My Nephilim Occult RPing Blog

So I heard directly from a Chaosium rep that the recent rumors of a second edition are false. An individual not associated with Chaosium was making his own game rules as a spec script he pitched to the rep. However, the spec game was declined because it did not fit with where Chaosium wanted to take the game creatively.  Addendum 8/17/2026: The thread seems to have vanished from the forums. No idea why.

According to a moderator on the official Chaosium forums, they are not working on a new edition in any capacity. Whoever is claiming to be working on a new edition is not supported by Chaosium. I don't know what to believe at this point. I'm gonna default to believing the official statement, but the whole situation sound so fishy to me.

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...

Chaosium's Nephilim setting is heavily altered from the French version. It would be very hard to recap the French setting and compare the two, so I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to explain my homebrew. I've decided to make a number of changes to Chaosium's setting for my homebrew setting. The major changes are: The paredrus The nature of the Nephilim has been changed from body-snatching parasites to higher selves created by the union of a human being and an elemental paredrus . All human souls, as well as all  paredri , were originally part of the House of Guf. Awakening as a Nephilim reminds them of this: it is a revelatory and transcendent experience. By itself, the paredrus is a mostly instinctive elemental beast driven by its passions. It is composed of a pentacle of the five elements, contrasting it against other elemental beasts that have only one or two. Likewise, the qualities of awareness, identity and will come from the human soul: Sol, or Solar-K...

Inspired by this old article  by amateur linguist Glen Gordon (which may be deleted come this December due to Google's new inactive account policy), I thought I'd do my own. The Nephilim game uses "Ka" as the term for magical energy. This is derived directly from Ancient Egyptian ka and "kha" from The Radix Tetrad  (from whence also comes the game's use of "voor" ). But what did it mean to the Ancient Egyptians? We'll never know exactly from the records we have, but Glen Gordon's article posits that our modern interpretation is wrong and the three Egyptian souls ( ka , ba and akh ) are better thought of as layers or modes. (Gordon provides speculative pronunciation of the Egyptian words, but Wiktionary disagrees. His speculative pronunciation is  *kuˀ , *baˀ and *ˀaḫ , whereas Wiktionary provides *kuʀ , *biʀ and *ʀiːχuw .) In Gordon's proposed scheme, the ka is the outermost layer, the ba is the middle layer, and the akh is the...

When Chaosium adapted Nephilim from the French version to the US version, they renamed Kabbalah to Summoning and introduced the Kabbalistic Lore Skill that covers understanding Ka-energies in general. Why do this? IIRC, it was because they felt it was inappropriate to reduce an entire mystic tradition to just the flavor for a summoning system.  Practical Kabbalah  is an extremely dense mystical tradition and has nothing to do with magical evocation. Most of the summons are drawn from the Good Ministers of the Enochian Ethers recounted by the Aurum Solis, in name if not effect, which have nothing to do with Kabbalah. I agree with Chaosium’s decision here. Kabbalah makes more sense as a mystical tradition underlying all the Nephilim’s occult sciences, not just one. Since each Sefira is associated with a planet, they can be associated with specific Ka-elements. Each Olam has its own Tree of Life with all ten Sefirot too, so it can represent the Ka-elements within the Ka-eleme...

I'm not an occultist myself and my knowledge of the occult is practically nil, so I've never really understood concepts like the Olamot nor how to authentically simplify them for a gaming context. However, I've found one explanation someone else already did for a gaming context. In Craig Cochrane's Immortals Handbook: Ascension , he mentions the Four Worlds of Assiah, Yetzirah, Briah and Atziluth by name and describes them in simplified form for a gaming context. He assigns them to different dimensions, axes of a coordinate system, that make up our universe. These dimensions are, respectively, Space (technically three dimensions), Time, Matter and Spirit. (Da'ath, "The Abyss", is the dimension of Thought.) So I thought I'd recap that here and explain it in terms of the emanations. Within the Kabbalistic context, the Four Worlds are successive emanations of the Divine that give form and existence to our universe. The first emanation is Atziluth and it i...

