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...

I've explored some of these ideas in previous posts, but I thought it would be prudent to put them all here for consolidation and comparison. This is all purely my homebrew and is completely non-canonical to the official games. The Saurians, the KaIm, the Old Races, the Nephilim, the Selenim, the Ar-KaIm... they are all Ka-beings. Their Ka dissolves into the magic fields upon disintegration, recycled into the births of future Ka-beings, making them both immortal in a sense and different generations of the same magical meta-race. The first generation of the Immortals are the Basal Immortals: the KaIm and the Saurians. The Basal Immortals are so named due to their practice of Basal Cycles, in which they would exist in purely spiritual form barely distinct from the magic fields and incarnate within natural phenomena; this is a stable version of the Elementalist Khaiba form. The Saurians were the first Onirim, born in the dreamlands, and the first to awaken to consciousness by incarnat...

The origins of the Nephilim have been subject to various revisions and retcons over the course of the game's editions and adaptations. In the first edition, French and English, it was mentioned in passing that new Nephilim could be born from Nexuses. In the English version, it is assumed that a Nephilim's first incarnation occurs shortly after the Nephilim was born from the magic fields. In the second edition, French only, it was clarified that all Nephilim were former KaIm. After the Fall of Atlantis, no Nephilim were ever born again. Instead, the beings born from Nexuses are "astrological Nephilim" who lack pentacles and incorporate Orichalc into their essence. In the third edition, French only, the astrological Nephilim were named Ar-KaIm. Furthermore, it was established that "natural Selenim" were born on the astral plane and incarnated in passing dreamers, bypassing existence as Nephilim entirely. Incidentally, Nephilim disembodied on the astral plane c...

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, ...

In the first and second editions of the French version, all Selenim were former Nephilim. The third edition introduced a second origin, the natural Selenim, who appeared after the Great Awakening at the start of the 20th century (see “Return of the Magicians”, Nephilim rulebook p77). I am incorporating this into my homebrew settings, but with some adjustments for the US version’s changes and my own ideas. The Codex des Selenim divides the incarnated Selenim into three origins: contaminated, sacrificial, and natural. The contaminated and sacrificial are both former Nephilim, whereas the natural were always Selenim. Each origin has its own minor benefits and drawbacks compared to the other origins. Natural Selenim are perfectly comfortable with their state, whereas former Nephilim always experience some lingering regret. Some desperately seek to find and restore their sundered Pentacle, locked in a Stasis they can no longer track. (Note: When a Nephilim loses a Pentacle branch due cont...

What follows is how disembodied and incarnated Immortals work in my campaigns, how they’re born, their ecology, sentience, etc.  Nephilim What is a Nephilim? A Nephilim is a fusion of a human being and an elemental spirit of the five fields, creating a microcosm of the Solar system that allows the Super-Ego to emerge and pursue Agartha.  What is that elemental?  Every proto-Nephilim is born from a Nexus during a Grand Enthronement when the stars are right. The element of the Enthronement determines its Dominant Ka. The conditions are so precise that this is impossible to predict more than a week in advance.  By itself, the proto-Nephilim is a beast little different than others born from the magic fields. The key difference is that it is composed of the five elements at once, when other elementals rarely exceed one. It looks like its metamorphosis fully manifest in Khaiba, but may display a few curiously human features and a seemingly higher intelligence than most ot...

What is a Nephilim? What are the Ego, Super-Ego, and Id? What is the nature of an elemental essence outside a body? What is the relationship between Nephilim and elemental beasts? How do the secret societies view Nephilim? How do Selenim and Ar-KaIm differ? Who were the KaIm and how do they differ? Long story short, I've tweaked Immortals to no longer be body snatchers because I want to make it easier for players to get into the game and sympathize with the PCs. That seems to be much easier when the PCs aren't body snatchers. See Montgomery's blog posts  here , here , here , here and here . Each Immortal is a fusion of a mortal human being, body and soul, with an elemental essence or spirit. Each has a psychic apparatus of three interacting agents: the elemental Id, the human Ego, and the immortal Super-Ego. The elemental's Id provides the Immortal's Personality Traits aka Emotional Traits, which the Immortal must understand and master in order to reach Agartha. Th...

This is a house rule adapted from the rules for  Psychomorphe and  Métamorphes totémiques from the French version. Totems for Western PCs The indigenous Nephilim of Northern America developed their own metamorphosis archetypes or "totems" independently of the Western Nephilim. I hope to provide detailed rules for them in later posts, but in the interim here is a way for their legacy to influence PCs following the Western Tradition. Nephilim PCs by default will be Western Nephilim that emigrated to the United States. A player may choose to play a Nephilim who was born from a Nexus in the United States after colonization and taught by the Major Arcana. Rather than a Western Metamorphosis, this Nephilim was born with a Totemic Metamorphosis. The rules for this are provided below. As with Western Metamorphoses, Totemic Metamorphoses are divided into several archetypes or "totems." Each Totem corresponds to a mundane animal that was/is held sacred or spiritually signif...

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...

A concept in the French version, introduced in the second edition, that was never adapted to the US version was the rules for cycles basaltiques (“basaltic cycles”). Basaltic cycles were periods where a nephilim—then a KaIm—was embodied within an existing natural phenomenon or feature, as opposed to creating their own physicality. Pyrim inhabited within lava, lightning or fire; Eolim within clouds, fog or tornado; Hydrim within waves, foam or coral; Faerim within flora and fauna, sand or stone; Onirim within nightmares manifest, disease or reflection. They developed a greater understanding of the magic fields and became more sensitive to the element of their habitat, as well as to its opponents and to their base natures. To summarize the 2e rules: at character creation the player picks if the character was a basaltic and then applies up to 5 basaltic cycles, choosing the element of each cycle. Each cycle applies a +5% bonus to the First Circle Sorcery skill base chance and a +1 bonus ...

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...