November Artaldo's Work For Hire's Journal
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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Friday, June 21, 2002
I think each of the three entries was roughly 600 words.
Monday, June 17, 2002
1. Core Ethos Sentence. [A single sentence that describes the core ethos of the world. For example, Forgotten Realms is a world of sword-and-sorcery adventure, where heroes battle monsters with magic.]
2. Who are the heroes? [Brief description of heroes central to the setting. This need not be a comprehensive list.]
3. What do they do? [What are the main objectives of the heroes, and what steps do they take to achieve those objectives?]
4. Threats, Conflicts, Villains [What is the main danger to the world, and from whom does it come?]
5. Nature of magic [What is the source of magic? How abundant/scarce is it?]
6. What's new? What's different? [What makes this setting unique?]
7. Entrant [That's you. Your name must be typed in the lower left corner of the page and nowhere else.]
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Caleb and Indigo.
I can post it below a fold for Michelle if requested, and for other people, but it's possibly the most spoilerish scene in the whole book so far.
A warning... I write Caleb and Indigo VERY QUICKLY compared to other demonstrated rates. So if I keep going on this, you'll start seeing 1000 and 1500 word posts for an hour's worth of work. I've spent less than half an hour on the words today.
If I started working hard to produce narrative journal entries of my life, ala Princess Diaries or Bridget Jones, is that acceptable writing? I'm not really comfortable posting such things in my normal journal, even if they would technically be journal entries, because, well, I'd definitely be applying the style of a story to them. But all the same, I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
--Chrysoula
Friday, May 24, 2002
Thursday, May 23, 2002
Word count, nominal.
But you can reward me anyhow. :-)
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
100 words. :-( And dog stress. Finished Legends of the South.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
risu, you can read, but please do not offer any sort of reward, for what I should think are obvious reasons.
For reference, I was trying for something that conveys an honest and accurate representation of my reactions to Nobilis without the exuberant 'buy this now, it's soooo goooooood' attitude of many reviews at rpg.net. Because I adore the author as a person as well as a writer, I want to be careful in my presentation. Please keep that in mind, Czr and Silkblade, in reading this.
I'm also not done with the review, but am concerned by the organization. It's kind of rambling; I'd like to know if this is a problem. If not, the final draft will probably just contain more text and some word changes; I'll post that here as well as on rpg.net.
----
Nobilis Second Edition.
I've been following Nobilis since the Pharos Press edition. I liked the
Pharos Press Edition very much; I'd encountered R. Sean Borgstrom's
writing before and found it evocative and magical. Nobilis 1 was much the
same.
It was also dense and small, as well as poorly distributed. As a game, I
was left with many questions on how to solve even the most basic of
problems. As reading material, I loved it. Perhaps this belongs in the
Amazon review section; I'll copy it there eventually, because this is just
as much a review of the book as a review of the game.
I'd never encountered anything as powerful and inspiring, such a catalyst
to my own imagination, as Nobilis. I suffered, though, in comparison with
the author's own brilliance; I read what the game was capable of, and
designed for, and often I floundered at coming up with ways to use the
system in ways as effortlessly brilliant as the author's examples.
That was first edition.
A sidestep here, for those approaching Nobilis for the first time. I
imagine there will be a lot more of those this time; Nobilis is actually
on gamestore shelves now.
Nobilis is a game about the Powers That Be. The players take on the roles
of minor gods, each in control of a specific estate of
reality. Computers. Strife. Loyalty. Obligation. Rodents. Dreams. Death At
Sea. The PCs, called Powers, or Nobilis, serve higher powers: angels,
fallen angels, gods, the forces of Light and Darkness, other
affiliations. The affiliations, of course, oppose each other, but all of
the affiliations are united against the Excrucians, who come from outside
Creation, and wish to destroy it, concept by concept. Nobilis are created
when the higher powers, collectively called Imperators, sink part of their
soul into Earth and put shards of their powers in humans; this would not
be necessary save for the invasion of the Excrucians.
Just as the Nobilis serve the Imperators, they in turn are served by
Anchors, humans whom they love or hate, who serve them absolutely and can
literally manifest the Noble's power and will. The Noble can take over the
Anchor's body, and see through their eyes. For all intents and purposes,
they are the high priests of the god the Noble is. Additionally, the
section of earth that the Imperator sunk his soul into is called a
Chancel; it is a world within a world, utterly subject to the control of
the Nobilis and the Imperator.
In the game itself, the characters run their chancels, and protect their
estates (the concepts of reality they control and guard). In first
edition, there was a notable lack of suggestions in what to do with these
wonderful characters once you created them-- one of the major problems I
had with first edition is that it presented a world I desperately wanted
to be part of-- but too often I was stumped on the details of how to make
my visions real. The second edition is filled with pages and pages of
suggestions, enough to spark even my slow mind.
The game presents an earth where things aren't quite the same as the real
world. Magic works, even for humans. Corruption runs rampant. Miracles
happen. That's what players do, after all. Almost every action they take
in the game is a miracle, large or small. The diceless system details how
to build characters from four attributes and a special gift system that
can do anything from legend or imgaination.
Blurbs for Nobilis talk about stark horror and blazing beauty side by
side, and it sounds trite, but it really is true. The author makes it
true, with the extensive use of examples and flavor text. Through the
flavor text that fills the sidebars of the book, the setting of the game
reaches out and embraces you, pulling you into the world of extremes it
represents, where the most horrific events you can imagine can share a
page, or even a paragraph, with an evocative description of transcendant
beauty. More than anything, I come away from Nobilis feeling like the
author has done a breathtaking job of creating a world just alien enough
from my own that it might be true. It's easy for me to suspend disbelief;
the flavor text and examples incorporate both the foregn and the deeply
resonant to create a new sense of the real. New legends. New myths. New
worlds. And the game promises the players a share of that.
Does it deliver? That depends on the GM, and the players. Because it's a
diceless game where players have an enormous range of options in most
situations, conflict resolution can be complicated. There are pools of
points related to each attribute that limit what you can do with that
attribute, but the cost of an action (those miracles I mentioned) is
related to where your attribute falls on a scale of dramatic
effects. Somebody who has only a little control over their estate will
have to drain their point pool in order to make a signifigant example of
their estate appear in the world. Somebody who has enormous control over
their estate may not have to touch their point pool. Personal costs can be
easily memorized, but speaking as a GM, I know that the first few games,
at least, will be a pain in the ass as I juggle the capabilities of
players and NPCs, as well as try to figure out just what the NPCs do. Of
course, this is mostly an issue in combat situations, where seconds matter
and the pressure is on.
The wound system is all new, and innovative; it's hard to hurt gods,
especially in trivial ways. Nobilis approaches that backwards from the
typical manner: you can't get scratched by a cat until you've been worn
out by surviving a building falling on top of you. I haven't used it yet,
but the concept pleases me; it allows for drama in injury rather than
juggling complex systems to determine such things.
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Also on Compass.
But yesterday I also came up with titles for my novel, named/briefplotted a whole bunch of Carousel stories and did a bunch of Compass email and FLTD email!
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
All Compass related, sorry. Perhaps some more today. You should post your reward-decisions below, and then I'll record them in my spreadsheet of doom.
Wednesday, May 8, 2002
You control my money.
If I don't write, I don't get the money.
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novembersong's journal