Nobilis: Seven Families

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on June 12, 2006 at 04:59 PM

A friend of mine (on the wrong side of the continent, dammit!) has started up a Nobilis game, so I've gotten nostalgic for it, and started thinking of Nobilis games I want to run. Here's one:

• It's called Seven Families, because there are seven Noble families on Earth: one for each continent. So Africa, North and South America, Antartica, Asia, Australia, and Europe each have a single Noble Familia. These people are the secret rulers of the world. As in: when a President gets elected, he gets to meet the Family, and his role as a pawn is explained to him by one of the player characters. It would be nice to do globetrotting, particularly to parts of the world where our games don't normally go. Bonus points if we hit a cynical/depressing anti-particularist note where differences in race or culture are as nothing before the Nobles' commonality as the ultimate ruling class.

• All the usual hidden-fantasy critters, like vampires and demons and stuff, all exist, and they stay in the shadows because the Families have decided they prefer it that way. This could be a fun way of inverting the usual setup, where the PCs are the monsters struggling to stay in the shadows: here, the PCs are the ones MAKING the monsters stay quiet.

• In this kind of game, I'd like the human world to play a bigger role than it normally does. Actually controlling nations should be valuable, and besides it's fun when the petty vanities and tiffs among the Nobility lead to nations burning in the real world, and when the costs of that kind  of monstrous egotism become plain.

Some rules hacks that would be good ideas....

1. Miracle point pools should be unified into a single pool. This lets players be more flexible and toss of little miracles with fewer worries.
2. Bonds should provide miracle points when they come into play, to give the players an incentive to risk the things they love by bringing them into the fray.
3. The point pools should refresh every conflict, rather than being persistent. This will simplify GMing, because you don't have to worry that the asymmetry inherent in having NPCs who are rarely in scenes and PCs who are in every scene will mess up the level playing field between the PCs and NPCs.
4. Speaking of conflicts, some kind of stakes setting conflict resolution would be nice, especially if we can integrate important bits happening as part of conflict resolution. More DitV, less 9W/HQ.