My Nephilim Occult RPing Blog

In a  prior post , I referenced the etymology of Archemy as deriving from archimastry . According to  another source ,  Archemy  comes  from  archè  (" principle") and  mia  (" one"). [Although I cannot find any corroborating sources for this latter part's etymology. Perhaps it derives from Italian mia  ("mine") or Latin monas  ("one; unity")?] Therefore meaning “the principle of unity”. Thus, Arkhémia is “the land of the principle of unity”, an apt name. In French fanzine Vision-Ka #2–3, a fan introduced an original occult science of Archemy designed specifically and solely for Ar-Kaïm. It displays noted similarities to Alchemy and is suggested as a path to Qiyas. The name is a play on Alchemy (which it resembles in some respects), Ar-Kaïm (who practice it) and archetypes (which informs how spells work). It involves invoking archetypes in order to get symbolically appropriate benefits, with the practice relying on physical cataly...

In the French version, the prima materia  ("primary matter, first matter") is a foundational principle of alchemy, though the details differ between editions. The name is taken from real alchemical texts, although the French writers interpret it quite liberally. Furthermore, the word materia in alchemical contexts doesn't simply refer to matter as we understand it, but to the created world (see A dictionary of western alchemy  by Jordan Stratford). The prima materia is the residual Ka present in all material objects, leftover from the original formation of the Earth and the movements of the magic fields. It is the origin of matter. Alchemy operates by acting on this prima materia , activating it and causing the desired magical effect. The alchemical substance generates its own miniature magic field, which resonates with the ambient magic fields of the Earth to produce the spell (so alchemy spells cannot be cast if the appropriate magic field isn't present). In editi...

In the US Nephilim rules, only one way of producing gold via alchemy was published. In Major Arcana , the Emperor Initiate Formula “Lead to Gold” allows the alchemist to transmute lead into gold on a cubic foot basis once per week. The maximum cubic feet is equal to the athanor’s Earth-Ka. For reference, a cubic foot of gold weighs 546.01 kg. As of this writing, 1 kg of gold is worth ~US$70,000. This would allow the Emperor Initiate to accumulate over US$2 billion per year per Earth-Ka point and easily break the game! (546 kg × $70,000 × 52 weeks = $1,987,440,000) In the unpublished alchemy draft, the Formula “Ultimate Purification of Gold” allowed the alchemist to produce 1 kg of gold per month. This would allow the alchemist to accumulate ~US$840,000 yearly. In Enlightened Magic , this was reduced to a much more reasonable 1 oz. gold per week. As of this writing, 1 oz. gold costs ~US$2000. So the alchemist could maintain a salary of ~US$104,000. Pretty good, but not game breaking...

As I did more and better quality research, I discovered that my old post on alchemy in the French version was full of numerous errors and inaccuracies. In this post, I will try my best to rectify that and provide a more accurate picture of alchemy in the French version. In all editions of the game, alchemists had to specialize. They had several different paths available to them. Based on their choice, the alchemist constructed a tool that produced a substance. The alchemist cast formulas using that substance, applying it to the target, throwing it into the air, and so on. In all editions except third, each Circle of Alchemy was rated as a single Technique. Second edition (1996–2000) The second edition was a direct refinement of first edition (1992–6), so I do not list the first edition separately.  In this edition, there were three Constructs: the Athanor, Crucible and Alembic. Each produced a Substance governed by a Process mastered by a Figure of the Glorious Alloyage. This sche...

While researching the French books I came across some unfamiliar words in the jargon for Alchemy:  Arkhémia and Spagyrie . The former refers to new world being created by a group of five master alchemists, while the latter refers to alchemical artifacts. I did some research and these words derived from real alchemy practices: the words in the English lexicon are seemingly " archemy " and " spagyrics " (sometimes "spagery" or "spagyry"). Various "modern alchemy" blogs define this in very different ways, even some academic papers too, but I found the historical uses. According to  A Dictionary of Western Alchemy by Jordan Stratford, on p10: archemy, archimastry A neologism that implies superior practice of the art of alchemy. It seems to be used by some alchemists to differentiate their activities from those of their rivals (Giovanni Agostino Pantheo refers to the rival practice as "illicit and duplicitous alchemy" as opposed ...

