Nobilis

So I'm (well, me and a friend so far) working on a Nobilis hack. You'd pretty much have to have read one of the Nobilis books to get this, so I won't bother explaining the setting much.

It's not the default Nobilis world, neither edition (okay, I haven't read 1st edition so I wouldn't know about that). There are no imperators, and the nobles are just people who somehow got an estate stuck inside them and have to cope. Maybe the prevoious Power of Fire came and appointed them successor, maybe their mom was the previous power, maybe they just found a soul-shard at a crimescene and later found out the victim was a power...

Power scale is significantly lower than in standard Nobilis. Everyone can still spend their reserves to surpass mortals, but not farther than maybe 3-harm fists and 2-harm just from being badass. They can still be killed, even by mortals, if they're very many, very well-equipped or have received help from a noble.

I intend to write more about the world and how it differs from standard Nobilis later, that'll probably go in the HG rules document.

Links to our work so far:
- HG rules and general rules
- Basic and peripheral moves
- Playbooks

This is great. I've never read or played Nobilis, but life really seeps into the world through this hack. It leaves me wanting to know more.

Both the books I've read - 2nd and 3rd edition Nobilis, but especially 2nd - are great reads even if you never intend to play the game. My intention is for this hack to be aimed at people who have already read either of them, so I probbly won't write a full description of the setting for those who haven't, but I might. So far it's all "this is how it's different from standard Nobilis".

It looks like you've made a few significant changes to the basic moves and playbooks - it's pretty cool in general, but I really liked how excel at the mundane was vitally different from acting under fire/defying danger. With that move, it read more like a game about gods than a game about adventurers.

Bump for more activity:

Playtesting has started! We did a first session, with much world-building and little actual play, yesterday! I just wrote it up in swedish and don't have all day so I won't write a report now, but here it isin swedish.

Here are the playbooks.

Simply awesome. I applaud to you

This is looking really good. I'm curious: what do the players *do* during a session? Do you have something that's the equivalent of Fronts?

Yeah, we're working on a framework for Scenes, or Stages, I can't really decide. Arenas, kinda. The HG works out something that more than one PC is interested and invested in, like "the Chancel of Old Sa'adi" or "the Nobles' involvement in the American government" or "the war with the excrucians". Then she writes up agents, which is just another term for threats so far. They have impulses, custom moves, and the ordinary threat moves for their type.

We've tested once, and didn't get very far after character creation, but so far the Warden's front figure, the face of her rule towards her chancel's inhibitants, has gone to the Alchemist to ask for a real human body. The intrigue for next session seems to be set up for the alchemist wanting to finsih this, the Warden mistakenly blaming the Small ones in the tunnels for abducting the queen, and the Tempest somehow using her spirits' information about the queen for an advantage over the Warden. This would b the Stage "the Chancel of Old Sa'adi", with agents "the queen", "the Small ones in the tunnels", "the slaver of the market", "the City of Black Rock" (some kind of landscape) and maybe something else.

Here's an outline of the Scenes playbook.

Yeah, we're working on a framework for Scenes, or Stages, I can't really decide. Arenas, kinda. The HG works out something that more than one PC is interested and invested in, like "the Chancel of Old Sa'adi" or "the Nobles' involvement in the American government" or "the war with the excrucians". Then she writes up agents, which is just another term for threats so far. They have impulses, custom moves, and the ordinary threat moves for their type.

We've tested once, and didn't get very far after character creation, but so far the Warden's front figure, the face of her rule towards her chancel's inhibitants, has gone to the Alchemist to ask for a real human body. The intrigue for next session seems to be set up for the alchemist wanting to finsih this, the Warden mistakenly blaming the Small ones in the tunnels for abducting the queen, and the Tempest somehow using her spirits' information about the queen for an advantage over the Warden. This would b the Stage "the Chancel of Old Sa'adi", with agents "the queen", "the Small ones in the tunnels", "the slaver of the market", "the City of Black Rock" (some kind of landscape) and maybe something else.

Here's an outline of the Scenes playbook.

Oh hoh hoh! You've been at work here, I love it. :)

Two things:

1) I can't open the playbook document.

2) With Dream/Fear, is Impulse really needed?

I changed it from "anyone with the link can view" to "anyone can view", but that's weird. Tell me if it works.

On impulses: I dunno. To me, impulses are like a one-step countdown. If you can't be bothered to make a proper countdown for a threat, you can treat it like a countdown that has "victimize the vulnerable" on every tick. Dreams and ambitions, however, are much more abstract, kind of like the dark future. You can't make a "dark future" for a Scene, because dark for whom? Not everyone's working towards the same goal, or against the same adversaries, and that's pretty much the point of using scenes instead of fronts. So we can't have a catch-all dark future but rather state everyone's hopes, dreams and fears broadly.

I'm not sure about impulses. How mandatory is it to create a countdown for every threat in AW? We could say that each agent should have a hope, dream, fear or impulse, or more than one of those, but at least one. Like, make it not mandatory. I don't know if that works.

I'll think I'll try using both. Then if I notice that the impulse just keeps reiterating the dreams and fears, we'll scrap it. But if it does generally say something else, then it can stay.

It works now!

I could really go out on a rant on what the words dreams, fears and impulses could mean, but I'll save it for IRL.

We played this today! We have a Spirit, a Mimic, a Seeker and a True King (of Cats), all living in London. It feels promising.

We did play a couple of sessions, it was fun, things happened. Right now I don't care enough to write a report, and besides it was months ago. I wanted to link to all the stuff when I saw the Big List of Apocalypse World Hacks, so I checked where the links in this thread pointed to, and realised they were off. So I made a link crossroads for anyone who wants to check out what's been written so far – but be warned, haven't worked on this for a few months and are unlikely to return to it very soon.

this is a link