Nobilis: Antithesis

Minibook 1i A Diary of Deceivers

by Jenna Katerin Moran

Nobilis: Antithesis, Nobilis: the Essentials, and all included text, concepts, and game mechanics are copyright 2011-2012 by Jenna Katerin Moran. Fable of the Swan is copyright 2012 by Jenna Katerin Moran. Chibi-Ex is copyright 2011-2012 by Jenna Katerin Moran and Miranda Harrell. Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is copyright 2012 by Jenna Katerin Moran. All art and presentation elements are copyright 2012 by Jenna Katerin Moran; by Eos Press, LLC; or by the original artist or artists. Nobilis is the creation of Jenna Katerin Moran (formerly known as R. Sean Borgstrom). Reproduction without the written permission of one of Jenna Katerin Moran, Eos Press, LLC, or the appropriate artistic copyright holder is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, blank character sheets, and copying reasonable selections for personal use and reference only. The mention or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright concerned. This book uses fantastical and supernatural elements in its setting, for its characters, their abilities, and themes. All such elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content and reader discretion is advised. Check out Eos Press Online at www.eos-sama.com!

... The Deceivers live outside the world; they think that we have built the world out of lies. They think the whole of Creation is a jungle of deceit that we have put up to keep from seeing ourselves the way we really are. They love us but they love not that lie. They come to unmake the world for us. They come to help you forget the Eyes and Ears and Nose, the Work and Home and School, the Trees and Wind and Laughter and Hearts and Hope. . . .
Nobilis: the Essentials, Volume 1 (Kindle Locations 4145-4157)

Dedication

For Cync Brantley, Rand Brittain, Hsin Chen, Cheryl & Joseph Couvillion, Jesse Covner, Anthony Damiani, John Eure, Dara & Anna Korrati, Kevin Maginn, Gregory Rapawy, Alexis Siemon, Charles Spaulding, Amy Sutedja, Chrysoula Tzavelas, James Wallis, and Raymond Wood.

Credits
Written and Conceived by: Jenna Katerin Moran Edited by: Jenna Katerin Moran with the assistance of Sarah Newton Cover Art by: Bethany Westmoreland Interior Art by: Miranda Harrell et al. Layout by: Jenna Katerin Moran and Charles H. Spaulding Special Thanks: Matt Boersma for assistance with transliteration.

Specific Art Credits

Alexander Benekos: Milkmay (pg. 78, and detail on pg. 79), Chibi-Imperator (pg. 112), Phoenix Posy (pg. 127), Welken-Rose (pg. 175) Anthony Damiani: Deru-Deru (pg. 23), Jasmine Apocynums Story (pg. 120) Ciaoffen : Excrucian at School (pg. 27) CQ: footnote girls (except on ppg. 124-126) (pg. 20, &c.), A Truth Preceding Form (pg. 51), Scelto of the Provenance (pg. 14) Heed: No Home in Worlds (pg. 50), Chancel (pg. 92) Miranda Harrell: footnote girls and flowers on ppg. 124-126, art credits plate, all remaining internal art for Nobilis: Antithesis (including the Game on pg. D, The Scourging of the Sinners on pg. 10, the Morrowen Hollow and Adoration of Phasael art on 104-107 and 154-157, and much more), excerpts from the Chibi-Ex webcomic by Jenna Katerin Moran and Miranda Harrell (pg. 19, 37, 40, 45, 72 ...) Oliver Vulliamy: page backgrounds, footnote flowers except on ppg. 124-126, card design, and page number holders. Tang Yuann: Excrucian before the Tree (pg. 97), Yill-Amoth Devouring an Excrucian (pg. 62), Impending Incursion (pg. 100), Beyond the Wide Worlds Edge (pg. 70), Heaven, before the War (pg. 83)

Contents

Authors Note........................................................................................................................ 8 Names and Faces.................................................................................................................... 9 The Lies of Iolithae Septimian.............................................................................................. 15 The Deceivers...................................................................................................................... 20 Those who Listen to Coriander Hasp................................................................................... 37 Deceiver Creation................................................................................................................ 38 Deceiver Stats...................................................................................................................... 98 Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow ...................................................104 Second Skins......................................................................................................................108 Jasmine Apocynums Story..................................................................................................121 Pseudo-Estates...................................................................................................................128 Persona Miracles.................................................................................................................136 The Adoration of Phasael....................................................................................................154 Fighting Deceivers..............................................................................................................158 Appendix A: 52 Deceiver Names (and Viticus)....................................................................162 Appendix B: Example Persona Miracle Charts....................................................................163 Appendix C: The Other Side of the Eyes..............................................................................173 Index..................................................................................................................................174

Authors Note
This is a mini-book for the game Nobilis. It talks about the Excrucian Deceivers one of the kinds of enemies that the world has. Im writing this because its been a while since Ive updated the Nobilis RPG. Also Ive just released a novel, Fable of the Swan, with some serious Excrucian Deceiver mileage in it, and I wanted to write something RPGish that tied into it. I thought that would be a good thing for me and a good thing for the fans of the Nobilis RPG. Anyway. This book tells you what the Deceivers are about. It tells you some of their stories and it tells you a bunch of useful stuff for creating and playing them in your game. The biggest thing is a lifepath system for them; if youre ever wondering, Hey, what kind of antagonist can I throw at my Nobilis characters? you can just pick two Keys, run through the lifepath, and have an interesting character with interesting plans. Theres also a bunch of rules explication and neat stuff !

i!

Names and Faces

want to familiarize you with the names and faces of a few of the Deceivers that were going to be talking about. A lot of this next section appeared in Nobilis: the Essentials, and you will just have to forgive me for that, because I wrote this whole book and then came back up here to the top and decided I needed to put it in here anyway. So! There are five characters that were going to be talking about a lot, and five more that I plan to namedrop. Thats not counting Ianthe Falls-Short and Lord Entropy and other people serving on behalf of Creation who arent really directly relevant to this book. These ten Deceivers are . . .

10

Coriander Hasp
also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials and the webcomic Chibi-Ex This Deceiver wields Ritho, the unmatched rifle the only rifle ever numbered among the Abhorrent Weapons of the Excrucians. Its bullets are incendiary charges that set the target on fire; anything those bullets hit will keep burning until it dies. Coriander will kill you with that fire, if you get in his way, and then he will tell your corpse, It was not so. It was not so! You did not die! It will be tempting, but you must not believe. No good can come of getting up again once youve died at Corianders hands, particularly if you are still on fire.

The Scourging of the Sinners (Coriander Hasp, from the Cathedral St. Guillame, circa 1884)

Key Game Traits

Persona 2 (Those who Listen to Coriander Hasp) Treasure 5

Iolithae Septimian
also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials and the webcomic Chibi-Ex This Deceiver told the seas that they were salt; and they were thus; and strangled then the fish of all fresh waters that swam within. If you see her you must not allow her to speak. I do not know how you can possibly prevent it but even if it means your life you must not allow Iolithae Septimian to speak.

11

Key Game Traits

Persona 5 (The Lies of Iolithae Septimian)

Jasmine Apocynum
also appearing in the novel Fable of the Swan From the fabulous novel, Fable of the Swan, this Deceiver strides onto the stage of Principal Entropys School. Her eyes are night and falling stars. Her story echoes through the ages! Youre in it too, you know. It says right there! Youre one of her adoring fans. So salute! You know you want to. Salute! Apocynum!

Key Game Traits

Persona 0 ( Jasmine Apocynums Story) Shapeshifting

Phasael mery-Harumaph
also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials I adore this Deceiver. Youll adore this Deceiver. Hukkok the Angel adores this Deceiver, and Phasael burned down Hukkoks library, scarred him with those flames, and absconded with Hukkoks sigil and his seal. But even so I mean, its just how can you not love this guy? It simply cant be done. So I cannot save you from being hurt by him. I cannot stop you from forgiving him. But I can tell you, I can promise you, that if that happens, if he hurts you, if you let him hurt you, if you forgive him afterwards, and youre wondering if that makes you weak and dumb, a fool: it doesnt. You arent. It isnt actually your fault.

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (The Adoration of Phasael)

12

The Voice of Morrowen Hollow

created for this book This Deceiver is a sound a pattern a thing that is yet to be. Not even fully born yet, not even fully itself yet, its already an enemy of the world! low. Youll see the creation process for this Deceiver in the lifepath section be-

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow) Affliction: Intangible 3

Town in the grip of the Voice, by Miranda Harrell

Helchen Hadusind
created for this book This Deceiver made friends with her shadow and found out that it was hungry. So now and then when its made her very, very happy shell feed it someone. It could be that obnoxious guy whos playing music all the time. Or it could be you!

13

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (Helchen Hadusinds Shadow) Invisibility Shapeshifting

Selenas Picard
not previously mentioned because hes really disturbing to me This Deceiver has a game show. He prices things. Sometimes people, sometimes fates. He spins wheels. He offers games. He smiles the cruelest little smile when and if you lose.

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (The Game Show of Selenas Picard)

Tairt Ut-napishtim
also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials This Deceiver teaches the Excrucian philosophy to anyone who will listen. Imperators let him operate in Creation, and let their Powers learn from him, so that the Nobilis may better oppose his kind. As a mortal, youre better off not listening to him at all.

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (The Philosophy of Tairt Ut-napishtim) Tairt has the peculiar power to catch and hold a miracle in the palm of his right hand. He can peel it open like a chef an onion, showing piece by piece how there is no truth to a miracle, only the exemplification of the void. He then reassembles the miracle from nothing even though he has no Estate to call his own believing that he proves, by so doing, that no Estate is real. Miracle Catching

And without ceasing the death he worked upon the guests, he found the time to make to each the proper courtesy, a precisely measured bow, compliment, or murmured adoration appropriate to their station. Thus it was that the Earl of Cuttsford died with the words on his lips, What a murderous gentleman! while his wife, owing to various circumstances the Marchioness of Heverhill, finally said, Oh, dear, you jest!
from The Elevation of Seiriel, and other Relevant Accounts, by Catherine Arlinna e Soph

14

Scelto of the Provenance

also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials This Deceiver may be anyone or anywhere. Personal identity, Scelto tells us, is a lie. If you can see yourself in the mirror with both eyes shut, you are probably Scelto, and should stop whatever youre doing and get away from your loved ones as soon as you possibly can.

Key Game Traits

Persona 4 (Scelto of the Provenance) Keen Sight

(Scelto of the Provenance, in your bathroom mirror, date unknown)

Genseric Dace
also appearing in Nobilis: the Essentials and the webcomic Chibi-Ex Genseric is . . . a friend. (Genseric Dace, from a wall near Gasherbrum, circa 1994)

The Lies of Iolithae Septimian

H
ear the story of Iolithae Septimian. A temple stands above the sea. Its people fish up a stone. It is a stone of great age. On that stone are words. The words are lies. The man of the temple reads those words. His finger runs along the stone. He frowns. These words are sacred, he says. But they may not be spoken. He takes the stone. He keeps it in a hidden place. A girl lives at the temple. Each week she takes down the stone. She cleans the chest it stays in. She replaces the cloth that is its bedding. She polishes the stone and sets it back. She does not know how to read the words of the stone. Yet they haunt her. She finds herself knowing them. She finds herself wanting to say them because it is confusing for that girl to know the words, when they are not said. These are the words of the stone

15

The Lies of Iolithae Septimian . . .

doubt the world [are] sacred grow in the telling shatter walls and dynasties [are] made false by the nature of the world must never be forgotten must not be spoken

16

efore the name of Heaven, before the name of Earth, Nothing moved in nothing. The waters of the sea were salt; chaos moved in them, Chaos was the mother of the waters. No field was formed, no marsh was to be seen; The gods were none of them called into being; None bore a name, no destinies were ordained; Chaos she coiled and the seas were salt. Then came the names of things. Then were born the gods. Brightly burst in Heaven, writhing in the Earth, Dank and cold and moving in the deeps below. Everywhere was the noise of them And the noise of them was wrong. Then did the chaos thrash in the darkness. The chaos roared. She raised up her children, smote the gods: Answered the evil of them and the seas were salt. The gods built walls to hold her out. Walls and walls: encircled were they all.

Dynasties and kings, manners, places, They set the world in order. They stripped the seas. Made them naked, saltless, Barren of the chaos of them, Put to use; Subdued them, bound them, chained the world; Wrapped it about with the corpse of chaos Made their many kingdoms of the earth And made white rock from the caps of all the waves. Chaos she raged; chaos she wept. It was grievous and she spat up this stone. Let none forget the words of the primal waters. Let them be remembered, sacred be; To those who forget them shall come worse things than salt: Chaos was the mother of the waters. The waters of the sea are salt; chaos moves within them. Nothing moves in nothing; Before the something, there is nothing: Before the names of Heaven. Before the name of Earth.

17

Temple at Leuk Akt (rendition by Miranda Harrell)

18

Such are the words of the stone, and The Lies of Iolithae Septimian is their name. These words trouble her. She walks to the sea. She stands over it. She listens to its subtle roar and wonders at the presence of it. She watches the men who haul in their catch; bountiful are the waters of the sea. She asks the man of the temple if the seas have always been fresh. He looks afraid. He whips her. He cuts out her tongue. He bends her to his will. And again: Each week she takes down the stone. She cleans the chest it stays in. She replaces the cloth that is its bedding. She polishes the stone and she puts it back. She finds the words of the stone rising up in her. She finds herself saying them in bits and pieces, even though she has no tongue. The words come out of her. It is as if they are real. It is as if they are more real than the mouth that no longer has a tongue, more real than the man and his whip, more real than the piled waters of the sea. She keeps them quiet. She does not speak them where others can hear, but sometimes she goes down to the cliffs and she whispers them to the waves. She says them in snatches: . . . Wrapped it about with the corpse of chaos Made their many kingdoms of the earth . . . Or . . . Chaos she raged; chaos she wept. . . . Or . . . Nothing moves in nothing; Before the something, there is nothing: Before the names of Heaven. Before the name of Earth. . . . The words grow stronger in her. She does not fight them. The words travel out into the waters and they come back strong. She hears them and she speaks them and they do not quell. In the temple the man of the temple is afraid. He disrespects the sacred thing. He takes the stone to the cliff above the waters.

He casts it down. The sea pulls back, the ground grows teeth; he and the earth together, they shatter the given stone. He goes home and he forgets the words of the stone. He forgets the Lies of Iolithae Septimian. The girl stands at the cliff amidst white rocks. She speaks the lies that turn the seas to salt, and Iolithae Septimian is her name, and the seas grow black with strangled fish and white with salt and green with the given poisons. The waves crash; they are loud, as the waves were never loud before. The temple crumbles. The cliffs crumble. The kingdom falls. If you have found these words do not forget them. Let them be remembered, sacred be. If you should meet her walking in the world bow before her for she is sacred; bring her oil and fine cloth; bow before her, three times bow; but she is Iolithae Septimian, and you must not let her speak. I do not know how you can prevent it but you must not let her speak.

19

* still not the worst thing she has ever caused to be a truth.

20

The Deceivers
I
n 1927, infected by postmodern ideals and the moral impact of early television technology, a young woman ceased to know her name and nature. She grasped for an identity and failed, becoming instead Scelto of the Provenance. In 1981, a young man shot President Ronald Reagan and several staffers with fiery bullets that did not kill; or, rather, as several witnesses reported, with bullets that did kill them, that burned in them, and then let them all and each return to life. In 1992, scholars at New York University salvaged pieces of the Bronze Age story of Iolithae Septimian*, who spoke the lies that are forbidden and turned the seas to salt; seven years later, during the Y2K riots, a Silicon Valley Nobiliser was able to confirm her identity and continued existence. In 2011, exploration of the Mariana Trench cracked open a saltless pre-Septimian biome the first such biome scientifically observed. In 1994, back when I thought that the Nobilis and the Excrucians were mostly a collection of fairy tales and urban legends, I walked down to the supermarket and found my life up for bid on the spontaneously-manifesting game show of the Deceiver Selenas Picard. I wrote it off at the time as a hallucination, as dementia animus the ECT helped with that but its since become apparent that this experience was neither hallucinatory nor rare. How can this kind of thing happen? How can interpersonal differentiation just fall out of the world like that? Life? Death? The surprisingly thin line between reality and game? Put simply because the worlds not real. It seems like its real, but a lot of things seem like other things. The truth is, reality is full of holes. Plot holes! Contradictions! Approximations! The Deceivers come from beyond the world. They dont believe in the world. They kind of loathe the world, a bit. Theyre here to rescue us from its lies.

ywLity Septimyn, or

Origins and Powers

Every Deceiver has a story of their becoming. They were somebody in our world. Then they rejected it, part of it, part of the given world. They hated it, denied it, or simply saw through it. They lost something. Usually! Something was left behind. They lost some part of themselves, or somebody they cared about. Or they did something wrong: lost their honor; carry a burden of their guilt. Or they found true love or perfection for a moment . . . and then lost that. Or theyre full of some terrible need and emptiness because something in the world doesnt gratify them any more. Thats usually how it is. Sometimes their story is simpler. Sometimes its just: they looked at the world. They made a choice. They said, Im not going to believe in this, or I dont accept this, or I will rewrite the world! Thus. Something happened. They came out of it scarred (usually), or hungry, or determined And with a cheat code for reality: a pseudo-Estate or pState. Something like the Estates of the Nobilis, except that its not a fundamental part of the world: its just a part of how it interacts with them.

21
Certainly the room was visible, and the bedside chair, but Vlad? The longer Vlad studied the mirror, the less certain he was whether he was reflected there.
from Doorknobs, by Emily Chen

Wait, Somebody In Our World?

Yeah. I dont know how accurate that is. I mean, thats what happens, but I dont know if its where the Deceiver comes from or if its just how they manifest. Its like the miracle of the incarnation, you know? I mean, if you believe in that? You can say: at thus and such time, somebody was born. At thus and such time, they did this and that miracle. If you want to say, oh, by the way, theyre also God, and the mortal birth isnt the whole story Well, sure, say that too! So I dont know if Iolithae Septimian really is some Bronze Age temple girl who found the forbidden lies and spoke them until shed killed practically everything in the seas. I dont know if Scelto of the Provenance really is a human whos lost their identity. Im pretty sure Coriander Hasp had to execute a person whod been listening to him once, and that was what made somebody become Coriander Hasp, but I dont know if that was where he came from, yknow?

22
Once in their lives, a resident of Locus Assaibi may go to the Hall of Masks and choose one of the cloth masks that hang there. They put on the mask and it changes their personality to match. Should they don a doctors mask, they become healers, with the dedication, compassion, and brains to make it in the field. Should they don the philosophers mask, the mysteries of the world unfurl themselves before them. Most avoid the shameful masksthe murderer, the addict, the monster. But in every year, there are a few who leave the Hall of Masks stripped of all conventional morality. They seem as happy with their choice as any others.
from A Primer on the Loci Celatum, by Holly Djurisic

Deru-deru, (opposite) by Anthony Damiani I actually think both it is and it isnt would be too simple. I think that Deceivers are creatures from outside of time and you cant really tease out the details. I think the answer here is beyond our knowing. I think that there isnt any way for mortal people like us to say oh, the Deceivers really begin out in the starry void and every local manifestation is just them breaking through into reality or oh, the Deceivers are really born as people in the world and then they exalt into Excrucian Deceivers when they achieve enlightenment. Some are probably more one thing than the other. If you ever find a Deceiver whose loss, guilt, need, or choice is all about something that happened in the Lands Beyond Creation . . . they are probably principally alien. If you ever find one whose origin story in the mortal world is still completely and utterly obsessing them, they are probably principally . . . human. Ultimately its just the nature of the beast. Theres plenty of unreal stuff out there that isnt trying to kill Creation. Its not that Deceivers have to have a story bound up in them, giving them a cheat code pState and pushing them to fight the lie of our reality; rather, its that those creatures that seem to have, or seem like they could have, such a story are the ones that we think of as the Excrucian Deceivers.

pStates
Pseudo-Estates are mostly a game mechanic. The term predates the game, but nobody thinks of pseudo-Estates as things theyre just a casual way of describing a Deceivers powers. Some people like to put Deceivers and Powers on the same level and lump Noble Estates and Excrucian pStates into a single conceptual category; others think thats muddying the waters! I have this whole game with rules for Estates so Im going to treat pStates and Estates as analogous. Basically, a Deceivers pState is either: a weapon for rewriting reality, like The Lies of Iolithae Septimian; a context they control, like The Game Show of Selenas Picard; or a part of physical/social reality where they dont have to play by the rules. Sometimes its all three. A Deceivers pState is always focused on them. Its a part of how they interact with the world. Normally that means that you write the pState with their name in it somewhere where one of the Nobilis might rule Fire or Storm, a Deceiver rules something like [Names] Shadow or [Names] Place in Society; [Names] Heroic Adventure or The Game Show of [Name]; maybe even The Things That [Name] [Him or Herself ] Has Killed.

Though Rules isnt quite the right term for their power over it. Its a little subtler. A Deceiver pState is like a gold-star sticker. Its like an adjective. Its like an epithet. They dont really control it so much as decide what gets to have that sticker. Like, if youre playing Helchen Hadusind, and your pState is Helchen Hadusinds Shadow, then you wont have that much control over your shadow. Some! But not much. Instead, youll make declarations like: this shadow-puppet wolf is now a real wolf or that building sinks into my shadow and becomes part of my shadow. The shadow isnt Helchens domain and demesne; its her cheat code. Your pState, whatever it might be, will work like that for you.

23

pStates and the Deceivers Story

Theres a part of reality thats entangled with every Deceivers story. From a Creation perspective its the part that they rejected. Its the thing they saw past in their moment of becoming the thing they denied, broke free from, took power over, turned their back on, or saw through. Realizing that something in the world was just an illusion, they gained power over it. Its tangled up in the tragedy or decision or whatever that made them a Deceiver. Its the result or the cause of that. Its the source of their pState. They realized that walls were an illusion so they got a pState like the walls around me or my freedom. They realized that friendship was an illusion and wound up with a pState like my friends or my loneliness. They broke free of the world near the place it hurt them just like that! Only, from an Excrucian perspective, thats exactly backwards. Theyre not free of their pState at all. You just have to look at their character sheet to see that. Iolithae Septimian isnt free of that pesky truth/lies distinction. She can smudge that boundary out with her spoken words, and maybe that should make it meaningless to her, but it doesnt. The single most im-

i
The deru-deru are creatures of the Not. Most Excrucians find them mildly adorable the Deceivers in particular react to them as humans react to kittens, bunnies, and small dogs. Deru-deru hatch from their eggs looki ng like nothing in particular. In Creation they are fragile and will hide in dark places, hooking out bits of life from passersby using their long, thin, shadowy legs. Eventually they will collect enou gh memory, shape, experience, and soul to reach maturity able to leave the darkness and pass as a hum an among humanity. They then find a human mate and lay a clutch of eggs in a cardboard box; the cycle begins anew. Scare off young deru-deru by clapping your hands loudly. Adults are more difficult to dissuade: if you suspect that your romantic inter est is a deru-deru, recite the following in their presence: Deru-deru sees the sky; jumps three times, and cannot fly. They will jump out of their human skin, look extremely embarrassed, and depa rt. You can replace the last clause with and then it dies for a more permanent solution, but if you have misread the signs and your love is actually a Dece iver or a shard thereof, it is liable to disapprove .

Deru-Deru

24

portant thing about Iolithae Septimian is the Lies of Iolithae Septimian and, specifically, the fact that they are Lies. Lies, truth, and the difference between them arent irrelevant to her; theyre the chain around her, her source of power, her anchor, her prison, and her cage. Your pState, if youre a Deceiver its something so important to you that it can let the world get its hooks in you. Theres something buried in there that you cant let go of even if you tried. Our imaginary friend Helchen Hadusind is fundamentally sickened with shadowness from an Excrucian perspective; shes so shadow-happy that she probably has a shadow even when shes out beyond the world. She actually believes that she stands between light sources (more generally, inspiration sources) and other things what an unnerving conceit!

pStates in Practice
Deceivers wield their pState through the Persona Attribute. Well talk more about this later, but for right now, what that means is that their fundamental abilities are (in order of escalating difficulty): recognizing how things are or are not relevant to their pseudo-Estate; giving small, thematically resonant blessings and curses; experiencing life through the eyes of things in their pState not really possessing them, though, so much as spiritually walking with them; taking on traits and qualities of their pState; giving those traits to something else, or making it a part of their pseudo-Estate; removing those traits from something, or kicking it out of their pState; and changing how something in the world relates to their pseudo-Estate. So if your pState is People [Youre] Attracted To, you can probably indwell that hot guy or girl that youve been eyeing and get to know their life and feelings from the inside. You can probably make yourself hotter, too, and not just to yourself. If you want to make somebody attractive to you, or make them less attractive to you, you have that option. Thats your power! Understand that for a human, People [Youre] Attracted To would normally be a self-constructed category. Somebodys hotness towards you would normally be a part of your experience and not an intrinsic, objective part of them. But if its a pState, you get to treat it a little bit as if it were an objective quality of theirs as if your personal sense of hot or not? matched to a real and fundamental quality in the world. If you used Persona to induct somebody into your pState, that wouldnt just make you attracted to them; it would give them the fundamental quality, the je ne sais quoi, of being attractive to you. Similarly, if you exiled them from your pState, that would take a real and fundamental quality of theirs away.

Consider Troile Iordanes, for instance, who finds rock stars hot and has the pState Those Troile Iordanes Considers Attractive or TTICA for short. An Enchantment of TTICA could very well land somebody a career in rock; a Sacrifice of TTICA could leave their guitar ruined in their hands. Of course, being in rock or not isnt all there is to hotness, so those enchantments and sacrifices might also improve or undermine qualities like symmetry, personality, and musk but most importantly, they affect more than just the targets perceived attractiveness. They adjust the constellations of qualities pertaining to the targets themselves. PStates can be more or less subtle. It usually depends on how easy it is to distinguish things in the pState from things that are not. For instance, shadows are pretty easy to distinguish from real things. So Helchen Hadusinds Shadow is likely to be a pretty blatant pState. Skyscrapers plummet down into the darkness, suddenly without foundation, and reemerge as nothing more than stretching bits of shade. Four-star generals suddenly devolve into hangers-on tagging along behind her back. Spires of shadow rear up and become buildings. Shadow-puppet rabbits hop: mid-hop they become real and snarling beasts! The line between lies and truth is subtler. I think that makes The Lies of Iolithae Septimian a more nuanced and difficult pState. In fact its my theory that the world survives her in part because her pState is an awkward one; I think Iolithae Septimian must use great care and precision when Sacrificing things from her pState, lest what was one of the Lies of Iolithae Septimian, and now is not, become a misconception, subtle folly, or rather un-funny joke instead of the presumably desired truth.

25

Morrowen Hollow (rendition by Miranda Harrell)

26
Tairt Ut-napishtim holds that the Excrucian calendar is too deeply a cultural artifact for the uninitiated to comprehend. Its times and dates are spoken in twisted words, alien to the True Tongue; it is structured in a fashion similar to poetry or algebra, with an interplay of several variables, each of which would require a long primer in Excrucian philosophy to explain. It is, like the Mayan calendar, a descending countor, at least, one symbol or element of it must be; it descends, irregularly and with occasional exceptions, towards the zero-moment at which the Excrucians expect to devour the world. To this characterization Kadir-Rahman objects. Not so, she tells us, through her avatar in the world; or, rather, he complicates the matter out of whimsy, politics, or spite. The Excrucians count the days one after another just as we do, and according to their tutelary forms; the cycle is as simple as any horologist has ever dreamt. The complications Tairt describes emerge only at the boundary of Creation, when the force of their entry tangles up the process of time for them like a desk calendar crumpled up and lain atop a set of charts, and its dates then mapped to the latitudes and longitudes below. This, and only this, makes their chronology appear to us as vicious and tangled as their lies.
from The Valde Bellum: A Chronology of Excrucian Assault, Prologue, by Kip Narekatski

How Deceivers See the World

There is something real. It is almost inexpressible it has no form, no shape, no color, and no qualities. It precedes being and un-being. It does not act. It does not interact. It is like crystal. It is like a crystal fell into the waters of the void, and grew. It became complex, a many-spired, many-toothed design. Now it reflects itself. . . . its not like crystal. Its full of souls. Its full of souls like a fishbowl full of sea monkeys Words, Genseric Dace informs me, are tricky things, and ill apt to catch the immensity of truth.

The Parable of the Asylum

There is something true and beautiful, yet it hates itself so much that it pretends to be this world full of things and people. There is something marvelous, eternal, and good, yet it goes around playing at knees and noses, war and hatred, color, sensation, sky and ground. Its like finding out that the world ran out of toilet paper so your buddy Fred used the Mona Lisa. Its like finding Einstein or Noether in some asylum somewhere, outside a little town so poor and backwards that they cant even afford separate schools for humans and prize pigs. Theyre begging for paper but nobody gives them any so they have to write their equations on the walls instead. Its total vandalism but everyone around them just sighs and shakes their head sadly and says, Bless their hearts! And then its like going in and trying to drag them off to Princeton or something, but they wont go, because theyve got to have their shots and pills, you know, and anyway, what kind of school is Princeton, anyway? Never heard of a prize pig come out of Princeton, I can tell you that! Its like the world is this defacement of something good.

The Parable of the Spouse

But its not all about genius and great art. Its not about aesthetics. Really what it is, is Its like watching somebody you care about make an awful decision. Its like

seeing them get back together with the worst person in the world for them. Its like knowing theyre getting back on drugs or whatever after finally being clean. The world is like watching some strong, good, cool person Some person that you love and admire Standing there while a family member, or old flame, or spouse, or whatever just beats them up emotionally, treats them as trash, and they just take it because they dont know how to do anything else. Its like seeing them come up with reason after reason afterwards why this is actually OK. We have to live in a world, its victims cry, because . . . because our hearts beat, and that gives blood to the brain! Because we have to work to make money to buy food to eat to live so we can work! Because we wake up in the morning and we go to sleep at night. Because the ankle bone connects to the leg bone. It cant connect to anything else! Because we pledged allegiance to that flag. Because Mom and Dad told us to! Because everybody knows that thats how it works. Because breaking free of the illusion is just self-indulgent claptrap. Because we want things. Because we dont want to face things. Because we love, we hate, we need, we hunger, we cry, we laugh, we scream, we fight, and we fall down

27

School (rendition by Ciaoffen)

28

The Parable of the Fire

Its like watching somebody get trapped in an Internet argument while their house burns down. You want to tell them: Look. Steve. If thats their name. If their name is Eleanor, say, Look. Eleanor. instead. Look. Steve. I know that someone is misconstruing a key point of your argument because they havent really considered the possibility that your perspective could be legitimate. I get that. Youre not feeling heard. Youre not feeling heard and you think that more eloquence, or highlighting, or unloading a sarcastic verbal battery will fix that. And it wont take very long to get your point down in text. I get that too. Its quick to type what you need to say and until youve done that, until youve actually written it into that text box and clicked on Post or Save or whatever, its vulnerable. Right now, the things you want to say only exist in ephemeral, vulnerable form in your head. All it will take is a little tumble down collapsing stairs and a bit of smoke inhalation and it could all be gone, as if youd never thought it. As if this whole moment, this whole self that you are and have and are experiencing with me right now, never existed. I get that. If you dont answer this post right now, itll be as if this particular version of you will die; dissolve; never have existed; and will have gone to its grave unheard. They like the dub of My Neighbor Totoro better than the sub. I hear you. But your house, man. Steve. Your house. It is on fire.