The  Emerald Tablet  is actual text in real world occultism. There was reputed to be an original Emerald Tablet from which may extracts were copied. But it has special significance in the Nephilim's secret history. As explained on Major Arcana p13, the priests of Thoth preserved imperfect copies of Akhenaton's 22 Golden Tablets in the form of 22 Emerald Tablets. The knowledge contained was transcribed on papyrus and collected as the Book of Thoth , of which many copies were made. The original tablets and most of the transcriptions were later lost or destroyed.  One tablet called the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus was found beneath the Sphinx by Alexander the Great and became the basis of the Corpus Hermeticum , but later vanished with his corpse in 323 BC. Many Nephilim who know of it believe it was the Emerald Tablet of The Magician. According to the history chapter of the unpublished draft for  Slaying the Dragon  (the planned alchemy supplement before...

In  a prior post  I mentioned relict athanors from third edition. I wanted to give an update on that, as since I wrote that I translated  The Gamemaster's Book  that provided more details. Basically, the athanor develops sapience as the alchemist progresses through the circles. It remains benign, and a master alchemist can transfer the athanor's Ka into a golem to create a familiar, or even into a living human body! If the alchemist disobeys certain limits, the spirit may become malignant and attempt to possess the alchemist's simulacrum. It cannot actually kill the alchemist, as this would kill it too, but it can become quite troublesome.  I read a French fanbook on alchemy collating and expanding the various canonical alchemy traditions in an unofficial revision/fork of third edition. (For reference, the fanbook was written by a Hubert "Ouroboros" Terrieux. It is divided into three files:  alchemy rules ,  western formulae ,  spagyrie artifacts ...

I watched the 2000 Hallmark version of The Argonauts recently and it inspired me to think about the Golden Fleece. In the US version In the US version, the nature of the Golden Fleece was never explored due to the line being cancelled. What was mentioned (see Gamemaster's Companion ) is that a mortal Jason and the Nephilim Hercules traveled to the lost Atlantean colony Colchis—nevermind that at this point in the timeline that Atlantis has been extinct for 100,000 years!—where they entered the so-called Tomb of Prometheus and acquired the Golden Fleece. Jason was unable to decipher it before he was killed by an unknown assailant and the Fleece was lost. Its true nature remains unknown... until the PCs happen to rediscover it, anyway. The Knights of the Golden Fleece (see Secret Societies ) are trying to recover it by investing in scientific research and development—although I have no idea how this helps them find the Fleece. In the French version The Quest for the Golden Fleece was...

In Liber Ka , Third Circle Sorcery Spells have a “Power Threshold” ranging from 10 to 90. This is the minimum value that the Sorcerer’s corresponding (and unadjusted) Ka-element and High Magic Technique must meet in order to attempt casting the Spell. In Enlightened Magic , this was tweaked slightly so that it applied to the Sorcerer’s ratings after accounting for circumstantial modifiers. Thus, Sorcerers could wait for opportune times, places, ritual paraphernalia and other conditions to cast High Magic Spells that were otherwise out of reach. Similarly, Slaying the Dragon (unpublished) and Enlightened Magic applied a Technique Threshold to Alchemy procedures that the Alchemist had to meet or exceed before he could even attempt the procedure. This didn’t have a Ka-element threshold, fortunately. Nephilim: Revelation , the third edition of the French version whose rules I’m adapting, uses a different task resolution system. While the Technique Threshold for Alchemy is trivial to conv...

In the French third edition  Players' Book , two summoning spells allow Nephilim to flirt with necromantic effects.  The Veiled Sentinels of the Onyx Causeway  will resurrect any corpse, while  The Bearers of the Flame of Life  will repair and reanimate any corpse as a lifelike zombie with limited memory of its former life. Both spells inflict points of Black Moon contamination on the caster (risking sundering the Pentacle and turning the Nephilim into Selenim), discouraging Nephilim from casting them. The US version invented two spells dealing with death and resurrection. These were created independently of the French rules for Necromancy and thus aren't strictly compatible. The alchemy procedure  Universal Solvent  from  Slaying the Dragon  (unpublished, but reprinted in  Enlightened Magic ) allows the alchemist to contact the spirit of any corpse no matter its age. If cast on a Simulacrum, then it only contacts the Simulacrum unless t...

