Quote from: GrimGent;363102Well, breaking down the beginning of the book, the eight pages of Chapter 1 (which I linked to earlier) describe the most central concepts and conventions in the game,

Fair enough. It is good to collect such things in one place.

QuoteChapter 2 is the first of the nine GM advice sections presented as a series of in-character lessons,

And a nice object lesson in Borgstrom's terrible habit of a) scattering things around the place and b) obscuring things via IC fiction. If she had something she wanted to tell GMs, she could have straight up told them, and she could have told them in a "GM advice" chapter so players didn't have to read half the story before they realised they didn't have to worry about it...

Quoteand "Chapter" 4 consists of just one page on genre assumptions.

And why, exactly, is does that merit its own chapter, when it could live quite happily in chapter 1?

QuoteChapter 3, a general gazetteer of the universe, could admittedly be moved back a little, but then you pretty much need that information anyway in order to create an appropriate character, unless the campaign starts out with the PCs as completely clueless about what's going on.

How long is that chapter again?

QuoteHum. By the way, that "Essence of Nobilis" summary really is Chapter 5 and not 4 as I apparently wrote last night. The table of contents doesn't number the chapters.

Because God forbid that the book be navigable...

Quote(Oh, and there's a two-page piece of intro fiction before everything else, as well.)

Because what the game really needed was more fiction...

Fucking Christ, Borgstrom even found a way to make the motherfucking Table of Contents pretentious and needlessly byzantine.

Borgstrom is not the Swine I most hate, but she is easily and by far the WORST writer, technically speaking, involved in the "professional" RPG industry today.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Warthur;363123And a nice object lesson in Borgstrom's terrible habit of a) scattering things around the place and b) obscuring things via IC fiction. If she had something she wanted to tell GMs, she could have straight up told them, and she could have told them in a "GM advice" chapter so players didn't have to read half the story before they realised they didn't have to worry about it...

And why, exactly, is does that merit its own chapter, when it could live quite happily in chapter 1?

Because like another one-page chapter later on (a FAQ on some potential dilemmas with the resolution rules) but unlike the first chapter, it's part of that whole "How To Be a Hollyhock God" sequence. That's largely a matter of ambience. None of it is fiction as such, though, not part of any storyline. The narrator, Ianthe Falls-Short, addresses the reader directly as someone interested in running the game. Think of it as if the RPG had been published in the setting and somehow avoided censorship: it really is GM advice... only from an anthropomorphic vegetable lady trained in debate ever since she was plucked from the vine.

QuoteHow long is that chapter again?

Eighteen pages. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that the setting in Nobilis tends to be more implied than anything else, and so even this section mostly describes the overarching cosmology along with a few illustrative details. For instance, while the text elaborates on the workings of the Locust Court, it never mentions where that courthouse is actually located, and there certainly are no maps. All such details will depend on what suits your own campaign.

Quote from: RPGPundit;363134Fucking Christ, Borgstrom even found a way to make the motherfucking Table of Contents pretentious and needlessly byzantine.

I don't see how. It's just a regular table of contents that lists the chapters and their subsections.

"Resolving Conflict
Terminology
Conflict between beings of miraculous power
What actually happens
Wounds
Non-lethal attacks
Disease and aging
Miracle point recovery
Experience
Death."

That sort of thing, no different from other RPG books. What it doesn't state is that "Resolving Conflict" is Chapter 13, only that it begins on page 161.

Quote from: GrimGent;363139Because like another one-page chapter later on (a FAQ on some potential dilemmas with the resolution rules) but unlike the first chapter, it's part of that whole "How To Be a Hollyhock God" sequence.

Why couldn't "How to be a Hollyhock God" have been its own chapter?

QuoteThat's largely a matter of ambience. None of it is fiction as such, though, not part of any storyline. The narrator, Ianthe Falls-Short, addresses the reader directly as someone interested in running the game. Think of it as if the RPG had been published in the setting and somehow avoided censorship: it really is GM advice... only from an anthropomorphic vegetable lady trained in debate ever since she was plucked from the vine.

Maybe I'm just being a grump here, but I rather feel that any GM who feels a need for GMing advice is more likely to appreciate a clear, uncluttered, and direct prose style, rather than a twee character gabbing at them.

QuoteEighteen pages. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that the setting in Nobilis tends to be more implied than anything else, and so even this section mostly describes the overarching cosmology along with a few illustrative details.

18 pages is vastly too long for a brief introduction to any setting. I remember that chapter well; there were far too many elaborations and tangents for a brief overview.

