Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Nobilis

the game of sovereign powers by R. Sean Borgstrom

Another reading of a RPG sourcebook. Benefits from a great scale of imgaintion, a type of extensive mental reach that fantasy could use more of. There’s the notion of magic as actually being radical and transformative, and a truly epic scope of action involved with players. What really builds the appeal of this volume is the "nanofiction" scattered across it, with short little stories of a few lines that give a real flavor for the magic, the major players and the whole tone of living in thuis world. My one disapointment was the major factions, while some of these were very creative and ambitiously formed (the Excrucians that seek to destroy the universe by wiping out basic concepts) others were too dependent on a revamped Christian mythological binary, Heaven and Hell, Light and Dark as factions. There are interesting things in all of these, but it felt like there could be a lot more, and that the reach for various mythologiacl systems is overly Eurocentric.

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