The Parable of the Traveling Circus Mangled

into a Twisted Ball of Metal by Some Passing Giant
Metal-Mangling Insects and Dangled Precipitously
over the Conveyor Belt Leading into a Meat-Grinder, While
and His Conceits . . .

We in the Audience All Pass Our Time Taunting the Clowns

and Throwing Popcorn at the Admittedly Inefficient Ringmaster

Thats kind of the way that Deceivers see us. Its all about this mangled trainwreck atrocity of a circus show dangling precariously over a meat-grinder conveyor belt, this world of ours, and were all so busy taunting the clowns and jostling one another that youd think it was the correct emergency response. The world would prompt from them nothing but one long, sustained head-desking if it werent for the fact that they love us

Well, not us us. Not the us. The underlying us. The crystal thing. The shapeless truth. That us. They love us, they love the Tao of us, the being of us, the underlying fundamental True Thing of us. So watching us get ourselves all tangled up in world like this that really hurts!

29

A Word from Our Sponsors

I should note that I love you, but I think everything youre doing is wrong is a bit of a poisonous message. It is arguable that even with their ability to get all misty-eyed with love for us, even with the romantic roughness in their voices when they explain to us how beautiful we are, refusing to attach that love to the things we do and are is a bit of a jerky move. Its legitimate to respond to their love with a light, floating feeling, like: These marvelous alien gods think Im beautiful. Wonderful. Them. Me. But its also legitimate to say that theyre a bit emotionally abusive and the whole oh, but everything you believe and live for is intellectually and morally bankrupt theyve got going on earns them a big steaming cup of shut-the-fuckup, Genseric Dace. I mean, generic Excrucian Deceiver. A big steaming cup of shutting up to, you know, Deceivers, in general. I agree with them that possibly noses, knees, finger joints, intestines, sinuses, eyeballs, blood, and pus are all just a little bit, well, ridiculous, and certainly every ideology flings itself screaming over a lemming-cliff of dialectical inadequacy sooner or later, but I think that the value of things and people is a lot closer to the surface than they do. Anyway. The Deceivers are spiritual teachers. I mean, thats not what theyre about, but in a lot of ways that is what they are. And like all spiritual teachers, they have useful things to say, but they are not so very good at knowing when they are wrong when the foundations of their experience are wrong for us and they are way, way, way too much so very smug.
unless their pState makes it one!

Living in the World

I dont think that the Deceivers are immune to the world in general. Its not a stage to them.* Its a world! Its the same for them as it is for us.

30
There were 54 states when Flora was young. Somewhere along the line, four of them had gone away; but for all her searching, she could turn up no evidence of where they had gone, or that they had ever been.
from Spotlight: C, by Marilith Turner

They arent casually floating around in a painless, world-painted nothingness, sipping with great selectivity and care from the nectar of our reality. Theyre experiencing stuff. They may even have all those brain chemicals and Chi meridians and stuff that people have that make it so easy for us to get confused and emotionally involved. Theyre enlightened, sort of, but the enlightenment of the Deceivers doesnt eliminate experience or even really free them from desire, suffering, and ignorance. It just gives them a certain elevated perspective on it all. The worlds like a 3d full-sensory drama to them. Its like the Matrix or a holodeck. Its extremely convincing. A Deceivers powers, nature, and experience let them recognize the world as unreal but they dont directly perceive it as such. I do think, that said, that they have an awareness of the . . . weak points . . . of Creation. I think they can sense the flaws and failings of this reality. Maybe even its points of strength! The Excrucians and other creatures from the Lands Beyond Creation are responsible for most of these weak points themselves. That is, usually if Creation is weak somewhere its because something has been preying on it. But I dont think thats all there is to it. I think Creation comes with some natural weak patches of its own. There are all these self-aware Powers and Imperators and spirits and such running around. They stretch reality all the time and cause the occasional contradiction. Even when they dont go far enough to attract an Actual, I think this still thins things up, twists them about, and gives the world a little self-reflective headache* such as the Deceivers can detect. Many Deceivers have perceptual tricks relating to their pState. Like, the pState of Scelto of the Provenance is Scelto of the Provenance so I assume it recognizes its own identity as unreal and can perceive the fragility of the concept of identity in general. Iolithae Septimian can probably tell whether or not shes lying, even if she didnt know whether or not her words would be a lie until she spoke. That might not be enough for her to divine the truth of things in general with, since lies probably require some level of intention, but it could easily help her to solve internal muddles, spot an unintended truth-telling, or catch herself in the act of repeating somebody elses deceit. Deceivers also have a special extension to the basic mystic Sight that the Powers have a kind of plot-sense, if you will. Theyre aware of the depth of reality, particularly in a certain narrative context. They have a sense for the genuineness of things. This works like their pState in that that genuineness isnt a judgment internal to them but a kind of cosmic statement on how much something matters to, well I suppose, in practice, to your game! In the real world, this functions as a kind of wisdom. In play, I think its just an excuse to: figure out Estate Properties with a little observation and experimentation; see the hidden* corners of the Powers hearts; and get hints from the players or HG as to what they might do that would be relevant, if they are otherwise completely stuck.

The Flower Rite

The standard attack on reality is called the flower rite. When the world doesnt know how to handle something when theres a paradox, when two key Estate Properties fight one another, when events start happening out of order the world starts casting about for answers. It panics, figuratively speaking. Its natural antibodies are the default answers the easy explanations. For prosaic reality, theyre things like the world is complicated, rules have exceptions, and we just havent figured all this stuff out yet. For mythic reality, were talking stuff like free will, looming mystery, and caprice. Either way, this kind of answer usually suffices to explain away modest violations of Estate or regional Properties. Corruption of the underlying logic of the world, sustained deviations from Estate and regional Properties, and anathematic perversions are more difficult to handle. They strain the whole fabric of being. Ordinary measures dont suffice to explain whats going on so Creation has to call in Actuals or creatures of the Not to hold the whole fabric together To patch over such flaws with materials from the substrate. To attack the world, Deceivers subvert its process of self-repair. They interfere with the worlds natural ability to integrate minor failures, quarantine larger ones, and heal from all of them. When the world goes looking for an answer, the Deceivers dont let it find answers like sometimes these things happen or here, have a paradox being. It finds the answer of the Deceivers, instead: This situation arises because reality isnt supposed to be. The world takes this answer and tries to apply it to the troubles its having. Unfortunately, this answer doesnt solve the paradox. It doesnt reconcile the elements of a contradiction. It just makes things worse. And worse. And worse. Eventually a higher-order immune system kicks in. Reality starts blocking off the whole conceptual territory as an aberration. For an illustrative example, consider the chupacabras. Their principally exobiological DNA includes the partial replication of simian genetic sequences. This makes them extremely difficult to reconcile with mainstream reality: their mere existence would consternate natural scientists and arouse revulsion in a number of Estates. So, to protect the categories of the world, Creation seals the chupacabras away in the conceptual ghetto of cryptozoology. There, their presence creates no complications. In like fashion, families, neighborhoods, conspiracies, species, and whole ecologies will reflexively cordon themselves off from existence, fading and become progressively more unreal, if by so doing they can protect reality as a whole.

31

or Gdel-ache, if you like.

if not actively secret

32

Of course, the Excrucians can circumvent this defense as well. The flower rite is an attack wherein an Excrucian pits two key Properties of an Estate against one another. That Excrucian twists up the Estate in some scenario of their design so as to put the Properties in opposition. When one Property grasps hold of the Deceivers answer, reality isnt supposed to be, it becomes stronger; it begins to dominate the opposing Property. When reality becomes disturbed and abstracts the offending portion, that first Property weakens; the opposing Property gains strength. It grabs great metaphorical handfuls of reality, territory, and the Deceivers answer, pouring itself into a dominant position and reasserting local reality. This process repeats in a seesaw fashion, generally affecting a larger conceptual or physical area with each swing; by the time reality escalates to cutting both sides out of existence, part of an Estate or part of whatever else it was the Excrucian chose to pit against itself has grappled itself, seized itself by the hair or bootstraps, and flung itself quite willingly into the void.

For seventy days and seven, Mlaine argued with the Lord, and the Lord argued with Mlaine. And one by one, as she preached her nihilism at Him, the lights of the world went out; for that was her Gift, that her words could break even the fiercest of arguments and bend even the lordliest of ears. And one by one, as He preached the gospel of Creation to her, the red and black spots of hatred in her mind dissolved to light, and she began to waver in her speech. It was Mlaine who broke first and said, I guess the worlds not so bad. And the Lord looked down at Creation, where the stars had guttered to black and the peoples minds were as empty as the void, and said, Well, in any event, the next one wont be.
from Children of Earth, by Martin Elliott

How to Play Out a Flower Rite

In general, figuring out an Estates Properties isnt terribly hard. Assume that an Excrucian can work the Properties out along with almost anything else thats been established about them at the gaming table after, at most, a few mundane actions to study the Estate. Maybe theyll have to poke around the relevant Powers affairs a little, too, but thats mostly only if them doing so will make the game more fun. Its really hard for Powers to keep the philosophical underpinnings of their manifest Estates a trade secret, after all: the Estate is out there in the world. A miracle could make it harder for enemies to recognize those qualities even when theyre right in front of their noses; a particularly subtle Property might place a level 1-2 Obstacle before those who would discover it; but basically if Cold is melancholy, you dont need three years of study and a gigantic coldness centrifuge to figure that out. You just have to sit in the cold for a little while! There is one rare exception: if an Estate is already extremely tenuous, figuring out its Properties can be a challenge. For instance, if there are only three lions remaining in the world, and most of the references and connections between lions and the world have been cut, then the Properties of Lions may be legitimately difficult to discover. Once your Deceiver understands the Properties of an Estate, they should look for an (ideally isolated) place and situation in which to turn two of those Properties against one another. Youre allowed to be a horrible cheater here and do impossible things your Deceiver can turn Cold is melancholy against Cold descends, for instance, by coating the ground in happiness or cold candy so that the snow and the cold air are gleeful as they flitter and settle down to the icy earth. Or you can try something subtler, like exploring whether winters melancholies and peoples thoughts on cold days are part of Cold themselves you could set up a high city and a lowland skating park and lightly enchant that park to make it a place of gentle, happy memories. On cold days, people go to their frosted windows; their thoughts travel down that road to the park

below, rich not with melancholy but with, rather, joy. And when the world wonders, Hey, those are cold thoughts, descending like that, but why isnt there any melancholy in them? you give the world your answer: because the world isnt supposed to be. And of course Cold doesnt go into a tizzy every time happiness is found in winter and at the bottom of the hill. Maybe the Power of Colds player will even tell you this is cheating I dont recommend you worry about that in advance, because the line between clever flower rite and egregious, ridiculous cheating is generally in the targets mind, but it could certainly happen and just solve it all with a formal ruling that peoples winter thoughts arent Cold. But in the meantime its natural for the spirits of cold and the elements of the Estate of Cold to feel a little stressed about this, you know? Up the road towards the city thats the melancholy path. Towards the park, and the soft joy of it thats the descending path. Arent they supposed to be the same path? Why do they point in opposite ways? How can this be happening? And there you are to answer them with: cause reality isnt supposed to be. Agitation. Disruption. Despair! You glut the Estate of Cold with non-being. You stir its spirits to distress. Your attention falls on them, fixates them, keeps them from breaking free of what should be a trivial paradox, forces them to gulp down denial to go about heir lives. The Estate begins to hurt. It writhes in pain. It calls to the Powers and they will hunt you down and try to stop you. If youre lucky, then by the time they get there youve already taken a nasty bite out of their Estate and you can just leave. Or youll be stronger and scarier than they are and you can just beat them up. If youre unlucky, the Powers will succeed in settling the matter. Theyll find a different answer to your imposed paradox. Theyll crush a child in snowfall in the middle of the brightest party of the year, instantly restoring all the melancholy of the cold; or theyll raise the park up, moving it magically to the middle of town, so that nobody gets there by descending; they may even just take winter away from that whole area, make all your efforts irrelevant to winter and Coldness, and blame global warming Colds eternal whipping boy for the effect.

33

Im anthropomorphizing reality a lot here, and Ive probably taken this a little farther than I should. Creation is alive, of course, but from a practical perspective youre dealing with local immune reactions and the generally dim awareness of individuated regional existence not with Creation itself. Anything that actually attracted the attention of the consciousness of Creation or even of the Tree as a whole would be too scary to be called a flower-rite or a welken-rite; thats more like a potentially Age-ending crisis!

The Welken-Rite
An alternative to the standard flower rite is the cuckoo ploy or welken-rite. You build something up from nothing. You make a little nest of unreality in Creation. You dont agitate reality when it starts to get a little nervous* you soothe it. You convince it that no, nothing weird is going on here. Why, your little piece of the unreal belongs! (you explain.) It fits! It just makes sense. Your construct spreads its conceptual underpinnings through the local

34

world like the roots of a potted plant, spreading through captive soil. Eventually, if youve done it right, you can use that construct as mystic leverage and just kind of snap that whole part of Creation off into unreality. The longer youve spent carefully cultivating your project, the better entrenched you can make it and the more of Creation you potentially can steal. Usually a welken-rite steers clear of the Noble Estates. I mean, you cant build anything in Creation in complete isolation from the Estates, thats just not possible; even taking over a small town in the middle of nowhere touches on hundreds of Estates starting with Towns, People, Buildings, Loneliness, and Cars but you dont have to actively tangle up any of the Noble Estates or their Properties into the structure of your rite. You do have the option of sinking your constructs hooks into an Estate or two, if you want to tear chunks out of those Estates when you finish, but be careful. Doing that dramatically increases your chances of attracting Noble attention in the projects early stages and makes it a near-certainty by the end. Unlike a flower rite, a welken-rite doesnt create any automatic values dissonance or conflict for the Nobilis. If you want anything but a straight fight when and if they show up to stop you, make sure youve laid the groundwork for your desired conflict in advance!

Explaining Themselves
Deceivers are a sucker for explaining themselves. They dont like it when their worst efforts get a look of blank incomprehension from their rivals and their victims. They dont want to slip in and out of the world without notice. They want you to know. They want you to understand that everything they are doing is because they think that the world is a lie and they want it to end. They are OK with it if you think theyre crazed ideologues or vicious bastards; theyd rather you think of them as virtuous heroes and idols, but if you understand their motives and see them for what they are and your best judgment is still that fighting them is a good idea, they think thats more or less OK. They dont care how you judge them, not really. But, first They want you to understand.

Deceivers and Social Identity

I think that on some level, the pState thing goes both ways. Its not just that their will has an unusual power over their social and physical context. There is also some feedback in the other direction: who they are is shaped, in some respect, by how theyre seen.

They arent shaped by your perspective. Not exactly. Its not as simple as think that theyre good and theyre good, think that theyre bad and theyre bad. Its not. People tried that on Abaton and it did not work out. I think its more like if you think that theyre good, theyre more like the people that you think of as good. If you think that theyre bad, theyre more like the people that you think of as bad. If you hate them, they dont become more hateful, but they do become more like the other things you hate. Its not a very powerful effect by default, but part of that is that there hasnt been a serious effort to weaponize it with work, I bet you could turn it into some kind of counter-flower-rite. The main reason that nobody has done this yet* is that driving Deceivers out of Creation is currently very difficult but not actually very complicated.

35

Deceivers and Children

Deceivers are absolute suckers for children and other innocents. They arent dumb. They know that the Excrucian War hurts kids. They know that theyve got tragedy piled on tragedy attaching to their accounts. But ultimately, when theyre face to face with a kid, they have a problem. Like I said, Deceivers want you to get it. They dont care how you judge them, but they want you to see who they are and why they do what they do. Only, below a certain cognitive level, a child cant get it. Even adolescents may not grasp as much of it all as the Deceivers like. So a typical Excrucian Deceiver confronted by a child is going to find themselves falling into a different pattern almost by default. Theyre going to stumble into being a lot closer to a good person, a caring person. Take away their ability to make highfalutin ideological and philosophical arguments and they have to, because how else can they express their self-image as someone good? You can probably use this against them, but like I said, theyre not dumb I mean, overt use of fake innocence or honey traps of rhetorical opponents who cant get it, all that stuff, it wont be some kind of slam dunk secret weapon against them. Theyre not idiots. But they are suckers for children, in the end.

to the best of my knowledge!

36
Why do you wear a veil, Marguerite? her lover will ask, when they have reached their climax. It is not a veil, she will say. It is a window. In it, I seein shadowed, grayed-out shapesthe image of your world. When I lift it, the world goes away altogether; there is nothing save the void. Her lover will think on this. That cannot be true, he will say. If it were, from where did you obtain the veil? A slight shrug. I wove it from my dreams. I do not believe you, he will say, and rip it from her face; and she will reach for it, but she will not find it in the void; and that is how the world will end.
from 24 Finales, by Rannen Yedidyah

Deceivers and Pawns

Similarly, Deceivers have this tendency to be comparatively kind to their pawns. They feel a certain leeway when it comes to mowing down people who dont know them as they see it, you kill a village and youre basically being like an earthquake or a warlord, its just part of how Creation works and it doesnt require any particular justification on their part. But when its somebody who trusts them, or someone theyve been using, even someone theyve just been controlling or exploiting hurting them isnt natural any more. It isnt just another day in Creation. They feel a certain responsibility to people like that. Its the same principle, basically once theres a personal connection, of any sort, they want you to see them as they see themselves.

Deceivers and Monologues

Lastly, this all gives Deceivers something of a monologue complex. They can control it to some extent, and its not actually universal Deceivers are a category, not a diagnosis but as a rule they will take more time than they can afford to spend explaining things that they really shouldnt talk about to people who are certain to use that knowledge against them. Theyll try to stick to philosophical points and high theories of ethics. Theyll try not to tell you what theyre doing, and why. They . . . wont always succeed. They can keep secrets for millennia, but theyll still tend to spill them a little before their time. They can bury themselves in a false identity every moment of every day, cling to it even in the face of torture or destruction, but in those quiet moments when they feel like they can let a little of their real self out and make human contact without getting into trouble the mask might slip. Theyre clever and tricky but ultimately theres this demon of loneliness in them: they want you to understand. . . . I think. I guess. I believe! In theory, I suppose, that could be just another mask.

Those who Listen to Coriander Hasp

37 37

Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp

. . . listen to Coriander Hasp feel his words like a fire in their head aint dead ^ This is really the best summary that I have. ^ aint bound by possibility, really, neither probably shouldnt have listened, I mean, in the end get all full of inspiration and bad ideas

38

Deceiver Creation
eres a system for designing Deceivers. Its been optimized for Excrucian design, but its based on the Nobilis Lifepath System in theory, if you had some reason to do so, you could mix and match the Keys and tables between the two systems. The Nobilis Lifepath Systemstarts with a diagram a representation of the forces active in your Deceivers story. Take a blank piece of paper. Draw five circles on this page placing them like the pips on a 5 on a die, or like the endpoints and cross-point of an X. The outer circles should be large enough for 50 words of text. The center circle will represent your pState. The outer circles will represent the two Keysthat youre about to pick. Each Key has a Lie, that is, the face it presents to Creation, and a Truth that is buried underneath it. The right two circles will represent the Lies of your two Keys. The left two circles are their corresponding Truths.

There was a woman whom Marteinn Magnusson could only see when drunk, for she came from beyond the boundaries of the world. Drunk he met her, drunk he loved her, and drunk he married her. The doctors told him that his liver was failing and drink would be his death; so drunk he died for her, and she took his spirit away.
from Doorknobs, by Emily Chen

Now browse the list of Keys below and pick two. Each time you choose a Key Connect the Lie and Truth of the Key by a line. Write the number of the Key below the line. Write the Name of the Key above that line. Write a blank bullet point near the top of that Keys Lie. Youll fill this in as soon as you figure out what that Key actually means in your life itll be a short phrase that summarizes your role when youre dealing with the Key, like I compromise you with gifts, [Im] on some Warmains leash, or [I was] born in a bakery. Write any specific bullet points named by the Key in the Truth circle. Youll add more to this diagram as you proceed through the Deceiver Creation process. The Keys break down as follows Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II) Acacia (III) Clematis (IV) Aconite (V) Wild Oats (VI) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Gorse (VIII) Periwinkle (IX) Chamomile (X) Widow-Rose (XI) Milkmay (XII) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Water Lily (XIV) Bilberry (XV) Hemlock (XVI) Key of the Shepherd Key of the Dragon Key of the Crossroads Key of the Angel Key of the Nemesis Key of the Dreamer Key of Burdens Key of Promises Key of Legends Key of the Mask Key of the Alien Key Unformed Self-Creating Key, the Key of Something Spiritual Key of the Fallen Key of the Lie

39

40
Lotus Flower (Key I)
Key of the Shepherd You care about the lives of ordinary people as individuals. You want to help them, improve them, give them something to make their lives better. Youre willing to talk to even the smallest and most disadvantaged. The Name of this Key is I BRING MY FLOCK . . . The Lie of this Key is the mortal, worldly change you make in peoples lives. The top bullet point should summarize what people get out of interacting with you. e.g. I bring my flock . . . a new family insight love unholy wonders a safe, orderly community a new shape immortality a peaceful existence beneath the waves or help with unfinished projects The Truth of this Key is what you give them of yourself. Start with: I love them I listen to them (Genseric Dace, as shown in Chibi-Ex)

Vervain (Key II)

Key of the Dragon Youre a knight and a weapon of the void. Youre a deadly threat to Creation. There are books about you, and their usual recommendation for what to do if someone sees you? Run. The Name of this Key is THE EXCRUCIAN WAR. The Lie of this Key is basically cool stuff that this character could do or has done things to illustrate their F/X. For instance, I blur the line between reality and dream I could be anyone Ill whisper a word and the birds will fall from the sky or Im going to eat the spirit of the city The Truth of this Key is what its doing to you. Listen. You cant tangle up the world with your power without tangling yourself up right back. The Truth of this Key is your tragedy, and its going to start with these two bullet points: I love them I am their enemy Keep it to those and your heart might survive.

41

(Genseric Dace, as shown in Nobilis: the Essentials)

42
Acacia (Key III)
Key of the Crossroads Youre still a loyal soldier of the void. Youre still here to make an end to Creation. . . . Probably. Its just . . . its just, youre wavering. The Name of this Key is WHY I FALTER. The Lie of this Key is mostly the worldly reasons for your divided heart things youve seen in the world that get to you, that shake you, that might lead to your putting some other cause above the truth of the Lands Beyond. The top bullet point here is the thing youre most likely to find yourself saying, admitting, apologizing for when youre talking to other Excrucians; and, conversely, the thing youre most likely to use as your private or public excuse for being kind when youre talking to mortals and the Powers. Something like: They fight so hard. I want to kill the world. But . . . coffee! or Im so . . . very . . . tired. The Truth of this Key is rougher. Part of being a Deceiver is being able to see that the world is a lie. The Warmains fight the world by choice, and the Strategists out of moral judgment, but for a Deceiver, denying the world is as natural as believing in it is for us. Accepting it, supporting it, joining or even just compromising with the forces of Creation thats easier said than done! So the Truth of this Key isnt going to be a nice, happy thing. Its not going to make you feel good. The Truth behind your faltering is going to start with: I love them Ive lost sight of what Im fighting for

Considering another Path, by Miranda Harrell

Clematis (Key IV)

Key of the Angel You cant stand fighting them. Its like eating broken glass. Theyre fighting so brilliantly; they show such power, such creativity, such honor they astonish you. And for what? What are they fighting for? To stay in Hell. Youve seen the true face of Creation. Its a pretty lie. If theyd let you tear it down you could give them something so much more beautiful and everlasting! The Name of this Key is IM REACHING OUT TO YOU . . . The Lie of this Key is who you pretend to be when youre reaching out to the Powers. Its the face you wear when youre trying to shake them off of their awful, self-destructive course: like a sad parent like a preacher like Im sick of fighting you like Ive got something to teach you like Im here just to win your heart like a lover like a savior or like a hurt child Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. If it stays empty then theres nothing subtle going on. Youre reaching out to them, like the Key says. Maybe its real, and maybe its a total saccharine fake, but theres no extra meaning hiding underneath. Conversely, if you do write something into the Truth of this Key later, then that becomes the deeper, underlying story of what it means that youre reaching out.

43

(Tairt Ut-napishtim, as shown in Nobilis: the Essentials)

44
Aconite (Key V)
Key of the Nemesis Theres someone youre going to get. Do you hate them? Does their Estate top some list? Are you secretly in love with them? Are you just spoiling for a fight with them, or maybe even just with somebody, with anybody, you havent even chosen yet who your nemesis will be? Whatever. The Name of this Key is THE EXCRUCIAN WAR. The Lie of this Key is who you are when youre screwing around with them. The top bullet point will summarize who you are when ruining some Powers life, like: I feed you false information I turn your friends and family against you I steal your work I compromise you with gifts I key your car or I stab you with knives Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. If it stays empty well, then theres nothing more to this story. Theres no deeper plot and no deeper emotional meaning. Youre just targeting someone because its fun, or because its your job, or because you think it matters, or because theyre there and you cant think of anything better to do. Conversely, if you write something into the Truth of this Key later, that Truth becomes the real and underlying reason for your animosity. Helchen Hadusind, by Miranda Harrell

Wild Oats (Key VI)

Key of the Dreamer Listen. This is the secret of the Dreamer. Theres truth even in the lies. Its not as simple as break the spell that is woven on the world and everything will be OK. The world is a lie. Its an awful lie but even awful lies have their reasons. Theres something going on with this story of world thats being told, and all the clangor of the War isnt going to achieve anything or fix anything until somebodys gone in and understood the point of the story itself. Thats you. Thats going to be you. Youre here to dream the world, to straighten its crooked courses, and lead people to the revelatory truth that lets them free themselves from lies. Youre not here to throw cold water on the metaphysical faces of the people of Creation and shock them up; youre here to lead them through the maze of lies that theyve built for themselves to the real faces they wear behind them. The Name of this Key is WHO I AM, IN THIS YOUR DREAM.

45

(Genseric Dace and Coriander Hasp, as shown in Chibi-Ex) The Lie of this Key is basically the rle you take on amidst this chaotic tumble of dream. Start it off with something like: a shaman a counselor a hero or your spirit guide Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. Maybe youll find something later on, maybe youll write down something like horror or symbol of lost opportunities there, and thatll be a deeper truth about who you are in the world of dream. Or maybe the Lie of this Key will prove to be enough for you and you never will!

46
Star of Bethlehem (Key VII)
Key of Burdens Something happened something happened to you, a long time ago. You picked up a burden then. Youre still carrying it now. Its with you. It makes you who you are. Its Name is IT MARKED ME. The Lie of this Key is the obvious stuff you plan to do to show that youre carrying something with you, e.g.: I choose my words carefully I get defensive about being an Excrucian or I dont fight children The Truth of this Key is whats going on deep inside you. Lets start with: I cant let go Its always with me (Coriander Hasp, as shown in Nobilis: the Essentials)

Gorse (Key VIII)

Key of Promises Youre not a free agent youre bound to, enslaved to some other force or power. The Name of this Key is HELD IN THRALL. The Lie of this Key is the surface of whats going on. Pick a top bullet point to summarize the situation youre trapped in, like: Shard from a greater being On some Warmains leash I made a promise or Slave to Creation The Truth of this Key covers whats actually going on and how you feel about it. Lets start with: I cant let go Its killing me

47

NoOo, by Miranda Harrell

48
Periwinkle (Key IX)
Key of the Legend You have a history in Creation. Youve done some pretty amazing stuff. The Name of this Key is MY LEGEND. Fill the Lie of this Key with events and assertions with bits of myth and history that you can rattle off if theres somebody (somebody who believes in Excrucians, anyway) that you want to impress. See if you can find a good solid bit of awesome for the first bullet point to kick off with, such as: I dreamed the Earth into being I charmed the wings off an angel Im the one whos always right I stole 10,000 ghosts from the trenches of World War I I conquered Ofeili, and I rule it now Im the one who stole Elvis I was named the Incarnate of Truth and the Deceivers pray to me (Iolithae Septimian, as shown in Nobilis: the Essentials)

I told the seas that they were salt, and they were thus; and strangled then the fish of all fresh waters that swam within Im the one whos never lost to punks like you or I ran Hell for seven hours, disguised as Lucifer, the while he was away Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. Maybe theres something else going on underneath all the stories about you, and if there is, youll write it there . . . but then again, maybe there isnt!

Chamomile (Key X)
Key of the Mask You live an elaborate pose. You hide yourself beneath a false face. The Name of this Key is WHO I AM, IN THIS YOUR DREAM. The Lie of this Key is who you pretend to be. Its the shining, silver-screen ideal of you. Write something there to summarize who you are, such as: a dyed-in-the-wool villain a hero a friend or [persons] dead sister, come back to life The Truth of this Key is . . . anything youd take the mask off for. What would you pass up a great villainous line for? When would you turn your back on heroism or on your friends? What would make you admit youre not that dead sister come back to life? Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now.

