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Chaosium Digest Volume 15 Number 08
Chaosium Digest Volume 15, Number 8
Date: Sunday, August 11, 1996
Number: 1 of 2
Contents:
Flickering Light (Timothy Ferguson) NEPHILIM
Editor's Note:
This week, a pair of articles. First, in V15.8, an article on creating
a Gothic setting in Nephilim. Second, in V15.9, a fun
Christian-oriented adventure for Pendragon.
Shannon
NEW RELEASES:
* Call of Cthulhu - _Tales of Terror_ (Pagan Publishing, $9.00) is a
book I mentioned last week, which contains more than 50 Tales of
Terror. I erroneously stated that it would be available in stores.
Not so. It's only available through Pagan Publishing's Mail Order
catalog. Phone numbers and addresses for ordering can be found at
http://www.halcyon.com/rev/outsider.html.
_Dwellers in Shadow_ (Triad, 120 pg., $18.95) is a book of six Call
of Cthulhu adventures. They cover a wide range of times, from the
prehistoric past, to the 1920s and the Cthulhu Now era. This is the
fifth Call of Cthulhu supplement that Triad has produced.
RECENT BOOKS OF NOTE:
* Elric! - _The Road Between The Worlds_ (White Wolf, 390 pg., $21.99)
is sort of Elrician. It's the sixth collection in White Wolf's
Eternal Champion anthology set. It contains: The Wrecks of Time (aka
The Rituals of Infinity), The Winds of Limbo (aka The Fireclown) and
The Shores of Death (aka The Twilight Man), three of Moorcock's
science fiction novels. The stories have been minorly rewritten,
with several characters picking up the Von Beck name, and some new
bridging text, related to the Chaos Engineers, and other elements of
_Blood_ has been added.
Last week, I noted the new Ramsey Campbell collection, _Far Away &
Never_, available from Necronomicon Press. Chris Jarocha-Ernst, Mythos
Bibliographier, said the following about the book: "The Mythos
connection is that most of these stories are set on Tond, a planet
mentioned in passing in 'The Inhabitant of the Lake', 'The Mine on
Yuggoth', 'The Franklyn Paragraphs', 'Before the Storm', and 'The
Render of the Veils'." Tond is also featured very prominently, in a
more Mythos oriented light, in "A Madness from the Vaults", most
recently reprinted in the expanded 1993 Headline edition of _Cold
Print_.
NEW ELECTRONIC RESOURCES:
Necronomicon Press 1996 Catalog
ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cthulhu/necropress/catalog96
This new 1996 catalog is the most up-to-date listing of all of
Necronomicon Press' books. Take a look at it for a plethora of Mythos
related books and magazines.
The HP Lovecraft Archive
http://www.primenet.com/~dloucks/hpl
This set of pages on HPL, constructed with the assistance of Lovecraft
scholars ST Joshi and David E. Schultz, is probably the best resource
about the Grand Old Man available on the net. It contains notes on his
life, his writings and a whole bunch more. Compiled and maintained by
Donovan K. Loucks.
--------------------
From: Timothy Ferguson <Timothy.Ferguson@jcu.edu.au>
Subject: Flickering Light
System: Nephilim
Author's note:
This article was inspired by a re-reading of _The Chill Companion_.
Althought the ideas expressed are my own, there are somne similarities
in style (for instance, I notice I followed their method of calling
the villan "The Menace").
FLICKERING LIGHT
A supplement to aid play of Nephilim in a truly Gothic setting.
Gothic is Not Angst-Driven.
Gothic is Not Victorian.
Let's be clear from the beginning, what we mean when we say Gothic.
Gothic is a mood, a feeling, a style. Recently in roleplaying, a sort
of nihilistic pseudo-Gothic has become popular, but it's not terribly
useful for Nephilim players. The older, original form of Gothic is far
more useful for our purposes. It has three main foci:
* Inamicable nature
* Triangular romance
* Physical decay
In recent roleplaying trends, physical decay has so overshadowed the
other elements as to make them invisible. Within Nephilim, however,
these two are the most important Gothic elements, with crumbling
structures coming a distant third. The point of this essay is to give
you a few suggestions for developing Gothic stories in the old
tradition.
THE TAINTED WORLD
Nature does not like you.
In Gothic tales, the weather, and more generally, most natural
settings, dislike the protagonist and agitate to harm them. Oddly
enough, many players will become irritated at a GM who, for instance,
creates blizzards when they are least convienient.
