So!
Nobilis, the game of
Sovereign Powers.
Anyone know it? If you do, do you want to play it?
My wife tried to run a
game, but we ended up starved for players and it kinda faltered, so we have this whole Chancel and Imperator set up (and pretty cool ones, IMO) with nothing to do with 'em. Since I'm usually more comfortable running things than she, I thought I'd give her a chance to play instead. Depending on players and so on, we may or may not remake the Chancel. (In the game, that's technically the player's job, and it comes after character creation, but it tends to require a few hours of sitting and discussing things, which may or may not be an option here.)
I'd lean towards a combined story/journal format, since the game itself is so very prone to navel-gazing. In other words, there will be plot events, but also individual storylines, and keeping an in-character "diary" or equivalent would be encouraged. (Wouldn't have to be an actual diary, either. "June 13 - Woke up late. Kinda hungry. Obliterated Poland because it annoyed me. Went back to bed." Vignettes or related writing pieces would be fine for this sort of thing; total pretentious wankfest, that sort of deal.)
For those who DON'T know the game, allow me to sum it up:
All the basic, fundamental concepts of the world are embodied in godlike beings known as Imperators. Reality itself is currently under assault by beings from Outside, known as Excrucians. The Imperators are all fighting off the high-end Excrucians, so they can't pay much attention to their actual, y'know, jobs. To fix this, they split off fragments of their god-souls and implant them in mortal subjects. These former mortals become Nobilis, also called Powers or Sovereign Powers. Imperators often rule over several concepts (which may or may not be related); these are their Estates. Each Noble gets only one Estate, in general, but for all intents and purposes they ARE their Estate.
For example, the Imperator Whoozit might embody the Estates of Wind, Weeds, and Secrets. He/she/it chooses George, a car mechanic from Waynesboro, and enNobles him. Now George, a thirty-five year old bachelor, is also the Duke of Wind. Because George is blustery, easily angered, and sometimes indecisive, that's the way the wind is also. And it's always been that way, so far as any normal person is concerned.
The new Nobles all go to live in a Chancel, which is a little pocket dimension created by their Imperator (at the cost of at least a hundred human deaths, btw; aren't gods fun?). A Chancel can have anywhere between one to infinite connections to the "real world"; Narnia is a good way to think about Chancels. The wardrobe is the connection between Narnia and the real world. And just like Narnia, Chancels have their own "people" that live in them, with their own politics and problems that need solving; a lot of a Noble's time is spent just governing the Chancel.
Lastly, there are a lot of rules and etiquette in the lives of Nobles. Social interaction and careful political maneuvering are the order of the day. The issue in the game is not so much "Can my character succeed?" as "What are the repercussions if my character does X? Can I avoid doing X? Should I?"
The game system is not set up in a normal fashion; there are no rolls or random chance. Basically, you have a certain number of Miracle Points, which you can use to more or less automatically succeed at stuff. The game part lies in managing your resources carefully, and finding ways to solve problems without wasting your miraculous power on it, since if you weaken yourself, you might end up in serious trouble. There are Vampire-style vicious backbiting politics going on, and the Excrucians have learned the trick of creating shard-souls - Powers - of their own, which means they can now assault Chancels and the real world directly.
/me checks for interest.
