Posted on December 4, 2010 by Jenna
So the first supplement for the new Nobilis 3e is looking to be
Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine,
or
Nobilis: Campaigns,
Volume 1: Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine,
or something like that!
I haven’t formally decided to go all out with the colons and stuff. There’s still time for someone to stop me. I don’t really mean you, although a loud enough voice will matter, I really mean either Hsin or my own conscience. On the other hand, they may push me to do it instead!
You can’t trust consciences.
Their agenda is their own!
There are some key decisions that are yet to be made here. This is because I’m pushing them to the end. For instance, right now, Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is high school anime. I’m still considering pushing the characters older or reskinning the magic to high fairy tale, steampunk, or sufficiently advanced science. The amount of rewriting involved is high but not really much more than I do for any given draft of any project.
Still, we can say this much about what’s in the project.
First, it’s a setting. Technically Nobilis already has a setting, which makes this a variation instead. But where the default Nobilis setting is pretty heavy on the metaphysics and pretty light on the who-lives-where and does-it-have-bus-service, the CMWGE setting is a nice little Town where things like that become defined.
Second, it’s a bunch of characters. That’s not really a big thing. It’s not like Nobilis characters are hard to make. But it’s a nice set of characters for days when you’re feeling lazy or when you want to sit down at the table or stand up at a LARP with a bunch of gaming or Nobilis or CMWGE newbies, hand out the characters, and go.
Finally, there’s a story infrastructure based on the old Projects capsystem, which is basically designed to make sure nobody ever finds themselves going “agh wtf do I do now I can’t think of anything” again, or, at least, that you never have to do it longer than it takes to find the right page in Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.
You know how once you have the broad outlines of what you’re trying to do, a typical task or conflict resolution system will tell you what to roll to attempt it? This is basically the other side of that, a tool linking the obvious details of what’s going on or what you’re focusing your attention on to its place in the story.
I suspect half of you have now decided it’s some kind of Story Now thing and the other half of you think it’s fruity and/or non-mechanical, but it’s not! It’s not any of that. It’s just a useful tool for knowing exactly what to do, because I wanted to be able to run this thing no-prep in the time it takes for people to familiarize themselves with their character sheets.
Oh!
Though, speaking of character sheets, I should admit that they have gotten pretty long. I realized that if I lowered the power level a bit and took away “every character has every Attribute” for the space of just one book, I could just write down what each character can do instead of their Traits, and with a minimum of redundancy and/or “see pg. XX for the full rules on this.” So on the one hand, when I say “familiarize themselves with their character sheets,” I really do just mean that; on the other, it’s really closer to a “character packet” than a character sheet.
Best wishes,
Jenna