Initially the lore assumed only the Unnamed Arcanum accepted Selenim, and vice versa. However, the third edition Gamemaster's Book notes that it is possible for (at least some of) the other Arcana to "adopt" a minority of Selenim. The majority of members remain Nephilim, however. Although some Arcane Quests are reserved for Nephilim, like those of The Magician (see Gamemaster's Screen ) and The High Priestess (see Vision-Ka #3 ), others like those of The Moon (see Vision-Ka #5 ) have paths available to Selenim. The  Al-Mugawir  campaign supplement notes that Selenim adopted by Judgment have integrated their Simulacrum's Solar-Ka and may learn to cast the solar Occult Science of Qiyas. The reverse is not true. The 13th Arcane Quest, the Bronzen Sublimation (see Gamemaster's Book ), is reserved for Selenim. Death is a haven for all magical beings who carry the Black Moon within them: Selenim, Serpentaries, 666's Rejects...  I still need to research how the...

A key difference between the French version and the US version is the rules for Khaiba.  In the French version, the effects of Khaiba were persistent. The more Khaiba points accrued, the more Khaiban the Nephilim grew physically and mentally. This gradually replaced the Metamorphosis with the corresponding Khaiban form. In the US version, this was changed to the Nephilim suffering Khaiba episodes . Khaiba points had no effect on their own, but affected the chances of the Nephilim suffering an episode during certain enthronements. During an episode, the Nephilim would become indistinguishable from an elemental beast.  I don’t know why this change was made. So that the Nephilim could more easily blend into human society? To match how Shouit operated? It was thought redundant to Metamorphosis Transformations? I can only ever guess why.  I didn’t know about this change until recently, but now it really helps me to understand details in the French version that I didn’t underst...

Back in the day when the US fandom discussed Chinese Nephilim on the mailing list, the idea that each culture would have different elements and so on often came up. The idea was that the cosmology given in the rulebook was too Eurocentric and not inclusive of other cultures, mixed with the general exoticism and poor understanding of other cultures because it was the 90s. Firstly, I think it's okay for Nephilim to have a unified cosmology regardless of what a given Immortal's culture is. Trying to invent a new cosmology for every culture and then have them all play well together is infeasible. Secondly, I don't think the cosmology is too westernized. It's actually a mix of multiple Eurasian astrology traditions. The idea of a pentacle of five elements , and associating the planets with specific elements , doesn't come from Greek philosophers but from Chinese astrology. The idea of five elements composing reality rather than four comes from Vedic philosophy. Indeed, ...

I'm still translating the 3rd edition, and my knowledge of the 4th and 5th editions is fragmentary, but I think I know enough of the rudiments to start thinking about my own rules revisions. The BRP rules aren't a good fit for Nephilim . So I've decided to devise a new system based on the French version, third edition and beyond. Currently my ideas are like so: The Nephilim's Ka, Personality Traits and Degenerations are treated as Characteristics and measured from 1-5 levels. Instead of numbers, Characteristics are described using adjectives and adverbs. E.g. Not Strong, Little Strong, Enough Strong, Strong, Very Strong. Each Characteristic has attached a pool of 0-10 "bullets" used to track progression: when the character accumulates 10 "bullets", then the "bullets" are erased and the Characteristic increases by 1 level, and vice versa.  Instead of persistent Meta-Characteristics, each Ka has an associated “Approach” that must be deliberat...

I'm currently translating the French third edition rulebooks from 2001 in order to get a good look at the rules and setting. That edition replaces BRP with a new system. I'll try to describe that below. Task resolution The 3e rules use much smaller numbers than BRP. Characteristics and Potentials have been consolidated into Characteristics and Difficulties. Characteristics and Difficulties are rated from 1-5, while Skills are rated from -2 to +1. However, the rules describe these with adjectives, adverbs, and shifts rather than numbers, like so: For Characteristics and Difficulties: Not (1), Little (2), Enough (3),  “…”  (4), and Very (5). For Skills: Profane (↓↓), Apprentice (↓), Companion (no modifier), Master (↑). Every task is resolved using the Resistance Table, or as it's called in this edition the "Universal Resolution Table", by comparing the Characteristic against a Difficulty level shifted up/down by the relevant Skill. Instead of a d100, a d20 is rolled...

So today I made this blog. Here I will blog about the 90s roleplaying game Nephilim . Specifically the English adaptation released by Chaosium, though I will probably reference the French version plenty of times too. For whatever reason, I have found myself drawn to the Nephilim game setting ever since I learned about it a decade ago. Unfortunately, it has tons of problems IMO. At this blog, I will post my ideas for fixing those problems. First up, simplifying the rules! Stay tuned!