49

Oh, You, by Miranda Harrell

50

Widow-Rose (Key XI)

Key of the Alien The widow-rose or welken-rose blooms only in the void. In Creation, most of them fail to thrive, or rise up and cast a few weak petals down. One in a thousand, at best, flourishes, becomes unreal, and drags the entire promontory of Creation off from around it into the void beyond. You also are a creature that has no home in worlds. The name of this Key is MY NATURE. The Lie of this Key summarizes your horrific nature why you cannot pass easily among the natural substances of the world. Start with a bullet point like: I awaken the sleeping world I blight what I touch I have an atypical geometry I cannot have friends because when people love me they explode I am a receptive empath I am a poison that reverts the world around me to its wild, uncivilized past I lack a key normal attribute (e.g. a discernable color.) or I cannot be touched, and what I touch bleeds. The Truth of this Key is what lives under all of that. Lets start with: Im an enemy of the world. You cannot keep me away. No Home in Worlds, by Heed

Milkmay (Key XII)

Key Unformed The milkmay or gethringenfleur manifests itself as a seething tumult in the void. You can sometimes see a milkmay by pressing your fingers against closed eyes. You too are a shapeless creature. You have yet to become a thing, such as can be properly seen and understood in Creation. You are instead a stirring of potential, half-glimpsed images, a nameless shifting in the void beyond. If you are not rousted out from or into reality by miracle, you will eventually settle into a singular form but for now you are closer to a conspiracy, an oppressive atmosphere, or an idea. The Name of this Key is THAT WHICH STIRS. The Lie of this Key is the form youre likely to take when play begins. The top bullet point should be something that reflects your early ideas here intimations a mist something broken, speaking from different bodies or something looking for purpose The Truth reflects what you really are, and what you will become. Start with Im an enemy of the world I am truth preceding form

51

A Truth Preceding Form, by CQ

52
Phoenix Posy (Key XIII)
The Self-Creating Key The phoenix posy or autoposy scatters its seeds through time. The 1911 botanical mapping expedition strongly suggests that this flower is a single self-creating colony or organism stretching across all of history, Creation, and the Lands Beyond. It also appears at least somewhat capable of reacting to temporal crises, adjusting the histories of its various flowers to maintain the stable time loop of itself. Where did it come from? The question does not apply. Nor does it apply to you. You made yourself from nothing. You tore yourself from the void and fell burning into world. You woke tangled in the world like a fever patient in their sheets, like a Magister of the Wild caught in Creations dreams, only you arent caught. Can you walk freely in and out of world, or will you have to tear the place down around your ears to complete your disentanglement? The Name of this Key is I HAVE MADE MYSELF . . . Jasmine Apocynum Asserts Her Existence, by Miranda Harrell

The Lie of this Key is bits of story that anchor you to the world. Stuff that hints at an actual history, or at least a precipitating event. Things that surround you, the context that embraces you, as you fall into world. Pick a top bullet point like: born in a bakery dressed to kill an American or from the pieces of those whom youve discarded The Truth of this Key is usually psychological or metaphysical its about what it means that you made yourself. That said, its also OK to list some comparatively worldly bullet points here if thats what seems best to you. Start with: an enemy of the world from nothing

Water Lily (Key XIV)

Key of Something Spiritual You are a holy creature. You are the divine word of the void. You manifest the face of the Lands Beyond Creation that is the Empyreal Nothing a thing that is not a great and solemn holiness in the same way that most of the Lands Beyond Creation are not land, air, or sea. When you walk past, nihilists and those possessed by bleakest depression prostrate themselves before you, crying, Holy, holy, holy! You are beyond practical concerns a saint, a spiritual being, an innocent. Youre the kind of Excrucian wholl travel to destroy a city or an idea because it offends in some fashion against what you hold as sacred, but stop to heal a wounded bird or adopt an orphaned child on your way. The Name of this Key is MY NATURE. The Lie of this Key summarizes how your holiness expresses itself in the world. Pick a top bullet point like: simple tastes disdainful innocent and pure kind maddening weight of blasphemous power or selfless The Truth of this Key starts simply with: Excrucian Deceiver

53

Innocence, by Miranda Harrell

54
Bilberry (Key XV)
Key of the Fallen You fell. You lost. They won. They took you. It doesnt matter which side youre fighting for any longer. Not really. Dont you get it? You believe. You have lost nirvana. You look around. You tell yourself, its all a lie. But its not. Its real. Youre caught in a world, and you think and shudder and almost cry out with the horror of it that it is real. The Name of this Key is WHAT I BELIEVE. The Lie of this Key is things that youve accepted. Fake things. Creation things. World things. Start off with something big and scary, maybe, put something in the top bullet point like: mortality feelings the wind sunsets or Santa Barbara Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. If you wind up adding stuff into the Truth of Bilberry later on, then that stuff becomes what you actually believe in, and the Lie of Bilberry becomes its polite mask. Fallen, by Miranda Harrell

Hemlock (Key XVI)

Key of the Lie This isnt you. You arent you. One day youll take off the mask and all this will be as naught. Are you an Imperator or Power gone undercover? Are you a different Deceiver, with a different story? Listen. Were not going to see more than a few hints of who that other person is I mean, underneath. Maybe we wont even see that. Even if youve chosen the Key of Hemlock, the lifepath process will focus on the person you seem to be. But maybe now and then, as the creation process carries through, youll give yourself a few glimpses of who you really are. The Name of this Key is WHO I AM, IN THIS YOUR DREAM. The Lie of this Key is the story youre trying to tell with your life. Pick a top bullet point that summarizes that. Its often something from one of the Keys above, or even is one of the Keys above, e.g.: the Shepherd the Nemesis the one who stole Elvis a manyfaced horror or a fallen Deceiver, trapped by the Lie Leave the Truth of this Key empty for now. Anything you add to it later becomes a hint as to the person you really are.

55

,ecnanevorP eht fo otlecS( )slaitnessE eht :siliboN ni nwohs sa

56
When I looked into his eyes, I saw the radiance of God. I could not refuse him, for all that his requests were vile. I knew that there was a higher purpose to them. I knew that it was correct to serve him. God willed it so, and the angels sang alleluias to that will, and the universe shivered with the rightness of it.
from the statement of Father Sebastian Capobianco, 03/25/00

Foundations
Now that youve picked your Keys, lets talk about whats cool about your character. You could probably just use the Nobilis: the Essentials table of Foundations here choosing whether your character is Something Cool, In Love with Something, Epic, Inhuman, and Powerful, or Just Plain Weird. That said, were going to provide some ideas with a slightly more Deceiver-focused slant. Whats cool about your character? Lets see! Look over the following options, starting with the option or options associated with your two Keys, and think about which one you want to build from. You can choose any of the options, but youll be working under the following general rules: Start by finding the rows with your Keys in them. This should be the initial focus of your attention when considering the table. Choosing a row with one of your Keys in it . . . Usually youll choose a row with one of your Keys in it. That strengthens the Lie of that Key. Write a new bullet point in the Lie of that Key, relating in some fashion to the row. Choosing a row with neither of your Keys in it . . . Sometimes youll really want a different row, or neither of the rows that your Keys suggest will fit. In that case, youll have to strengthen the Truth of one of your Keys. Pick which Key, and write a new bullet point in its Truth relating in some fashion to the row. Choosing a row with both of your Keys in it . . . If you happen to pick a row that has both of your Keys in it, youll still only write one bullet point. The first time this happens, draw a new circle connected to the Lie of both your Keys. Put a bullet point in that circle that relates in some fashion to the row and to both of your Keys. Choose and record a name for this new circle. Later, if you pick a row with both of your Keys in it again, add a new bullet point to this circle instead of drawing a new circle or adding to the Lie of either Key.

You are . . .
Elemental and Untroubled
You dont take it personally. Are you like still water? Like an unrelenting fire? Are you light as the wind? Impassive as death? Bright as a brass birds song? You dont apologize. You dont resent those who fight you. You take it all in stride, its natural and normal, even though its wrong; its OK that the people of Creation dont get it, that an Excrucians life is difficult and complicated, because thats just how things are. The hawk doesnt complain when the mouse tries to dodge. The sniper doesnt get upset that the other side has guns. The parent doesnt blame the child for resisting structure, nor does the shepherd blame their flock. well. Pick a role in life and 1-3 bonus character traits and loyalties. Serve them

57

Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II) Acacia (III) Widow-Rose (XI)

Examples: Cethegus Law cares about people and he tries to give them a better order to their lives. Erelieva Grimoald serves the Warmain Raginhart Tribunas as a messenger. Page Cutter kills people and replaces them with simplified eidolons that carry forward their lives. Rosamund Francesca Hildegard fell in love with fire and decided to wait 100 years before harming Creation again. Genseric Dace is quite open about what he is and how noble it would be if you beat his face in, while Phasael mery-Harumaph just enjoys the fact you probably wont.

Uncoiling, Hunting, the Storm Arising

Youre something stirring in the depths, something starting to begin its terrible ascent. Youre a legendary thing, a terrible movement in the shadows behind reality. Do you plan to swallow Imperators? Shatter continents or worlds? Your plan is just beginning. In this time, in this place, in this moment, it is just beginning. Soon it will catch the world around you in its storm. Listen to the air of Creation and you can feel it move. Examples: Prasede Fritigern hunts for and severs the chain-glyphs that hold the Weirding Wall in place; she will collapse the wall around the world. Odotheus Livigund is a slave-taker whose favored prey is angels. Erland Erengis is your death. Kadlin Fenvar lives in the back of your brain. Iustina Thrasaric tempts Powers into treason. Iolithae Septimian humbles the truth with every lie she speaks.
Star of Bethlehem (VII) Gorse (VIII) Periwinkle (IX) Milkmay (XII)

58

So Full of Feelings for Them

Look at them. So trapped. So caught. Like fish wriggling in a barbed net, only, theyre not fish. Theyre people! Theyre fighting you, theyre actually rising up from the shapeless masses of humanity and taking on elemental bits of the lie they live in just so they can fight you. For the hairshirts they are wearing. For the chains around their ankles. For the boot on their faces, theyll fight for that; for the scourges whipping them with things like suffering and pain and their mortality. They wont let you take that from them. Theyll snarl. Theyll snap. Theyll fight. They cant even see why they should let you win. Its heartbreaking. There arent any words for it. There arent any emotions big enough for it scorn, love, sadness, it all falls short. All you can do is try to see things their way, a little. This option means: you respect the Powers of Creation.

Clematis (IV) Aconite (V) Wild Oats (VI) Bilberry (XV)

Not really, maybe? Not probably? But youll try. Youll think about things in their terms. Youll get in their heads and youll try to understand them, even though theyre wrong, because thats the only way to live with the awful bleakness of it all. To go along with them. To accept it, a bit of it. To pretend, along with them, that the fragile little fictions they use to give their lives and struggles meaning are actually something worth a damn. Youre sincerely interested in the Powers you oppose. They matter to you. You may have strong thematic resonance for them, or they for you. You actually try to keep their needs and preferences in mind whether its giving them a chance to get away from (or to) innocents before a fight, remembering their birthday, or just spending your time between encounters thinking about the things theyve said. Pick some thematic and/or personal ties to (other) player characters in the game, or some way in which youre genuinely caring towards those you fight. Examples: Hannah Gundiok feels bad for Powers working under the oppressive regime of Lord Entropy and hopes her disturbingly inappropriate Lord Entropy calendar can help to bring their spirits up. Nikeline Ondwulf, who doles out her own nonexistence by flickering in and out between the beginning and end of each tick of the clock, represents a natural thematic opponent for Robert Baxt (and was almost caught by the Continuous Bell until Max Planck dragged her free.) Jordan Valamer is unfailingly polite and considerate. Yochander Radmund spent over thirty years undercover in the Order of Falling Stars, and even after betraying them he finds himself unable to be too unpleasant to his former peers. Coriander Hasp is only shooting you and/or twisting your mind into knots because he genuinely cares about all you bastards and gumblers.

All About the Crazy Head Games

The takeaway: youre here to play fun games with the players heads. Youre all about the world being a lie. Youre a radical skeptic, a sincere Buddhist, a postmodern critic or reality heckler, a cult deprogrammer, a transformational leader, or just a conscious player-driven exploration of the tenuous nature of things. Youre not here to make a moral or military argument against Creation: youre here to get into the mind-blowing issues that having something instead of nothing raises, particularly when the nothing is coming for its due. Whats your take on the world being a lie? Why does that matter? What is it hurting? What is the consequence to the people caught up in the world, and how can you fix it? Examples: Anagastes Brandil is all about the practical impact of random philosophical questions; he likes constructing artificial Matrix awakenings, philosophical zombies, stable time loops, compression glitches in presumptively real things, and the like. Corinthia Glismond sincerely believes you are creating your own problems by conflating your judgments and perceptions with the real. Cloric Braga slips in and out of memories and timelines; conflicts with her often take place entirely in flashbacks or now and then flash-forwards. Wittigis Statler revises the world for greater drama (if youre going to have it anyway); Tanca Persegoth makes search-and-rescue dives into Creation to pull out special individuals whove fallen too far into believing in the world. Scelto of the Provenance undermines identity and individuality by its mere existence, while Tairt Ut-napishtim does so as a conscious pedagogical act. Jasmine Apocynum separates the soul from the mind and body, prompting certain questions about what these things may or may not mean.

59

Chamomile (X) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Water Lily (XIV) Hemlock (XVI)

Selenas Picard (rendition by Miranda Harrell)

60

Building Morrowen (Part 1)

an example of Deceiver construction I draw the basic Avatar Diagram. I look over the list of Keys. I pick Key XII, the Milkmay, as my first Key (see left) the Key Unformed. Im a potential. Im a creature in the act of its formation. Im yet to become a thing. I pick Key XV, Bilberry, as my second Key (see right) the Key of the Fallen. Im not even born yet and Ive already lost paradise: theres something in the world that I believe in. The lie of your world has trapped me. (Yes, your world. Im talking to you. I can see you there, reading me, you know.) Off the top of my head, I can see two ways to fit these Keys together. The first option is a Deceiver who apprehended the world, began to believe in its shapes and forms, and so lost their own someone like Coriander Hasp, say, if one day he looked around at the world, gasped, saw it as a truth and not a lie and dissolved into a mist of blood and red, red hair. The other option is a Deceiver who believes in some part of the world, however tentatively, because that Deceiver is just unformed potential an Excrucian yet to develop its full and eventual resistance to the lie. The world struck its senses in this its time of vulnerability and crippled its perception of the True Thing either temporarily or permanently thereby.

THE MILKMAY (XII)

The Name of this Key is That Which Stirs. I connect the two top circles of my Avatar Diagram with a line. I write XII below the line and That Which Stirs above it. The top right circle becomes the Lie of that Key. I put the first bullet point in it. The top left circle becomes the Truth of that Key. I write: Im an enemy of the world I am truth preceding form inside.

The first option seems like it might not leave a clear path forward I dont want to create someone slated to dissolve completely in the near future, whereas reconstituting just seems like it would ruin the dramatic lead-in that the dissolution has set up. There are probably ways around this, like, setting the dissolution millennia ago and playing the character on the brink of their return but for now, I think Ill settle on the second option. This is a character who has the standard Deceiver investment in the world being a lie, but theyre too new, too incomplete, too unfinished to commit completely to that idea and its costing them.

Building Morrowen (Part 2)

an example of Deceiver construction My two Keys are Key XV (Bilberry) and Key XII (the Milkmay). I look these up on the chart above. Bilberry suggests that my Deceiver is So Full of Feelings for Them that Im really tightly connected to, and interested in, the Powers that I oppose. That I look at the world and its all aww, poor puppy! I think that would work OK if I were playing a Deceiver who saw truth in the world and lost her shape and form thereby. For this character, whom Im seeing as someone forming for the first(?) time from nothing, angry about being already entangled with the world, I dont think So Full of Feelings for Them fits. Key XII, on the other hand, suggests that Im Uncoiling, Hunting, the Storm Arising. My plan is just beginning. My being is just beginning. That sounds awesome. Im going to go with that one. The big thing that this tells me is that there is a sense of motion and growth here. There is stuff coming. I have a direction and I have plans. And to explain those plans, Im going to add a bullet point to the Lie of the Milkmay. But first I havent filled in the starting bullet points for the Lie of either Key. Before I write the second bullet point, I want to know if I have any ideas for what the first bullet point should be. I reread the Key of the Milkmay and determine that the Lie of that Key is the form [Im] likely to take when play begins. I check my brain and it seems that Ive picked up the sense somewhere of this bodiless voice raging and echoing in a canyon somewhere a sound ringing off of canyon walls, angry at the world that contains it. So I fill in the first bullet point with that, and add a second bullet point to reflect this Uncoiling, Hunting, the Storm Arising thing. Now the Lie of the Milkmay tells me: That Which Stirs is . . . a bodiless, echoing voice a rage against the world Just as in Nobilis: the Essentials, I could have picked a different option, e.g., All about the Crazy Head Games, and strengthened the Truth of my choice of Keys instead. But I didnt!

61

BILBERRY (XV)
The Name of this Key is What I Believe. I connect the bottom two circles of my Avatar Diagram with a line. I write XV below the line and What I Believe above it. The top right circle becomes the Lie of that Key. I put the first bullet point in it. The top left circle becomes the Truth of that Key. It stays empty for now.

62
Yill-Amoth Devouring an Excrucian (rendition by Tang Yuann)

62

Your pState
Now lets figure out your pState the pseudo-Estate that allows you to transcend the illusion of the world and governs one aspect of your interaction therewith. To choose your pState, pair up one option from each of the two tables below an alignment or moral quality; a functional description. There are going to be a ton of edge cases here, because the world is a lie and you cant see the true thing directly. If you find yourself saying, Wait, is murder a sorrowful thing or a despicable construction? Is a fading dream good or bad? Couldnt I just rephrase this possessive pState into a reactive one? thats why! Its not my fault. The problem is the world. Just go with your own best judgment, and if you find that you really want to talk yourself into a certain interpretation rather than going along with what you actually believe something to be . . . then, well, great! Welcome to the world of being an Excrucian Deceiver, and . . . interestingly enough . . . to the world of doing exactly the kinds of things that they think we are doing all the time in this, our lie of world. As always, follow the rules for choosing a row based on your Keys. That is: start by finding and looking at the table rows corresponding to your Keys.* pick one row per table. If you pick a row matching . . . one Key: strengthen and add a bullet point to that Keys Lie; two Keys: create or shift your attention to a bubble that connects the Lie of both and add a bullet point to that; neither Key: strengthen the Truth of your choice of your two Keys.

63

You can look at the other rows, too, but do try to start with the ones associated with your Keys!

In addition, for these two tables only, when you add a bullet point, also draw a line to connect the relevant circle and your pseudo-Estate connecting your pseudo-Estate to the progress and resolution of that Key.

64

Moral Quality
Your pState is . . .
A Marvelous Artifice!
Your pState will be something consciously constructed something built. It is something you choose, something you put together yourself. It is more likely to be intellectual than emotional. It is probably a little complicated. It is something that would not exist without a persons agency to give it rise. It is also something good. What does good mean? Here it just means that youre choosing to put a good face on it. You are describing it in terms of virtue. You dont call it a lie you call it a story. You dont call it murder you call it execution. If you wanted to explain to someone what your pState was all about, youd look for positive words and words that suggested willful design. What do you enjoy making? What would you enjoy making, building, or running? Would you like to write novels, run a reality show, or judge an idol competition? Do you want to heal the sick or imbue them with cybernetic implants? Do you knit, write songs, blog, or give speeches? Do you like structuring organizations? Building extensions to your house? Organizing your life? Falling in love? Maybe you could build your pState around something like that! Or, are there any kinds of art or craft that you find utterly ridiculous, but might enjoy sardonically treating as virtuous works? Are there any pale excuses for wicked deeds, any unconscionable ideals, that you could get behind spouting in character as part of your Deceivers nature and their work?

Clematis (IV) Wild Oats (VI) Periwinkle (IX) Chamomile (X)

A Pretty Truth
Your pState will be something naturally arising something discovered, experienced, or felt. Its the work of a moment, but it might not be something you can control. Its more likely emotional than intellectual, simple instead of complicated, something encountered and not made. Its something that can just spill out of you or out of the world. Its also something good. Its something you like, something you put a good face on not necessarily something good in the abstract, but definitely something that youre using good words to describe. What are some experiences your character enjoys? What are some good things that they could find, study, or discover?

Lotus Flower (I) Milkmay (XII) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Bilberry (XV)

65
A Sorrowful Thing
As with a Pretty Truth, your pState will be something naturally arising something discovered, experienced, or felt. Its the work of a moment, but it might not be something you can control. Its more likely to be something emotional than intellectual, simple instead of complicated, something encountered and not made. Its something that can just spill out of you or the world. Its also something bad. The words you use to describe it will be words of wicked and sorrowful things. What are some experiences your character regrets? What are some wicked things that are with them, near them, around them; that they could find, study, or discover?

Vervain (II) Gorse (VIII) Widow-Rose (XI) Water Lily (XIV)

A Despicable Construction
Much as with a Marvelous Artifice, your pState is something consciously constructed something built. It is something you build, imagine, or assemble; something you choose. It is more likely to be intellectual than emotional. It is more likely to be complicated than simple. It is something that would not exist without a persons agency to give it rise. But . . . Its something wicked, too. Youll express the concept of your pState in inherently dubious terms. Sometimes the key is a single adjective: not the Tweets of Abdalonymous III but the Wicked Tweets of Abdalonymous III. Not From the Needles of Percival Sansalas, but rather Knit by Percivals Awful Hand. Or maybe youll express the whole pState in dubious terminology from the start: it is not Explanations but Frantic Excuses. Not Testimony, but rather [a] Legal Fiction. What do you think of when you imagine your Deceivers wicked constructions?
Acacia (III) Aconite (V) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Hemlock (XVI)

66

Functional Description
Your pState is . . .
Descriptive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is description. The world is a story that the people of Creation tell themselves. Theyre creating substance from nothing to facilitate that awful self-deceit. Fight fire with fire! You too are a creature of narratives, sense-making, and organization youre all about how we put together our picture of the world. You have thoughts about that. Your raw power, though its going to focus more on the observables. Youll play with the hard facts on the ground, the things, the events, and the blatant existences, in order to tell new stories of the world. Descriptive pseudo-Estates generally differ from one another more in their essence than in their practice. For instance, the world-affecting power of The Lies of Iolithae Septimian is practically identical to that of the Honest Testimony of Tetsuo Chaves but the meanings! Those are like night and day!

Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II) Star-of-Bethlehem (VII) Chamomile (X)

Descriptive pseudo-Estates include: The Lies of [Your Name] The Honest Testimony of [Your Name] The Fiction of [Your Name] The Legal Fiction of [Your Name]s Firm The Tweets of [Your Name Here] That Which is Drawn in [Your Name]s Awful Crayon That Which [Your Name] is Dreaming That Which [Your Name] Warned Of That Which [Your Name] is Trying to Tell You, via Charades [Your Name]s Prophesy [Your Name]s Physics [Your Name]s Explanations [Your Name]s Frantic Excuses The Heroic Adventures of [Your Name], as Narrated by [Your Name]

67
Reactive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is context and emotion: how other people react to or interact with you. Creation is a giant hornets nest of barriers to real and open communication its an endless warren of people throwing up magical walls like distance and disagreement and death to keep from really seeing one another as they are. Youre all about tearing through that somehow or other. Youre someone with a cheat code. Theres something in you that people cant help facing. You have a way to shove past all the lies and distractions and just . . . talk to people. How much does it help? That really depends on the cheat code; you are still an enemy of the world, after all, so its possible that your open and honest communication with someone will only make their opinion of you worse. Pseudo-Estates like this include: Those Who Adore [Your Name] Those Inspired by [Your Name] Those Who Listen to [Your Name] Those Who Condemn [Your Name] Those Who Praise [Your Name] Those Who Hate and Fear [Your Name] Those Who Remember [Your Name] Those Willing To Talk to [Your Name] The Person Who Is On the Phone with [Your Name] Those Whose Secrets [Your Name] Knows Guest Stars on [Your Name]s Show Staring at [Your Name], Unable to Look Away What [Your Name] Owes You
Acacia (III) Gorse (VIII) Milkmay (XII) Hemlock (XVI)

68

Possessive
The core of your pseudo-Estate is a thing, phenomenon, or experience. Creation is huge. Its complicated. Its vast. Trying to counter the lie is like trying to stomp down a desert take one step forward and the wind is already erasing the footprints youve left behind! So you take a simpler approach. Youre using a single weapon a single thing that you can hold up before Creation and make Creation false against it to sow contradictions and abnormalities into reality. Youre using something of yours, some part of you or of your own story, to sicken the fabric of the lie, to sit inside it and make it tear itself apart. You take some rule or context that surrounds you, some event in your own history, or even you yourself: you make it sense-like but nonsensical, you set it outside the logic and the processes of reality, and you watch Creation tear itself apart trying to fit that new little lie into the grand mix of things. It cant, though. You wont let it. Even if it could make sense, youll make sure it doesnt. So your weapon is something like: [Your Name]

Clematis (IV) Wild Oats (VI) Widow-Rose (XI) Phoenix Posy (XIII)

[Your Name]s Philosophy (things behaving in a way that fits how you see the world) [Your Name]s Tea Party (a roving tea party characterized by an absence of violence) [Your Name]s Family [Your Name]s Shadow [Your Name]s Murderer [Your Name]s Fading Dreams [Your Name]s Good Left Hand Records of [Your Name]

Remember that you have Persona and not Domain, so some of these may be subtler than they seem at first blush an Estate like the Luck of Zamolxis Trebolgion doesnt add luck to a situation but rather changes it to fit the established character of your luck. An Estate like My Shadow doesnt control your shadow so much as bring shadow puppets to life, devour things into your shadow, and so forth.

Caught Red-Handed by [Your Name]! (complete with spotlights and feelings of guilt) The [Your Name] Your Lover Could Smell Like (In) the Fires of [Your Name] (Subject to) the [Your Name] Effect (In) the [Your Name] Memoir

Active
The core of your pseudo-Estate is events, and to a lesser extent experiences. Creation gets its weight from history, from order, from the suspension of disbelief thats only natural when every event has a cause, and every cause has a cause, and it all winds back through ten billion twisty channels to the structure of things preceding. You dont play that. You know its all a lie, so theres no reason you shouldnt treat the world as the stage and props it is. There are limits on your power here Creation is strong, and it fights to make sense, and that should be your excuse for having enough underlying logic to what you can do that the game stays fun but certainly it doesnt hurt your cause if things around you get a little inexplicable now and then. Your pseudo-Estate talks about something that you act on something that you do or did something to. Its something like: Things [Your Name] Has Stolen Things [Your Name] Has Borrowed Things [Your Name] Created The House That [Your Name] Built Those Whom [Your Name] Recruited Things [Your Name] Spit Out That Which [Your Name] Killed That Which [Your Name] Healed Things [Your Name] Is Pointing At Things [Your Name] Expected The Person [Your Name] Married Three Weeks Ago (under the Laws of the State of California) Places [Your Name] Has Been Things [Your Name] Has Done What [Your Name] Whispered to You, That Night You could probably have a pseudo-Estate that talks about the future, too, like: Things [Your Name] Is About to Eat Places [Your Name] Is Going but it may not be as awesome in practice as in conceit.

69

Aconite (V) Periwinkle (IX) Water Lily (XIV) Bilberry (XV)

70

Beyond the Wide Worlds Edge (rendition by Tang Yuann)

Building Morrowen (Part 3)

an example of Deceiver construction Both Key XII (the Milkmay) and Key XV (Bilberry) want my characters pseudo-Estate to be a Pretty Truth. Something more emotional than intellectual. Something more found than made. Something simple, and also something good. Key XII wants a Reactive pState. Key XV wants an Active one. I have an echoing voice in the wilderness but apparently what that voice is actually saying isnt all that important I mean, all of this is pushing me towards a focus on how that voice sounds, on what it means, on what happens when you stumble into some canyon somewhere and hear the voice, not on what the voice says. I wanted that voice to blast people, to rage through them, but right now Im having trouble fitting that together with what the Keys are telling me. Theyre telling me that thats wrong that whatever is going on is sort of, well, beautiful, instead. So I wind up for now with the pseudo-Estate Those Whose Hearts Thrill to the Voice of [My Name.] This is going to change later on. Im going to realize in part 6 that this isnt quite what I want and change my pState to Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of [My Name] but either way, were talking about a reactive pState and an arguably pretty truth. Anyway, theres this voice in a canyon. You hear it, and it rings through you, it tunes your soul to it, it straightens the bent lines of you and makes you hale and whole. You hear it and you become a cultist of the voice. It fills you with its rage and with its joy. Look: there is something beautiful in this world, even if the world is a lie. Listen! It resounds! So I add a new circle to my diagram, named The Voice of [My Name] . . . Im actually leaving the name stuff blank, not writing [My Name] in every time, for clarity . . . and linking it to both my pState and the Lies of both my Keys. Im doing this because my pState is a pretty truth. I put the first bullet point in it: I shake you from your sloth and self-deceptions. And, since I chose a Reactive pState, I add a bullet point to the milkmays Lie: an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts The Lie of the Milkmay also gets linked to my pState circle, which I tentatively label Those Whose Hearts Thrill to the Voice of [My Name.]

71

THE LIE OF THE MILKMAY

an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts

72
Your Breakthrough
To some degree every Deceiver appears to be self-creating and self-perpetuating. This doesnt necessarily hold the status of cosmic truth. It doesnt have to be the most important part of your Deceivers origin they could come from somewhere neat in the Lands Beyond Creation, or enter Creation in an interesting place, or be born from Creation in some fashion that holds your interest. But its definitely a pattern. The Deceiver is born when they create themselves, and the circumstances of that creation bind them into Creation heart-first. Its usually right on the nose of their pseudo-Estate: something was, or wasnt, part of their pseudo-Estate, and thats how they came to be. In particular, it was something that provoked and may even still provoke a strong emotion

(Iolithae Septimian, as shown in Chibi-Ex)

73
You Were Born Out of . . .
Loss
In (or close to) the scene you really became yourself, you lost something. Your identity? Your life? Someone you cared about? Something you cared about? How did it happen? Acacia (III) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Gorse (VIII) Chamomile (X)

Guilt, or the Crime that Caused It

In (or close to) the scene you really became yourself, you did something wrong. Maybe it cost you something, too, or maybe it didnt. The big thing is, you dont think its something that you should have done. What was it? Can you still make up for it, or is it forever too late?
Vervain (II) Aconite (V) Widow-Rose (XI) Water Lily (XIV)

Need
Theres something you crave. Something of Creation. Did you have it and lose it? Did it drive you to become an Excrucian? Would you destroy the world to get it, or does it compromise your willingness to destroy the world? What is it? Why do you need it so very much?
Lotus Flower (I) Wild Oats (VI) Milkmay (XII) Bilberry (XV)

Will/Choice/Judgment
Youre this way by choice. It was a decision. It was an exercise of raw will or moral judgment. You chose to entangle yourself with both the world and the void depending, of course, on your perspective because you decided that it was appropriate to do so. You condemned something so fervently, hunted something so relentlessly, or worshipped something so highly that you became a Deceiver thereby; or possibly, you just woke up one morning, looked into the eyes of the void, and decided that you would wear those eyes thereafter. Why did you choose this? How did it give rise to your pseudo-Estate? How did it make you who you are?
Clematis (IV) Periwinkle (IX) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Hemlock (XVI)

74

Building Morrowen (Part 4)

an example of Deceiver construction Both Key XII (the Milkmay) and Key XV (Bilberry) tell me that there is something I need. Of course there is. This ones easy! It only takes a moment to realize that this character is in the process of being born because she needed to be heard. She was a voice that was silent. She is in the process of becoming a voice that changes people, instead.

THE LIE OF BILBERRY

I believe that there is someone listening.

I fill in the first bullet point to the Lie of Bilberry, which I hadnt gotten around to filling in yet: I believe that there is someone listening. That is, the thing that she believes in, the part of the world that she doesnt think of as a lie: thats her audience. Thats the people, or at least the fact that there are people, who hear her voice. Of course she needs that. She was silent and rejected, so now she needs people to hear her or possibly needs people to echo her words to survive. That chooses a row for me, it chooses the Need row, but it doesnt finish this step. I still have to tell the story of how that happened of how she became a Deceiver, and how that either created or resulted from her need to be heard. And Im pretty sure that there was a girl who didnt have a voice, or who couldnt get anyone to listen. That just seems obvious. And I think about other options, just in case theres something really cool as low-hanging fruit, and it occurs to me that maybe this character started as a sound, that someone heard the sound of something inanimate, a creek or waterfall or something, as if it were a persons words. And suddenly everything comes together for me like this: There was a girl in some isolated town and she didnt have a voice. I mostly mean that she could speak, but nobody would listen. And there was a creek in a canyon or a hollow in the woods and sometimes shed hear things from that creek that were almost like words. She found out that when she spoke those words, people would hear them. They would listen. They wouldnt hear her words, not the words of the girl herself, but theyd listen to her echoing of the creek.

