My Nephilim Occult RPing Blog

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 (546 kg × $70,000 × 52 weeks = $1,987,440,000) In the unpublished alchemy draft, the Formula “Ultimate Purification of Gold” allowed the alchemist to produce 1 kg of gold per month.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...

The Nephilim have developed several “Grand Rituals” (distinct from the rituals used for casting Ritual Magic) used as aids in their learning and casting of the Occult Sciences. In this post I'll be explaining how I'm adapting those to my campaign setting, based both on the US version, a fan wiki , and the French version's Nephilim: Revelation and Nephilim: Legend . The ideas presented here are tentative. The Ritual of Stasis: Nephilim use this ritual to tap charges from their Stasis item to boost spells and other uses of Ka-energies. Ar-Kaïm who have been bonded to a Stasis item may do the same, but may only charge the five elements available to Nephilim. Selenim require Sarcophagi or other special means to charge and tap Black Moon-Ka. The Ritual of Sacrifice : Nephilim use this ritual in emergences to ensure a spell succeeds. This costs Occult Development Points (my translation of the French version's XP mechanics) and may only be used when performing a Sorcery ritu...

By default, the sorcerous magic item creation rules given in Gamemaster's Companion and Enlightened Magic just create items that allow the user to recast the spell it contains. I find this rather boring and weaksauce when sorcerers can design their own spells (and I'm not the only one ), so an idea I had was to allow magic items to have more unique effects. Instead of recreating a spell, the item itself is enchanted to provide a specific bonus or effect. There's precedence for this: the magic supplements give permanent enchantments that apply to people and places, not objects. To cite a few permanent enchantments (and costs) from  Enlightened Magic : Awakening the Inner Fire  (p43): permanently enlighten a mortal (1 POW) Eternal Warding  (p53): permanently ward an area against sorcery (2 POW) Call the Land  (p53-4): permanently befriend the animals and plants in a place (2 POW) So if you permanently enchant a gun with Weapon Blessing  by spending POW, you don'...

In a prior post I recapped the spontaneous magic rules from Nephilim: Revelation  (NR) and mentioned that I wanted to adapt what I could to the enlightened sorcery rules printed in Liber Ka  (LK) and Enlightened Magic  (EM). In this post, I would like to explain how I would use NR as a basis for more robust rules for designing and casting spells on the fly. I use both LK and EM as my resources here, since EM adds additional spells that are useful for illustration, but I use the d20 roll-under task resolution from NR. For reference, EM refers to Ka-vision as "Mystic vision"; the main difference is that the latter has a passive state that mage characters have active at all times to notice vaguely when something magical is happening in their vicinity. As explained in LK and EM, the different circles of Sorcery have different limitations. A rule I'd like to adapt from NR is the generic table , which lists the various parameters that spells can have (range, duration, area, et...

Inspired by some ancient and long forgotten discussions on the old mailing list, I decided to dedicate a post to the concept of magical names in Summoning. The following is my musings on the subject, without specific rules text. The use of magical names is a vital part of the occult science of Summoning. Just as the names of targets provide magical connections for casting Sorcery, they provide connections for invoking and contracting named entities. There is power in names: naming an entity allows the summoner to call or compel the entity directly. Invoking a divine name allows the summoner to compel entities beholden to that name: e.g. speaking "The power of Christ compels you!" to exorcise a demon. In order to summon a specific entity, you must know its specific name. This can take any number of forms such as conventional words, occult sigils, musical notation, etc. The name must be written, spoken or performed as part of the summoning ritual.  Acquiring a name generally r...

In the French version, casting a summoning spell required either a focus or an inscription containing that spell. In both cases, the summoner needed to draw a summoning circle in which to call the entity. Both third and fifth editions introduced an additional rule for a pact , which tied into the French version's different rapport systems. In third edition The Players' Book , summoning an entity was a single roll rather than the two rolls of previous editions. The summoning rules stipulated that entities had a rapport with their summoner. Their level of positivity and hostility were rated respectively as the statistics Allié and Féal , translating to "allied" and "serfish" respectively. Being polite and respectful to the entity increased its  Allié  and decreased its  Féal , while being cruel and dishonest did the opposite. Whether it was friendly or hostile determined the severity of failing the summoning test: friendly entities inflicted inconvenient but n...

