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 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. -------------------- The Chaosium Digest is an unofficial electronic 'zine about Chaosium's Games. In no way should it be considered representative of the views or beliefs of Chaosium Inc. To submit an article, subscribe or unsubscribe, mail to: appel@erzo.org. The old digests are archived on ftp.csua.berkeley.edu in the directory /pub/chaosium, and may be retrieved via FTP.