My Nephilim Occult RPing Blog

In the past, I have noted that the Basic Roleplaying rules were not a good fit for the Nephilim game and setting. The French version abandoned it after the second edition in the 1990s and every edition released since has used its own bespoke system. The third edition used a roll under d20 task resolution with attributes measured by 5 adverbs and skills by ~3 guild ranks, the fourth edition used a convoluted Pythagorean percentile task resolution that measured attributes from 1 to 25 with skills as one-note or guild ranks, and the fifth edition used a percentile task resolution that measured attributes and skills from 1 to 10. It is all pretty complicated and difficult to convert between. While researching, I discovered that a fan in the French fandom created his own system that cherrypicked aspects of the various editions. This marries the various measurement systems on the following table: Main Generic Table Numerical value ...

So there's some rumors and leaks going around regarding a second edition of Chaosium's Nephilim , the US version. I prefer to wait for an actual book release to peruse. From what I've heard, it's a mix of much needed rules revisions and some sweeping changes to the setting. I'm not a fan of the setting changes. I typically dislike lore in tabletop games because it's invariably irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction, even if I otherwise like the premise of the game (e.g. I love the premise of Dark•Matter , but dear gosh that history chapter! ). Nephilim holds an odd place in my heart because it's the only game to make its dense lore personally relevant to the PCs by making them reincarnating immortals and including past lives as modular options at character creation. So why change the lore if the lore isn't the problem? It just feels arbitrary to me, and it's especially unwelcome considering how the past decade has been full of old IPs being reviv...

(This piece excerpted from a longer article that was originally published here: https://scifiwright.com/2015/01/sanctuary-by-bill-whittle/ ) As an exercise in perspective, let's briefly compare our civilization to another. Let's compare our supposedly soulless, banal, hum-drum society to the splendors of ancient Egypt. And let's tie both hands behind our backs while we do so. Let's not compare the Great Pyramid to one of our skyscrapers, or airports, or hospitals, or even our shopping malls. Let's take a moment to compare the Great Pyramid of Cheops with the most common and drab and ordinary structure on the block: The Great Pyramid vs. the 7-11. Assume that we could transplant a corner 7-11 to the Egyptian desert, with all of the support systems that make it what it is. It is a tiny speck compared to the gleaming white marble sides of the pyramid. It looks small and poorly made. From afar. Pharaoh comes by barge and litter to inspect the competition, laughing at...

In an older post , I suggested making Saurians the same race as the KaIm. However, after thinking some more, I thought a further refinement would be to make them the ancestors of the KaIm. Rather than being wiped out by the KaIm, the Saurians wiped each other out in a civil war between the Black Saurians and the White Saurians. The White Saurians won and brought the Black Moon crashing down, but it was a pyrrhic victory that resulted in their extinction as well. While new KaIm were born from the nexi, the Saurians themselves were extinct. What made the next generation so different from their predecessors? The Saurians existed in symbiosis, an elemental Onirim Pentacle and a corporal dinosaur body. The next generation of KaIm were born in spiritual form and used their innate mastery of the elemental fields to create bodies for themselves. The Ka from the deceased Saurians was recycled by the nexi to birth new KaIm, but they would never again be Saurians because their fleshy envelopes we...

A key distinction in my campaigns is that Nephilim are symbiotic hybrids of human and elemental, not elemental spirits possessing hapless human hosts, nor awakened humans with a connection to the magic fields. The human half provides a physical body and a soul (Sol, Solar-Ka), allowing the Nephilim to interact, travel and to have awareness, identity, and will. The elemental half provides the Ka-elements, allowing the Nephilim to exist in symbiosis with the magic fields and to practice the occult sciences. There is also a third portion, the stasis object, which anchors the soul and the Ka-elements so that the Nephilim can be immortal. Without a stasis object, the Nephilim's Solar-Ka and Ka-elements will dissolve into the magic fields upon death. With a stasis object, his Ka-elements are able to remain on the earthly plane as a spirit known as a daimonian or paredrus . Without Solar-Ka it is bestial and driven entirely by its passions, but as an insubstantial spirit it can do nothing...

As mentioned in the timeline in the  GM's Companion , there was a 10,000 BC Mediterranean civilization named Tarshish. (A full writeup by Ian Young is  archived here .) As was pointed out to me in a discussion, the name Tarshish here is anachronistic. In real life documents, Tarshish was a port that traded with the Israelites, not any kind of ancient civilization. So if the name doesn't make sense, then what could replace it? Atlantis? While Plato's 9000 year estimate does place it in the same general range, the name Atlantis is Greek and Greek wouldn't have existed at that time. I did some research, and ultimately there really aren't many suitable names that I could find. The best candidate I could find is "Kheheb", a name for a prehistoric Egyptian civilization in the roleplaying game Fireborn . It's a fictitious neologism, so I think it could fit okay. The language spoken by them would probably be completely speculative anyway, since this civiliza...