The summon spell  Pharaonic Egregor is presented in Major Arcana p11. The element is that of the Egregor’s Arcanum, listed in the Exaltation table on p9. The table lists elements, planets and zodiac months. These are copied almost verbatim from the astrological correspondences  proposed by the Golden Dawn  ( cheat sheet here ,  color coded here , secondary correspondences here ). I've reproduced and merged both tables below: ARCANUM EXALTATION EGREGOR DYNASTY 0 Fool Air Unknown I Magician Mercury Djoser (Zoser) III II High Priestess Moon Khafre (Chephren) IV III Empress Venus Netaqerti (Nitocris) VI IV Emperor Aries Narmer (Menes) I V Hierophant Taurus Unas V VI Lovers Gemini Yaqub-Har XVI VII Chariot Cancer Sheshi XV ...

The rules for magic resistance and magic damage in Nephilim: Revelation are scattered, so I’ve decided to centralize what I've been able to find for easier reference. I found this fansite article very helpful in explaining things. I might use house rules in the future... Magic Resistance Magic Resistance in other editions works via the Nephilim resisting using the Spell's Ka-element (or one of the two opposed starting in 2nd edition onward), but this gets complicated when trying to adjudicate Selenim, Ar-Kaïm and mortals who don't have Pentacles. (In the US version at least, muggles cannot resist at all, awakened humans resist with half their Solar-Ka value, and Mithradites resist with their full Solar-Ka value.) Immortals do not make any resistance tests against Spells in third edition, only a few Spells here and there that increase the attacker's Difficulty. I assume this is because it would be difficult to cover all three magical races (see below), so no resista...

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...

When the Liber Ka rules first came out in 1995, they more or less invalidated the rules for artifacts previously published in the Gamemaster's Companion . Nephilim no longer needed to find foci to cast spells, but cast Casual Magic without any and could design their own foci as needed to cast Ritual Magic and High Magic. It wasn't until Enlightened Magic in 2014 that LK-compatible magic item rules were finally added, and these amounted to single-spell inscriptions of Ritual Magic or High Magic that you could carry around and share with anyone who knew Casual Magic (as spell inscription wasn't included in EM except for third circle alchemy meditations). Meanwhile, the 2nd edition of the French and subsequent editions provided “Past Points” at character creation: letting players buy foci, artifacts, and other goodies saved from past lives to start play with. My quick-and-dirty house rule for reconciling these was... to do basically nothing. The GMC-style artifacts allowed ...

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...

This post is just me musing about artifacts rules.  As introduced in the second edition French rulebook, artifacts are divided into active and passive types. Active artifacts have their Ka and can be used by anyone who know the keyword, even without elemental Ka. Passive artifacts require elemental Ka to power their effect, whether from a Nephilim or from a Ka Reserve (equivalent to the US version’s Elixir).  This distinction may be applied to the US version and derivatives thereof. The sorcerous artifacts in Gamemaster’s Companion and Enlightened Magic are passive artifacts. The alchemical artifacts in Enlightened Magic are active artifacts, since they produce their effects even for unenlightened users.  By combining both books we get two types of sorcerous artifacts: single spell artifacts that are enchanted with Ritual or High Magic spells (see Enlightened Magic ), and multi-spell artifacts that are crafted through a much more grueling process (see GMC p26-31)....

As part of my rewritten summoning system I took inspiration from real occultism and divided summoning spells into three types: invocation, astral evocation, and physical evocation. An invocation doesn't cause the summoned entity to appear before the summoner, but causes the summoner themselves (or another target) to exhibit the desired traits of that entity. For example, invoking Mammon makes the invoker better at building wealth. An evocation summons the entity to appear before the summoner. There are two types: astral evocation and physical evocation . An astral evocation summons the entity on the astral plane. The evoker then communicates with it through the ritual altar's crystal ball, mirror, or even the reflective surface in the cup of water. This evocation has limited influence over the physical world, but the benefit is that the entity may show the evoker any imaginable image. This type of evocation is extremely useful for acquiring knowledge. A physical evocation su...