And I take issue that the setting is "implied". Yes, we don't have an exact map of it. But there are a hell of a lot of setting details which are outright stated explicitly and which participants appear to be expected to keep track of, from the differences between Nobles and Imperators to the different Imperator factions and their place in the cosmology to the fight against the Excrucians to the various flower rituals to Lord Entropy and his utterly arbitrary laws which for some reason the Nobles and Imperators go along with*, there's just heaps and heaps of stuff in there. And you have to wade through it all, with not much idea of what's important and what's flavour until you've digested the whole book, before you hit character gen.

QuoteFor instance, while the text elaborates on the workings of the Locust Court, it never mentions where that courthouse is actually located, and there certainly are no maps. All such details will depend on what suits your own campaign.

One does not need locations and maps to have an excess of detail. This is a good example. Why do players need to know anything about who the Locust Court are beyond "They work for Lord Entropy"? Why can't that have waited for a more detailed look at the setting?

* I never understood why the other Imperators let Lord Entropy get his way. His laws seemed to exist solely to allow modern-day Earth to look like modern-day Earth - in other words, it's the setting's equivalent of the Masquerade in Vampire, or Paradox in Mage. Were I running Nobilis I'd scrap the guy, scrap modern-day Earth to boot, and keep the campaign entirely in the mythic realms. It's not as though they aren't stuffed with the gills with things to interact with in the first place.

Quote from: RPGPundit;363134Fucking Christ, Borgstrom even found a way to make the motherfucking Table of Contents pretentious and needlessly byzantine.

The chapters are titled and paginated, not numbered.  No big deal.  Except to you, who likes to Make Shit Up™ to support an untenable position.  At least read a book before you criticise it.

!i!

Quote from: Ian Absentia;363167The chapters are titled and paginated, not numbered.  No big deal.  Except to you, who likes to Make Shit Up™ to support an untenable position.  At least read a book before you criticise it.

!i!

I think the Amber mob would have his head if he touched Nobilis.  They can smell the ink.

Quote from: Warthur;363161I never understood why the other Imperators let Lord Entropy get his way. His laws seemed to exist solely to allow modern-day Earth to look like modern-day Earth - in other words, it's the setting's equivalent of the Masquerade in Vampire, or Paradox in Mage.

The Ash Earth doesn't resemble ours to the same degree that, say, the World of Darkness does, though, and the fact that those accused of crimes are officially presumed guilty until proven innocent even in the setting's USA is only one small example of that. Never mind about details like the name of the current president: going by the book, it's not even possible to tell if WWII ever took place, or whether the American Civil War was erased from existence when nearly five hundred years of earthly history were lost. For that matter, keeping track of such supposedly fixed facts about historical events might turn out to be utterly pointless anyway because history is in a state of constant flux, so that any specific war between mundane nations might have been won by one side on Monday, by another on Tuesday, or by a sudden alien invasion from Mars on Wednesday, and no ordinary human being would realize that anything about their past has changed.

But the resemblance is meant to make easier for the players to relate to the setting, of course. For the same reason, the PCs are humanly comprehensible Nobles instead of inscrutable Imperators. There's very little by way of a "canonical" setting: the basic metaphysics, a couple of realms, a few organizations, a number of philosophies. That shouldn't tax anyone's memory.

Also, Lord Entropy? He's basically not only very, very good at what he does and one of the most powerful Imperators in Creation, but also something of a twisted messiah figure. Besides, most of his peers don't concern themselves with meddling in petty mortal affairs unless their Estates becomes involved. They are the universe, after all. Considering that they have their divine hands full with defending the boundaries of reality against the Excrucians, back on Earth the Locust Court, backed by Entropy's authority, remains a convenient instrument for inspecting possible weak links in the war effort and weeding out outright traitors.

(Opinions on how that GM advice could've, should've, been arranged comes down to personal taste, I suppose. But if you don't care for the IC perspective, would it really have been any better to lump all those chapters together without OOC breaks?)

Quote from: GrimGent;363176Also, Lord Entropy? He's basically not only very, very good at what he does and one of the most powerful Imperators in Creation, but also something of a twisted messiah figure. Besides, most of his peers don't concern themselves with meddling in petty mortal affairs unless their Estates becomes involved. They are the universe, after all. Considering that they have their divine hands full with defending the boundaries of reality against the Excrucians, back on Earth the Locust Court, backed by Entropy's authority, remains a convenient instrument for inspecting possible weak links in the war effort and weeding out outright traitors.