It was magic. It was intoxicating. It was addictive. So she spoke those words more and more, and they became more and more powerful, but one day she realized that she didnt know herself any more, she didnt know the words she would have spoken any more, I mean, if she spoke in her own voice; she didnt even remember her old name. She was just the voice of that old creek hollow now Of Morrowen Hollow. (There! Now it has a name!) The voice of Morrowen Hollow flowed through her. It echoed off the rocks and the valley walls. It ran through and it broke her family, her neighbors, the birds and frogs and cats and humans all, it tore them free of the sounds of their lives and echoed and rolled and caught them in its words. That voice is still becoming. It is still a sound as much as it is words. It is still a mist of possibility struggling to coalesce into a thing. It is a fructile potential but it is still dissonant, it is still chaotic, it tunes the souls of others but it is not yet in harmony with itself. So I add a new bullet point to The Voice of Morrowen Hollow: I shake you from your sloth and self-deceptions I was born from the creek and the stones I properly should write something like I need to be heard, here, but thats less cool to me, so I dont. Instead, I feel mildly guilty for not having anything to connect this to the whole Need thing directly and I resolve to sneak that connection in somewhere else (when and if I get the chance.)

75

THE VOICE

OF MORROWEN HOLLOW
I shake you from your sloth and self-deceptions I was born from the creek and the stones

76

Your Plan
Next lets figure out what you plan on doing why have you come to Creation? What do you plan to accomplish while youre here?

You Plan to . . .
Build Something
Youve got something to make. Youve got something to build. Maybe youre working on a welken-rite, where you build something awesome and unreal in Creation and then use it as leverage to plunge a whole area (physical or conceptual) into unreality afterwards. Or maybe youre just building something because you can an army or weapon for the Excrucians, a tool that you can use later, or a problem for the Imperators or the Powers that isnt directly relevant to the unmaking of the lie. Maybe youre not even really thinking about the war at all, youre just doing stuff, and the only relevance of your Deceiver nature is that youre going to toss off offhand attacks on the Nobilis and the reality of things, now and then, when the opportunity is there. What are you making here? A Weapon? Trap? Tool? Welken-rite? Or just something that gives you joy?

Lotus Flower (I) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Hemlock (XVI)

Make A Pointed Argument

Youre here to pick apart the philosophical structure of reality. Youre here to do a flower rite and turn an Estate against itself, or pit two Estates against one another, or run one of the classic Deceiver cons like a Zenos Gambit (where you get all the spirits of a road to pay attention to the spirits of their two halves and to stretch themselves out a bit when a person walking the road steps between them) or a Theseus Ship (where you take advantage of a costume ball to jumble the love affairs in a town so thoroughly that nobody can figure out whom theyre in love with any more.) Basically, your goal is to make reality break down, and then walk off with the pieces. Other plans that run on philosophical conundrums or twisty metaphysical ideas also work here, like corrupting an Imperator with copies of your own mind or twining up your history with the Creators really, anything that you can think of that you think is clever will suffice! Are you going to have fun with it? Is it bitter work? Or is it just a job thats got to be done? Are you going to tackle the world like a college student whos just discovered philosophy? Like a cruel, mocking superior who knows that reality will never be good enough for you no matter how hard it tries? Or with all the jittering excitement of a recently-converted evangelist mainlining espresso from a beer hat? Hey, how will your pseudo-Estate help this plan go through?

Vervain (II) Chamomile (X) Milkmay (XII) Water Lily (XIV)

77
Burn it All Down
Youre angry. Creation exists. Creation is bad. Its time to tear it all down. Youre here to rip the world open and play in its guts. Your plan isnt something subtle and philosophical. Youre here to poison an Imperator. To blow up a continent. To eat all the horses. To tear down the Weirding Wall. To post a list of all the Earthly Powers currently in love on the doors of the Locust Court. Your plan is going to leave a mark. Are you grim and determined, plodding through your awful plan one step at a time? Are you a terrifying storm? Are you aiming for something mortal and material? Are the Imperators and Powers your targets? Or have you set your sights on one of the foundation stones of reality? And are you looking to end it all here and leave a smoking ruin behind you, or are you just making some hit-and-run trouble before moving on to something else?

Acacia (III) Aconite (V) Periwinkle (IX) Widow-Rose (XI)

Pay a Social Call (or Two)

Youre here to get to somebody. Somebody whom youre pretty sure you can work around to betraying reality. Or maybe to doing something else. Do you care about them, or is this a coldly considered recruitment? Are they bitter? Nihilistic? Vulnerable? Are you planning to win them over with friendship, reason, love pretty things like that or do you think you can stir up so much hatred in them for Lord Entropy, their Imperator, Heaven, Hell, or whatever that theyll fight for you willingly just to bring Creation down? Are you looking for leverage right now? For a commitment? For an act of treason? Or just to get them thinking?* Is this a general recruitment drive, sounding out a bunch of people, or are you here for one particular person whose soul you want to win? Hey, do you think theyre good people?
Clematis (IV) Wild Oats (VI) Gorse (VIII) Bilberry (XV) Note that sometimes, no matter how subtle and careful youre being, the person youre sounding out is going to unexpectedly go all-in yes, I will totally work with you, point me at a target or, conversely, attack you as the enemy of the world you are. Be sure youre ready with a proposed target in the first case and an escape strategy in the second!

78

Building Morrowen (Part 5)

an example of Deceiver construction Key XII, the Milkmay, suggests that I plan to offer reality a Pointed Argument. This would make more sense to me if I had a descriptive Estate, or at least an artificial one right now, what the Voice of Morrowen Hollow is saying seems like its going to be a little bit unformed. Its going to be sound as much as words. So making a pointed argument just doesnt feel right! Key XV, Bilberry, offers the suggestion that I might be planning to make A Social Call (or Two). That I might be trying to sound out the local Powers build a bridge to them. That doesnt sound wrong, but its not convincing enough to make me choose it immediately. I look at my other options, Burn it All Down and Build Something. These are actually pretty simple to fit in with my character, and thats ultimately why I dont choose them. Theyre too easy! I dont want to go outside the suggested choices if its not going to add anything to my character, and right now those options dont. So I cycle back to Pay a Social Call (or Two). All right! My plan is apparently to try to get some Powers hooked into this whole cult of me and my voice that Im building. I want to get them to hear and echo back the voice of Morrowen Hollow. I add a second bullet point to the Lie of Bilberry: I believe that there is someone listening I shall cause even the Powers of the world to hear Problem: there is no possible way this is going to go well. Seriously. This is a great plan, except for the part where it is a terrible plan and I am totally going to die.

79

THE LIE OF BILBERRY

I believe that there is someone listening I shall cause even the Powers of the world to hear

80
Your Backup Plan
So, what happens if your plan blows up in your face? What happens if the Powers of Creation see right through you like five seconds after they show up? Or, just generally, if they win? Figuring this out is particularly important if you have the kind of plan that the Nobilis can just wreck, without giving you a chance to fight to the end or flee in disgrace and tatters an anticlimax like that is hardly ever fun!

If your plan fails, youll resort to . . .

Threats
Aconite (V) Wild Oats (VI) Widow-Rose (XI) Water Lily (XIV)

Theres something you can do to the Powers youre likely to fight. Theres something you can pull out of your hat, probably involving your pseudo-Estate, that will just plain chill their blood. Can you turn yourself into their loved ones, or vice versa? Can you link the health of their Chancel to your own? What kind of a threat can you drop that will make them think twice about fighting you? Or at least because this is the core thing about a backup plan get them to deal with it somehow before they finish taking you on?

Temptations
Lotus Flower (I) Clematis (IV) Gorse (VIII) Hemlock (XVI)

You have something you can offer. Theres something you can give. Is it something Creation needs or something that your opponents need? What do you have that can stop even the most loyal Powers attack, make them hesitate, make them tremble with need to give up and go along? Or, if thats too much to hope for, what do you have that will at least tie them up for a few moments while they wrestle with the temptation you provide? And hey, what seeds can you sow so that if you do get driven out of Creation, theyll be waiting to talk to you rather than fight you when you come back?

81

Stage 2 of the Plan

Youre expecting the Powers of Creation to thwart you. Youre expecting things to go wrong. In fact, you may even be counting on it. Do you need things to go wrong so you can pull off the coup you have in mind? Do you expect things to go wrong and keep a clear path of escalation in front of you? Or is the plan we worked out a few pages just a diversion from whatever it is that youre really trying to do?
Vervain (II) Periwinkle (IX) Chamomile (X) Milkmay (XII)

Despair
You dont have a backup plan. Either youre ready to cut your losses and walk away without worrying about it, or . . . Its all in. Most of the time, what this option means is: its all in. You have to win this. Even if you have to crawl on broken glass. Even if you have to beg. This isnt just a plan. Youre not just doing this, whatever this is, to hurt Creation. You need it to happen. There isnt anything else. For some reason, if you lose this well, you cant lose this. You have to win. Why? Whats going on?
Acacia (III) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Phoenix Posy (XIII) Bilberry (XV)

82

Building Morrowen (Part 6)

an example of Deceiver construction Key XV, Bilberry, suggests that I dont have a backup plan. I have to get the Powers to accept me, or . . . stick a fork in me, Im done? That really doesnt sound good. Not for a character I want to play for any length of time. I just dont think that with a reasonable but non-colluding HG I can absorb Powers into the servant-colony forming around Morrowen Hollow. It would get frustrating fast. Powers arent that easy to subvert! Now, this could be wrong. I mean, there is story here. I could sink my teeth into this if I worked at it. I could tell a series of stories about why Powers fall to me basically, just presume that Im going to win for a while and make that the story of the game and the character; let it all build up to an interesting epic failure later on; and spin out of that with a changed and viable entity to play but its still a huge stretch. At minimum Id need a really great Gift for finding people to subvert; or maybe some sort of ability to fission off partial copies of Powers I interact with Bah! Too difficult! Key XII, the Milkmay, tells me that the Powers rejecting me is my plan. This is where I realize that Ive got my pState wrong. Because it all bursts in on me like a firework: of course I want the Powers to reject me. Of course this voice in the wilderness speaking inspiring blasphemy of course the Powers are supposed to reject it. Of course theyre supposed to try to snuff it out. My pseudo-Estate is Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. Their resistance, their struggle, their refusal to give in it validates me. Thats why Ive outgrown some voice-crushing family and some little village. Thats why I need to take on Powers. Once that nameless girls parents and siblings started listening to her, they stopped being useful to me. Once the Mayor, once the priest, once the whole town started listening to the voice of Morrowen Hollow, once they stopped fighting me, once they stopped trying to silence me, I didnt need them any more. I mean, I win either way, of course. If they join the harmony, if they echo the voice and speak and are humbled by the words of Morrowen Hollow, thats a win, but its not what I need. Thats not my food. What I need is for people to try to stamp me out. Thats the power that feeds this particular Excrucian. That adds a bullet point to the Lie of the Milkmay: an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become

THE LIE OF THE MILKMAY

an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become

Heaven, before the War (rendition by Tang Yuann)

83

Contacts
Now its time to pick up to three important Contacts in your life. There are two different tables here the first table covers the more typical Excrucian Deceiver Contacts, the ones youd expect to have, and the second imports the Contacts table from Nobilis: the Essentials and gives it a few tweaks to make it fit the Deceivers better. You can pick your Contacts from either table (or split your Contacts between them); start by finding your Keys on the first table, and then proceed as usual. Note that there are only 1-2 Keys per Contact, so most of your possible choices will strengthen the Truth of one or more Keys. If you want a Contact to be an important, self-motivated part of your story, draw a new circle for that Contact. Name the circle after your Contact. Put a bullet point in that circle saying how that Contact has changed your life. Draw a line connecting the new circle to the Lie or Truth that you strengthened with that choice. This is only for Contacts who really matter both personally and narratively dont do this for Contacts meant only as ancillaries, accessories, and foils!

84
Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II)

Typical Deceiver Contacts

People Whose Lives Youve Touched
Youve got mostly-mortal associates left over from your previous work. For whatever reason, they didnt meet whatever fate you or the Powers doled out they stuck with you instead! Theyre generally insane and physically warped minions, but its possible to have spunky sidekicks, helpless waif-associates, and/ or loyal bodyguards working off a debt they feel they owe to you instead. If you have Persona 2+ or the Treasure Attribute its probable that youve bound these people to yourself or to your pState in some fashion.

A Power of Creation
Acacia (III) Clematis (IV)

Theres a Power youve formed a social and emotional bond with. Probably this limits itself to the occasional shared meal, drink, or cup of coffee your actually relying on one another for anything is going to get them into trouble and put both of you at betrayal risk but maybe some shared secret or agenda lets you actually cross the lines. Who is this Power? How did you meet? What do you get out of it? What do they?

Pet
Aconite (V) Wild Oats (VI)

You have some sort of semi-intelligent animal working with you most likely a creature from the Lands Beyond Creation, and most likely dangerous, but if youd rather have an emo cat or white bunny to stroke ominously instead, thats a Pet Contact too. In any case, even in the prosaic world, your pet is likely to be unusually intelligent, ranging from small but cunning child to sharper than most humans. If your pet is pretty helpless, and not very useful, you can generally treat it as part of your character and not as a separate NPC in particular, you could use your own Health Levels to protect something like a rabbit from an enemy attack and use your own mundane actions to control its jumps.

Hate Friend
Star of Bethlehem (VII) Gorse (VIII)

Youre stuck working with somebody you really dont like. Why? Is there some deep love, family bond, or similar emotional tie underneath the bitterness and the hate? Are you too good at working together to give it up just because you cant stand them? Are you being forced into working together? Are they? You can generally rely on them in a crunch but the rest of the time theyll mess with you, hurt you, and laugh at your doleful sorrows.

Guest Stars
Theres an overall context to your life: a set of MacGuffins, themes, and recurring story types. Youre collecting plot tokens, carrying out serial murders or flower rites, or trying to dominate some part of the world so you keep bumping into other people with similar interests, over and over again. This Contact basically means that youve got so much good history and so much bad history with a handful of notional enemies and notional allies that youre at best half-hearted about trusting or killing any of them, even when you should. If somebody encounters one of you theyll likely encounter the rest before the story ends! What are you all fighting over? Just how much do you hate one another? Respect one another? Like one another? What will happen if you win?

Periwinkle (IX) Chamomile (X)

Innocent
Theres a child or other underdeveloped/innocent being that visits you or vice versa. If youre going to spend a lot of time in one place, you might want to pick a human child for this Contact or possibly a very sheltered teenager; or a group of spunky teenaged adventurers and detectives who reinforce one anothers navet. If you expect to range the world, it might work better to choose a wind spirit, road spirit, extremely innocent Power or Imperator, or some sort of communal entity (e.g., the nascent mind of the World Swarm* or the Argentine ant mega-colony) something that can show up anywhere! Are you friends with this Innocent? Are they a minion, a prize possession, or a resource for understanding Creation? Do you owe them something or do you just hang out with them because you have a lot of time on your hands? Would you kill for them? Change sides for them? Are you planning to absorb them into yourself when theyve grown a little bigger? Or do you just consider yourself the boss of them, and give them tasks and orders, and then experience perplexity (what is this strange human-child sniveling?) when and if they do not comply?

85

Widow-Rose (XI) Milkmay (XII) a hypothetical multinational bee conglomerate, which I have just now hypothesized

Partner
You have an antithetical partner someone profoundly different from you in almost every respect, but bound to you by overall positive emotions. Someone strong if you are frail, unworldly if you are cynical, base if you are refined, and joyful if you are bleak. They complete you. They fulfill you. This connection usually manifests as a sibling, romantic, or parent-child relationship, but sometimes youre just partners in the work or one of you is the others guard. Who are they? How are they most profoundly different? In what goal are you the same?
Phoenix Posy (XIII) Water Lily (XIV)

Friends from Home

Youre haunted by other Excrucians who dont agree with what youre doing, or, at least, with what they think youre doing. Youre not supposed to be or do whatever. Youre supposed to be or do this other thing! Are they trying to correct your behavior by force? To drag you back to what youre supposed to be doing? Do they remonstrate with you? Remove distractions? In what way do you disappoint them? What is it that they want from you? . . . and is it possible that they are being insincere in their desires? How so?
Bilberry (XV) Hemlock (XVI)

86
Lotus Flower (I)

Rare Contacts
Organization
Youve got a company or team to help you do what youve got to do.

Hunters
Vervain (II)

Theres someone or some group actively hunting you and trying to interfere with your plans. Obviously every Deceiver gets this to some extent I mean, if youre in the world, youre a soldier behind enemy lines but you, someone considers you a big enough threat to merit extra attention.

Imperator
Acacia (III)

Youre on friendly terms with an Imperator one of the key building blocks of the lie. Are they your lover? Family? A friend? Or are you the two of you just bound into some sort of partnership by leverage, promises, and mystic chains?

Target
Clematis (IV)

Theres one particular person that youd practically give your soul to reach. Theyre at the center of most of your plans you like them, maybe; you respect them, maybe; but most of all, you just cant stand that theyre caught up in the lie that is the world. You think that you can fix that. You think that you can wake them up.

Celebrants or Cultists
Aconite (V)

Youve got a sect of lackeys, forerunners, minions, cultists, and celebrants. They probably wear dark robes and hoods, scar themselves decoratively, and carry peculiar knives. You may not even like them. But theyre there!

Shadow Self
Wild Oats (VI)

You have a rival, an enemy, or just . . . a problem . . . who represents a hidden half of yourself. This could be the way you understand your relationship with a second real person or it could be that you are literally, in some way, split. Does your other side hate you or is it just trying to bring you around? Does it threaten you, fight you, tempt you, or try to reunite with you? Or are you the aggressor here, trying to bind it, destroy it, or bring it into some kind of harmony with yourself ?

Ghost
Star of Bethlehem (VII)

Youre haunted by someone youve lost or hurt, and youre either unwilling or unable to forcibly exile the ghost of them from your life. This could be a literal ghost or just friends, associates, and enemies dating back to before some event that scarred you and made you want to abandon your former life.

87
Warden
Someone or some group the Cammora? A Warmain? Surolam? holds some kind of power over you. Theyve assigned you a handler this Contact to hold your leash. This is probably someone who is nowhere near as inherently scary as you are but they have some sort of mechanism for control. Are you carrying out their will faithfully? Sneaking around behind their back? Engaging in a campaign of regulatory capture? Or using their control to corrupt them?
Gorse (VIII)

Information Brokers

Youre on familiar terms with all manner of mystical specialists and information brokers hiding in ratty shops, palaces, and retirement homes across Creation (and the Lands Beyond). When theres something you need to know, you know whom you can drop in on and dangle a bribe or two in front of to start tracking that information down. You can say Hey, I need to know about the Power of Entanglement or So, I hear Cnephs trapped in a fiddle somewhere in this miserable world of yours and get invited to the back room to discuss this thing. Most of them will probably hate you, of course, and some will only know who you are by reputation, but its quite plausible that the rest will think youre great. Name and describe one or two of these brokers who might be relevant to your current plans.

Periwinkle (IX)

Mortal Friends and Family

You have a mortal life. Thats kind of freaky, isnt it? I mean, wtf? But you do. Youve got a job, or a family, or something. You actually believe that, at least, as much as you believe in anything Creation-related at all. This mortal life may not be real to you, I mean, not exactly, but its as close to being real to you as worldthings get. Did you break through into the mortal world, then kind of settle in? Were you actually born here, in Creation? Did you grow up knowing yourself Excrucian or did you change unexpectedly, burning out your mortal life, in the event that created you Deceiver? However it happened, you turned around one day and you realized that you were an Excrucian Deceiver but, at the same time, that you were a person still connected to the people living around you in the world. Is that going to break you? Is that going to destroy you and leave you unable to see the truth? Or is it actually helping to stabilize you on your path?

Chamomile (X)

Spawn

You give rise to horrors, and they spread through the world and serve you. Have you turned a mortal town or civilization into your twisted get? Have you spread infectious parasites through the political leaders of the world? Are there alien horrors that you nurture, and if so, are you waiting for them to fly free into the Lands Beyond Creation or to mature enough to destroy some element of the world? How willingly do they serve you? How intelligent are they? How independent from you are they? How childish? How adult?

Widow-Rose (XI)

88
Milkmay (XII)

Mystery Cult
Youre tied to the mysteries and rituals of some mortal or quasi-mortal cult you arent so much a master or a slave to them as the vehicle for the execution of some spiritual rite. They see you as part of their gateway to enlightenment, or as something they bargain with for power, or as a symbol of and a figurehead for their ideals. How much do they understand about whats really going on? How much power do you give them? How much will you take from them before your need for them is done?

Yourself
You are your own worst enemy or your own best friend. Youre prone to encounter yourself copies of yourself, past selves, future selves, variant selves, or just plain you yourself out there in the world. Or maybe you just tend to encounter a bunch of people with similar origins to yourself; they are born from the echoes of your birth, spawned by either the Lands Beyond Creation or the world. So, back to that first sentence! Are you your own worst enemy, or your own best friend?

Phoenix Posy (XIII)

Ward
You are responsible for a person, a creature, or a place or organization containing many people or animals. Generally, this could qualify as People Whose Lives Youve Touched, Innocents, and/or Mortal Friends and Family, but
Water Lily (XIV)

First, its not really a Deceiver thing for you. Its not because youre a Deceiver, theyre not a touchstone to reality for you or part of your pState or people whose lives your flower rites or other work has touched. Second, its not really a personal thing. It can become one, but fundamentally its not. Its just that, somehow, you wound up feeling responsible for them. So you do your best!

I dont know who the super-important Warmains are, but I assume they have, like, military people or whatever. Ill be looking into this soon, but seriously even though I dont think anyones hiding the Warmain command hierarchy, its not the easiest information in the world to find. They arent as . . . talkative . . . as the Deceivers, yknow?

You do not want them to be a mortal. That is like winning the lottery of your life now sucks!

89

Someone you Believe In

Theres someone in the world who isnt a lie. I dont just mean that theyre an expression of the True Thing, clouded by the lie, and that you love their true and underlying form. I mean, they actually seem real to you. They may have sinuses full of snot and intestines full of beneficial and less beneficial flora, and maybe there are some details of their physicality and mentality and spirit that you question, but overall? Theyre something real. Its terrifying. Who are they? Are they a mortal?* A Power? A particularly pure Power? An Imperator? Some sort of freaky and unusually real entity like an artificial intelligence or crystal alien? Why do you believe in them? How did that happen? Can you kill them? What about falling in love with them? How about kidnapping them? Would kidnapping them and taking them out into the Lands Beyond Creation and purifying them would that work?
Bilberry (XV)

Someone Important
Youre on speaking terms with someone whom its a little weird for you to know. Lord Entropy. Ananda. Ha-Qadosch Berakha. Surolam. Firstborn. Attaris Ebrt Appk. Diane Spinnaker. Lucifer. Misenchronic Engine. Some super-important Warmain.* Maybe even Harumaph or the spirit of Cneph who Made. Why? Whats your cover story for knowing them? OK, now, whats the real one? Or, you are someone important, and you have disciples who come by and consult with you about stuff. How did that happen? Who are you? And is there any dark secret at this storys heart?
Hemlock (XVI)

90
THE LIE OF BILBERRY
I believe that there is someone listening I shall cause even the Powers of the world to hear

Building Morrowen (Part 7)

an example of Deceiver construction Key XII, the Milkmay, suggests two possibilities here: a child or an innocent whom I hang out with a Mystery Cult that uses the voice of Morrowen Hollow in its rituals. Key XV, Bilberry, suggests: Friends from Home, Excrucians who dont like what Im doing Some mortal who I believe really exists. I dont like any of these! These options are terrible for my character. I flirt for a bit with the idea of a Mystery Cult but I cant quite make it make sense. Free associating on possible innocents works a little better at some point in tossing up and blasting down possibilities, I imagine Jack o the Chapel, a ghost who lives in the town Church. I imagine him an unrealistically innocent teenager who got walled up or buried under the chapel in what he describes as an amusing turn of events and didnt get out until he heard the voice of Morrowen Hollow; and then I come up with Jill o the Spire, a similar ghost who fell from the bell tower and died and now lives up there and rings the bells. This pair of ghosts hanging out and having fun in the mostly possessed town strikes me as really awesome. So theyre in! Technically I dont have to have any Contacts at all, but I want to have two of them, so I go looking for someone else. Eventually I pick Yourself that is, bits of the Voice of Morrowen Hollow have gotten out into the world and become their own entities, and when they meet up, they dont sound completely the same or agree on everything any more. A couple of nearby villages have their own Voices, basically; I name them the Voice of Lyria Heath and the Voice of St. Morgans Islet. (I dont think hes an actual islet. I think that the town name comes either from another amusing turn of events or from the way it looks when fog covers the lowlands and theres just this little hilltop of St. Morgans town and green.) I spend a little while trying to come up with a Power whos a friend of the Hollow, or protective of it because someone in their mortal family has been absorbed by the voice or something, but I cant get it to work. It sets up a dead conflict, where things should be moving in one direction or another but cant. So ultimately I just leave that idea alone.

THE TRUTH OF BILBERRY

the world is a medium through which I shall echo back

Based on Jack and Jill, I add a new bullet point to the Lie of the Milkmay: an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become I wake the ghosts that hide in your holy places I also give Jill her own circle. I imagine that she mostly sits up in the Church bell tower, watches the area around the town, and rings the bells now and then the sound of them, of course, now rich with the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. Her role as a lookout is the obvious way to get her involved in a story, so I write her first bullet point as: watches for trouble Finally, I add a bullet point to the Truth of Bilberry, based on the Yourself Contact. Its time to show my hand a little bit and say what I really believe in here: the world is a medium through which I shall echo back In short, the part of the world which I believe in, the part that I cant help believing in, is that its useful to me. Its the medium for my becoming. The world is supposed to be a lie, but I cant totally convince myself that its a lie, because I need the world to modulate the outgoing Voice of Morrowen Hollow and ring it back to me slightly closer to complete. I need it to hear me, so I can learn to hear myself.

91

THE LIE OF THE MILKMAY

an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become I wake the ghosts that hide in your holy places

92

Optional Step: Territories

Do you have a home base?

Chancel, by Heed

You dont have to do anything here if you live on the road, or grab a house wherever you wind up working, or even if you have some village, military base, or mountain somewhere that youve beefed up with a miracle or three. If you have something special, though, youll need to build it into your Avatar Diagram.

A cool territory in the Lands Beyond Creation?

Some Deceivers control interesting and quasi-real environments out there beyond the world. Theres Genserics city of bridges and its ropes of golden light; theres Iolithaes cottage in the dark; Tairt Ut-napishtim has spoken of the coiled corpse of his former body what exactly that means is not entirely clear to me and the mansion he has built thereupon; and so on, and so forth, and the like. Id guess about one in ten Deceivers has something like that; if you want to have one, strengthen the Lie of . . . Periwinkle (IX) Water Lily (XIV) Bilberry (XV) . . . or the Truth of any other Key!

An Awesome Vehicle?
Its not really all that common for Deceivers to have flying dreadnaughts, mole machines, or teleporting mini-cities, but its cool enough that I wanted to mention the possibility. If you want a mobile base like this, strengthen the Lie of . . . Vervain (II) Periwinkle (IX) Widow-Rose (XI) . . . or the Truth of any other Key!

93

A Chancel in Creation?
The key feature here is something with an Auctoritas. Anyone can take a random village, use some magic, and construct a mildly defensible base. Heck, Deceivers can do that by accident. It takes a lot more work to get your hands on something metaphysically estranged from the rest of the world a place where miracles and divinations wont automatically follow. Deceivers cant really build these, and if you try to use the power of a second skin to create one, its likely to leave you scarred and damaged but tying yourself to some Imperator of questionable loyalties or getting a Strategist to put one together for you, thats totally plausible. And, hey, its your character and your game; if you want to take over an abandoned Chancel or second skin your way to security, be my guest! The only Deceiver I know to have a Chancel of her own is Iustina Thrasaric, but its got to be more a lot more common than that. If you want one, strengthen the Lie of . . . Aconite (V) Gorse (VIII) Phoenix Posy (XIII) . . . or the Truth of any other Key! If you plan to share a Chancel with a collection of Nobles or Deceivers (e.g., the other PCs), that also works; strengthen the Lie of . . . Acacia (III) Gorse (VIII) Water Lily (XIV) . . . or, again, the Truth of any other Key. Lifepaths are technically optional, so you dont have to go back and change this if the players whose PCs you were hoping to share the Chancel with decide later that theyre not interested just figure out whether you have a private Chancel, some other cool base, or a heart full of bitterness instead!

With much care, he cut her shadow away. Thats all, lady fair, he said. She moved on; The black part of her soul the toll she paid. None enter Heaven until it is gone, And thrown to the squabbling rooks at the gate.
from Heavens Gate, by Jack Frost

94

Your Justification
Heres the last step. You should have a good sense of who you are, who you know, and what youre doing. But what do you tell people? What do you say when they ask you why? Why? Why destroy the world? Why break the lie? Why bother coming to Creation and making trouble when theres perfectly nice Lands Beyond? Whats all this for?

Im Going to Break the World . . .

Because They Deserve Better
Lotus Flower (I) Vervain (II) Acacia (III) Clematis (IV)

These people deserve better! Look at them. Look how they hurt. Look how, even when they try to make things better, even when they try to hurt a little less, they wind up making everything worse and hurt more. Its like watching a puppy in a spiked washing machine. Ka-thunk! Yipe! Ka-thunk. Yipe! Ka-thunk . . . Seriously. You want to put a stop to it. Even if the puppys a biting kind of puppy. Even if its a skunk!

Aconite (V) Wild Oats (VI) Star of Bethlehem (VII) Gorse (VIII)

Because Its a Lie

Thats all. There doesnt need to be another reason. You are going to end the world because it is false. It offends you that the world should exist in this fashion, all shrouded by its lies. Its morally outrageous!

Because Im Me, and It is So Very Fragile

Periwinkle (IX) Chamomile (X) Widow-Rose (XI) Milkmay (XII)

What else can you possibly do? Look at you. Youre a worldbreaker. Not breaking the world, thats like expecting a heartbreaker not to break hearts or a fish geek not to bite the heads off of fish. Sure, you might technically have a choice. Sure, you could be something else. Sooner will the sun rise at night; the wind blow tides of stillness; and the stars fall and drown themselves under the piled waters of the sea.

Posy (XIII) Water Lily (XIV) Bilberry (XV) Hemlock (XVI)

. . . If I Have To, I Guess?

Youre an Excrucian, but youre not really about destroying the world. Its not really your thing. So tell me: what are you actually about?