Gamemasters are forced either to rely on coincidence or to stretch
credibility. In some mystical settings the presence of the menace,
Dracula for instance, allows you to explain why the weather hates the
characters so. In Victorian London, the weather is always bad, so the
players don't feel picked on when it is bad for them. Before designing
a scenario, try to find a way to explain why the weather is working
against the characters.
If you want to run an ongoing campaign, you might like to try the
following rationale, which gives a gamesmaster a blank cheque to
bedevill the characters.
The Intelligence
The Nephilim were once KaIm, creatures of great power who reveled in
the world, shaping themselves and their environment to maximize their
innocent pleasures. Then the Black Star fell, shattering the spires of
Atlantis and spilling its bile into the magical fields. The KaIm were
crippled and cast down, their bodies destroyed as their minds were
shattered. Manipulation of the fields of magic, once as simple to them
as breathing is to us, became more difficult as those fields began to
thicken. Ka vision became cloudy. Since the time of the Fall, Nature
has been at odds with the Nephilim.
The Millennium was a time of great mystical turbulence, but, in
hindsight, most Nephilim felt the victory had been theirs. Pope
Sylvester the Second had failed to enslave the Nephilim and the
Templar's Grand Plan had been set back a thousand years.
Unfortunately, ill-luck comes in threes. As the Second Millenium
dawned, the vindictive side of nature became self-aware. The Nephilim
have no proof that this has occured, save that coincidence seems, at
times, to work against them. Those few mystics who consider these
things call this entity "The Intelligence."
The Intelligence has been strengthening during the thousand years
since its awakening. In medieval times, it was able to do little more
than create foul weather and the occassional rat plague. In the modern
era, its power to meddle with tiny electrical charges has made it
increasingly powerful. In 1994 a Nephilim who claimed to be a
reincarnation of the Fool John, called the Baptist, claimed that the
Intelligence was preparing to take an avatar, who he called The
Incarnate. He mentioned that its mother would be a new Madonna known
throughout the world.
The advantages of The Intelligence as a plot device are several:
As the Intelligence is developing, it is less potent in the Middle
Ages, in case you want to try some Classic Gothic, while being
monstrous and frightening in the modern world.
You can feel free, henceforth, to stretch coincidence past the bounds
of all reason, so long as you only do it in certain areas where the
Intelligence is active.
The Intelligence allows you to run the plot out of most Devil or
Slasher flicks without using a Selenim.
As the powers of the Intelligence are never quite defined, you can
feel free to have its servants do just about anything and be fast and
loose with the rationale afterwards.
The Intelligence can be held at bay, but never actually destroyed, as
it is naturally disembodied. This allows it to act as a re-occuring
villian without the sticky matter of having to continually explain how
the Great Enemy escaped its last showdown with the player characters.
It also, however, allows you to tone down its powers, as it needs to
work through vessels, none of which have more than a tiny fraction of
its power.
Having a Power of Evil gives characters someone to sell out to. It
gives evil a source, so that characters can choose to damn themselves
to a certain being in exchange for power.
Powers of the Intelligence
The simplest power of the Intelligence is lodestoning. Any piece of
awakened orichalka suspended from a silver thread or chain will rotate
until one end points to the closest Nephilim, like a magnet toward the
North. Few secret societies are aware of this, because the trick with
the silver thread usually has to be taught. For the first twenty years
of its existence, the Intelligence was incapable of any other power.
Since then, it has developed the ability to affect weather, to empower
its minions, to preserve Orichalkan spirits and to manipulate flows of
Orichalka, so they are more likely to overlap. In the modern era, it
is far more potent, able to invade computer systems. The Secret
Societies are far from safe from its meddling, as the Orichalkan wards
in their machines are, in a sense, an extension of its presence.
Once it incarnates, it will act like a sort of Ka sponge, sucking in
magical energy and extruding litharge. Finally it will be murdered,
but in the process, it will open a path to a new form of
Enlightenment, previously known only to the Sun Arcarnum, the
Invisible Way.
Servants of the Intelligence
Imagine that the Black Star Meteorite was the stasis of a Nephilim and
that when it was crunched up, so was the creature within it, divided
into smaller and smaller pieces which were still in communication,
until they resembled, in a spiritual sense, the polyps in a coral reef
or the neurons in a brain. This is the sturcture of the Intelligence.