A syntactic magic system is one in which casters can create spells on the fly using a system of "nouns" and "verbs" (or "realms", as GURPS parlance puts it). Ars Magica is the classic example.  In the French version, both alchemy and sorcery would use some variation of the concept in different editions.  Starting in the 1e Alchimie supplement and continuing thereafter, alchemy used verbs in the forms of processes : Destruction (Powder), Transformation (Liquor), Mastery (Metal), Revelation (Vapor) and Creation (Amber). The elements provided the noun. However, the actual lists of formulae didn't respect these themes at all Sorcery, renamed Magie (Magic) in French, gained verbs starting in the third edition. Again, the elements provided the noun, with a table of analogs for each element being given at the back of the book. In third edition, the first circle had the verbs of Perceive, Modify and Sense, the second Commune, Displace, and Transform, and the...

The French and US versions of alchemy developed in very different directions. The French version was further developed across multiple editions and included brief rules for different cultural variants used by Chinese, Aztec and Amerindian Immortals. The US version reprinted only the first edition French rules and didn't benefit from any of the subsequent French revisions, so Chaosium ordered a rewrite of the alchemy rules to be printed in the canceled Slaying the Dragon supplement (although the author shared his draft on the mailing list). However, these rules were later adapted to generic BRP and reprinted in Enlightened Magic . If you're a fan of the US version then you should already be familiar with those. I found a fan-made French netbook that described the Old World traditions of Alchemy side-by-side and revised them for third edition (here: alchemy rules , western formulae , spagyrie artifacts ). I found this a very useful overview of the French cosmology and it got me ...

The US version of Nephilim was forked from the first edition rulebook of the French, so it didn't incorporate any of the many revisions the French supplements added that were available around the time. One of these was the rules for alchemical artifacts or spagyrics. The US rulebook includes a few alchemy formulae for various golems, but the French version revised and expanded on this into an entire class of alchemical artifacts known as spagyrics. When the third edition was released in 2001, it couldn't include spagyric rules due to space constraints and was canceled before an official supplement could be released. However, a fansite included an unofficial conversion of the spagyric rules to third edition (part of a homebrew revision of  alchemy rules and alchemy formulae ). The third edition alchemy rules made an unpopular change by linking each substance to a specific element, although Vision-Ka #1  included a short house rule to rectify this, Vision-Ka #9 included det...

While transcribing and translating the alchemy rules from Nephilim: Revelation 's The Players' Book , which condenses a decade of mechanics and fluff innovations, I came across a description of the Athanor as sharing a bond with its creator. By building the lab and investing it with Ka from his Stasis item, the alchemist creates an alchemical being composed of his Pentacle, his Stasis item, and his lab. To destroy any part of the lab is to amputate this being. When a tool is destroyed, all substances produced by it instantly lose effectiveness and the alchemist is shocked into a depression for days. Certain laboratories are even said to develop sentience, seek to possess their creator, and defend themselves with alchemy! In other words, alchemical relics (see  Gamemaster's Companion  p33 for details). The meditations Miracle of Creation (see the unpublished alchemy rules) and Ultimate Purification of Gold (see Enlightened Magic p95-6) may be used to imbue objects with so...

In the unpublished revised Alchemy rules, the three circles were divided into specific purviews: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual, respectively. Black Stone creates alchemical substances that physically alter the target. White Stone creates works of art that inspire the desired feeling in witnesses. Philosopher's Stone creates meditations that produce the desired effect in souls by sight or touch.  While transcribing and translating the French third edition, however, I was inspired to think of a gap in these rules: what about psychotropic substances? Rather than producing a lapel that makes viewers perceive the wearer as more charismatic, what about giving someone a potion that makes them more positively inclined? As of the RAW, there's no way to do this because White Stone doesn't craft consumables. But could it work as a combination spell using both Black Stone and White Stone? I wonder... The Black Stone version of Coagulation of Understanding allows the alch...