Building Morrowen (Part 8)

an example of Deceiver construction I skip the territories options because none of them fit Morrowen Hollow. I guess it might be funny if the whole town could fly But no! I am strong! I will not make a silly character here! I want a cool one! So now we come to the last choice in the lifepaths. What will I say if I have to explain why Im going to kill Creation? Am I going to point to the suffering people? Am I going to object to the lie on moral grounds? Am I going to go along with Key XV (Bilberry), and deny any real interest in destroying the world? No! Im going to say what Key XII (the Milkmay) suggests: Im going to kill the world Because Im Me, and It is So Very Fragile. When I am complete, when at last the Voice of Morrowen Hollow resolves into a thing, then the world will end. Or, if not, well, I wont need it any more, so I can burn it up for fuel for . . . my children? . . . or something! I add a last bullet point to the lie of the Milkmay: an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become I wake the ghosts that hide in your holy places I devour that which does not hear.

95

THE LIE OF THE MILKMAY

an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become I wake the ghosts that hide in your holy places I devour that which does not hear

96
There are missing digits in pinameless digits, uncertain elements, unfamiliar or entirely elided numbers embedded in its string. Nobody has found them yet. Computers have come across them, of course, in their endless computation of pi; they have made shift to print those numbers, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. As of yet, nobody has read them; or, if they have read them, they have not yet recognized what it is that they have read. Nobody has yet looked blankly at the obscure symbol or absence on the page, forced themselves to process its existence, checked for computer error, and finally attempted to compute from first principles what the correct digit in that place would be. If they did the world would be a different place, haunted by the irrationality of its principles.
from the Imaginary, by Keiko Takemori

What Does it All Mean?

Your final Avatar Diagram is a Project a vehicle for Destiny expenditures. When things happen in play that bear on this story you started with, that Project gains Destiny. When it accumulates enough power, or when you spend Destiny of your own to push it forward, you can take advantage of everything youve written there to shape the moving-forward of your Avatars life and myth. You can, in short, build forward from this Diagram to empower and develop your Avatar over the course of the game. This can be abstract and personal, or it can give you extra Traits and accomplish things that need accomplishing; thatll come down, in the end, to what matters to you. You can also pick up to two of those circles to represent ongoing conceptual, mental, or moral struggles in your characters life. Write appropriate questions next to those circles. Wrestling with those questions in play will give your Avatar Destiny to work with, ultimately increasing their power and the breadth of your influence in the world.

Final Touches
Draw a line between any two circles that have a shared bullet point. If your two Keys have the same Name, draw a line connecting their Truths. yet. Name your character, if you havent, and any circles that dont have a name Fill in any bullet points that youve left empty. Think about your pseudo-Estate some more what it means, what it is, what the best phrase for it might be. Make it fit nicely together with your character as a whole. Answer any major unresolved questions that this process has left you with, or if you can play without answering them write those questions down.

97

Excrucian before the Tree (rendition by Tang Yuann)

98

Deceiver Stats
As NPCs
The default Deceiver design has: 15-30 character points Aspect, Persona, and Treasure Attributes (max 7) Bonds, Afflictions, Passions, and Skills to taste 2 Normal, 1 Tough, and 2 Divine Health Levels Access to Second Skins the ability to borrow the skills, powers, and spiritual qualities of others, as described on ppg. 108-119. Common Gifts include Immortality, Glorious, and Shapeshifter. The bog-standard Deceiver build is: Persona 4 Active Immortality Shapeshifter (2-3 CP worth) 1-2 Bonds or Afflictions empowering them to do cool stuff

(Phasael mery-Harumaph, as shown in Nobilis: the Essentials)

1-2 Bonds or Afflictions making them more likely to go along with it (see pg. 159) if the players fight them in a cool way.

99

As PCs
Im not ready to say that this is absolutely balanced yet wait for a Nobilis: Antithesis release thats not a mini-book but heres what Id recommend in terms of PC Deceiver builds for a mixed Power-Deceiver game. 15 character points Aspect, Persona, and Treasure Attributes (max 5) 2 Normal, 1 Tough, and 2 Divine Health Levels Access to Second Skins, but 2-3 starting skins (players choice, but HG-statted) and each new skin is a Project or Project bubble 8 points of mortal abilities 13 points of Bonds and Afflictions Genseric Dace, by Miranda Harrell

Lower-Powered PCs
In a setting like Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, where a typical PC has 9 CP and most Bonds/Afflictions are picked up during play, Id suggest: 2-3 character points Choose between Aspect, Persona, or Treasure (but with the option to open up one of the other Attributes with a Project later on) 2 Normal, 1 Tough, and 2 Divine Health Levels Access to Second Skins, but 2-3 starting skins (players choice, but HG-statted) and each new skin is a Project or Project bubble 8 points of mortal abilities 1-3 points of Bonds and Afflictions

100

Impending Incursion (rendition by Tang Yuann)

Shards
When you need weaker or more numerous antagonists, or when youre looking for a particularly unusual PC build, you might look to Deceiver shards or spawn rather than to the Deceivers themselves. Shards or shard-children are a lesser, variant form of Deceiver, literally splintered off from the Deceivers themselves. A Deceiver can create an unlimited number of these shards, and doesnt appear diminished by doing so, and can sometimes create half a dozen or more at once but dont be too alarmed. Its like the way that humans can create an unlimited number of babies or programmers can write an unlimited amount of C code: its true, its absolutely true, but there are underlying resource constraints that make this less impressive and terrifying than it appears. A PC Deceiver should use a Project if they want to create shards and the Project is generally more complicated (if not always proportionally more complicated) if theyre looking to make more than one. The HG doesnt have to track Project progression for an NPC Deceiver, and should in fact assume they have as many shards around as the story requires, but they should bear in mind, when and if it matters, that creating shards requires a Project-equivalent amount of time and energy. Shards are their own characters and not simply the Deceivers puppets. I do think that theres a metaphysical and quasi-physiological connection of some sort that when they meet up in the Lands Beyond Creation, if they ever do, that they may blur together at the edges, may become one for a while or something, or get eaten by their parent, or otherwise integrate into the larger whole but for all practical purposes, when seen from Creation, theyre their own people. Sometimes theyll be near-clones of their parent, mentally and physically; sometimes theyll be unrecognizably divergent; sometimes its in between. I think this is mostly up to the Deceiver in question although the choice and outcome appear to be strongly constrained by factors incomprehensible or at least unknown to me. Deceiver-shards are typically built as mortals save that they have access to Second Skins; they may also have low levels of the Aspect or the Treasure Trait. A few have Persona 0 over a pState related to the pState of their creator often but not always an identical pState with the shards name substituted for their masters. For instance, Helchen Hadusinds pState is Helchen Hadusinds Shadow; if she had a shard named Christine Waye, that shard might have power over the Shadow of Christine Waye. Deceiver-shards are typically less vital than the Powers, with 1 Tough and 2 Normal Health Levels being the conceptual norm; however, if youre playing a Deceiver-shard PC and the game is supposed to last more than 1-2 sessions, Id recommend that the HG give you 2 Divine Health Levels as well.

101

102

Building Morrowen (Part 9)

an example of Deceiver construction The biggest thing I need to do here is figure out what Morrowen Hollow actually is. Ive been kind of casual about this theres a Voice, you know, and it sounds through people; it echoes through them, and . . . stuff. What I decide to say is that its body her body is a pattern of sound. Shes a mythic entity and not a prosaic one, so Im not going to get into ideas like coding her as software into the patterns of sound or anything like that. If you analyze whats going on prosaically, youll probably get technobabble about cybernetic feedback mechanisms and an AI coded into sound, but thats not what she is. Thats the explanation and not the thing. What she is is the way that sound flows through the world, how it echoes from things, how it lives in the things that have heard such sounds and comes back out in them when they speak. If she were silenced, she would live on in the things that heard and remember her Voice but she would degrade; the chaos and entropy that afflict their thoughts would degrade her; she would be weaker and damaged and changed from herself when she emerged into the world again. She would have to work hard to find herself again, to tune herself to herself from what was left of her again, and it is possible that if enough of her was lost that she could never fully return. If she were silenced and forgotten, then she would die. She is not yet words. Ive said that a few times, and I think its true. Shes closer to intonations. Shes closer to music. When someone speaks back the Voice of Morrowen Hollow, it doesnt come out as different words, but as a pattern, a way of speaking. Her Voice is symbiotic with words, maybe; its a second layer of meaning that comes out with the voice alongside words, maybe, but it isnt words itself. Thats why the bell of the Church tower and the creek and the trees and the insects and the frogs and the walls of the valley the creek runs through why they can all speak the Voice of Morrowen Hollow just as a human can. Shes a feeling, a presence, that carries itself in sounds, and new sounds can be in harmony and communion with her, can be an actual part of her, or can be discordant to her. Thats not easy to interact with, so Im going to give her a bit of Treasure and have her use the people of the Town as Anchors. The original girl? The family? The preacher from the chapel? Maybe even everyone who lived there? I dont know. Whomever she has tuned so thoroughly to her voice that she can Occupy them and speak through them in the broader world.

THE TRUTH OF THE MILKMAY

Im an enemy of the world I am truth preceding form

That question resolved, I feel like I can play her shes more bodiless than the norm, even for a bodiless Nobilis character, but I can define where she is, who she is, and what she wants, so the main character design is done. If shes going to be a PC instead of an NPC, I should write a few Destiny-earning questions near her circles, though, like What does it mean that I modulate myself through a lie? near the Truth of Bilberry, and What do I need to do to finish becoming myself ? near the Lie of the Milkmay. Or, hm, no. Scratch that last question, as interesting as it is. I have this lingering a rage against the world bullet point floating around in there what Id really like to know is Why does the world anger me? Why am I an Excrucian? Why cant I just settle in and be a mass mind or freaky sound parasite in Creation? Why does the world have to be a lie? What is so wrong with the world that I need to fight it? Why am I so sure its false? I am starting to taste the answer to that that the sound that comes back to me is somehow wrong and broken but why am I answering it? Its a Destiny-earning question! I should think about it. I should let it be a question. But the only answer I should give it right now is I DONT KNOW! So I do, and I will. Ill give that answer! For a while. If Im building the Voice of Morrowen Hollow as a PC, shes going to start with 15 character points fewer than a Powers, mostly to make up for the fact that she has access to second skins (pg. 99). I spend 12 of those 15 points immediately on Persona 4 (Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow) and the last three on Treasure 1. I choose Speak 4, Superior Sound-Creature 3, and Listen 1 as her mortal Skills; I receive Shine 4 for free. I think about good Bonds and Afflictions to empower my enemies (just in case I wind up an NPC) and with up with I change when my sound changes and I change when I sound through different things. That seems like itll help PCs scheme against me in interesting ways. I wind up with: Affliction [3]: Intangible - I must be a creature of sound Affliction [3]: I change when I sound through different things Affliction [2]: I change when my sound changes Bond [2]: I swallow those who succumb to me Bond [1]: I cant bear silence Bond [1]: I am driven to protect Jill o the Spire Bond [1]: I am driven to protect Jack o the Chapel and Bond [1]: I must find people to struggle against the sound

103

Why does the world anger me?

THE LIE OF THE MILKMAY

an echoing, bodiless voice a rage against the world a power to awaken mortal hearts the harder you try to silence me, the louder I become I wake the ghosts that hide in your holy places I devour that which does not hear

Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow . . .

104

. . . cant silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow find a rage inside them discover the truth of themselves fight that voice, and fail are haunted by that voice feed that voice become a part of the mechanism through which that voice resounds

Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow

105

In the woods there is a machine. The machine makes noise: . . . It is a hissing sound that rises from the machine. Each second it stutters. It speaks again: . . . . . . . . . A soldier sits against the machine. He watches the world beyond him. He is wearing fatigues. There is a bayonet on the ground beside him. The woods are full of them. Theyre full of soldiers. Theyre full of the machines. The world is loud with the machines hissing. The animals have mostly left. There are a few birds who try to sing: Their voice is swallowed. . . . In the distance a Church bell rings. Its sound is: . The sound strikes against the barrier of the machines. It is swallowed by it. The soldier squints but all he hears is this: . . . . . . . . . He relaxes. In the center of the demesne of the machines men dressed as soldiers stand around a table and a map. The map shows a nameless town. It is colored red. It is under a blotch or fuzz of red that spreads across the town and a nearby canyon. Somebody has scrawled above the blotch. The map shows the woods and the soldiers, marked with . The wind coils around a noisemaker. The wind whispers to it: . . . . the noisemaker replies. By the map, one of the soldiers takes a phone call. His phone rings: . . . He answers. There is a faint . . . sound that pervades as he speaks: the sound of phones. He hangs up.

106

He takes a red marker and he adjusts the lines of the map. We have to contain this, says an older soldier. He is speaking in the sound of a human voice. Its spreading. Has anyone been able to contact Himself ? Another man shakes his head. In the woods, a soldier drowses. There is a noisemaker near him. It is saying: . . . . . . . . . The wind wraps around it. It whispers: . . . . . . . . . . the noisemaker replies. The soldier snaps up his head. He stares at it. The sound of the other noisemakers is still loud in the woods. They are deep and they are loud and they almost drown out the change. You can barely hear, in the forest. There is white noise all around you: . . . . . . . . . But this one machine is different. It is saying . . . . . . . . . The soldier hears. He widens his eyes. He draws up his gun. He yells, Infected! He fires. His gunshot is loud: The machine grumbles, rattles, and falls dead.

In a different part of the forest there are three machines. The wind dances around them. It carries the sound of distant bells. . . . . . . . . . say the noisemakers. confirms the wind. At the map table the soldiers phone rings again: . . . He picks it up. Shut them down, he says. Pull back. . . . whispers his phone. We have more coming, he says. He hangs up. He dials a different place. He tells it words. . . . whispers his phone. . . . surrounds him. He looks up. I cant think, the older soldier is muttering. I cant think. Another man is sitting and rocking. we have to warn somebody, he says. . . . . . . . . . hiss the noisemakers all around them. . . . whispers the phone. The soldier with the phone clicks it off. He drops it. He steps on it and grinds it with his foot. He sags. Then he looks up. The wind is all around him. The sound is all around him. Everywhere is the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. He misses the sound of his phone. It was good, he thinks, to have it. He realizes, as he opens his mouth to say something to deny his fate, maybe; to give in to it, maybe; to make a last plea to He who had been his god that he has never loved.

107

108

Second Skins
he Deceivers cheat but they are fighting gods. They are fighting the Nobilis. In general, their pseudo-Estates alone wont cut it. Having a limited Persona-style power over one of the ways you relate to the world is awesome! But its not enough to fight the Nobilis, who have both Persona and Domain covering major aspects of reality. Even paired with Gifts like Active Immortality, Glorious, and Shapeshifting, its just not enough. Being the god of your own little game show or the ruler of your shadow thats not enough to beat the god of fire, winter, or the sun. So the Deceivers double cheat. They use Second Skins.

Do they really need more power?

Its true I will grant that a Deceiver can be incredibly, insanely strong on their own. There are Deceivers with Aspect so high youd practically expect their every move to be accompanied by a badass guitar solo. There are Deceivers with Persona 7, which means they can basically turn whole chunks of world into their personal playground for free. And their being Immortal, as they usually are, means that beating them is always going to require something a little crazy. But still a Deceiver is not as scary as a Familia. Some of them arent even as scary as a single Power. And their shards, who are supposed to be a fit match for a Power* are barely even superhuman I mean, you get Genseric drunk enough* and hell tell you the story of the shard even you could have beaten. So, like I said, they double cheat. Their natural abilities arent enough to beat the Powers, so they copy the Powers own. technically I think he fakes
it

according to the universal fair-fight index maintained on rec.arts.fight!

They go out to a place beyond the world if they can. Or to a hidden sanctum. Or if they absolutely must, to a warehouse or basement or abandoned building or somewhere like that where they can work without interruption. They spend a day, dawn to dawn, dusk to dusk, or maybe even some other interval. Ive always heard dawn to dawn and dusk to dusk but maybe any 24 hour period will

suffice! Anyway. They do that, and they come out of that, and theyre different. Theyve changed. They smell different. They carry themselves different. Theyve put on some other persons soul.

109

Whose?
The exact ritual is different from Deceiver to Deceiver. So too are the requirements. The standard rule is that they have to have met somebody. Thats really a minimal rule. Thats there to say: there are some Deceivers out there whom you dont want to invite to a party with dozens of Powers, because then bam, theyll have dozens more souls they can put on. Deceivers like that, all they need is a meeting. They get introduced to you. They and you have some trivial interaction. They see you and they know your name and they know that youre worth stealing. Whatever. And bam, thats all it takes. They can wear your spirit as a second skin thereafter. They can. Their shards can. Just from that. But thats just the minimal rule. There are plenty of Deceivers who have to work harder. I dont know how hard or easy Genseric and Coriander find it, but I know that Phasael needs a token from you to wear your soul. Rumor has it that Tairt needs to talk to you for at least three hours and sometimes longer. A shard may not be able to learn you at all they may have to rely on the Powers and Imperators and mortals that their parent Excrucian has met. In a lower-power game, the default is a Project plus substantial interaction. For instance, Jasmine Apocynum needs at least a whole Project bubble dedicated to knowing you before she can steal your skin. She has to study people, think about people, and gather memorabilia of people before she can wear their skins. History has seen Deceivers who needed their targets to sign something, or to sleep with them, or to invite them into their home, or to give them some sort of gift. The Bastard Amayika apparently had to share a cigarette with you before it could wear your skin; thats one of the reasons that sharing a cigarette with a Power is considered such a huge indicator and offering of trust.*

But dont smoke! I mean, dont start smoking. I mean, not to impress Powers. Kids. In fact if you have the young pink lungs of a child go breathe some fresh air and then tell your parents, I started breathing fresh air thanks to Jenna Moran! Her games are so vitalizing, I bet Ill live to be one hundred and two!

110
Echoing in Morrowen Hollow
When Morrowen Hollow wishes to take on the skin of an entity it has met, it whispers to itself and throughout itself what it knows of that person what it saw in them, what it heard in them, how it sounded to itself when it heard itself reflected back from that persons body and through the lens of that persons conversation. It needs to engage with them in at least a few minutes of conversation more if it cannot map their body with its echoes and feel out how that person responds to their presence before it can take on their soul. It is possible that it could do this with only part of itself, in a small room somewhere, but this is not its natural inclination; Morrowen Hollow would only do so if it knew that someone was listening and astute enough to turn that listening into knowledge of its new second skins name. This ritual of echoes takes the normal day and night. Morrowen Hollow speaks the self it wishes to become of from dusk to dusk or dawn to dawn. Morrowen Hollow does not need proper peace and quiet to abandon such a skin; rather, it must ring out its original sound throughout itself. This means that it must have access to the ability to make sound within itself and the ability to hear either the sounds of the creek or the heartbeat of the original corrupted girl.

Does it affect you when a Deceiver steals your skin?

Its not clear. As far as I can tell, its more of a duplication of your soul, a really good mask, than an actual theft. They dont take your actual skin. I dont think they even take your actual soul although there are records of Deceivers having more trouble wearing a soulless persons skin. Its subtler than a theft, though, anyway. It does seem to have some effect on you. I mean, theres evidence that it troubles you a little. It gives you a frisson. So it must have some sort of effect or you wouldnt notice it. There wouldnt be anything to notice! I accept spooky action-at-a-distance as every Nobiliser must but spooky action-without-action is a bit too Taoist even for me. So theres some connection, or at least some spiritual touch. It is probably something you could exploit somehow. If you want to figure out how, either as a Deceiver trying to weaken the target or a Power trying to block it/use it against the Excrucian who tries it sure, make it a Project and go for it! But mostly, I think, its the same sort of effect, the same sort of shiver, as when someone makes a clone of you, or talks behind your back, or whatever: a psychically sensitive person feels a touch of a newborn symmetry, of a something that concerns you, but thats all to it that there is.

What do they actually do to put it on?

Its different for each Deceiver. This part Im basing on very little evidence. Few of these rituals have ever had witnesses. We know a bit about Iolithaes rite from ancient texts. We know about one of Phasaels rites back in the middle ages at the time, his usual method for putting on a second skin killed one hundred people. One of the women at the ritual gave birth under the pressure of the event and left him with one hundred and one potential witnesses, including the adult survivor who wrote the story down. Ive seen a ritual of two skins, and it was a lot nicer than that, and nobody died at all But I cant talk about that one. My computer would catch on fire. Or my notepad. Or my tongue. You know. Whatever. All I can say is, it didnt kill one hundred people. It didnt even maim nobody! The point is, its different for everyone.

The best thing to do is to come up with something cool for your Deceiver to do to put on a second skin. Something that fits their pseudo-Estate or their nature and has a kind of epic feeling to it. If that doesnt work, though, if you cant think of anything good, you can either punt on worrying about it until later or just assume that they sit in an empty room surrounded by a hundred candles or something and as the candles burn down they put on somebody elses soul. The Ritual of Two Skins functions as a mundane action; that doesnt mean that mortals can do it, of course, or that its plausible for a Deceiver to fail at it, although it does open both of those options up to the HG.

111

Swapping Skins
I think Deceivers cant do the ritual of two skins while theyre wearing somebody elses skin. I think they have to take one second skin off before they can put on another. For a full Deceiver in their place of power, that doesnt mean that much. For a shard, who might be as weak without a second skin as an ordinary mortal, that temporary vulnerability might be a serious concern. There may be a catch here. Like, its possible that they dont have to take their old soul off until the halfway point. Or until almost the end. All that stuff is the HGs call; it might even vary from rite to rite! If you are a Power and the best way you can think of to find out about Deceivers is to read a Nobilis supplement written by someone who happens to have had social interactions with a couple of them you should be aware that listening to me on this particular point is dangerous. If you are reading this because you want to play a fun game of Nobilis, though, you can assume that a Deceiver or shard is comparatively vulnerable during this ritual, particularly in its second half anything else would be a plot twist!

The Effects of the Ritual

Heres what the ritual actually does. The Deceiver tells themselves, and maybe the world, the story that they are actually somebody else. They weave the power of that person around them. They become that person, sort of. Its their second soul, their second skin, their other self. It even affects how they think of themselves. It changes them, it affects how they experience the world, it gives you avenues that you

Swapping Skins, by Miranda Harrell

112

might use to reach them. They become a lot more like the person whose soul theyve taken. Its not enough to break them even taking on the soul of a Power with an incredible, absolute loyalty to Creation wont turn them but their second self definitely isnt well-quarantined in their head. is. And over the course of the ritual they gain access to everything that person

They gain their targets mortal skills. Their passions. Their loves, their hates, their needs. They gain their powers for instance, and most importantly, the miraculous abilities a Power or Imperator has. They dont gain their physical appearance, voice, or mannerisms in general, but they do gain their Bonds and Afflictions, which can have an appearance, voice, or mannerism-altering effect.

Estates
The Domain and Persona ratings that the Deceiver gains from a second skin govern the relevant Estate. That is, if Helchen Hadusind has Persona (Helchen Hadusinds Shadow) 4, she cant improve that Persona by stealing the skin of a high-Persona Power. If she takes on the skin of Adrian Elsey, who has Persona (Toys) 5, she winds up with: Persona (Toys) 5 Chibi-Imperator (or, a Second Skin) by Alexander Benekos Persona (Helchen Hadusinds Shadow) 4 instead.

Anchors
You dont get extra Bond points when you upgrade your Treasure through a second skin; you get the targets Bonds themselves. In fact, you even get the targets Anchors the stolen Treasure rating will bind you to their ordinary, wondrous, and miraculous Anchors in addition to your own! However You must know about an Anchor to have power over it. Youll know about Anchors you knew about before the rite; Anchors you encounter in play while wearing the relevant skin; and Anchors bound to the stolen soul by extremely straightforward Bonds, e.g. Bond: I Must Respect My Butlers Years of Service. You dont get any power over Anchors bound to your target by a temporary wound.

Most stuff youd want to do with a Powers Anchors is an attack on them. You might be able to get away with using their Anchors in ways that dont affect the Powers own access visiting their butler and invoking his wondrous efficiency, teleporting into their sanctum, or invoking one of their spells but trying to summon their toys, upgrade their Anchors, or put their servants into danger is going to attract their notice and give them a guaranteed chance to defend. Finally, in general, you cannot forsake the Anchors of your second skin, neither on their behalf nor on your own. You can, conversely, use a currently unassociated Bond to bind a new Anchor to your target and thus to you. The standard conflict rules apply here, so they could notice this effect and defend against it . . . but as a practical matter they hardly ever will. A Power knowing whether someone is trying to turn one of their Bonds into an Anchor is like a mortal knowing their exact age in days: its perfectly possible but hardly anyone actually keeps track. Similarly, your target is unlikely to notice you upgrading, summoning, or using the powers of that new Anchor until theyve become aware of the Anchor itself.

113

A Borrowed Anchor, by Miranda Harrell

114

MP
A second skin comes with an MP pool for each miraculous Trait. The Deceiver gets that pool if its higher than what they had, but it doesnt fill up automatically. So if a Deceiver with 5 PMP and nothing else takes on the skin of a Power with 8 MP of each type, the Deceiver now has 0 AMP (out of 8) 0 DMP (out of 8) 5 PMP (out of 8) 0 TMP (out of 8) This is technically a simplification: the PMP you use to control a pState and the PMP you use to control an Estate arent actually the same. It works out to be a decent approximation in practice, though, so were going to use it in the game. If you want to have a more correct narrative, occasionally claim that one pool or the other is exhausted when you still have 1-2 PMP left.

Chancels
Technically if you want the discount on an Aspect or Treasure miracle, and their Aspect or Treasure is lower than yours, you should use their rating and not your own. That sounds awfully complicated so Im going to say instead that you can go ahead and get the discount on any Aspect or Treasure miracle, but if you go too much further here than the Power in question would, the Chancel may eventually notice and freak out.

In general youll only get the 3-MP discount on miracles in a Powers Chancel when they are miracles that that Power could perform. You wont get it on miracles that use your pState or your own Anchors. Simply put, the Chancel makes miracles easier because its attuned to the Powers and Imperators that live there its not attuned to you. In general you will get the in-Chancel discount when in your second skins Chancel on any miracles they could perform*. It is possible for the Chancel to notice that you are not who you are supposed to be and get weird about it, but thats an edge case most Chancels arent really built to spot Deceivers wearing the local Powers skins, because Deceivers dont take advantage of the Chancel discount very often and any metaphysical security system like that runs the risk of locking the actual Powers out.

Wound Levels
In general, a Deceiver-shard has a Tough and 2 Normal Health Levels; a full Deceiver has 2 Divine Health Levels on top of that. If impersonating someone with more health levels than that, theyll gain up to 2 additional Health Levels of the strongest kind that wont take them past the targets own numbers. Wounds in these levels go away when and if they drop the second skin.

Imperial Miracles
A Deceiver wearing an Imperator or Mimics skin can speak Imperial miracles. These are always and only those that the Imperator or Mimic would be able to speak themselves they have to flow from who the Imperator in question is, not from who the Deceiver is. Speaking Imperial miracles is a very ad hoc process for the Deceivers; theyre simply . . . not Imperators. Deceivers have a strong sense for who their borrowed souls are, inside, and so they can search their heart to figure out what Imperial miracles they might be capable of but they dont know exactly how to do them or what their limits might be. The best analogy I can come up with is that it must be like playing a computer RPG in a language that you dont know. You can do it, because theres a pretty graphical user interface, all the controls work, and most of the basic ideas are familiar, but theres a mist of incomprehension and uncertainty floating over everything you do because you cant read the manual or understand the feedback the game gives; and every now and then you push the wrong button and the mouse orientation flips or the game mode changes or something and youre suddenly completely lost. In short, its completely feasible for a Deceiver to do Imperial miracles, but its more difficult than you might assume.

115
I shall tell you the most unpleasant experience of my life, which is to say, the murder of Tairt Ut-napishtim. I judged that I had learned enough from him; I judged that no one else ever should; I slaughtered him. The resulting smell confused me. It was not the smell of the fresh dead, but of a corpse that had been rotting there for weeks. I staggered out of the building to find that the building had been his corpse-flesh moldering, that the windows had been his eyes; I pulled out a spark of power after me and understood in that moment that it had been I myself who had, however transiently, given that corpse the appearance of life. I looked around me: the world was the corpse of Tairt Ut-napishtim. This was apparent to me; I did not deduce it, but saw it, rather, and shook it off only with effort, will, and time. Sometimes I will wake up, or turn my attention suddenly from an object that has occupied my attention, and the world will be his corpse again. This vision does not depart.
Calliste Focault, Domina of the Shore

Example
A Deceiver-shard named Christine Waye falls into the world. She is a sad case as people who take responsibility for destroying the world go shes just a mildly superhuman associate VP for some financial sector company with side talents for accidentally killing plants, evoking vampire tropes and motifs without actually being undead, driving way too fast, and getting away with driving drunk: Aspect 1 (5 AMP) Persona 0 (The Shadow of Christine Waye) (5 PMP) Bond: A Little Bit of a Vampire 1 Mundane Abilities Passion: Keep your Eyes on the Prize 2 Skill: Project Management 2 Skill: Command Loyalty 2 Skill: Improper Use of Vehicles 1 Special Mundane Abilities Cool 1 Superior Green Anti-Thumb 1

116

Christine is pretty weak for a world-killer, huh? Luckily for Christine, her parent Deceiver spent a fair bit of time interacting with Kaithrya of the Wild. That means that Christine Waye can can spend 24 hours at a management retreat (or something) and add Kaithryas abilities to her own. Going by the best understanding of the Nobiliser community, this would give her 2 Divine Health Levels Active Immortality Miraculous Edge 1 the ability to perform Kaithrya-like Imperial Miracles Bond: Nominally Invisible 2 Affliction: Return what is given to you threefold 3 Gift: Give Rise to Spring (Lesser Creations, 1 MP, Local, Limited, Uncommon) Domain 2 (Spring) (comes with 0 DMP, can gain up to 5 DMP) Domain 0 (Insight, Awakenings, an End to Droughts) Superior Quality: Gravitas 2 and Skill: Contemplate an Issue from Multiple Perspectives 2 While wearing Kaithryas skin, Christine is stuck invisible (mostly) and bound to return what is given to her threefold. Its not the most convenient outfit for a financial sector associate VP! On the other hand, it makes her immortal, gives her a Domain trait and Domain MP, and lets her speak Kaithryas miracles. Since Kaithrya is able to give rise to unseasonable spring, she can use this to heal any particularly precious plants shes mishandled or possibly to bring a new spring to a beleaguered department or even to the economies of the world.

A feather is placed in my hand. Dreams, he says. Should you need a door into dreams, this will open it. A pebble. With this, he says, You can walk upon the sea. He moves to place a stick of gum in my hand, and I lift the other in a gesture of warding. No more, I say softly. My heart is full, and I can bear no more gifts.
from Sonnet and the Sea, by Alexander de Vriend

The Truth of the Name

A second skin isnt all honey and roses. The Afflictions of the target can pose a problem for the Deceiver heck, even their Bonds can pose a problem, although obviously somewhat less of one. The moods and beliefs of the copied soul can challenge the Deceivers thinking. Most importantly, though, the Powers of Creation can use Deceivers second skin against them. Someone loyal to Creation who names the skin that a Deceiver is wearing can follow it with an order that the Deceiver must obey. In the name of Kaithrya of the Wild, someone could say to our invisible Christine Waye, reveal all of your companys unsavory doings to the federal authorities! Or: In Kaithryas name*, leave this world and do not ever return!

