My Nephilim Occult RPing Blog

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...

This idea was inspired by a conversation on discord. I was chatting with someone who criticized the backstory about how the Saurians awakened the Kaïm by creating the Black Moon. His argument was that it took agency and focus away from the title characters of the game. So that was his justification for removing the Saurians entirely. I disagreed, so I quickly thought of a way to reconcile our opposing viewpoints. What if the Saurians were actually a type of Nephilim? A type of Onirim dragon? This would allow them to stay, while putting the focus back on the Nephilim. So my idea is that Saurians were an early evolution of Kaïm, specifically the old race of dragons: lunar dragons. They had a pentacle of five Ka-elements, but Moon-Ka was hypertrophied and eclipsed the other branches, a ka-imbalance typical of dragons. This meant it was easy to confuse them as beings of purely Moon-Ka, even while they manipulated all the magic fields to create their civilization. The Saurians were the firs...

The word paredrus is Latin and refer to the power of a familiar spirit in magic or wizardry. I first learned the word on Montgomery's blog and, as I noted in a prior post, adopted it to refer to the elemental half of my setting's vision of Nephilim as hybrid beings. A Nephilim is created when a Paredrus merges with a mortal and creates a microcosm of the Solar system: on its own the Paredrus has no awareness, identity or will, which is provided by the mortal's Solar-Ka. The Paredrus is what allows a Nephilim to work magic and to access past lives' experiences.  So how does that fit with the backstory involving the KaIm? Well, I'm still using the secret history as recounted in the Gamemaster's Companion . The difference is the introduction of the Paredri and their role in the creation of Nephilim. After the fall of the Orichalka meteor, many KaIm were destroyed outright and most of the survivors were locked into permanent physical bodies. By the birth of Christ, ...

While transcribing and translating the French third edition, I came across mention that Atlantis left a horrific scar on the human psyche. Within the Anti-Lands (lower planes of nightmares) is a "chthonic Atlantis," depicting a horrific tableau where countless innocent human beings are tortured and killed by nightmarish creatures resembling Nephilim with elemental metamorphoses (akin to the elementalism Khaiba transformation, basically animated material of that element).  Although the French version doesn't really dwell on it, the Nephilim are actually fairly monstrous even long after Orichalka. Hence why the US version's fandom (even the writers themselves!) didn't like the body snatcher angle. I also found some unsubstantiated mention that one of the freelancers had created house rules where he equated the Kaïm with the Great Old Ones, but I have been unable to confirm that actually happened. Now I cannot get the idea out of my head: were the Kaïm the Old One...

In this post I recap the generations and origins of the immortals from the French version, followed by my ideas for adapting those ideas to the French version along with some house rules of my own. In the French version In the French version, the Nephilim were described as coming in three “generations”: the first was the basaltic Nephilim, the second was the symbolic Nephilim, and the third was the astrological Nephilim aka Ar-Kaïm. Likewise, the Selenim were described as coming in three “origins”: the ethereal Selenim, the incarnate Selenim, and the natural Selenim. After the destruction of the Black Moon, but before the Fall of Atlantis, the Kaïm gave rise to the first two generations. The Kaïm first lived as bodiless spirits who inhabited natural features that molded their Basaltic Metamorphoses after said features (see my post on “numinous cycles”). The Basalic Kaïm were organized by the state of their elemental manifestation: solid, liquid or ethereal. Eventually most Kaïm assumed...

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 fi...