boil down to “strengthens you in an exceptionally vague way” and/or “has walls.” Now, mind, I have an apartment that has those features myself. It is doing me good being here in a really incredibly vague manner, and it has walls! But these powers are perhaps not inspiring. Ultimately I realized that most cool sanctums would become effective tools as well if they had some way of projecting their primary benefit to you from afar. If your library could send you books; if your arsenal could send you weapons; if the glade where you gather health, life, and magical power could also beam it to you; if your lair full of minions had monitors that, well, monitored you, so minions could charge out from it to bring you stuff at need — The magistrate closed the Center for Investigation into the Actuality of Existence today, saying: “It is not possible to find evidence for Creation within Creation, whereas the converse is not true. Hence, the pursuit of this Center can yield but two logical ends: futility, or the pernicious collapse of the dream in which we live. I wish for neither; have done.” —from The Daily Oneiromant (a newspaper in Locus Iurabatres)

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Whatever! That would be something to make having the place meaningful in play. So that’s why at level 4, a local sanctum (and in fact any local Anchor) can reach you with something; and why, at level 7, sanctums (and other Anchors) can reach you from, well, anywhere!

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Image is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Index of Sidebars, Errata, and Texts Errata

Miscellaneous Cites

Note on Occupation/Possession (pg. 14)

The Daily Oneiromant: 3/24/00 edition, section A3 (pg. 46)

Sidebars Stretching a Power (pg. 28)

Texts Édouard Guy, collections compiled by: Void Stories (pg. 36) Emily Chen: The Duchess’ Needle (pg. 11) Fayola Osiagobare: Becoming Noble (pg. 33) Jackie Robinson: Parables for Our Modern Age (pg. 27) Jasprite Sherrard: A Tourist’s Guide to Creation (pg. 8) Luc Ginneis: On the Creation of Humankind (pg. 37) Michael Kay: Tragedies of Spirit (pg. 30) Keiko Takemori: Tumbledrum (pg. 13); In the Service of Meloria (pg. 21) Kip Narekatski: Chronicles of Wonders (pg. 4); (introduction to) The Valde Bellum: A Chronology of Excrucian Assault, Volume VIII (pg. 17) Rannen Yedidyah: 24 Finales (pg. 32)

Paul Linton (order #5465578)

Sermons and Speeches, 3/25/00: Statement of Father Sebastian Capobianco (pg. 42) Wulandari 6, Power of Authenticity: personal communication (pg. 17)

Image (except for the Eos logo) is Copyright 2006 The Scriptorium (www.fontcraft.com) Paul Linton (order #5465578)