Except in the setting as written, as far as I can tell Lord Entropy fucks about with other people's Estates and Chancels all the time. How's he meant to enforce the no-love law unless he spies on what the Nobles do when they're at home, huh?

Quote from: StormBringer;363171I think the Amber mob would have his head if he touched Nobilis.  They can smell the ink.

So that's it.  They get high off of wet RPG and HUM1101 textbook printing ink.

Quote from: Warthur;363247Except in the setting as written, as far as I can tell Lord Entropy fucks about with other people's Estates and Chancels all the time. How's he meant to enforce the no-love law unless he spies on what the Nobles do when they're at home, huh?

It's common knowledge that everyone breaks the Windflower Law: Entropy might have even come up with that decree precisely because it'll give him an excuse to remove any otherwise inconvenient Noble for completely different reasons. As for keeping an eye on the private lives of Nobles, don't forget that divinations don't work on miraculous beings, while any non-miraculous spy who enters a Chancel immediately becomes vulnerable to detection by the local Familia.

Quote from: GrimGent;363364It's common knowledge that everyone breaks the Windflower Law: Entropy might have even come up with that decree precisely because it'll give him an excuse to remove any otherwise inconvenient Noble for completely different reasons. As for keeping an eye on the private lives of Nobles, don't forget that divinations don't work on miraculous beings, while any non-miraculous spy who enters a Chancel immediately becomes vulnerable to detection by the local Familia.

But this, combined with the guilty-until-proven-innocent thing (and how do you prove you're not in love?), means that Lord Entropy is basically empowered to snatch away other Imperator's Nobles at a moment's notice. I just don't see why they agree to that.

Basically, for my money Lord Entropy is a big heavy blunt force that's there to make PCs behave in a particular way. Fuck that shit.

Quote from: Warthur;363430(and how do you prove you're not in love?)

By killing the object of your not-love out of hand, of course.

Yeah, as I've suggested earlier, the particulars of the canon could get pretty heavy-handed, which is why I always chose to circumvent them.  I think that all of the scenarios I created could still exist within the overarching canon, but I made a point of not having them intersect with it.  By comparison, it'd be like setting a Vampire game in against a backdrop that is somehow isolated from the Camarilla and the Sabbat.  It can be done, and certain canon elements can be introduced step-wise later on if you feel like it.

!i!

Quote from: Warthur;363430But this, combined with the guilty-until-proven-innocent thing (and how do you prove you're not in love?), means that Lord Entropy is basically empowered to snatch away other Imperator's Nobles at a moment's notice.

The presumption of guilt is a quirk of alternative history which only applies at mortal courts of justice, and those aren't allowed any authority over the Nobilis. At the Locust Court, Nobles are always entitled to defend themselves, no matter what the charge is. Lord Entropy prefers not to summarily execute anyone without a proper trial if he can avoid it, anyway: it's in his nature to destroy through order, in a way, but he's not idiotic or insane. Much like any good general, he knows that persecuting Nobles without reason would only weaken the defence lines of the universe.

Old Bloody is by no means omniscient or omnipotent, either, and he certainly can't read minds in order to discover who's guilty of "the most ignoble crime of love." His main advantage lies with the prestige and support which he enjoys among the Imperators. Any attempt to overthrow his reign would have to account for those before anything else.

By design, he's a constant reminder of the setting's unfairness and a challenge to the sensibilities of the PCs, a built-in guarantee of conflict. So there's a monster on the throne of the world, a distant tyrant whose decrees and demands may seem inscrutable but who's also believes to represent the last best hope of survival for all that exists. What are you going to do about that?

Quote from: GrimGent;363446By design, he's a constant reminder of the setting's unfairness and a challenge to the sensibilities of the PCs, a built-in guarantee of conflict. So there's a monster on the throne of the world, a distant tyrant whose decrees and demands may seem inscrutable but who's also believes to represent the last best hope of survival for all that exists. What are you going to do about that?

Call the author a heavy-handed hack, toss the rulebook, take up a setting which has even the slightest grain of subtlety about it, and brandish against the braying yea-sayers of Nobilis a single upraised middle finger, wreathed in flame.

Seriously, though, Lord Entropy isn't even a monster, he's a fucking cartoon, and Nobilis's setting is the worst case of kitchen sink mythology I have ever seen. It's like a third-rate Neil Gaiman cosmology cooked up by a thirteen year old.

When the Excrucians come the first thing I will feed them is the concept of Nobilis.