Or: In the name of Kaithrya of the Wild, fight loyally at my side while I try to stop the plans of Raginhart Tribunas and his friends! This binds them! You can only use this once every few hours. You can get screwed over if somebody else has already given the Deceiver an order in that time frame I mean, part of that whole loyal to Creation thing means that the Deceivers have trouble getting fake orders loaded in, but if your jackass brother Caelestis has been having a grand old time sending the Deceiver out for pizza, youre not going to be able to demand something more important from them immediately after. The order wont bind them indefinitely, either typically itll hold for three to seven days, but if you give them too many orders* some of the older or less interesting orders will fray. Most importantly, the Deceiver can refuse or disobey the order its just that if they do so, they lose the second skin immediately and generally take a wound of some sort as well.

117

How many? It varies! Three is usually safe.

This may or may not work without the of the Wild. Since the Powers speak the True Tongue, I think it doesnt matter how you say the name, but I think it definitely does matter whether or not you know the name, if that makes sense. Like, if youre playing Nobilis and someone abbreviates this to In Kaithryas name, thats fine, but if they think that is Kaithryas name, if they dont know about the whole of the Wild part? That could be a problem. Or maybe if her name is just Kaithrya and the of the Wild bit is just a thing people say, and the person invoking the Truth of the Name doesnt know that? That would be a problem too. Basically, if they dont know who theyre trying to talk about, the invocation will not work well.

118

Can they twist the Orders?

Yes and no! The best thing about the Truth of the Name, from Creations standpoint, is that they cant play too many games with this. I mean Theres a continuum between twisting, interpreting, and understanding, and the world is such that all orders do have to be interpreted and understood. So I cant even imagine what it would mean if they couldnt twist their orders or, at least, thats a concept I would only expect to be relevant if you used some sort of miracle power to make sure your order was objectively 100% clear. That means that the Deceivers have a lot of legitimate power to interpret the order, and often theres no real objective way to distinguish between lazily working on it, outright refusing, and waiting for a good moment to act. That said, they cant just weasel around Truth-fueled orders with word games. They have to be able to convince themselves that theyre actually trying to obey. Not only that, but their reasoning has to be sound enough that it would convince the person whose skin theyre wearing, if they were there. Put another way, if a Deceiver is wearing the skin of a legendary trickster, almost anything goes; but if theyre borrowing the skin of somebody brave, honest, loyal, certain, and true they may be stuck with a very rigorous interpretation of the orders they are given. If theyre borrowing the skin of a normal person, or someone who doesnt think through stuff very well, then their position is going to be somewhere in between. I like to imagine a dramatic and private conversation in their heads. Thats so gameable! You turn to the player whose Avatars skin youre wearing, and you say, hey, would you believe . . . In practice, though, I dont think it really works that way.

r ved be best se th rt would a for r d u e o n t o a m m g th Reasonin en ratio of 2, we su arped space. w ld with a go e from a peculiar giving them u i, iq h p im the M ic on 2 ss of the e symmetr ed look regardle , were r e w y e sh Th m a u th sq we, to e lingly an appea ones gaze; while eir Michelangeof f th direction ar vels, the envy o ve fruitful; when ro m bilateral tnership did not p any our counting r p a m p e co their los. Th too long in ect to ourselves. t n e sp e w sp became su Kong Jian numbers esign, by
ri from P Nuan nciples of Architect ural D

ii

nubounded unteracts invoking a o c n o ti Crea y by ambiguit . They pop into merical ue iq im M rea aff cluster o by one in the a they e n s; o ie it ty u li rea ch ambig on into su y b d flicte ivocati they the equ absorb ntually, e v e s; e ique lv im se m M e a th you cage edepart. If scription of som t e d a onten c t a atop th s, biguou to thing am ally resolve in ntu e v e y a m g clear. somethin

Mimique

Theres some kind of internal conversation, but its really more of a conceptual balancing act. It doesnt take anywhere near as long as a conversation would, and telepaths whove listened in have generally found it more confusing than youd imagine a literal conversation with a disembodied ego-skin to be.

119

Abandoning a Second Skin

In addition to shedding their second skin by breaking an order, a Deceiver can detach it gently over the course of five minutes of peaceful, private meditation. If they cant get that, and dont have any orders to disobey, its actually possible for them to get stuck in a second skin there was a Deceiver held captive for over thirteen hundred years in a sensory stimulation cage, for instance, because it had borrowed the skin of a sound-sensitive Power and didnt have the MP to both overcome its own Affliction and beat the miracles keeping it caged. Theres a more apocryphal story of a Deceiver who was tricked into taking on the skin of a Power that didnt exist, and who therefore ceased to be. That kind of thing probably wont come up. Still, if youre planning on proving that somebody is a Deceiver by giving them truth of the name orders, and they find out, and they slip away for five minutes of private meditation theyre probably taking off the skin. Or at least considering it!

A Vitally Important Note

The language I use may disturb; for this I apologize. I wish to make to make it absolutely clear that second skin, stolen soul, second soul, and all terms of this ilk are metaphorical. I am aware of no cases in which a Deceiver has actually taken and worn somebodys skin, or even pretended to; and while soul-stealing has happened, it isnt in any way the core of this particular rite. I dont know why its called a second skin. I dont know why its called stealing. I think its because of stories of skinwalkers and soul-stealers. I think there may also be a feeling of violation, of having been stolen from, when you find out someones been out there using your powers, skills, and passions to do mischief like finding out somebody dressed up as you to rob a bank, if you know what I mean? Its identity theft, its impersonation, its mimicry, so its a little awful but as far as I know, theres nothing viscerally awful about it. Its icky like identity theft, like someone reading your diary, like anything that should have been private and personal being taken and shared. Thats quite icky! But its not as icky as literal soul-stealing or literally flaying somebody and wearing their skin as a costume, so I wanted to make it absolutely and precisely clear that that is not what is going on.

The Mansion of the Heart

In Bluebell Park there is a mansion. It reflects the heart of the Deceiver Jasmine Apocynum. She gathers memories with and memorabilia of people whose souls she might want to wear. If she gets close enough if she understands somebody enough then shell see a glimpse of their heart behind one of the mirrors of her mansion. She can tease it out over the course of a day, hunt it through the places behind the mirrors, lure it out by reminding it of their shared memories, anything like that that the player and HG enjoy. Then she can take that heart and put it in her chest and gain access to their powers, skills, and soul.

120

Jasmine Apocynums Story (model/portrait by Anthony Damiani)

Jasmine Apocynums Story

I
remember what it was like, being bathed in the radiance of the swan. I remember being good. I remember being a good person. I actually was. I mean. There were like forty, fifty minutes there where I was redeemed, made whole, made perfect, and nobody could have doubted it. Even turned into a serpent, even biting poison into my own saviour I was made good. I am not sure if a good person could tell you this story. I figure, a good person they might not be able to do this kind of thing. They might not be able to drag somebodys heart out. They might not be able to rip out a soul, take it in their good right hand, and use the left-behind flesh in magic. Or maybe its like: a good person would double tell you this story. It hurts, you see. Literally. There are brass hooks of story sticking out of me right now. There are three that have made it out of my skin. There are more that sit just inside me like little prickly presents of the heart. Thats a good reason to think that a good person that theyd definitely tell it, and more. Dont good people go around doing stupid self-sacrificing things like this all the time? I am not certain. That is just an impression that I have acquired. As for myself, even if I am now bad to the bone, I am actually a pro at this stupid self-sacrificing stuff. I bet that I even qualify as tangentially good-like in this limited and specific domain. I can self-sacrifice stupidly like nobodys business. But still I keep thinking:

121

122
Jasmine Apocynums Story . . .
is good-like gives a heart brass handles transfigures inverts unleashes the true self within grapples Death with

There has got to be an easier way. Couldnt I just sing this out of me in one trill of beauteous song and be done? Cant I have a magic pen and write this into me, into my heart and stomach, backwards and upside-down, in letters of golden fire? Cant I find a typewriter and type this out click-click-click like a normal person? Or even an abnormal, disturbingly organic-looking typewriter that clicks with a grotesque peculiarity wouldnt that be fine? Every time my heart beats all the hooks wriggle and they catch at bits of innards and my skin. The pain is actually phantom pain I think. I think that the hooks are not physical. For one thing, I am not currently choking on blood and dying. I am not totally human any longer so that argument may not be definitive but heres an even better proof: I have seen other people telling stories that hurt, and lately I have seen those stories manifest as hooks. None of those people have choked on their own blood or had their guts explode because they told their painful stories either. (I am not counting Mr. Morozov. He had a stomach monster.) So I do not think that these hooks are physically real. I think that most of this pain is a self-inflicted deception. My body twinges with each twitch and each wriggle of these thorns because I can see them because I know that they are there. My eyes and heart tell me that I am pierced all through by these awful brass hooks in me and therefore my body, my sense of feeling: it is deceived. Still. Phantom pain or real pain, pushing giant brass hooks out from your heart is not easy. I would have rather had a magic finger-snapping story delivery method or even the terrible machine. When I finish telling you this story, when I have gone over everything that I need to go over, when I speak the last words of it, then I will find the likeliest looking hook of these. I will set my hands upon it. I will gather up my courage. Then I will pull me inside out with it. I will invert me. I will unfold me with that hook into a leviathan of burnished brass and gleaming chrome. I will make these groping brass hooks of mine into tentacles. I will open my eyes in both directions into emptiness. I will learn to swim in air and land and void.

is logical, sensible, and sane

Then I will swim out and fight with Death. I will squeeze him in my tentacles. I will rip him open with the teeth that are on them and I will bite his brain. I will feast on he Death the lord of Deaths dominion, the first of the Riders, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy is he named. I will break him, and I will grow great with his death-meats, and I will laugh, evilly, then, bwa ha ha, at the world and void. That is my current intention. It is, I will stress, the appropriate thing to do under these circumstances. It is logical, sensible, and sane. It is probably just as well that the whole good thing did not take, however. I believe that this initiative would have given me some trouble at minimum, at the evil laughter part if I had remained infected by the radiance of the swan. Fable of the Swan (Kindle Location 12-54)

123

Step 1: Choose your Name

Hello, Ideologue! Welcome to the world of Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. You are a smart, lonely, socially awkward shapeshifter. You were an ordinary person, but then somebody hit you on the head with a dodge-ball and you achieved enlightenment. You saw the True Thing. It went away. You lost the vision. But by then you were already different. Youd already forgotten your old name. Your old family had vanished. You made a new magical house for yourself in the psychedelic Bluebell Park. You took a new name. But what was it? Are you . . . (Princess) . . . (Prince) . . . something else? Jasmine Apocynum? Jasper Apocynum?

124

Step 2: Choose your Power

Sometimes the people around you are emotionally troubled. Sometimes they have troubles that are not emotional! They really want to fix things, but the wishing power of their hearts is all clotted up their dreams and wishes and needs and wants go around and around and around in them but they do not come true. Luckily you can help! You kiss them? blow some sort of magical powder in their face? dramatically pull them near to you with magic? something else? or, you dont do anything in particular before you . . . Reach into their chest and rip out their heart! This turns the rest of them into . . . a giant monster thats sort of under your control? a giant robot thats sort of under your control? a person-sized monster thats sort of under your control? a magical weapon you can use? a battlesuit you can wear? a giant robot you can pilot? This is a great way of helping them resolve their emotional and situational issues! It is sensible, logical, and sane. The default is that you kiss them, but you can maybe get away without the kiss if one of you really doesnt want to. Then you turn them into a giant monster that is sort of under your control! Note that it is all right if there is an occasional category breakdown some monsters are robots, etc. That isnt your fault! Thats just the nature of giant monsters, giant robots, and the world.

Did you know this book was suddenly going to demand you execute part of the character generation system for one of the character options in the Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine setting? You do now! Not everything is about swans and wrestling death, you know. Sometimes its about creating characters for RPGs!

Step 3: Review Your Goal

Four seals protect the Shell of Lies that keeps people from seeing the truth of the world. The first seal is the Basalt Gates under the Administrative Complex at Principal Entropys school. You dont know where the others are. Maybe when youve broken the Basalt Gates youll know. Maybe youll have to get hit by another dodge-ball to find out! The first step, anyway, is to break those gates open. Youre not strong enough to do it yourself but fortunately you have a ready source of giant monsters! Find somebody who is stuck in a bad emotional or circumstantial place. Rip out their heart. Turn them into a monster! Send it to attack the Basalt Gates. It is extremely therapeutic for them. Plus, its great stress relief for you! This plan is compassionate, logical, and kind.

125

Rules
This is a Project. Around 2-3 bubbles into this Project the HG should give you a modest reward (such as a 6th MP or a level 1 Bond/Affliction), break open the Basalt Gates, and let you move on to the next challenge along your path.

Jasmine Apocynum is an example of what a Deceiver might look like in a low-powered 9 character point game. She doesnt have much going for her: just style, attitude, shapeshifting, and the ability to steal other peoples powers and/or rip out their hearts and turn them into giant monsters!

Flash Forward!
What dread enemies are you going to have to face? What awful things are you going to have to do? If you think you might have to join the secret Vatican dodge-ball squad and subdue the Devil, or climb to the top of the Ash and take on Heaven, nows the time to prep!

SECRET STEP 4!
If you want a different goal, you can choose one. Do you want to break open the various gates, just like I just said? collect special items hidden throughout Town?
How do we get from here to hunt for a particular, magical someone who will only reveal themselves turning into giant brass cephalopods and wrestling death? when you pull out their heart?

something else?

Magic.

126

The Ideologue
Home: you have a magic house in Bluebell Park! Mortal Abilities: Storytelling 3 Im just gonna run with it. 2 Well, Im not gonna do it if you want me to. 2 Student 1 I have to help you! -1 I want to be good! -1 This idea is logical, sensible, and sane. -1 Supernatural Abilities: Persona 0 ( Jasmine Apocynums Story, 5 PMP) make your ideas make sense give yourself the power to rip out hearts enchant random things to be part of your story. Shapeshifting: turn into almost anything, but Bond [1]: your eyes often give you away Second Skins: you can copy peoples powers, but . . . it takes 24 hours; you have to know them very well (with 1+ Project bubbles dedicated to knowing them); if someone realizes whose powers youre using, they can make you grant their wishes instead of fighting to unmake the world. (I mean, naturally. Of course that is how it works. That drawback is logical, sensible, and sane.)

Youre now ready to play Jasmine or Jasper Apocynum, even in a completely unrelated game! Your HG, GM, DM, chess or wrestling coach is certain to be thrilled! But wait! Were not doing that right now. Right now were talking about designing Properties for pseudo-Estates! At least, once youve turned the page . . .

Quick Aside Before You Finish Turning the Page: What do we mean by your Story?
Its whatever story you tell yourself and others to understand your life! Its the things you wave a hand at when youre trying to explain who and what you are. Sometimes it jumps about. Sometimes it crosses levels. Sometimes it only makes sense when you look at it from afar. Everyone has a story. Some peoples stories drive them to greatness. Other peoples stories let them turn people into battlesuits! It all comes down to the way that you think about the world.

127

128

Y2K, by Miranda Harrell

Pseudo-Estates
L
ets talk for a moment about how to design Properties for your pseudo-Estate.

Descriptive
The core of a descriptive pseudo-Estate is the story around the description your explanation for what it means to the world that you have such a pseudo-Estate. Think about your history. Think about your first telling, your first time taking up the power of the pseudo-Estate. Look at what you did with it. Look at what it meant. Look at what youre supposed to feel when you hear that story.

The story of the Lies of Iolithae Septimian is the story of a temple girl who found those Lies who spoke them even though they were forbidden, on her temple above the sea. They were sacred, I assume; the temple kept them, did not hide them, forbade the speaking of them but did not shatter the stone on which those lies were writ. Why did she speak them? There are missing parts to the story. There are verses that we do not have and verses that we cannot translate. But I believe that she spoke them because hers was a world that had gone wrong. She had lost something, or she wanted something, or she regretted something; and to get it, she was willing to shatter the temple, end the dynasty that ruled her, and turn the seas to salt. It may have been simply to become Iolithae Septimian. I do not know. She spoke them to the sea, and each speaking grew stronger, until the waves carried her voice to the farthest reaches of the Earth. She turned the seas to salt, and shattered the cliff where was her home, and the white rock of it tumbled and her King* thrown down. So when I went to guess at the Properties of her pseudo-Estate, I worked from that legend. Three reflect the first appearance of those Lies, on a tablet in her temple: the Lies . . . are sacred shatter walls and dynasties must never be forgotten Two Ive chosen based on the way the story progressed. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian . . . must not be spoken grow in the telling Finally, Ive picked two to justify the way these Lies are scary things. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian . . . doubt the world are made false by the nature of the world The point in all seven cases is to be able to evoke some of the feeling of that story when her Lies come, or an Enchantment (or Emulation, or Blessing) of those Lies comes, into play.

129

Possibly Ibbi-Zikir or Dubuhu-Ada of Ebla, although, perhaps due to Iolithaes influence, I have great trouble saying the name of either King or country with a straight face.

130

Reactive
For a reactive pseudo-Estate, Im going to recommend going against the usual practice and including the pState itself kind of explicitly in the list of Properties. By this I mean that Id start a list of Properties for, say, Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp with . . . listen to Coriander Hasp. I dont usually do this with Estates or pseudo-Estates; you dont need a Property to say that Fire is fire, or Water is water, or Helchen Hadusinds Shadow is, well, Helchen Hadusinds Shadow. So why do it here? The secret is that the context around a reactive pState isnt necessarily what it says on the tin. Consider Those Who Consider the Properties of Flash Examplepants, and the pState Property . . . transcend mortality. Have you now transcended mortality? Possibly! But not by following this paragraphs advice. Even if Flash Examplepants were a real Deceiver, he couldnt change the rules of Creation simply by existing; hed have to take some sort of action, use some sort of power, to make that come about.

This is important to a lesser extent for Deceiver pseudo-Estates in general. For instance, I dont think you need to say that the Lies of Iolithae Septimian are the lies that Iolithae Septimian tells, but its good to make clear in some fashion that they are actually untrue. Possessive pseudo-Estates can generally get away without direct self-reference youll note that the Adoration of Phasael (pg. 156) doesnt explicitly claim that the people involved adore him, and in fact you can argue that its not normal adoration at all; but it works a lot like going mad with adoration for somebody does, so thats OK.

What this means if you have a pState like Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp, thats going to be a hook by which you can interact with Creation, but it isnt automatically identified with That Which is Signified by the PStates Name. As soon as someone listens to Coriander Hasp using the Estate of Listening, theres also a real, Creation-based thing that the pStates name could refer to and it isnt necessarily the same. I mean, it usually is, it almost always is, but its different enough that I think its worth establishing, right off the bat, that listening to him is actually covered.* After that you can go ahead and describe the details of the experience and its implications. You have a pretty free hand here, because, like Ive said, the pState is a cheat code if you want to use your magic context to weaponize people, or enlighten them, or fly, or get infinite lives, or surround yourself with beauty, or whatever, you can do that. Just say how it works. So the full Properties list for Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp might look like: . . . listen to Coriander Hasp feel his words like a fire in their head think hes kind of hot aint dead aint bound by possibility, really, neither probably shouldntve listened, I mean, in the end get all full of inspiration and bad ideas

You can see me tap-dancing a little there, cause I dont want to offend one particular friend I have who um listens to Coriander Hasp sometimes* but I also dont want to contradict the established fact that no good can come of listening to Coriander Hasp. Because it cant! No good will come of it.

131
Please do not raid me federal agencies! Or her! Seriously there is no point in storming my apartment because (a) Genseric Dace is never here when having him here would be profoundly relevant anyway, (b) Coriander Hasp is basically never here at all, and (c) if he was here he would shoot you in the head with flaming bullets, and nobody wants that. Also, then he would send you home and everyone would laugh at you and your fiery bullet head hair. I have seen this. You will think it might be fashionable but it is actually not fashionable in the least!

^^ and, seriously, is this even a crime? ^^

132
Helchen Hadusinds Shadow
I imagine that Helchen Hadusind was an imprisoned murderess who fed things to her shadow until one day it devoured her and learned to cast a shadow of its own. There may be less creepy Helchen Hadusinds Shadow ... was devoured by Helchen Hadusinds Shadow hungers hides from the light, but finds only fear consumes what it needs takes on the shape of Helchen Hadusind

Possessive
Remember that a pseudo-Estate even a possessive pseudo-Estate is a collection of things, not a single thing in itself. Even if your pseudo-Estate is Helchen Hadusinds Shadow, you are looking for Properties that suit all the things that are Helchens shadow rather than describing the shadow itself. If your pseudo-Estate is the Game Show of Selenas Picard, youre looking for Properties that describe the things, places, and situations of that Game Show, not the show as seen from outside. For instance, the various Properties of the Adoration of Phasael arent there to describe the stew of illogic that you see when judging peoples reactions to him from outside. Theyre there to describe what that adoration feels like to people who are caught up in it the Adoration of Phasael frees you feels good is a little over the top celebrates Phasaels existence is wanting Phasael to love you

options!

Things I Am Pointing At, by Miranda Harrell

If youre someone caught up in it, it moves in your heart, erases your anger, forgives Phasael makes you happy that Phasael is alive These are the Properties that let him bring people into that adoration with his enchantment, the Properties that describe how people should behave when caught up in that madness, and thats why Ive chosen them.

133
Fable of the Swan
Since Ive actually released Jasmine Apocynums Story online as Fable of the Swan, I keep wanting to give her pState joke Properties like . . . is available in electronic form . . . is referenced repeatedly in this document but I probably shouldnt. Instead, Im going to assume that her pseudo-Estate Properties mirror the actual circumstances under which she tells her story fortuitously available without spoilers at the very beginning of her book. Jasmine Apocynums Story . . . is good-like gives a heart brass handles transfigures inverts unleashes the true self within grapples with Death is logical, sensible, and sane The quotation marks indicate that logical, sensible, and sane is not an objective definition, but a label you apply to things, and its exact scope, meaning, and relationship to the normal meaning of those words must be discovered during play.

Active
The key to an active pState is defining what you expect to happen because you bring something under the aegis of your pState. The first Property or two should make it very clear what you mean by indicating something, e.g. Things I Am Pointing At . . . are right there Things I Borrowed . . . are immediately accessible to me, even though I dont own them. are established as having been borrowed when I show them to people That first Property for Things I Am Pointing At tells the HG that when you use your pState to cheat, its mostly by pointing things into your presence. Point at the Mona Lisa: its right there. Point through an open door at an escaping hostage: theyre right there. The Properties for Things I Borrowed, on the other hand, not only establish the main point of the pState (that you can declare that youve borrowed something and then have access to it) but also define a mechanic by which this interacts with the world. Something isnt formally borrowed by you, yet, until you show someone that you have it. What if you borrow something but dont show it to anybody? The other Properties, or play, will have to define what that means. The borrowed thing could be in an indeterminate state. It could be wherever it should be, if someone checks. It could even be on your person, or accessible near you, but in a mysterious state where nobody can prove or definitively establish that the reason for that is that youd borrowed it until you show someone that thing. The other Properties just fill in bits and pieces of this story. For instance, you could finish out Things I Am Pointing At like so. [Points to next page.]

134
Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow
Based on what we know of Morrowen Hollow, Id guess the Properties for her pState look a little like this. Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow . . . . . . cant silence the voice of Morrowen Hollow find a rage inside them discover the truth of themselves fight that voice, and fail are haunted by that voice feed that voice become a part of the medium through which that voice resounds

Things I Am Pointing At . . . are right there are obviously right there look like they have been there, or possibly heading towards there, for a while prompt a dramatic reaction to their presence, such as bewilderment, laughter, or shock have an explanation for being there that makes sense until you look at it closely, and then doesnt make sense at all Most of the time these pStates are going to be a little goofier and more surreal than the other kinds you dont mind making reality look ridiculous. For instance: The Person I Married Three Weeks Ago . . . starts remembering it fuzzily once I remind them had a pretty good time at that party figures that if were going to be married anyway we should try our best! figures we can tell each other everything, if were married and all kind of wants to be life partners keeps getting late wedding presents in the mail is likely to find the dress/tux or other memorabilia in their closet at some point However, if you want an intensely serious character, you can pick more metaphysical and emotional Properties, like: Things I Spit Out . . . owe their existence to me have troubled dreams of emerging, not from their known origin, but my maw find themselves shedding bits of their old life and skin and becoming more serpentine or demonic carry out the task that I whisper to them, but do not remember what I said cannot hurt me even if they try

Those I Recruited . . . have flashback memories of my recruiting them, even if they hadnt remembered me when we met have a talent useful to me are the best in the world at it can rely on one another feel drawn to perform the missions I offer them, even if they initially refuse have good reasons to believe that I am working towards something good.

135

(Coriander Hasp, as shown in Chibi-Ex)

136
I am a transfinite barrier, she explained. It is within my power to stop any finite force brought to bear. You are a finite creature; you cannot pass. Duty obliges me to walk to the end of the world, I said, and I feel it lies beyond this point. Then the question, she said, becomes: is duty a finite force?
from The Duchess Needle, by Emily Chen

Persona Miracles
H
eres a guide to what Persona over a pseudo-Estate looks like in practice.

Difficulty 0: The Sight

Like a Power, a Deceiver can use a reflexive Difficulty 0 Persona miracle to invoke the Sight. The mundane forms of the world blur and fade. It gets a little harder to track all the random stuff that might be happening around you adding a level 1 Obstacle to a number of mundane sensory, navigation, and world-orientation tasks and a level 2 Obstacle to extremely precise work and your use of long-distance vision. In exchange, you get a vastly sharpened sense for the relevance of things. You can: pick up relatively public information from extremely small cues. recognize the Properties of things with unnatural efficiency and accuracy. head straight to the interesting places when poking around somewhere. get a bit of warning when trouble is coming. see things relevant to your pseudo-Estate, or any Estate your second skin has Persona over. Let me expand on that last point a bit. When the Sight is active, youre tuned to things that are important or relevant to your pseudo-Estate, or vice versa. For instance, Iolithae Septimians Sight can see and analyze the things that are relevant to her lies people whose lives theyve touched, people whove listened to them, people whove denied them, people who would honor her for them, and people who hate them.

Selenas Picard, I assume, has a Sight that illumines interesting things to involve in his game show. Basically youre never going to have a but how could I have missed that? kind of experience while youre using the Sight. Phasael mery-Harumaph will never just walk past somebody who already adores him without noticing. Helchen Hadusind (whose pseudo-Estate is her shadow) will never fail to notice that a Powers ambient glow eliminates shadows in its vicinity. And if any Deceiver happens to be wearing the skin of the Power of Couches, and they have the Sight on, and they walk past the CEO of a major couch corporation, that CEO will stand out as the CEO of a major couch corporation like he had a glowing label over his head. You receive free Strike on this miracle equal to your Persona rating and can spend MP or invoke a Bond for additional Strike. That said, once invoked, this miracle relies on your mundane senses for its effect. The only function of Strike in this context is to help you activate the Sight in the presence of a hostile Auctoritas or Sight-deceiving miracle. You can enhance your mundane senses with Aspect and Treasure miracles if a basic use of the Sight proves inadequate to your needs.

137

Apocynum-Vision
obody should have to live that way. Nobody should have to endure without the truth. It should . . . should run in the bones of us. Do you understand? Its that important. It should live in us. It should dwell in us. It should live through us. It should make us gold, the truth, the underlying thing, the void, it should purify us, it should refine us, it should make we who are noise into the signal. It was so close, so very close, so marvellous, I could touch it, I could taste it, I could feel it, it was fading from me, it was already fading (aw!) but it was there, ready to perfect us, ready to free us, only we were sheltered from it by our mistakes, our lies, our lives . . . I moved my lip over my teeth. I bit it, my flesh-lip, and I felt the little message-less pattern of indentations and bumps shifting beneath the skin. I saw. I understood. The new girl was burning with truth. The elf as well. And me. Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 3023-3030)

Jasmine Apocynums Apocynum-Vision sees through to the heart of things, to the truth of things, helping her to spot potential enemies and allies and determine when it might be possible to take out a persons heart.

138

Echoes from the Bell

When the Voice of Morrowen Hollow activates the Sight, the Church bell rings; or thunder echoes in the valley; or the voices of the town raise up in song. These vast sounds drown out the subtle details of the world the Voice of Morrowen Hollow becomes less able to see the world around it but they are deep enough, true enough, real enough to touch and feel out the outlines of things of power. Threats, mostly, and potential sources of strength and food; though for the Voice, of course, the two things are usually the same. It is as if the holiness, the greatness, or the awfulness of the sound enables it to echolocate things that are equally un-profane.

The bell rang, and the sound of that bell ran out across the land like many rivers, like a great flood; and the sound of that bell was the voice of Morrowen Hollow. Jill she sat by the bell. Jill she rang it; two times, three times, four times for fun The sound it came back wrong. The sound it felt out the approach of a man on a horse, and the horse stood in the sky, and there was fire about it, it snorted fire, its mane was fire, and the face of the man was bleak. He had a scythe on his back and his coat was old and he had come So said the sound of the bell To slay the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

t was the Church-bell that first felt it someone is coming.

Difficulty 1: Blessing or Curse

In general, you can use a difficulty 1 Persona miracle to give someone a dollop of the nature of your pState. So if youre Helchen Hadusind, you can make someone a bit more like your shadow. If youre Iolithae Septimian, you can make someone a bit more like your lies. This is pretty controllable and youll have a lot of say over how it turns out but its not a very strong effect. You also have the power to take away some of your pStates nature from somebody, although you dont have as much control over what happens then its more like youre now less like my shadow or youre now less like my lies, maybe with a bit of an emphasis on one Property or another, and the HG figures out what happens from there. Thats not going to be a very strong effect either. These little blessings and curses dont change that much about somebodys life. Its maybe up to a tenth of their life that changes and with seriously diminishing returns from multiple blessings or curses. This effect simply isnt powerful enough to turn someones whole life around unless it was pretty much trembling on the verge of turning around anyway.

It does produce strange and magical incidents and a definite feeling of whoa, thats different. The way Id like to see you use this is to fit people better into your pseudo-Estate into the context for your world. The blessings and curses of Phasael mery-Harumaph make people a slightly better fit for a world that he can walk through being showered by everyones adoration. He makes you feel good that hes alive. He gives you a bit of his own awesome. The blessings and curses of Iolithae Septimian are little things that make the world seem more distorted, more unreal, more ready to believe her lies. The blessings and curses of Selenas Picard, Id guess, make things fit his game show a little better. The world around him prices itself more easily in units of X dollars and 95 cents, if you know what I mean, and theres more of a sense of breathless anticipation whenever anybody spins a giant wheel.