If a piece of Orichalka is doubly awakened, that tiny section of the
Intelligence is able to manifest itself physically. Such double
awakening is rare, as most pieces of Orichalka are tiny, and the
ceremony too difficult and costly to be performed solely to produce
insect-sized creatures.
The Intelligence is aware of a block of pure Saturnian stone some two
meters across which is buried in the Sickness Country around
Coronation Hill, Australia. If it is able to dig it up, it could
manifest one of its largest subsections. Its second-largest section is
in the Middle East. The largest is stored in the United States, to
await the Millenium and the Incarnation. It will manifest a special
form which will allow it to double awaken all Orichalka bought into
its presence. The middling chunks, of which there are currently a
scant dozen, have produced Hollow Men, Selenim-like creatures. These
beings are a little like the Intelligence's split personalities.
Occasionally, they war on each other, to dominate the Intelligence at
the expense of their fallen foe. Splitting the lump of Orichlka that
made these creatures tends to kill them, causing them to reproduce by
fission. When viewed in the Magical fields, they, like all Orichalka,
are a void or space; they are literally "Hollow". [IMC, the spirits in
SS are also hollow, not black. This is a minor quibble, but I prefer
to keep black colours for the Black Moon.]
The Intelligence really doesn't care if the world knows of its
existence. Its servants advertise its presence, forming their own
secret societies. The highest priests of the Intelligence are warped
by it, as in essence they have surrendered their freedom to their
master, in exchange for magical skills or powers. These servants are
usually called Archons. Their primary purpose is to create areas where
the Intelligence is strong. They usually do this by creating tiny,
evil Aspiriations, a new magical creature which will be described in a
later article.
Creatures sometimes form in Orichalkan plexuses. The Intelligence uses
them sparingly, as they are easily depleted outside of those areas in
which it is potent. To humans they are terrifying, but for Nephilim
they are even worse, as the creatures can be used in suicide strikes,
where the creature and the victim mutually annihilate. [Indeed, the
Silver Death, a suicidal and destructive Orichalkan Creature, is
described in the recently released _Nephilim Gamemaster Companion_
-sda]
Lastly, in places where the Intelligence's minions have been active
for some time, reality warps to its will. This is not an enormous
change, but little things will tend to follow its instructions in this
area. Candles will snuff out at the most inconvenient of times, cars
will break down, food will foul, street signs will become coated in
dust.
The Secret of the Intelligence
Some few Magicians prepare for the coming Millenium, but they will be
betrayed and destroyed by a powerful group of Nephilim who wish to
embrace the Anti-Prophet.
Have you ever wondered what makes the Solar Arcanum unique? After
all, everyone seems to know their Big Secret. Isn't everyone on the
Road to Argatha?
No.
The Solar Arcanum takes things to a terrifying extreme, one so
frightening that their early missionaries were scorned or killed by
other Nephilim, who have instead chosen the comparatively easy route
of Agartha's Golden Path.
The Solar Arcanum is a suicide club.
The believe that the Black Sun and White Sun should be fused together
to create a source of unending power, a process that, to other
Nephilim, looks precisely and exactly like being extinguished. In
fact, they aren't, they go on as Litharge spirits, invisible to the Ka
Vision even of the Agarthans. They are, in essence, above meddling
with the magical fields. For them, the whole Invisible World of
Litharge objects, places and spaces is available. The Hollow Men may
be the Jungian shadows, in a sense, of the elemental Nephilim.
They believe that the anti-Fool will finally force other Nephilim to
take their more extreme measures seriously, will finally force other
Nephilim out of their complacency and out of the half-measures
employed in the quest for Agartha.
Half-measures?
Yes. Solar Nephilim differ from the others in a basic respect. They
believe that being elemental is somehow wrong. Its regressive. Being
Embodied in Matter is basically an anchor that stops Nephilim taking
adavntage of the Great Opportunity. The problem is that the average
Djinn thinks that burning is a good idea. The average Slyph likes
being a creature of the winds. The Invisible Path demands that all of
that be given up, that the Agarthan path of becoming so self-centred
that the universe becomies ignorable be discarded. Try explaining this
to a Satyr:
"But if I if I give up my element and my nature, then I'm nothing!"
"That's the idea!"
"Screw that for a joke."
You can see their problem. Enough Metaphysics! Back to some meat!
The point of the weather section of Gothic horror is to give you a
moody backdrop for the main action, but also to prevent the characters
moving away from where you want them to be. You put them in the
castle, you move in the blizzard, they are staying there. You want the
villan to get away and the rain buffets down or the pea-soup fogs
rise.