So I've been doing more and more research on the French version's books, which is a huge mess btw. I discovered the rules for "Ka Reserves", which function basically like Elixirs do in the US version.  I can't find a copy of the first edition French rulebook, so I don't know if Ka Reserves were present in the first edition that the US version was based on or whether these were adapted back to the French from the US version. There's also rules for active versus passive artifacts. Ka Reserves As of the second edition rulebook the rules for Ka Reserves are similar to those of Elixirs, but with a few differences: Creating a Ka Reserve requires a mix of "Rare Earths" (the French name for what the US version names Litharge) and blood, flesh or whatever from the targeted Nephilim placed in the vessel. It must be created during day of the desired Ka-Element. The human mage may puncture and steal the Nephilim's Ka-Element at range, similar to a magic...

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...

In Nephilim: Revelation , the French third edition, the Occult Sciences got some new jargon for their practitioners and spells. These were: Occult Science  Keyword Practitioner  Spells Magic Intuition  Mage Sortileges Kabbalah  Relation Kabbalist Invocations  Alchemy  Construction  Alchemist  Formulae Each Occult Science had some further jargon specific to it, the "symbolic and social", including titles for each circle, colors, and attributes. The third edition structured these after the medieval tradesmen system of Apprentice, Companion (Journeyman) and Master. E.g. an Apprentice Mage was titled a Disciple, and one with mastery in Lower Magic was ranked as a Master Disciple. Technique Title Color Attribute Lower Magic Disciple ...

My planned conversion of the Black Star spells from Secret Societies has been delayed multiple times already, so I'm going to explain my rationale behind adapting these spells here. The Black Star invented several spells to destroy or enslave the Nephilim. These include Awaken Orichalc , Sacrifice Nephilim , Create Elixir , and Create Homunculus . These spells are solar techniques that generally don't require elemental Ka to cast. Awaken Orichalc The spell Awaken Orichalc comes in several versions. The oldest is a Casual Magic spell that awakens raw Orichalc by exposing it to Solar-Ka via the caster bleeding on it. When cast using Ritual Magic, the Solar-Ka may be provided by assistants or unwilling sacrifices. The caster uses his Solar-Ka to calculate the spell's POW, but uses the astrological modifier for Saturn. Orichalc may only be awakened on Saturdays, as the doomed field is otherwise too weak. Orichalc is usually too rare to make pure weapons, so the Orichalc is us...

As of third edition, the strength of the local Black Moon field is irrelevant unless using house rules. The Black Moon is either present or it is not: in the latter case, the Selenim’s occult sciences are impossible.  However, to complement  my post on Black Moon sites , I present spells for dowsing and manifesting Black Moon Fields similarly to Sorcery from Liber Ka . These spells may be cast using either Necromancy or Black Summoning, since there’s not really a Black Sorcery equivalent. Both involve manipulation of the Tenebrae: corruption and domination, respectively. (I’m currently working on proper rules for black magic. Stay tuned…) Dowse Black Moon Field   Circle : Initiate Spell (Unnamed Arcanum) Ka-element: Black Moon  Threshold : First Circle (Necromancy) or First Circle (Black Summoning) Range: Ka-vision  Duration: 10 minutes  Description: This spell allows the caster to know the direction of the nearest Black Moon Field. Once the spell has bee...

There’s a difference in the way that Nephilim inscribes spells and Enchanted Magic enchants spells. Previously I thought of possible ways to reconcile it, but since these don’t strictly contradict except on one or two points (see below) then you can use the rules as written. Having a spell inscribed on the caster's aura or enchanted onto an object obviates the need to design the spell in advance. This substitutes for a copy in a grimoire and provides other benefits. An inscribed spell is generally much faster to cast or prepare, while a spell or procedure enchanted onto an item has its POW fixed at the moment of enchantment. Ritual Magic and High Magic spells may be inscribed on the caster’s aura. This lets the spell be cast using Casual Magic instead. High Magic cannot be inscribed unless the caster can cast it without boosted Ka and is still limited to the corresponding day of the week. Ritual Magic and High Magic spells may be enchanted onto an object as Casual Magic in a simi...