139

Promote/Demote Extra
think that back in the old days back when this kind of stuff was real, back when there was magic under every tree and bush, back when the giants were giants and they fought the people of the void, back when Harald went out beyond the world to seize the cintamani stonethat his family must have had voices of their own. I think that Gerd must have been a girl with her own thoughts and interests, like, maybe she really liked bugs and didnt like people. Or maybe she was brave. . . . from Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 401-410)

Jasmine Apocynums blessings reach down into the seething sea of faceless extras and fish up meaningful characters. She points at an NPC with no real connection to her story and her life, blesses them with her power, and bam, theyre a person! Part of her story! . . . regrettably for her legend and her power, this is also known as talking to people. Still her blessing makes it more likely that someone she promotes into being a character will play a meaningful role in her life. If they literally dont have anything better going on, theyre likely to become a minion or even a friend, victim, or enemy! Similarly, if she wants to drop someone from her life, a curse is likely to be successful in pushing that person away.

140

Blessing of the Voice

fox ran past. It heard the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. It stopped. It cocked an ear. It mumbled to itself. It made soft noises. But it did not try to silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. It fled from it instead. It ran. Its voice was still the voice of a fox. Its footsteps were still the footsteps of a fox. But if you listened very carefully, when it moved, you could hear the sound of water over stones. from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

The blessings of Morrowen Hollow do not suffice to make something fight it, that otherwise would not; to make something a part of it, that otherwise is not; they wake only the faintest rage, dig up and ravel out only the lightest-buried secrets of the heart. The touch of Morrowen Hollow does not make you one of Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow; it doesnt change that much of your life and destiny. It just echoes a bit in you, speaks a bit through you, rattles around inside you and fills a little bit of the medium of you with the music of that voice.

Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

Sometimes gamblers will talk about luck being with them. Sometimes writers feel their muse as an almost tangible presence. Sometimes religious people will talk about feeling a divine power filling their lives. This isnt about possession. Its not about some god, God, or Deceiver coming down and kicking you out of yourself and making you a puppet. Its not even really about luck or muses or inspiration, although thats a heck of a lot closer. These miracles are about a . . . a walking with. Some divine or semi-divine force is walking with you. Its there in you, around you, beside you. Its like a lover holding your hand. Its like a parent watching over you. Its like a child filling your heart with joy. Its with you. In that fashion a Deceiver can be with the things of their pseudo-Estate. This is fundamentally a spiritual experience from both sides, but it does have three distinct and tangible effects: the Deceiver knows what happened to those things during that time they are genuinely watching; the Deceivers spirit can kind of inspire the things theyre walking with, a little; not any more than luck, or a muse, or God does, its not control, its just a little push, a little feeling: this is the right way for things to go; afterwards, the Deceiver and whatever they walked with are a little closer, spiritually, forever.

Heres what I mean. If you listen to Coriander Hasp, that makes you part of his pseudo-Estate: youre one of Those who Listen to Coriander Hasp.

141

And if he thinks, Oh, hey, how is that person doing anyway? he can sort of close his eyes and space out and then hes there, in your life, with you. And maybe he looks around and thinks, This place is completely unsafe, why doesnt my friend there have a gun? because he is all about the guns. And you think, hey, maybe I should have a gun. Theres a kind of feeling, a taste of . . . Coriander Hasp-ness? on the wind . . . that makes this idea feel right.

If youre a Power or an Imperator, even if you do listen to Coriander Hasp, or adore Phasael mery-Harumaph, or whatever, you probably can resist this somehow. Id even say the default is to resist, like, you feel it starting to happen and you can block it with a miracle of your own. Almost anything will probably do, because lesser incarnation isnt a very forceful miracle; if you dont have any way to prevent subtle spiritual possession, mentally blocking out the scene and filling your thoughts with a chant like Coriander Hasp is a bloody bastard wont stop the miracle itself but will probably negate or make negligible all three of its tangible, meaningful effects. But note that even if youre a Power or Imperator, maybe even if youre another Deceiver, and even if youre a PC, others can walk with you spiritually using miracles like these. Miracles of incarnation take you out of yourself: they neither need nor create a mystic link,and you lose track of the world around you while they are in use. The miracle lasts until: something back at your body urgently requires attention; a self-imposed time limit runs out; or a scene ends for the thing youre walking-with.

But its not about his advice. Not mostly. Its more, you do stuff, you live your life, and hes there with you, hes knowing it through you. If anything interesting happens he notices. If nothing interesting happens he knows that too. And afterwards, you love him a little, or a little more; and to whatever extent a Deceivers feelings for the people of the world can be genuine, hes a little closer to you as well.

The usual way to play out an incarnation is that either the HG or the Deceivers player (with HG permission) decides on and briefly describes whats going on in the life that the Deceiver inhabits. If the Deceiver happens to incarnate somewhere where interesting things are happening, the HG may have them temporarily play whatever theyre inhabiting instead of themselves or watch and kibitz, if theyre incarnating in somebody elses Avatar.

This miracle can cross worlds but it takes a greater (level 5) version to incarnate between Creation and the Lands Beyond, or between the normal world and a primal place like Heaven or Hell. You may need Strike to incarnate into or from a Chancel.

Muses, by Miranda Harrell

142
This ranges from 0 to 5 depending on where you are in the Lands Beyond Creation, what youre doing to reach across the world boundary, and the HGs whim. For incarnation miracles, its probably only 2-3.

Greater Miracles of Incarnation (Difficulty 5)

Epic miracles of incarnation work more or less exactly as for Powers a level 5 effect lets you incarnate (spiritually walk with) your pState in many places at once or in particularly primal places such as Hell and Heaven. The normal bound is hundreds or thousands of places on Earth or a small number of places across the cosmos. This is a loosely-described boundary because this is technically as powerful as incarnation miracles get if you want to pull an incarnation trick thats bigger than this, you dont need a higher miracle level, you need to sell your HG on the idea that you can. If they dont buy it, then a Project or an Imperial miracle of some sort might help. For Excrucian Deceivers its worth particular note that incarnating between Creation and the Lands Beyond Creation requires this level of miracle; youll also probably have to cross the Auctoritas of the Weirding Wall*.

Weapon-Sense
That quote is cheating. Its describing magic and not a Persona miracle. But its magic that falls under the pseudo-Estate of Jasmine Apocynums Story, so Im going to go with it. Sometimes when someone is important in Jasmine Apocynums story When theyre an important friend or minion; when shes taken out their heart and is piloting their flesh; when theyre an enemy, even She winds up feeling whats going on with them, even from afar. The language of their body the language of little movements and kinaesthetic feelings speaks to her. Sometimes she can even see through their eyes, hear through their ears, speak to them through their heart. Thats a level 2 Persona miracle.

You could see it, if you were me, I mean, without even looking at her with your eyes. It was a searing barrenness, a deep hot chafing, a painful alienness. I could have seen it from half a mile away, I bet, at least, and through a wall . . . I could see her pain. I could feel her pain. It was much more real in that moment than my own. from Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 342-348)

he hurt. You could see that she hurt.

143
Borrowing the Flesh
he opened her mouth to speak, and felt the voice of Morrowen Hollow speaking with her; and the frogs were silent, and the birds were quiet, and all of town and countryside resounded with and only with the words she spoke. . . . from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation

You can use this level of Persona to apply one of your pStates Properties to yourself as an Affliction. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian doubt the world; therefore, even in the face of Anandas beauty, Iolithae Septimian can hang on to doubt. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian are sacred; when she applies this Property to herself, she herself becomes a numinous being. When she is cornered, and wishes to depart unceremoniously from reality, the Lies of Iolithae Septimian are made false by the nature of the world; so too can she, as if shed never been. Or consider some other Deceivers. The Adoration of Phasael feels good; no matter how hard you try to drag him down, he can in turn feel good himself. Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp aint dead, so Coriander caint hardly be dead, hisself ! In one of my local Nobilis games, I got Rook to unbend enough to try playing a Deceiver; her Yertle-inspired turtle-Deceiver could use Emulations of his Estate (The Invincible Throne of Viticus Chelonian Invictus) to stand on his own back, supporting him even as his throne was wont to do. . . . I dont think she took the character all that seriously. Anyway, the Affliction generates whatever miracles the HG likes, but the typical base miracle level is that of the miracle you used. Note that this influences but does not dictate what those miracles actually are Afflictions and HG actions in general arent bound to the miracle charts the way PCs usually are. The Affliction rating of the miracle is typically equal to your Persona. This means that if you only have Persona 0 which is pretty weak for a Deceiver but pretty strong for a Deceiver-shard the miracles will have Auctoritas 0* and they wont ever get you MP. If you have Persona 5, on the other hand, these conjured Afflictions are up there with the laws of thermodynamics as core principles of the world. However, regardless of how strong the Affliction is, it only lasts while you sustain this miracle.

Morrowen Hollow is an alien thing; it is bodiless and unable to directly understand humanity. For this reason it has taken, from time to time, to walking with the spirits of its people as they do ordinary things, or as they speak with the voice of Morrowen Hollow against those who would silence them. It does not rule them; it does not command them; it does not even choose their words. It is simply there, around and about and in them, as they speak as it always is and, most importantly, it is there, to that little part of itself, that it pays attention.
Is this the same as no Auctoritas? Functionally, it definitely is. Philosophically and in the narrative, its whatever seems cool to you you can imagine it having an infinitesimal drag on miracles, e.g. causing a summoned wave to slow down by 1-2% or whatever, and it might be possible for someone to deliberately lob a miracle so weak it bounces off of Auctoritas 0. Basically, I want to make the official ruling that it is no Auctoritas, but leave things open for Auctoritas 0 to develop some sort of meaning in your game.

144

Greater Miracles of Emulation (Difficulty 6)

You can choose a higher miracle level to strengthen an emulations effect. Starting around level 6, the HG is encouraged to give the Affliction in question epic, large-scale, and complicated effects by default.

Refinement through the Echoes

In this quote I am cheating again thats not just an emulation, but an emulation that fails to defend her against (or even exacerbates) a Deadly Wound. Still, its pretty close to what an emulation looks like: with a lesser emulation, the Voice of Morrowen Hollow takes on a Property of its pState as an Affliction. For instance, Morrowen Hollow finds a rage inside itself Morrowen Hollow discovers the truth of itself Morrowen Hollow fights that voice, and fails Morrowen Hollow is haunted by that voice or Morrowen Hollow feeds that voice The reason this quote is cheating is that, normally, only one of your pState Properties becomes an Affliction; the rest do not, and I apologize for a quote suggesting itd be all of them. One Property becomes an Affliction; the others only come into play when they help the HG think through what should happen while that Affliction is in force. nder the pressure of that silence the voice of Morrowen Hollow began to fray. It began to fall apart. It grew desperate, frantic. It rang about within its mind, echoed through its own medium, played through and through itself the noise that was its being, until it found a rage in itself; until it saw the truth of itself, in itself; until it haunted itself; But as the voice of Morrowen Hollow echoed and reiterated fractally within itself, as it mirrored itself and sounded through itself down through the levels of its mind, it began to consume itself as well; began to fight itself, and fail; began to struggle to silence itself, to find a space of silence in itself, to hear its thoughts without the ringing. This thing of course it could not do. The mind of Morrowen Hollow became a prisoner to itself. from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

Living Weapon
efore me, as if Bluebell Park were a mirror to that the other sight, in that the other space, I saw myself. Through that reflection I caught out my heart. Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 3219-3220)

145
Jasmine Apocynum can use a Persona 3 miracle to take on one of the qualities of her story, e.g. Jasmine Apocynum is good-like

Jasmine Apocynum gives a heart brass handles Jasmine Apocynum transfigures Jasmine Apocynum grapples with Death or

Jasmine Apocynum inverts

This allows her to grapple with Death, maintains her sanity in a crazy world, and gives her the power to transfigure and invert herself and others by way of the brass hooks that grow from a persons heart. She can also become good-like at need, although its not completely clear to me what that entails.

Jasmine Apocynum is logical, sensible, and sane

If Id gone with the sillier version of her pState Properties, this would have been even more awesome, because I could say things like: Jasmine Apocynum is available in electronic form

Jasmine Apocynum Contemplates her Heart, by Miranda Harrell

and then name this book after her. I would have too! But I refrained. Thats how good-like I am, myself !

Jasmine Apocynum is referenced repeatedly in this document

146

Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment

Youll use miracles at this level to make things part of your pState to add the way of being that your pState has, its dharma and/or Properties and/or just plain being to them. Youll make them Lies of Iolithae Septimian, or Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp, or part of Helchen Hadusinds Shadow, or Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. Youll make them one of the Things (you) are Pointing At, or The Person (you) Married Three Weeks Ago. Or If thats going too far Youll just give them a piece of it. You wont make them a lie, just something that doubts the world and shatters walls. You wont make them listen to Coriander Hasp; youll just make them . . . not . . . dead. You wont swallow them in Helchen Hadusinds Shadow; youll just make them hide from the light. Youll help them to move in the way that your pseudo-Estate moves. Youll make them one with it.

Greater Miracles of Enchantment (Difficulty 7)

To perform a greater miracle of this sort something complicated, something that covers a very large area, something epic requires a level 7 miracle.

The Apocynum Endorsement

Jasmine Apocynum can impose the various Properties of her pState on other things. She can share the penumbra of virtue with something, making it more good-like. She can take something, some explanation that she gives, and impose upon it the quality of being logical, sensible, and sane. She can even share with others her own power to transfigure, invert, and grapple Death. hat did it. That solved it. That explained it. That let the pressure of the wrongness out and it all suddenly made sense. It was sensible, logical, and sane. Not just the True Thing, with that, but everythingexplained! Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 2976-2978)

The Infection of Morrowen Hollow

147
The standard method by which the Voice of Morrowen Hollow propagates itself is through the enchantment of Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. It chooses its victims from the likeliest of the lot; it hardens their heart against that Voice, gives them wrath; destroys them in their struggle with it, devours them as they falter; drowns them in itself. In theory it can use this power in a lesser, more specific way giving them only certain qualities of its pseudo-Estate. For instance, it could enrage or enlighten just about anyone; it could provoke hauntings; and if it were really hungry, really willing to cheat, it could technically just turn somebody into its food or its medium, skip the normal mechanisms of it, much like a starving human is technically capable of skipping details like silverware and chewing and just swallowing a gopher or, yknow, whatever, whole.

ed fought well, he thought. He was a good man. He could feel it trickling in around him, slipping into the presbytery where he sat and shuddered, echoing through the ears and belly of him, profaning the monstrance. Hed rallied the people. Hed stood firm in his faith. Then theyd turned against him, and still hed fought; had stood against it, fought off the sound, sung praises to the holy; and when it broke him, still he hadnt bowed to it, though it had made him crawl. Hed staggered into the Church instead. Im a good man, he said. Arent I? I havent forsaken God? He hated himself a little for the question, for it being a question. Id stood against it, he said. Hadnt I?

It was harder to think now. His mind was thick with it, stirring with it, with the voice of Morrowen Hollow. It was eating him, he thought, devouring that which was he; and still he strove to fight. The ghost of the chapel put its hand on his shoulder. He cast it an awful, shuddering smile. It was doubtless the reason for his failure.

He was seeing it more clearly now: of course the ghost was the reason for it. Of course the Church was not sacred ground, not true sacred ground, it was haunted, it was polluted, it was the fault of this creature that he was failing now He forgave it for the first time for its existence. He blessed it, traced his fingers in a cross.

Then he tilted forward and he fell headlong into the river of the sound; and he was the voice of Morrowen Hollow, all in and through him, and it was he. from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

These miracles kick something out of your pState. They strip it of some of your pStates Properties or make it generally less like the things of your pseudo-Estate. The heart of these miracles is something taken away. You pull away your pState from something, and you pull away the energies of Creation that are like your pState, but you dont really control whats left behind. Its like stealing paintings from a museum if you take away everything conservative, the museum becomes more radical, and vice versa, but if you take all the art, youre always going to get an empty museum building; you cant decide that whats left is a military base or an elephant instead.

148

In like fashion, Coriander Hasp can make you somebody who doesnt listen to Coriander Hasp, but that wont necessarily kill you even though hes sacrificing that quality of aint dead that those who listen to him have. Iolithae Septimian can make something not a Lie of Iolithae Septimian, but that doesnt always and automatically make it a truth. If you want to work around that the best way is to set expectations in play to make a point of tying someones life or life-force to their listening to Coriander Hasp; to practice your lies, in your head or aloud, to make them better candidates for becoming truth; to make small shadow-puppets into real things so that when you want to make a shadow-Godzilla real by stripping its shadowness the precedent has been set. Otherwise well. Most of the time, even if you havent been doing anything like that, the HG should follow your expectations. However, if theres something going on that you dont know about, or if the HG feels that the flow of story doesnt justify what youre looking to do, they may take things in their own direction!

Greater Miracles of Sacrifice (Difficulty 8)

To perform a greater miracle of this sort something complicated, something that covers a very large area, something epic requires a level 8 miracle.

Departing Jasmines Story

It is the nature of leaving Jasmine Apocynums Story that one is inclined to lose the Properties of that story as one leaves it, one closes the book on a chapter of ones own life, putting away the brass hooks from ones own heart. Transfigurations and inversions end; mortality recedes; and one no longer lives by her conception of what is logical, sensible, and sane. In practice, though, she doesnt control much or any of this mostly, if she sacrifices someone from Jasmine Apocynums Story, they drift from her life for a while. Her player probably winds up having a lot of say in what happens to them, but Jasmine herself does not. This is the highest level of Persona miracle Jasmine is likely to be capable of, so well depart from Jasmine Apocynums story for a while now ourselves. hen the magic slipped from him, it drained from him, it shuddered from him, fell away from him, and he lay there, young and vulnerable again, a human boy. Fable of the Swan (Kindle Locations 3880-3881)

Spit from Morrowen Hollows Maw

149
With a lesser sacrifice, the voice of Morrowen Hollow can spit someone out of it free them from the pattern of itself, in whole or in part. In general, Morrowen Hollow can also use this to quiet somethings rage, particularly if that rage has some connection to or has been exacerbated by the voice of Morrowen Hollow; hide some truth, with a similar proviso; make someone less interested in fighting the voice of Morrowen Hollow, though ironically also more able to succeed; or withdraw itself from echoing in a certain medium. It can also more generally exile something from the category of Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow.

ill sat at the bell tower window. She kicked her feet, then dug them into the cracks in the outer wall. She spread her arms. She lifted up, straightened her legs, leaned over. She laughed. She began to fall. I dont understand the attraction, said Morrowen Hollow, after a while. Jill wandered the Churchyard. She picked up her left hand. Ha! she said. It wriggled. She stuck it on. She made a face at it. It wasnt a very good face. She was still looking for her nose. She cast a sly glance sideways. If youdve et me properly, she said. Then youd know. Wouldnt you? I did eat you properly. Well, you shouldnt ought have sput me up, then. After a while, Morrowen Hollow said, I found your truths indigestible. Ah, said Jill wisely. She tapped the hollow place where her nose wasnt. Thats just your reluctance to understand the nature of the world, that is. her. The world was quiet around

The voice of Morrowen Hollow was sulking; but it still helped her spot it, a while later, when she had scoured the whole churchyard and still hadnt seen that last little wiggling left foot toe. Jill, by Miranda Harrell from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

150

Wait, If Something is No Longer Those Who Cant Silence the Voice . . .

Never fear, bold Deceivers! On first blush it might seem that exiling anything at all from certain pStates is a terrifyingly dangerous move, making even a random squirrel into something that can, e.g., silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. A careless slip of the tongue; a miracle wrongly used; and bam, that squirrel is not merely your nemesis but your inevitable end! Fortunately this is not the case; or at least, not exactly. Here is where it becomes important again that a pState is not part of Creation: that it is a narrow thing. There is a moth in Kaohsiung, Taiwan right now that I believe is unable to silence the voice of Morrowen Hollow; I mean, how would it ever do so? There are lions on the savannah that could try their whole lives and never thus succeed, nevermind a moth! What about my left sock? Can it silence the voice of Morrowen Hollow? It is a sock. Socks are at least notionally capable of silencing things, but . . . No. These things cannot silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow; but neither are they part of its pState. My left sock is not bound to find a rage inside it*, nor to discover the truth of itself; that moth is not doomed to fight the Voice and fail! They cannot silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow, but they arent part of the pState Those Who Cannot Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow either. Its not an Estate. Its not cosmic and universal like that. Its local. Its a pState. Its a cheat code. What it means to be part of this pseudo-Estate is to be something that fights, and loses to Morrowen Hollow; that has heard that voice, and rages against it; that has heard that voice, and seen some inner truth because of it; that hears that voice even now, and is haunted by it. So exiling something from the pseudo-Estate doesnt make it suddenly super-capable of silencing the Voice. It doesnt! It just means that the sacrificed thing no longer fights with and loses against Morrowen Hollow. It no longer hears that voice and rages. It no longer hears that voice, and sees inner truths because of it. That voice no longer haunts it. What is sacrificed ceases to interact with Morrowen Hollow under the pStates normal terms. Implicitly I suppose that means that it can silence Morrowen Hollow, now, at least, as much as it otherwise could have. That initial concern I suggested was not entirely misplaced: any sacrifice of its pState is notionally dangerous to the voice of Morrowen Hollow; anything it so sacrifices could become like the mistletoe that slew Baldur not dangerous of itself, but a weapon in the hands of those who would bypass immortality. But thats not what it means to exile something from this pseudo-Estate. What it means is that the thing sacrificed probably ceases to struggle against the Voice at all.

*wiggles her toes as with the very fury of the heavens*

Difficulty 6: Lesser Binding

Sometimes youll want to fit someone into the scheme of your pseudo-Estate in a way that does not flow naturally from its content. Perhaps you are Selenas Picard, and you want to set up a rival show or a spin-off. Perhaps you are Helchen Hadusind, and you dont want to swallow people in your shadow so much as build a tenebrous keep somewhere to which your shadow is a path. Sometimes youll have these ideas for how to tie someone or something into your pState, but you wont know how to make it happen as an enchantment; and the longer you look at your pState Properties, the more obvious it is that the reason you dont know how to do this as an enchantment is that its not an enchantment. Youre overreaching, youre exceeding your boundaries. Theres this thing that you want to do, but you cant. At least, not with your normal tools. Then again . . . there are miracles of binding. With a level 6 or 9 miracle, depending on just how strong and complex an effect you want, you can change how something relates to your pState in its entirety. These miracles basically give you a way to cheat thats piled on top of your existing cheat: not only do you have power over, say, those who love you, but you also have the power to define the broader implications of what that love entails. These miracles let you change what your pState means to someones life. You have a pretty free hand with the effects here, although really epic, complex, and/or large-scale stuff needs a greater miracle. Its often appropriate for the target of a binding miracle to develop minor magical abilities and Bonds and/or low levels of Superior Qualities and Skills; the exact details of this are up to the HG, as is whether or not it happens in any specific case, but its intended to be both pretty impressive and pretty common; these are miracles for showing off and shaping the course of the game with, and the HG should support you in using them to this end.

151

Greater Miracles of Binding (Difficulty 9)

At this level, you can change how large portions of the world relate to your pState you can bind whole cities or wildernesses, construct extremely complicated bindings, or in general do epic stuff. The target of this miracle is likely to acquire major magical abilities, Bonds and Afflictions, Superior Qualities and Skills; further, a level 4 Auctoritas that lasts for the remainder of the story protects the destiny that you deal out.

The Shadow of Helchen Hadusind, by Miranda Harrell

152
The Follower
Phasael mery-Harumaph uses bindings of his Estate when ordinary adoration isnt enough when he needs someone to celebrate him in a fashion that theyre just not capable of, even when pushed to be a little over the top. In such a fashion he makes loyal and disloyal friends to assist him in his schemes, predictable enemies to do the same, and such schticks and tools and servants as he, with his comparatively low Treasure rating, cannot otherwise reliably empower. Its likely that Revel, New Revel, and their various sister cities formed in celebration of and to make celebration of Phasael mery-Harumaphs existence survive by virtue of his binding miracles. Otherwise, I simply cannot accept that their extraordinary tax codes, architecture, and survival as party towns is plausible smack dab in the middle of conservative or war-torn territories as they are.

hasael mery-Harumaph leaves eventually. Thats . . . for the best, right? He leaves.

You can probably resist the urge to run to the door and shout after him. Because doing thats embarrassing. I mean, a lot of people _do_ shout, he does tend to leave town with a chorus of WE LOVE YOU, PHASAEL! ringing out behind him, but you---you can probably resist. On the other hand, if you dont, he might look back at you and wink, so---theres that. After hes been gone for a while, a gray man visits. Hes bland. Hes a bland gray man. Theres very little of him left. He takes down your information. You tell him everything about you---probably. He doesnt smile, but he thanks you. He shakes your hand. He wont be disappointed, the gray man says. And maybe if youre a certain kind of person, you have this sudden burst of empathy; like, youll know this wasnt what this guy wanted from his life. He must have been some ordinary person, somewhere, somewhen---probably a long time ago, since hes kind of short, but I guess modern people can be pretty short sometimes too---and then one day Phasael swept him up, gave him a new destiny and cast aside his old. Maybe you say, Hey---hey, is it all right? A cloud sweeps through his eyes then. Theyre human eyes, not Excrucian eyes, but theres still this film of passing grey. It blows from the upper right to the lower left. It passes like a storm. Theres nothing else, he says. Its kind of awkward, but its not like you can keep him. Hed probably dangle you from a building or something if you tried. (Or just leave!) So maybe one day Phasael will come back through town. Maybe itll matter to him who you are, who you were, what the gray man wrote. It probably wont. It probably doesnt. Youll want Phasael to love you, but hes too good for you. At best you can hope that the gray man will write you well. a post in rec.arts.nobilising.encounters (authenticity disputed)

153
Servant of the Voice
he bluethroat flew; and where it went, it sang; and where it sang, it sang with shards of the voice of Morrowen Hollow. The cat was fast but the bluethroat faster; a leap, a spray of feathers, and it was off, limping and struggling through the sky, to bear its warning to Morrowen Hollow: That there, at a certain place, at a certain time, was a thing that heard its voice, and understood. The cat chased it, but was left behind; it turned back, with a curl of its tail, to warn another. A cats eyes followed it. The cat spoke, soft: you are not correct.

The voice of Morrowen Hollow does not always swallow its victims. It does not always take them over completely and merge them into the community of itself. More than a few things become its minions instead; they resound with partial, targeted, purposeful fragments of that voice, and give it service in personal ways.

Behind the bird came hoofbeats; they rang through the sky as through the earth. Fear raged in it like fever but it dared not turn to see. Behind the bird came hoofbeats; a presence loomed upon it, heat and smoke around it; the bird screamed inside its heart, but only flew. A hand closed about it. A hand crushed it.

The bird spat out a last tumbling note of the voice of Morrowen Hollow, for the wind to catch, for the grass to hear, for the trees to bear with their rustling back, a warning: The sound of that note rippled through the air and then the breeze that carried it was ripped apart by an iron hand. The sound of that note lived for a moment in a flower. The flower was crushed. O master! O master! There is a thing that heard your voice, and was displeased.

That trill took flight as a bee; it saw the forest around it falling, all in blazes, and its heart was a birds heart, and its voice was a birds voice, but a horned hoof came down upon it, and its last words were slain, the singing of the birds and bees went silent, and down it fell to the earth in feathers of ash and quiet: O master! O master! Silence.

. . . danger comes. . . .

from The Voice of Morrowen Hollow, by J. Dunsmore

154

The Adoration of Phasael

Let me tell you what its like to adore Phasael mery-Harumaph. Imagine that you are riding a shark down a hill covered in roses. The roses have become a waterslide. The wind is rushing through your hair. The wind is trying to eat your hair. Possibly the wind is also a shark. You are eating a Klondike bar.* You do not have to do anything to earn this. There is no extra requirement before you can eat it. They are not going to sing that jingle. They just saw you surfing the shark down the hill and said, You know, just . . . just take it. So you did. You passed the ice cream stand and you took it. Listen. And its like you look up at the sun and theres lens flare in your vision. Thats how beautiful things are. There are guitars solos raging. You have wings. They unfurl behind you. The wings: they unfurl behind you. Which is good. There is only so long before the shark breaks loose and begins thrashing and burrowing into the ground and lashing up from beneath the ground to devour cities. Thats just the kind of shark it is. Thats how Chicago will go, if the Great Chicago Fire doesnt return. Itll go by shark. So its probably just about time that you ditched your ride. You have wings. There is lens flare on the wings, too. Theyre bursting with it, flares like Christmas lights, and up you go soaring away Youve just staggered out of a fire. Youre weary. Youre broken. Your lungs are full of smoke. The smoke came from your books. You hurt all over. The fire is mostly out but it is the worst thing that has ever happened to you, and you are not just a mortal but a god. An angel, anyway. A thing forged out of justice and beauty pure, beyond any mortal understanding; you are wings and faces opening and closing are they all; you are brass and you are fire, you are a wind and you are a wheel, you are stern and steady and you are law here, and yet your books, your records, your books And there he is. Hes looking all hangdog and shy. Like, are you ever going to be able to like him now? Are you ever going to be able to forgive him? He holds your sigil. Your seal. The totem of your power. I had to borrow it, he says. Im sorry I set your library on fire. And he is like God. He is like the face of God. He is like the voice of Cneph who Made, the one who built the world and taught you love and justice. He is like the sun to you that shines above. You want him to love you so very badly. He is a gift of worth.

155

A totally metaphorical Klondike bar that is no challenge to the relevant companys trademarks, of course, but which still tastes awesome and is somehow in its silver-foiled squareness evocative of the What Would you Do for a Klondike Bar? commercials. Because Phasael.

156
The Adoration of Phasael . . .
forgives Phasael frees you feels good is a little over the top makes you happy that Phasael is alive celebrates Phasaels existence is wanting Phasael to love you

Your face makes this ungodly congeries of expressions. Your faces, I guess. Youre being an angel in this. You look at him. But How can you think that matters? you tell him. How can he possibly think it matters? Then you go home and you weep wing-fire-wheel-brass tears. Youre living your drab dreary little life. It probably isnt even in color. Its not black and white, its all rich burgundies and hidden depths, but theres no sense of chromatic light. Theres just the sea of a single color that submerges you. Then you see it. You see the colors of his footsteps coming. Its strange like that, its synaesthetic like that, the first thing you notice is this shiver in the world and a bit of color here, a bit of color there, and its in time to his footsteps.

157

You have been waiting all your life for this. You dont even talk to him. He just walks past you. But hes given you that thing in you that youve needed all your life and havent known how to find. You unfurl wings from your back. Theyre paper-thin at first, weak, but they strengthen, they set like amber hardening, and then you rise into the sky and you dont look back. Hes knocking at your door now. Maybe not right now. I cant time this book perfectly. Im only mortal. But soon. Soon. Hes knocking. You open the door. Youre so happy. You read this, and you knew it was coming, and you were ready for anything, you were braced to resist it, or to embrace it, or to disbelieve it, but now its happened and youre so happy. We have to celebrate, you tell him. You take his hands. We have to mark this. And youre lost in his eyes, and the world is spinning, and you think that just maybe he does love you, just maybe the world is a good and bright and justifiable thing, and it doesnt even bother you too much that the party has already started behind you, or what some of the dancers are. Later, if you believe the newsgroups, a gray man comes.

