Nobilis RPG: The Essentials Vol 1: Field Guide to The Powers

Nobilis: the Essentials (Volume 1: Field Guide to the Powers) will serve as your guide to the Nobilis and other magical creatures that live among and beside us, as well as including a complete and full-featured role-playing game" that allows you and your friends to take on the role of Nobilis. Each of your characters — a "Noble" or "Power," one of the Nobilis — will command and embody a sacred Estate, a fundamental principle of the world such as Fire, Storms, Hope, Dreams, Cars, Cities, Pain, or Love.

HIDDEN TRUTHS

Dharma Worms

These transparent green inchworm-spirits assign people their dharma — the way they should be in life, the path that is harmonious with them, the "destiny" that is given them.

They crawl over you sometime in your youth to provide the initial dharmic determination and return occasionally throughout your childhood to touch the matter up.

Inchworms don't really care whether they're assigning people power, potentialities, attractions, or inevitable outcomes, so it's not always clear what exactly a person's dharma is; what is clear is that it somehow defines what works for a person and works a kind of goingness of direction into the fabric of their self. When an Imperator makes you a Power, your old dharma becomes obsolete. You can attract dharma-worms with a mixture of honey and crushed flowers left out on a porcelain plate, but unless you've lost your dharma and failed to replace it with anything else all they can really do is crawl on you, polish any bits of your dharma that may have faded, and measure roughly how many dharma-inches you have remaining.

MYTHIC REALITY

This is the reality behind the dream that is our world. In an endless emptiness there is a single cup of fire. The flames of it are blue.

There is no scale to it.

There can be no scale to it. There are no referents. The texture of the void is impermeable to the idea of measurement. The stars are unreachable and incomparable above.

It is larger than the universe and it is smaller than a pebble in your shoe.

And in that cup, a tree. And from its branches — dangling like fruit — are worlds.

A GAME OF POWERS

The Nobilis RPG uses a diceless system built around resource allocation and semantics.

You'll have access to a collection of loosely-specified abilities that range in power from the mundane to the world-shattering. Most of these abilities are defined in reference to your Estate — e.g., Fire, Storms, Transformation, Consensus, Cats, Fleece, or whatever else it is of which you are a god; the better you are at forming and expressing ideas about that Estate, the more potent your abilities become.

You'll also use a limited supply of "Miracle Points" to push past your ordinary limits and perform atypically incredible feats.

The new Nobilis includes: