There can be no doubt: Nobilis is a triumph of the human spirit.
Okay, maybe not, but it is really, really, really fucking awesome - and I don't pull out three of those babies too often. If those of you who haven't encountered this game yet are wondering if this post will just be a shameless drooling plug...yeah, it will be.
Print run production values, at least of 2nd ed, remain unmatched; finally, an RPG I've been proud to have on my coffee table when my non-gamer academic friends come over and all the Dragon magazines must go upstairs to their little shelf.
Mechanically, the game isn't seminal (weird - I wrote seminary) but does an excellent job of being just obtrusive enough to spice the pot and just transparent enough to get out of the way when I'm trying to tell the story.
Conceptually, it stands alone as the only successful take on the "gods" theme out there - one need only compare it to the "competitors" to make this utterly clear (the risibly IMPENETRABLE The Primal Order springs to mind as a game with too little myth and too many quadratic equations). If you happen to be a GNS strong-Narrativist, take this bad girl out for a spin - woo boy!
And the writing is simply divine. However, I admittedly do have a weakness for magic-realism in nanofiction.
In sum, this game is so far head-and-shoulders above most of the orc-and-pie publications that thud into the hobby shop every year that the bar has been permanently raised by its very presence and designers will be hard-pressed to exceed it. Full marks.
So one wonders why I can't seem to get my players into the idea of actually playing it. Maybe I oversold?
I've run Unknown Armies a couple of times - what's your beef with the magic system?
Hmm. Good question. Well...
I guess I have no serious issue with the basic mechanics. I ran CoC for ten years, and I've always praised percentile systems for their intuitive, unencumbered speed. I think the flip-flop is a clever conceit. I like cherries.
There are many things I love about this game system: the modern-obsessions-for-modern-magic trope; the narrow rather than freeform scope to magic; the freeform rather than narrow scope to skills; the transgressive-as-burglar versus archetypalist-as-con man distinction in play; the incredible madness system. I could go on. This game throws in handfuls of grit even when things go cosmic, so you could actually scale up over time from the alley-eye view to a high level campaign without fear of things devolving into a bad run of Silver Surfer(forgive me Mage, but I'm looking at you here).Yet they left it blurry enough so you can set the dial on how powerful magic is in your game. All good.
I just feel like when you take everything this game has going for it, the whole elaborate postmodern paranoid surrealist Jungian metaphysic thing, the magic mechanic just feels so damn...Flat. Unmagical. Ultimately I felt that the same smoothness percentile resolution lent to mundane tasks backfired when the subject was meant to be portrayed as mystical and awe inspiring and more than a little disturbing. Not that you can't add that stuff back in, but I'm a vocal proponent of "System Matters" and I've seen other systems that handled that angle better somehow.
In some ways, Mage did aspects better (if you enforced paradigm strictly enough to keep the characters from slipping into using mechanics as the lingua franca of their Arts and prevented dot-blitzing across the Spheres leading to "everybody can do everything"); Sorcerer (the Ron Edwards game) did some aspects better; and, for the game's roots in Last Call by Tim Powers I've never seen a better system than Christopher I. Lehrich's Shadows in the Fog: even in its totally unfleshed form, his Tarot-based system rocks UA's d% bones hard.
In the end it doesn't matter of course. I love this game enough to use it and I've been playing for enough decades now to be able to rip it apart and rebuild into something I feel works better. You could glean some clue of where I'll be starting to salvage my replacement parts from the partial list above. I just can't help but feel a vague disappointment that Stolze and Tynes didn't bring the same vibrancy to the magic mechanics as, say, the madness system.
There: you asked me the time, I built you a watch.
However, as for the gun obsession goes, I'm all for it. I love the idea that the baddest of badass warlocks might buy it when his girlfriend finds out he's been banging her sister on Tuesdays and puts a .22 round through his brainpan while he's on the crapper. I really dig that unlike Mage, where a competent PC confronted by a mugger can melt off the guy's face before he can even blink and soak the paradox bruises on the way to buy more smokes, a PC in this game should be very afraid any time heat comes into play...just like real life. And frankly, I would be thrilled if my games of this frequently escalated into early Tarantino-style with all the players betraying each other and ending up warily circling with magnums drawn waiting for someone to flinch. For me anyway, Obsession + Paranoia = Blood Opera.
Oh man...I gotta start cutting back on my post lengths. |