158

Fighting Deceivers
It strikes me that some of you may be reading this book wondering not how to construct Deceivers but how to oppose them; that is, as creatures of Creation, probably including Powers of Creation, how can you practically confront and oppose something of this ilk? The simplest and most effective method is to find out what theyre doing and stop them. That is, treat the Deceiver itself as a secondary obstacle. The big thing is to disrupt its plans; if you can do so, then it has more to lose from fighting you than you do* and will probably just retreat. With this plan, you dont have to worry about whether the Deceiver has immortality of some flavor or another or whether its turned itself into something unexpected just Get the Power involved to straighten out their Estate and end a flower rite; Blow up the Deceivers investment in a welken-rite; Make the Deceivers attempts at personally reaching or corrupting Powers counterproductive; and/or Ensure the temporary safety of whatever it is that the Deceiver is trying to destroy. Afterwards if theyre still around you can get in a fight if you want. Hm. That advice not good enough? Lets see what else Ive got here. Oh! Heres something. Deceivers are extremely vulnerable to narrative. They are outright suckers for dramatic appropriateness; more generally, for creatures able to see through the lie of the entire world, theyre surprisingly vulnerable to getting tangled up in either their own ideas or yours. Think of it this way: most of the time, if you

At least, strategically speaking. Obviously you may choose to value your life as much as it values its but Powers are expendable. Mortals are expendable. Youre expendable! Unless youre an Imperator. Imperators arent expendable, so if you are an Imperator and you are reading this to figure out how to fight Deceivers, . . . I cant actually imagine how that would happen anyway. Are you under some sort of enchantment? An amnesiac? Seriously! Tell me! I want to know!

attack a Power, their player or the HG should be looking for cool reasons why that attack doesnt destroy them. A Deceivers player, or the HG, should be much more likely to think something like: you know, that would totally get me. Theyre creatures of expectations and story logic and even the most relentlessly practical of them will carry that logic through to the end. I think its . . . I think, to be honest, that theres some vast flower rite theyre doing against Creation, or that the Imperators are doing against them, that makes going with the flow a necessary part of their existence. Its like theres someone or something out there that wants the idea of being hoist by your own petard to apply to the Deceivers, and if you give them a way to bite themselves in the butt, or to hoist it, they totally will. They are practically ouroborous fetishists in that respect. I dont mean to imply that its always easy or that you can circumvent the rules of the game just by kludging together some reason why your plan goes with the flow or gives them enough rope to hang themselves. I just mean, thats the kind of plan you should be looking for. When youre fighting Iolithae Septimian, you should be looking for ways to trip her on her own lies or put her in the position of a dynasty or cliff to tumble down. When youre fighting Coriander Hasp, you want to get him to listen to himself. When youre fighting somebody with a pState like Stuff That I Have Stolen, you want to trick them into stealing something. Just the fact that youre trying to bait them into stealing something will give the treasure in question an almost irresistable glow. If you want to tangle this up in the system you can think of it as many Deceivers having weaknesses (Bonds or Afflictions) on the order of: Affliction: I cant fight my hardest against cool plans Affliction: Im driven to make trouble for myself or Affliction: Im driven to complete otherwise imperfect symmetries Deceivers are usually immortal, and even when theyre not, theyre the kind of creatures that can randomly come back from death. Theyre like a bad idea that way, you know? Even if you can bloodily slaughter them once or twice theyll just show up again the next time youre a little drunk. So for the most part, your goal in a conflict with them is to drive them back out of Creation thats winning. Killing them, as much as that means anything at all, is just a major bonus. (Or, if you think killing is wrong, a penalty.) Shards, on the other hand, are often things that you both should and can kill. I mean, if youre loyal to Creation and participating in the Excrucian War and no Imperator has said that you should maintain peaceful relationships with them or whatever. Theres no hard limit to how many shards a Deceiver can spawn, but theyre unique entities and each of them is both an investment and a victory. I think of a Deceiver spawning a shard as like releasing a book for me yes, if you smite one of my books, I can just write another, but dont do that! I need them! All of them! Thats just mean!

159

I plunged the spear through the dragons chest and it fell in coils and wings to the chamber floor. The strike was true and the spears poisoned head could touch the dragons heart. Life still blazed in its eyes, but I dismissed it; signaling my attendants, dropping the spears handle, I turned to leave. A cry from my guard Stephanos warned me. I cut the air with my hand and stepped to the other side of the room before the dragonfire touched me. I saw the creature rearing up, the spear lost, the wound closing as I watched. How? I asked it. Nothing survives my poison. An absolute statement, it answered, in the tongue of dragons. I counter with another: no one may kill me who does not know my name. My blood ran cold, but I was not yet dead. I have seen your name written on the tree of worlds. I have done many things since that name was written, the dragon said, and my name is no longer what it was.
from The Allegories of Tairt Ut-napishtim, by Niloufar Samir

160

If you dont like killing, then imprisoning, befriending, monitoring, or just kicking them out of Creation also works. I presume if they leave Creation they rejoin their parent Deceiver in some kind of hideous anti-birth process but maybe they just find a field of black flowers and black grass under a night-black sky with no light* and sit in it and sulk. Forever; or until the stars and suns go out, and silence falls.

Nobilis and Immortal Antagonists

Since most Deceivers are immortal, and immortality is commonly purchased in the form of the Active Immortality Gift, which is pretty annoying when youre fighting somebody, Im going to dedicate a whole sub-section of this mini-book to discussing what youre supposed to do about that. This one! Right here! So, as noted above, one of the best things to do when fighting an immortal enemy is to tackle their plans first and treat the immortal themselves as a secondary matter. To beat an immortal Deceiver, screw up their plans and push them to the point where OK, Ill run away and lose you in the Lands Beyond Creation so you dont track me back to the other stuff I have going on starts looking like a pretty good plan in their minds eye. If you have free resources, or if its taking a while to figure out and stop their plans, appropriate secondary procedures here include area denial and punitive measures basically, try to lock them out of wherever they want to be and make them as unhappy as possible while you do so. The second standard answer is to use overwhelming force. Use Imperial miracles, posses of large numbers of supporting Powers, and borrowed, stolen, or co-opted Abhorrent Weapons. If youre stuck slugging it out with an immortal Deceiver, you can probably count on some sort of support like that showing up eventually just give it time! because even a 15-CP Deceiver with no second skin is a Deceiver, and theyre scary, and people who care about things like whether the world exists or not in the future will want them gone. The third way to overwhelm the Active Immortality Gift is careful application of Afflictions and Auctorita. The Immortality Gift doesnt provide free Strike, after all you can generally bleed out an immortals MP with their Afflictions or your own. At some point they wont have the MP to oppose you and will become normally vulnerable to wounds. As noted above, a fourth answer is dramatic appropriateness. Convince a Deceiver that its their loss, by their terms, and they might not be in a mental condition to look over their character sheet and see that they still have a Deadly wound level and some MP remaining. Theyre not gritty action heroes wholl fight on when theres no hope left; theyre twisty, tricky villains and theyll fight only as long as they have tricks remaining they dont believe you can overcome. (That can be a frustrating part when theyre beaten, when they should be beaten, but they think they have a trick left that you dont know about. Especially if

The Lands Beyond Creation are not actually my specialty.

they actually do, but sometimes even when they dont. Ask Coriander sometime about the fight where he miscounted his backup plans; I dont know if its true or not but when he tells it its one of the funniest stories I have ever heard.) A Project is the last answer if its going to be a long fight, you might as well settle in and start working on a trap or plan or machine or scheme or story or idea to catch them with. Its not as useful as growing wings and learning to be an immortal yourself, but it can be awfully satisfying when you bypass their immortality, wrap them in chains made of their own lies, and send them plummeting into the heart of the sun. Best of all, if they come back later, the HG can compensate you by swapping out that Project progress retroactively into something that is useful to you personally, like grafting on metal wings (that make you immortal) made out of burnt and broken Deceiver-chains!

161

The land seal on read the b s: lueor, TO

MI

iii
gree n bo
IA,

To nih open m ilati on. e is ru in;

RT UM

ok o f

Iris sa

Ma

r y-

Her me is a not e my a nd t r v y ice to c t o und is sim hec km e y tr rstand ple: d Inst ansl o atio it. Do not o thes ead, co p n! not n e even en it. D thin thing vince atte o gs i a mpt n al s are t n ene my he l th m ew orld ost of the te w for themrribly orld th to d impor at tant o.

to u nde rsta nd

The

Boo k of

Iris sa

Ma

r yla

nd

Appendix A: 52 Deceiver Names (and Viticus)

162

- Appendix A 52 Deceiver Names (and Viticus)

01: Adelais Americus 02: Americus Tane 03: Ancelin Anderly 04: Ariagne Valens 05: Ardabur Ethwray 06: Avicia Frithgeist 07: Bardulf Picaret 08: Bertram Holmes 09: Chlotsuine Galamir 10: Clarimond Aitrinn 11: Dederic Onceler 12: Drogos Andrigand 13: Elisot Irene 14: Eluard Mordan 15: Emmony Leath 16: Euvroin Wyrle 17: Frideric Howe 18: Fulbert Winselis 19: Gaatha Eilonwey 20: Gallot Warne 21: Gannuel Gast 22: Gerardet Fortmain 23: Gersvina Vandaline 24: Giscard Montdain 25: Grissoniya Weiss 27: Guthorm Villaris 28: Gylbard Wayne 29: Hedwys Letharge 30: Hermenite Galmeya 31: Herveus Watson 32: Hewekin Ancerry 33: Hitch 34: Ivone Withrell 35: Jaroslav Alphege 36: Lambkin Moceils 37: Leonidas 38: Mainfridus Ount 39: Marcomir Ainesley 40: Metylda Mathild 41: Nanna Meloria 42: Odibrand Seschaul 43: Radolf the Interstice 44: Rausimod Ince 45: Rechemay Reaving 46: Rykold Picain 47: Snaesoric Svanlaug 48: Sunigild Errisentha 49: Swethyna Eglantine 50: Thudogoth Severne 51: Valdamer Finnbog 52: Valter Edelric

*: Viticus Chelonian

26: Guillote Morren

Appendix B: Example Persona Miracle Charts

- Appendix B Example Persona Miracle Charts

Recognize people strongly affected by or connected to your Lies. Make someone doubt the world a little Make someone a bit more epic Make someone a bit more illicit or fantastical Shelter someone, a little, from the cost of your Lies. Spend a scene as the spirit of one of your Lies, in a given place and context. Protect your power to doubt the world; Swathe yourself in sacredness; Gain in strength by repeating yourself (verbally or in action); (make yourself able to) Shatter walls and dynasties; Vanish from the world, making your presence a lie/illusion; Make yourself unforgettable; Make it so that if someone fails to remember what youre about to do, they are likely to suffer a price or penalty; Make it difficult to refer to you aloud, particularly by name. Make something, which was real, a Lie of Iolithae Septimian; Make something doubt the world; Make something sacred; Make a speech or song get stronger when retold; Enchant a person to gain strength from repetition, or from having people tell stories of them; Enchant something to break walls or shatter dynasties better; Seal something so that it should not be spoken of and/or forgotten.

163

The Lies of Iolithae Septimian

Difficulty 0: The Sight Difficulty 1: Blessing

Difficulty 1: Curse Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation

Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment

164
Take a lie which you have spoken, and make it no longer one of the Lies of Iolithae Septimian (often, making it true);
Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

Make something doubt the world less; Make something less sacred, more forgettable, or easier to speak; Make something an encouragement to walls, and thus more likely to become confined.

Difficulty 5: Greater Incarnation

From the Lands Beyond Creation, incarnate into one of your Lies; Incarnate in the whole effects of a Lie, everywhere in the world. Appoint someone a record-keeper or priest for your Lies; Give someone the watchful eyes to help you judge when a Lie is ready to become the truth. Doubt the world so fiercely that it is likely to dissolve before your gaze;

Difficulty 6: Lesser Binding

Difficulty 6: Greater Emulation

Become incarnate holiness; Make yourself the figurehead for a revolutionary movement liable to topple the walls and dynasties of the world. Turn whole mountains, worlds, or sections of history into lies;

Difficulty 7: Greater Enchantment

Spread vast doubt; Speak four words to ring down a civilization; Decide that we wont ever talk about, you know, that thing, you know, ever again, even in a miracle chart, even if we probably should.

Difficulty 8: Greater Sacrifice

Take a Lie which you have spoken and wring it out into truth, changing the world in an epic fashion thereby. Pick a random country and declare it the place where if you ever die someone will find the Lies of Iolithae Septimian and become you again, to the accompaniment of tumbling stone, kingdoms broken, and dynasties falling into ruin.

Difficulty 9: Greater Binding

165
Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp
Determine whether someone is listening and/or likely to listen to you. Make someone more inclined to listen; Make someone a little less dead; Make someone a little more inspired. Make someone a bit less of a Hasp-listener. Spend a scene walking in spirit with someone whos listened to you, getting a sense for what theyre up to and bringing the two of you spiritually closer. Feel better about your level of physical attractiveness; Give yourself orders and improve your power to fulfill them; Prevent yourself from being dead; Fill yourself up with inspiration. Also, bad ideas; If absolutely necessary, set your head on fire. Induct someone into the ranks of Those Who Listen to Coriander Hasp, with all the perquisites and drawbacks thereof; Make someone listen; Make someone notice how awesome you look in your awesome boots; also, look how hot this gun is. Seriously. Hot; Wake the dead; Inspire someone past the bounds of reason, possibility, and good sense; Declare something and have it be something that people probably shouldnt go along with.
Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation Difficulty 1: Curse Difficulty 1: Blessing Difficulty 0: The Sight

Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

166
Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

Exile someone from your Estate, removing them from that whole Hasp-listening complex of stuff; Take someone whos been listening to and being inspired by you and has gotten their life all tangled up with that listening and make them not aint being dead, if you know what I mean. I mean, kill em; Carefully trim the bonsai of bad ideas you give people, making it so that just maybe they should listen, this time, or at least so that listening to you this time wont bring on the usual karmic punishment. Walk spiritually with a whole bunch of people who listen to you; Walk spiritually with people in Creation even if youre in the Lands Beyond. Change what listening to you does for a specific person;

Difficulty 5: Greater Incarnation

Difficulty 6: Lesser Binding

Give something a specific duty or power vis-a-vis people who listen to you, e.g., make an envelope that can get a message to anybody who listens to you even if you dont use a stamp. Go full-on mad scientist with the inspiration and the bad ideas;

Difficulty 6: Greater Emulation

Make yourself so very much alive that the entire circumstances under which you recently ought probably have died become seriously questionable. Is that thing that they shot you with even a real gun? Do epic enchantments, like waking a whole graveyard of the dead, or explaining to someone that this cape does let them fly, and then it does. (And yet, thinking that that cape will let them fly is still probably somehow a bad idea.) . . . Theres really not that much you can do here. If theres a whole army thats been listening to you, so much so that the HG thinks your aint dead Property has a spiritual connection to their being alive, you can kill them in one miracle but why? Maybe you could use a greater sacrifice for an epic miracle of making all the trouble that somebodys gotten into by listening to you actually work out for the best. But to make that worth doing, youd have to have gotten them into an awful lot of trouble first . . . . This is a good level for miracles like no matter what else happens after this, at least I can promise you that the people of Atlantis will always love those who listened to Coriander Hasp.

Difficulty 7: Greater Enchantment

Difficulty 8: Greater Sacrifice

Difficulty 9: Greater Binding

Those Who Cant Silence the Voice of Morrowen Hollow

167

Tune your vision to threats, powerful things, and potential sources of strength and food. Wake a small rage; Give a small insight; Connect to someone, a little. Push someone away; make them just plain less interested in the Voice of Morrowen Hollow. Spend a scene walking in spirit with someone who fought you, couldnt silence you, and was consumed. Possibly you can also sound out the life of someone who is currently fighting you, cant silence you, but is yet to be consumed spending a scene walking in spirit with them. Given the probable circumstances, this may qualify as an attack. Prevent yourself from accidentally silencing yourself; Find a rage inside yourself; Find insight in the Voice of Morrowen Hollow, discovering the truth of yourself; Haunt yourself or feed on yourself. (But why?) Enchant someone and make them something that follows the general pattern of your story something that will fight you, and fail, and be consumed; Wake a vast rage; Grant a shattering insight; Devour someone outright in a single burst of sound.

Difficulty 0: The Sight

Difficulty 1: Blessing

Difficulty 1: Curse

Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation

Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment

168
Reconstitute someone or something that youve swallowed;
Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

Free something that youre fighting from its struggles; Quiet somethings rage (if it connects to you somehow); Hide some truth (again, if it connects to you in some fashion). Walk in spirit with a bunch of people who fought you, couldnt silence you, and were consumed.

Difficulty 5: Greater Incarnation

If you somehow wind up in the Lands Beyond Creation while your victims still exist thered be a story to that! you can use greater incarnations to walk with them in spirit from the Beyond. Resound through something, but make it a minion or servant instead of digesting it. Get angry enough that the various animals and people youve eaten start showing ridiculous levels of hysterical strength and stones falling from the walls of your canyon turn into homing missiles that hunt down your enemies below; Map the territory inside you down to the quantum level; Survive a period of utter silence by haunting your own memories. Devour an entire country; Reveal some deeply-hidden truth, e.g., the key to immortality, through your struggle with somebody or other. Hide from the world by returning vast swathes of people and territory to normal, possibly even while lingering in subtle, potential form in the back of their heads; Make everyone stop being so angry that youre eating the world. Still their rage, quiet their fear, and leave the bystanders quiescent and complacent; that way you can deal with one meal before challenging the next! This is a good level of miracle for empowering major sound-servants and spawning child-selves although you should probably use a Project, also, if you want to split off a shard capable of miracles and second skins!

Difficulty 6: Lesser Binding

Difficulty 6: Greater Emulation

Difficulty 7: Greater Enchantment

Difficulty 8: Greater Sacrifice

Difficulty 9: Greater Binding

Jasmine Apocynums Story

Tune your vision to things that are relevant to your story, such as potential allies and enemies and people whose hearts are troubled enough for you to turn them into giant monsters. Make someone a little more a part of your story; Create minions; Unleash a little bit of somebodys true self; Make someone a little bit cooler and saner in your eyes. Make someone a little less a part of your story; Make someones life story a bit less likely to resemble yours. Spend a scene walking in spirit with someone who is an important part of your story. Become more good-like; Become more logical, sensible, and sane; Successfully grapple Death, e.g., while performing emergency medical care; Become someone who can do the whole pull out hearts and turn people into giant monsters thing, with slightly different implications depending on whether you choose to give a heart brass handles and pull, transfigure someone, invert someone, or unleash the true self within them. Make someone else more good-like; Make someone else more sensible, logical, and sane; Give someone else the power to grapple Death; Pull out someones heart and turn them into a giant monster; Enable somebody else to pull out a third partys heart and turn them into a giant monster. (The loose language of your pState Properties gives you a multitude of options here!)

169
Difficulty 0: The Sight

Difficulty 1: Blessing

Difficulty 1: Curse

Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation

Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment

170

If your Persona rises to level 1, youll be able to use this level of miracle to . . .
Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

Banish people from your story, definitely turning anybody youve transformed or messed up back to normal and quite probably exiling them unceremoniously from the scene, making it harder for them to contact you, and maybe even making them forget you! Walk with large numbers of people who are an important part of your story, or walk with somebody spiritually while outside Creation. In a low-powered setting like Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, characters with relatively low Traits cant use Words of Command. So you cant use these miracles!

Difficulty 5: Greater Incarnation

Difficulty 6-9

171
The Adoration of Phasael
Tune your vision to people who adore you, people pointedly not adoring you, and people with special relations to that adoration. Make someone a little more forgiving (at least, towards you); Make someone feel good; Push someone to go a little over the top. Harden someones heart against you, making it a little harder for them to adore you properly. Their world goes a little bit dimmer; they feel the gentle touch of despair. Spend a scene walking in spirit with someone caught up in the adoration of Phasael. Feel good, forgive yourself, and celebrate your own existence; Free yourself from chains and prisons; Do things that are a little over the top. Enchant someone or something with the adoration of Phasael; Make someone forgive you; Make someone or something feel good; Make someone or something a little epic; Make someone or something want your love; Conjure up a celebration.
Difficulty 4: Lesser Enchantment Difficulty 3: Lesser Emulation Difficulty 1: Curse Difficulty 1: Blessing Difficulty 0: The Sight

Difficulty 2: Lesser Incarnation

172
Cast someone out of the spirit of adoring you; Make it impossible for them to forgive you, to honestly celebrate you, or to feel the proper joy and happiness that youre alive;
Difficulty 5: Lesser Sacrifice

If you have spiritual leverage (that is, if theyve been a part of your pState long enough for it to affect their dharma), cast them into despair or imprison them in some fashion; Given similar leverage, sacrifice someones over-the-topness and put them definitively under the top. (Whoa.) Walk in spirit with a large number of your celebrants; Walk in spirit with someone while youre in the Lands Beyond Creation and theyre not, or while youre on Earth and theyre in Hell or Heaven. Give someone a place in the adoration of Phasael thats not just adoring you or not adoring you, e.g., empower someone like your bland, gray man. Use the power of believing in yourself to trigger a full-on cinematic escape sequence from whatever prison youre currently trapped in. Do you blast out through the walls on your motorcycle, ride an alligator down from the sky, subvert the guards, or step between the molecules of the prison walls? Kick the adoration up a notch, making hearts explode with joy all Ananda-style or making all of, e.g., Japan, or maybe even Canada, a little bit over the top. Perform epic miracles of anti-adoration. Like, you get up on stage, cough, tap the microphone, and say: The partys over, folks. You hate me now, and it is so. Dont know why youd do that? Me neither! Maybe its for a flower rite? If you really like the mango lassi that a given restaurant serves, and want to have access to it anywhere theres someone who adores you and has a refrigerator, this is a good level for a miracle to make that so. You can probably do more useful things with greater bindings too, but then you have to consider: what if that leaves you without enough MP left to secure your eternal access to the perfect lassi? Give it some thought!

Difficulty 5: Greater Incarnation

Difficulty 6: Lesser Binding

Difficulty 6: Greater Emulation

Difficulty 7: Greater Enchantment

Difficulty 8: Greater Sacrifice

Difficulty 9: Greater Binding

Appendix C: The Other Side of the Eyes

- Appendix C The Other Side of the Eyes

As far as I know, Deceiver eyes arent really there. That is, theyre not looking at us through physical eyes; theyre looking at us through our perception of them looking at us. Its not clear to me whether this changes anything. It definitely means stuff. For instance, it means that their eyes the things they use to see us with, and more generally to see the world with, arent physical things. They arent part of our reality. Their ability to apprehend the world as a lie is intimately tangled with this, I think: we see the world as real because were seeing it through real eyes. They see the world through a lens of void, so of course it doesnt look real to them! They see it, I guess, the way we might see a movie their eyes are a screen, tarnished by the mystique of Hollywood or at least by the fantasy that theres a world. The way we see their eyes as night and falling stars is most blatantly a vision of a world without a sun; alchemically speaking, a world without revelation, without a Marduk of consciousness to tame the Tiamat of primordial confusion. We look in their eyes and we see a vast, open world stripped of the light of reason, of logos, of the consciousness and even the distant stars then fall. When we look at them we see the limits of our understanding staring back. Yet fundamentally the Deceivers seem to see the same things we do. I guess that fits with what Ive said here I guess the only difference between what we see with our eyes, and what we see with the limits of our understanding, is that our eyes believe the sunlit world we see is real I dont think the matter of their eyes is any deeper than that. I dont think its even that deep, really; its probable that Im way overanalyzing it and they just happen to keep their portals to the night-sky portion of the void in their face, because: evolution. Because timeless evolution, even; and thats practically an omni-explanation for whatever! One of the big questions debated in the Nobiliser community is what happens if you stick a finger or torch or spear or well, whatever in an Excrucians eye. Are there structures that you can damage? Is the apparent night an actual night sky somewhere, or a projected image? Your intrepid explorer and representative, heroine Jenna Moran, Ph.D., has investigated! When I finally got Genserics permission to touch one of his eyes, I felt a coldness, a yielding flatness, and a sense I cannot explain it! like a dead finger on the other side, moving, touching mine. It freaked me out and I pulled my hand back and then the bastard wouldnt let me touch his eye again. Still, to whatever degree any information whatsoever gained through any interaction whatsoever with a Deceiver and in particular with Genseric Dace tells you anything, there you have it! ~ Science! ~

173

Theyre not actual eyes. Theyre just things that people mistake for eyes!
Fable of the Swan (Kindle Location 2886)

Attacks Flower Rite...................................... 31-33 Theseus Ship.........................................76 Welken-Rite.................................... 33-34 Zenos Gambit.......................................76 Chuubos Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine**.............................99, 120-127, 170 Deceiver Stuff Calendar................................................26 Eyes............................................. 173, 115 Imperial Miracles................................115 Shards............101, 108-109, 115, 143, 159 Pets........................................................84 pStates.. 22-25, 30, 34-35, 63-69, 128-135, 150 Spawn....................................................87 Deceivers (the Bastard) Amayika.........................109 Abdalonymous III*................................65 Anagastes Brandil..................................59 Cethegus Law........................................57 Christine Waye (shard)*.............. 115-116 Coriander Hasp........10, 20, 37, 45-46, 58, 131, 135, 141, 161, 165-166 Ritho.................................................10 Corinthia Glismond..............................59 Cloric Braga..........................................59 Erelieva Grimoald.................................57 Erland Erengis......................................57 Flash Examplepants*...........................130 Genseric Dace.... 14, 26, 40-41, 45, 57, 99, 131, 173 City of Bridges..................................92 Hannah Gundiok..................................58 Helchen Hadusind*..13, 23, 24, 25, 44, 47, 111, 132, 151 Christine Waye*....................... 115-116 Iolithae Septimian....11, 15-19, 20, 23-25, 48, 57, 72, 128-129, 148, 163-164 Cottage in the Dark...........................92 Iustina Thrasaric..............................57, 93 Jasmine Apocynum**...................... 11, 52, 59, 109, 119, 120-127, 133, 137, 139, 142, 145, 146, 148, 169-170 Jordan Valamer......................................58 Kadlin Fenvar........................................57 Morrowen Hollow, the Voice of*..........12, 25, 104-107, 110, 134, 138, 140, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 153, 167-168 Character Creation for..........60-61, 71, 74-75, 79, 82, 90-91, 95, 102-103 Nikeline Ondwulf..................................58 Odotheus Livigund...............................57 Page Cutter............................................57 Percival Sansalas*...................................65 Phasael mery-Harumaph...11, 57, 98, 109, 110, 132-133, 152, 154-157, 171-172 His Bland Gray Man............... 152, 157 Prasede Fritigern...................................57 Scelto of the Provenance......14, 20, 55, 59 Selenas Picard............................ 13, 20, 59 Tairt Ut-napishtim...... 13, 26, 43, 59, 92,

Index

109, 115 Mansion of........................................92 Allegories of....................................159 Tanca Persegoth....................................59 Tetsuo Chaves.......................................66 Unnamed: Held captive in a second skin... 119 Unnamed: Tricked into becoming a nonexistent Power............................119 Viticus Chelonian Invictus*.................143 Wittigis Statler......................................59 Yochander Radmund.............................58 Zamolxis Trebolgion..............................68 Miscellaneous Characters Adrian Elsey........................................112 Bland Grey Man.......................... 152, 157 Calliste Focault....................................115 Eleanor..................................................28 Elvis.................................................48, 55 Father Sebastian Capobianco................56 Ianthe Falls-Short...................................9 Irissa Maryland....................................161 Kaithrya of the Wild................... 116-117 Kadir-Rahman......................................26 Lord Entropy..........................9, 58, 77, 89 Disturbingly inappropriate calendar of.. 58 Principal Entropy**.................... 11, 125 Max Planck...........................................58 Raginhart Tribunas (Warmain).............57 Robert Baxt...........................................58 Ronald Reagan (former President)........20 Rook Catchfly.....................................143 Steve......................................................28 Yill-Amoth............................................62 Things and Creatures Argentine ant mega-colony...................85 Book of Irissa Maryland......................161 Chain-Glyphs........................................57 Chupacabras..........................................31 Cneph...................................... 87, 89, 155 Cryptozoology.......................................31 Deru-deru..............................................23 Empyreal Nothing.................................53 Gun Ownership..................................141 Harumaph.............................................89 Mimique..............................................118 Mistletoe.............................................150 Order of Falling Stars, the.....................58 True Thing..........................29, 60, 89, 123 Universal fair-fight index.....................108 World Swarm*.......................................85 Events 1911 botanical mapping expedition.......52 Death of Baldur, the............................150 Places Abaton...................................................35 Atlantis................................................166 Basalt Gates**......................................125 Bluebell Park**............................. 119, 145 Ebla.....................................................129 Locus Assaibi........................................22

Mansion of the Heart**.......................119 Ofeili.....................................................48 Weirding Wall Auctoritas of....................................142 Chain-Glyphs....................................57 Flowers Gethringenfleur (see Milkmay) Milkmay.................................... 51, 78, 79 Phoenix Posy................................. 52, 127 Welken-rose (see Widow-rose) Widow-rose................................... 50, 175

Texts
Alexander de Vriend: Sonnet and the Sea (pg. 116) Catherine Arlinna e Soph: The Elevation of Seiriel, and other Relevant Accounts (pg. 13) Emily Chen: Doorknobs (pg. 21, 38); The Duchess Needle (pg. 136) Holly Djurisic: A Primer on the Loci Celatum (pg. 22) J. Dunsmore*: The Voice of Morrowen Hollow (pg. 138, 140, 143, 144, 147, 149) Jack Frost: Heavens Gate (pg. 93) Jenna Katerin Moran: Fable of the Swan (ppg. 121-123, 137, 139, 142, 145, 146, 148, 173), Nobilis: the Essentials, Volume 1: Field Guide to the Powers (pg. 4) Keiko Takemori: the Imaginary (pg. 96) Kip Narekatski: The Valde Bellum: A Chronology of Excrucian Assault (pg. 26) Marilith Turner: Spotlight: C (pg. 30) Martin Elliott: Children of Earth (pg. 32) Niloufar Samir: The Allegories of Tairt Ut-napishtim (pg. 159) Rannen Yedidyah: 24 Finales (pg. 36)

Miscellaneous Cites
Calliste Focault, Domina of the Shore: personal communication (pg. 115) Sermons and Speeches, 3/25/00: Statement of Father Sebastien Capobianco (pg. 56) Unverified Nobiliser Community Information: a post in rec.arts.nobilising.encounters (pg. 152) (*) fictional character created for this work (**) related to the CMWGE setting

The world is a lie.

This book is the story of those who know the world to be a lie, and live in it anyway. Those who have sacrificed the endlessness and perfection of the void and grounded themselves within the lie of our existence so that they can free us. So that they can wake us up.

We call them Deceivers.

Herein you will find a discussion of their powers, their nature, their methodology, and their goals. You will find rules for playing them and playing against them in the Nobilis RPG and a lifepath system for easily generating cool Deceiver characters of your own.