Nobilis 4th Edition: Rites of Place
Hi!
Welcome to today’s development diary for the fourth edition of Nobilis.
Today I’d like to talk a bit about how we’re trying to capture the feel and metaphysical dynamics of various locations in the newest edition of Nobilis.
Properties of the Prosaic World
A standard modern technique for capturing a place’s truths is to boil them down to a short, punchy list of traits. The third edition of Nobilis, A Field Guide to the Powers, specifically used Property Lists, which expressed those traits as a list of ~7 short sentences about the place, e.g.,
The Mill, by Rembrandt van Rijn
(a mill overlooking water)
The Properties of the Prosaic World:
its locations are relative
its particulars are measurable
its particulars are explainable
its particulars exert causal force
its events have causes
... these causes are impersonal
... these causes are amoral.
That’s the description of the ordinary world, the scientific world, the world we live in—the world you see if you aren’t looking at the mythic Earth instead. It’s the world that, according to Nobilis, the Earth created for itself after a bit of Heavenly smiting happened, to duck out on the whole idea that something like a smiting could be just.
—that might be important to remember, incidentally, if you’re someone who cares about the domain of reason, but for some other reason than “I’m still having nightmares about that darned K-T event.” The domain of reason that you live in when you’re conditioned into dullness isn’t the same as the one you find when you’re enthralled by scientism, which isn’t the same as the one you land in when you’re caught up in pure love for reason and science’s potential, which in turn isn’t the same as all the other non-K-T-event related domains of reason you might wind up in by rejecting abusive religious ideas, which aren’t the same as the domain of reason you find yourself in growing up a naive materialist. This prosaic reality is awfully broad, broad enough to evoke insights about the world we live in, but it’s still a solid and specific enough place that you might find yourself saying at some point in playing Nobilis “what’s going on here is, the prosaic world is not our own.”
That said, the list above is the description, the core description, of the ordinary world, the prosaic world, in Nobilis, one of a number of spiritual (or, unspiritual) realms depicted in the game;
These lists carry forward into Nobilis 4th edition, but their mechanism of invocation is now stronger.
The Rites of Place
"Niagara," by Frederic Edwin Church
So the principal idea behind the Rites of Place is that a character who’s made a deep study of a place, or simply learned a Rite from someone else, can invoke one of these Properties of that place. They can shine a metaphorical spotlight on that Property, strengthening its force IC and making it available both IC and OOC as a tool for manipulating their environment.
To do this, they spend either one of their “spotlights” for the chapter, an in-game resource, or 2 “MP,” another in-game resource. Often they’ll also recite the Property, OOC or even IC, but that’s optional, as long as they refer to it in some way.
When they invoke its Rite, the Property is dragged out from the continuum and becomes an explicit focus of attention for the GM and possibly the group. More specifically, it becomes what’s called a temporary Geas—a truth of the world sitting close enough to the foreground of the group’s attention that it can activate intermittently “on its own” to do miracles and enforce that truth. (There are miscellaneous rules for how to subvert, interrupt, or interpret this.)
Now, in truth, that’s 99% of the actual rules for the Rites of Place right there—
There’s some mechanical detail put into how you go about learning a Rite if you wouldn’t know it, and how the Rites work when a Geas wouldn’t be the right thing for them to do, and probably a few other niche things too, but pretty much everything else I have on the Rites of Place is commentary.
It’s “here’s what that particular Geas might do” or “here’s what people actually use that for.”
For instance,
The Rite of the Larch:
“These Causes are Amoral”
“Lyall Larch (Larix lyallii),” by Mary Vaux Walcott
… you can spotlight its events have causes; these causes are amoral to seal the world against intrinsically morally potent influences such as the power of Heaven—or, for that matter, Hell; or the influence of the Codes; or the weight that the presence of an Imperator has on mortal minds. It is the Rite of the Larch that protects against miracles of karma and judgment; the Rite of the Larch, that asserts events are morally neutral and true divinity is not found within the world.
The principal use of this Rite is to heal or guard the minds of mortals against influence—
To take someone who has seen divinity, or an Excrucian, and drag them back from the exaltation of that into a more dull prosaic world. To transform the presence of the numinous into a cognitive or perceptual condition and allow people to step back from the brink that it can take them to, notionally recovering [themselves].
A secondary use is to protect against judgment itself: against those rarer Imperial powers that literally smite “the wicked” or “the unjust;” against magic with a karmic twist to it; against ... well, anything of the sort.
The last use is arguably pernicious; the Rite of the Larch may be used to choke back even mundane moral judgment; to prevent the assignation of moral value to a thing; to throttle the right that even [mundane action trait] has to say, “that’s wrong” or “that’s meaningful” or “that response was just.” The effect is honestly somewhat horrifying, though, at least, it is limited to the scene (and at least notionally easier to apply to “all opinions of a certain event” than, e.g., “all opinions by a certain person” or “all opinions whatsoever.”) Mortals have very limited options to avoid the effect; narrative providence may, at best, allow them to take damage (pg. XX) to suppress the Geas, at twice the normal cost.
It is the general opinion of such scholars as make studies of the matter that the Rite of the Larch and its underlying Property are the central features of prosaic reality; it was with this Rite that prosaic reality itself discarded the idea that the K-T event that smote the world was just.
The Oath of Blood
Quick sketch of a planet hanging before the World Ash, with part of a letter showing carved into said Ash. An illegibly tiny city is barely visible, deep inside the letter's groove.
Over the course of writing the game I wound up with a handful of effects I wanted people to be able to invoke one way or another—usually effects that were already called “Rites” historically—that fit poorly into the existing Rites of Place and traits.
For that reason, Nobilis 4th includs the “oath of blood,” covering these edge cases:
Writ into the Ash, and holding within it a set of Rites spanning all Creation.
The book does not at present say if the writing itself has any power, or who wrote it, though it does offer a handful of thoughts and suggestions on the matter. The writing is not established as the oath of a given entity, or as binding on any given entity. It is simply the case that, like the Rites of the prosaic world in the prosaic world, like the Rites of Heaven in Heaven, like the Rites of the Mythic World, in the Mythic world; like doubtless, in many Chancels, the player-written Chancel Rites …
These are “truths” one can invoke, throughout the Ash:
a nettle’s sting can steal all Heaven’s power,
divinity is a thing one can devour,
even the foremost may still be broken—
flowers hide the scars of miracles upon the world.
we have no power we can use to claim peace or ease, but
we may earn a place of safety with a crime … and
blood it is that binds to the divine.
For the Nobilis, these principles aren’t really a part of their story. This oath isn’t part of their story. It shouldn’t be, anyway.
This stuff didn’t fit in their trait set, after all, or the affordances they had for working with it.
It’s not part of their story. … but they have to deal with it anyway, because, alas, the Oath of Blood is part of the Imperial story. Part of Cneph’s legacy. Part of the whole world’s story.
… and having the legacy of someone else’s mistakes just kind of tacked onto your life and your soul … that is a part of how their stories go.