The rest of nature is just as friendly. Trails move in woodlands, for
example. Rivers rise and waves crash. The sun doesn't come up at dawn,
but stays down forever, if need be. Machines break down, horses lose
their shoes. Cats whine. If you accept the Intelligence, it is far
from stupid. It's perfectly willing to make the place where the
characters live the gloomy castle, while that of its minions remains
light and airy. Remember, the characters are supernatural in this
game. If you want mirrors to shatter as they approach, then that's
fine too.
TORRID LOVE
Gothic literature seems to have started as a sub-genre of romance.
True Gothics contain a troubled romance, often, but not always, a love
triangle between the Hero, Heroine and Menace. Dracula, for instance,
contains such a triangle. Some later Gothic authors, Poe for instance,
begin to leave this sort of thing out, which begins the movement
toward American Pulp. The rule of the Romance is:
It's got to be central to the story. The person threatened has to be
important to the character. You have a right to demand this from
your players. If they are cynical, callous or just goldbricking,
then you may fairly set them up as the Gothic menace.
There have be multiple layers of threat to the romance. Harker's
kisses with the Brides of Dracula are as much a threat to his
betrothal as Dracula's seduction of Mina. Note also that in movie
versions of most stories the Menace is sexy whereas the Hero is, well,
gentlemanly. If you need inspiration, go past alt.romance and ask "Why
do nice guys finish last?" You'll get the same sort of response to
that of women in Gothic novels. They want a nice and respectable
husband, but before that a bit of charming and illicit lust seems
attractive.
The point is that if the player, for instance, gives in to the menace
rather than their Love, then they should lose their "soul", that is,
they should lose some of their free will and many of their options for
doing good through their own will. Imagine what Mina would have lost
had she become Dracula's Queen. Enforce the costs of falling into
temptation.
If you aren't going to go that way, reverse it completely and make the
Rival so horrible that he can never be accepted, so this drives him to
do terrible things. Frankenstein's monster, for instance, offers to
leave Victor alone if only he will make a female monster.
The thing to do is review your players and use their preferences to
set up the romantic partners for the characters. There need not be
pairs; Lucy Westrana's armours, for instance, demonstrate that a
single woman, in the right setting, can have her hooks in half-a-dozen
men. Its not as hard as it sounds, because, unless you are casting the
player into the Menace role, the romance is all of the sending flowers
and swooning type. Gothic's heroes are generally not bodice-rippers.
Immortal romances are different to those of humans. The main problem
is boredom. Humans can't keep things together for a single lifetime in
most cases and Nephilim are little better. Those familiar with CQ
Yarbro's Saint Germain Chronicles will be familiar with her technique,
where the hero is searching continually for love, but only finds it
after hundreds of years. In the interim, he has an on-again-off-again
relationship with a woman, most of which is carried in by letter. Its
advantage is that when they do meet each other, they have separate
life-experiences to relate.
The Lovers Arcanum mentions that there are several ways to get a
romance together which goes on eternally. The easiest is to have two
stases fused together, so that the characters are stuck together
forever, love or hate each other. The second method is rather more
complicated, and is stolen from R. Chetwynd-Hayes. It's based on
shrines.
If two things have been together, metaphysically they stay together.
This is the law of Contagion. Two things that are similar are the
same. This is the law of Similarity.
Once a romantic character awakes, he or she begins to gather together
things that were prized in the life of their love, or things similar
to those items. Eventually, the links of contagion become so strong
that those mediating in these chapels can feel the an empathy with
their lover. Eventually, the character's shrine can awaken the loved
one, with the character losing their next Ka advancement, to kick
their love out of their stasis. It is recorded that two Nephilim from
ancient Greece hated each other so deeply that they performed similar
rituals, to renew their duel at each stage of human history. They are
back in the 1990s, preparing again to slug it out, this time through
the worlds stockmarkets.
CRUMBLING THINGS
Things don't just break because it's possible; they do it to reflect a
moral. The Church crumbles because a place is godless. Houses fall
because they are benighted by their inhabitants. When you are laying
in hard with the grey and black tones, be careful that everything is
not uniformly squalid. There are so many games out there based on dark
themes, that I don't feel any need to go into Crumbly things, beyond
this minor caution.
Originally I'd planned to place Aspirations, a new type of magical
creature, here, but it'll be in a separate document. Watch for it in a
future issue of the Chaosium Digest.
--------------------
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