The rules for enlightened alchemy in the Enlightened Magic supplement mention that Third Circle meditations are rolled under a Meditation specialty. However, there is no Meditation skill in the Basic Roleplaying rulebook! Some old supplements and variants like Mythras list a Meditation skill, which seems to be essentially useless and has no specialties. It’s a strange oversight in what are otherwise pretty coherent rules. Snead’s draft for the Nephilim rules doesn’t mention a Meditation skill at all. The alchemist just rolls Philosopher’s Stone to design the meditation and Ka to cast it. Somewhere in the adaptation process the writer referenced a Meditation skill that didn’t exist in the BRP rulebook or else forgot to include it in the supplement. If you don’t have a supplement explaining a Meditation skill (and none of the publications I’ve found list specialties either), then I’d let PCs substitute another appropriate skill like Art/Craft (these were combined in Call of Cthulhu ...

Over the course of my archiving old dead fansites, I found  a grimoire bookshelf  that mentioned a few original ideas in passing. One of these was “blood stone alchemy.” As the page said: Blood Stone is a path of Alchemy involving sacrificial blood and its elemental bases; it is equivocal on levels to Black Stone. Few cultures ever possessed this knowledge, but amoung those that did, were the ancient Celts, Vikings, and, more notably to history, the Aztecs. There are other Circles imagined—involving consuming blood and flesh, the semi-mythic cannibalistic peoples in Africa, Asia, and Pacifica—but no known references exist. Perhaps fortunately… Not much to go by, but it sounds pretty easy to adapt under the enlightened alchemy rules as a flavor of laboratory and athanor for Black Stone using something like Craft (Sanguimancy). I imagine the Xibalbans probably practiced this form of alchemy, but without the Silk Road they probably weren’t able to advance into the higher circles ...

In the French version , athanors were revised over the editions.  First Edition In the first edition, the Athanor was an egg-shaped oven that produced alchemical Powders for all five elements.  US version This was retained by the US version. Although a revised system was planned and drafted, the line was canceled before it could be released. These rules were later genericized and incorporated into the BRP supplement  Enlightened Magic . In those rules, the Circles were reorganized like so: Black Stone involved manipulation of physical substances via the laboratory, athanor and alchemical materials. It affected the physical. White Stone involved the creation of works of art that induced a specific effect in the minds of the audience. It affected the mental. Philosopher's Stone involved meditations that would affect the very souls of the alchemist's targets. It affected the spiritual. In other words, much of the first and second circles of the French were consigned to...

To complement my post on enlightened sorcery comparisons, I present this companion post on enlightened alchemy. Some history: Before the Nephilim line was cancelled in 1998 there were plans to revise the alchemy rules in a supplement titled Slaying the Dragon similar to how Liber Ka revised the sorcery rules. A draft was written before the cancellation and two chapters containing playable rules written by John Snead were shared on the mailing list (BRP Central hosts a copy ). This material was later adapted to the enlightened alchemy rules in the 2014 BRP supplement Enlightened Magic . The rules between the two are nearly identical, aside from the enlightened version being modified for use in general BRP and not the Nephilim rules. Overview of changes These differences are small, but they exist. Notable examples include: Number of elements:  In EM the element of Moon was removed and its various procedures were folded into the other elements as the writer deemed appropriate. Some ...

The Nephilim magic system underwent several revisions, with the most recent version of the rules presented genericized in Enlightened Magic  (so check that out for the full details). What follows is my attempt to unify, codify, and simplify the magic system. Nephilim practice three types of magic or "occult sciences." The nephilim don't see what they do as magic, but as the applied knowledge of manipulating the universe. These occult sciences are Sorcery, Summoning, and Alchemy, in order of their development. The occult sciences are each divided into three circles, and advancing to the next circle requires mastering the previous circle. Sorcery The rules for sorcery were extensively revised in Liber Ka and a genericized version of this revision was published in Enlightened Magic . Most of the differences are minor (e.g. name changes, some spells absent, some spells changed element), but there is one big change: the EM rules don't have a lunar element, so lunar spells...