How do Nephilim balance their mundane and magical lives?

Over in the US version's fandom back in the day, a big deal was made over the Nephilim being body snatchers and how this made them unsympathetic. Furthermore, the role of the Simulacrum and the Nephilim's relationship to his Solar-Ka remained woefully undeveloped beyond "his family becomes concerned and stages an intervention that you have to escape." I agree to a large extent, which is why in my campaigns the Nephilim are hybrid entities akin to Star Trek's trill, the Avatar from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Leto II from God Emperor of Dune, etc. 

But one old recurring proposal I disagree with is the idea that Nephilim need to balance the mundane and magical sides of their life, or else suffer increased Shouit and other risks. The simple fact of the matter is that 1) their advancing metamorphoses make it increasingly difficult to blend in unless they're Hanged Men, and 2) dealing with mundane minutiae is boring when Chaosium tried to advertise play as a mix of The X-Files and Indiana Jones!

If your PC’s Simulacrum is a lawyer and the Metamorphosis is a Phoenix, then how do you expect to keep the transformations from interfering with his career? Why would you want to? 

This is true for all three magical races of the Immortals. The Ar-Kaïm suffer a similar problem with elemental manifestations. The Selenim don't age and thus cannot frequent the same crowds for too long without arousing suspicion.

While initially an Immortal might try to maintain their personal relationships, they will inevitably need to cut close ties for the most part if they hope to go on adventures and advance their occult development (read "The Shadow Out of Time" by H.P. Lovecraft for inspiration). While their friends and family won't think they're turning into a magical creature, after enough fraternization they will start glimpsing the metamorphosis manifestations (which are psychological and spiritual transformations to the PC's aura and bearing rather than physical in my campaigns, to match Liber Ka's subtlety theme) and misinterpreting it as something mundane like a viral disease, drug addiction or mental illness. So Immortals always need to keep mundane folks at arms length, unless they know they can absolutely trust the other person not to risk their secrecy. This is where cults come in handy.

Of course, if your group would like the option to roleplay "playing house," then don't let that stop you. I might find it boring, but that's just me! Since Ar-Kaïm can only reincarnate in the descendants of their first incarnation's bloodline, they need to maintain a social connection if they want to be immortal...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“Fixing” the setting

These posts assume that the reader is already familiar with Nephilim , so don't expect an explanation of the game here. In addition to the clunky rules, and probably more important, the Nephilim game had fluff that alienated players in the Anglosphere. The rulebook frontloaded potential players with millennia of lore that they had to keep track of. Perhaps the most criticized aspect was that the titular nephilim were presented as parasites who possessed unwilling human hosts to pursue their agendas. While players were seemingly okay with playing murderous psychopaths in other games of the 90s, apparently body-thieves just weren't kosher. The English mailing list had numerous debates over this during its heyday. Rather than rehash those here, I'll cut straight to the point: in my revision of the setting, the nephilim are fusions of a human being and a soulless mindless elemental spirit . The human soul (Sol, Solar-Ka) provides will, purpose, desire, etc. The elemental spirit...
Read more

Simplifying the rules

One of the problems with the Nephilim game was that its rules, a variant of the venerable  BRP , were overly complicated and probably not all that well suited to it. The French version eventually dropped BRP entirely starting in its third edition, and the current fifth edition uses a dramatically simplified rules system. This has inspired me to devise my own simplified rules system for the English adaptation. I'm not going to convert to Fate like certain others have tried . The task resolution system will still be BRP's roll under d100 with difficulty levels and variable results. But all the character traits will change. The standard attributes/characteristics are Air-Ka, Earth-Ka, Fire-Ka, Lunar-Ka, Solar-Ka, and Water-Ka. These represent the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the character. For nephilim characters, these also represent supernatural aspects. Rather than distinct skills, characters are described in freeform terms and given general competence ratings....
Read more

The spiritual pentacle and the elements

Image
In this post I explain the spiritual meaning of the Nephilim’s pentacle and the Ka-elements themselves. Although linked to specific game statistics, like Fire to Strength and Moon to Charisma, all of the elements have physical, mental and spiritual correspondences and manifestations.  It’s not one or the other . You don’t have to posit different cultures all have different elements to explain varying beliefs. Real occultism isn’t supposed to be accurate in the game world anyway, but the result of information leaks and cargo cults by muggles. Liam Routt gave a good explanation in  his old FAQ : (I’m putting it between horizontal rules because blogger has issues with formatting) The Spiritual Pentagram Traditionally, the pentagram represents our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical composition: Fire Doing—Fire is energy, the power to act. But it is pure action, undirected by thought or feeling. Air Thinking—Air is thinking, ideation, mental activity, but it can...
Read more