Ka'im and Nephilim

Sorry I haven't posted to the blog in a while. Real life issues, the Nephilim fandom in the Anglosphere dwindling to nothing... Anyway, I wanted to use this post to explain further an idea I had for revising the setting.

In a previous post I mentioned sidestepping the controversial possession angle by changing the Nephilim into multipart fusional entities: mindless elementals that are given sapience by their human hosts and which preserve the egos of past hosts, an idea I got from Andrew Logan Montgomery's blog on the subject.

Now, something you may notice is that this doesn't quite jive with the original backstory about the Ka'im. (It's spelled KaIm by Chaosium or Kaïm in the original French, but for simplicity I'm using the spelling "ka'im".) I decided to tweak the backstory further by borrowing an idea from Sisensee's campaign blog: the Ka'im and Nephilim are different "species," as it were. 

The Ka'im are the original five-part immortals, born from the elemental fields with their own personalities and ability to form and reform bodies for themselves. After the fall of the Black Star, they became trapped in whatever bodies they had at the time and developed stasis as a way to prevent their eventual disintegration. They eventually went extinct by the time of Christ's birth. In their natural state the Ka'im looked humanoid with elemental features, inspiring the legends of fairies and rustic gods.

The Nephilim... or rather, their elemental spirits, are the next generation of immortals, born after the fall of the Black Star. They had no personalities or thoughts of their own and couldn't remain stable... unless they merged with a human being. In their natural state, these spirits look and behave little different from other elemental creatures aside from their fivefold nature and an instinctive urge to bond with sources of Solar-Ka.

This distinction isn't hard and fast. If a player really wants to, then they can have a surviving Ka'im as their first past life. This also leaves some room for ambiguity. If the GM desires, then they can keep the backstory about the Saurians, Ka'im, Atlantis, etc a secret for the players to discover during the course of their adventures rather than frontloading it at the start of the campaign. This might make it easier to get new players onboard with the game.

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