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Who's Who In The CBU Update 2010

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

Nobilis

By Park Cooper

Hogshead Publishing recently sent me and Barb the new RPG NOBILIS by... wait, there’s a lot of info here. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if I swiped from them a little in the interests of fueling the public relations juggernaut (because no one can stop the juggernaut)

Author: R. Sean Borgstrom
Editor: Bruce Baugh
Artists: Charles Vess, Michael Kaluta, Bryan Talbot, Al Davison, Denise Garner, Ralph Horsley, Frazer Irving, Martin McKenna, Rik Martin, Raven Mimura and Lee Moyer, plus Arcimboldo
Cover: Full colour, featuring the sculpture ‘Sphinx Mysterieux’ by Art Nouveau master Charles van der Tappen
Published by: Hogshead Publishing
Format: 11" x 11", 304 pages
ISBN: 1-899749-30-6
Price: $42.95/Ł29.95

Seen here and here:
http://www.hogshead.demon.co.uk/
http://www.hogshead.demon.co.uk/Nobilis_index.htm

Okay, let’s stop and drop jaw over some of those artist names. See if you’ve heard of these: “Charles Vess, Michael Kaluta, Bryan Talbot...”

Yes, it’s the game made by SANDMAN fans for... well, gamers, but especially Sandman fans...

The Tarts communicated us telepathically and said Barb’s always talking about bringing the Gamers back into the fold from their status as the eighth Lost Tribe of Geekdom so would she like to review a game?

Contacting her, of course, because I am no one, I am a small biscuit floating in the omnicosmic void. And perhaps that’s the way I like it, quite frankly, because how could I go to school and teach science every day if my students found out I was Spider-Man? Frankly, they’re already suspicious.

So I said sure, say yes, and I’ll translate since I was raised in a gamer creche even I do not look like the gamers nor practice their ways, I still grok their strange language and custom.

So if my briefing/prep report’s good enough for Barb, it’s certainly good enough for you.

First: You need to understand something that’s obvious to Barb and I because it’s lying around our house: this is a big, beautiful, hardcover book with fantastic original illustrations by fantastic artists. This beats any coffee table book you’ve got lying around just on its merits as a printed object, before you ever even get to reading it.

Second: This is a DICELESS RPG. There are numbers because you have to keep track of certain things you can and can’t do, etc, but no dice. It’s multi-person storytelling in its purest form and I dig that. If you have no imagination nor creativity whatsoever, I’m not sure you can play Nobilis.

Now then: here we go.

How Nobilis Works:

Explanation approach 1: the timeline approach.

Initially, there was some sort of reality.

The Creator, in a bit of a rip from Sandman, took three entities that were already around. From them, he made the foundation of Heaven, Yggsdrasil the World-Ash, and the Wall around everything he was setting up. Yggsdrasil is an unimaginably large tree with worlds here and there upon it, most notably Earth. Heaven is just above the top branches. Hell is reflected down at the bottom. The Weirding Wall (hey, I didn’t name it) keeps whatever wildness (and presumably chaos) outside creation at bay (and keeps us in).

Giant dragons/wyrms grew from the tree; these are known as Aaron’s Serpents. They help protect the tree and some look after Earth since Ygg feeds slightly off our rich soil (as I understand it).

Angels are created, and we start making Earth stuff, like Flowers (pretty important in Nobilis, they’re used to work big magic since each flowering plant is a symbol of some cosmic principle like Chastity (Water Lily), Liberty (Live-Oak) or Wealth (Auricula) etc.)

The dinosaurs die because some snotty angel, put in ‘time-out’ on earth for a bad attitude, is offended by the roughness and stinkiness of mortal reality and starts blasting all the dinosaurs. Typical.

Lucifer and some angels fall.

Adam and Eve fall.

Adam and Eve eventually outlaw incest and some hybrids show up. Human/animal hybrids cause humanity to increase in population and spread out across the earth but also water down man’s essential divinity a lot.

Lots of struggle and fighting amongst the light and the dark and evil and everyone else, time gets rewritten now and then, bringing us up to the present day.

Explanation approach 2: How the world works.

You’ve got one conflict above all others: Everybody vs. the Excrucians.

Basically these are beings from the other side of the wall. They may be more entities like the ones the Creator got rid of to make Creation. They may have made a bargain with God of some sort and then God, like Genma Saotome, failed to keep his end of the bargain, so they’re angry. It may be that they think they’re playing some big game where humans and worlds are like toys or game pieces and whatever they can destroy before the universe ends, they’ll get to keep and take home with them to play with when the game’s all over (whoever lives eternally with the most toys wins -- my line, not the book’s). Either way, they’re such badasses they can slip little shards of their power through the wall and into hosts, or something like that, and they’re out to get us all.

Next subconflict: Everyone vs. Everyone Else.

Our head general on Earth is Lord Entropy. The incarnation of Entropy and a few other things, he’s about as scary a badass as our team has, so what he says goes. The prophecies all say that his deep study and understanding of evil, corruption, the darkest magics, and all other badness means he’s the only badass bad enough to out-bad the Excrucians when the day of the Final Battle comes. Unless he gets so into it all that he betrays us at the last second and crosses the line of the darkest side after all and dooms our asses big time. The prophecy isn’t completely sure which way it’ll fall, which is why the prophecy (as on Angel) sucks ass.

Lord Entropy decides Earthly policy with the other three members of the Earth Board, but for reasons known only to the two of them, Badass #2 won’t ever vote against him (it’s presumed Entropy’s got something on him/holding over his head), so the only way Lord Entropy ever doesn’t get his way is if the other two both vote against him and #2 abstains (which is as close as he gets to dissent). Entropy also has a pet race of magical superior humans that he’s bred that secretly run the scenes behind lots of Earth global politics, etc etc.

Anyway, these are Lord Entropy’s Rules for Nobilis who wish to be Highly Successful at continuing to exist, as paraphrased by me:

1. DO NOT LOVE.

If you let yourself love anyone, the Excrucians will find out and use it against you, so don’t even think about it.

This is called the Windflower law, possibly after the first schmuck to set precedent? Just about everyone breaks it in various creative ways (it can be hard to prove, since Lord Entropy doesn‘t know what‘s going on deep in your heart without external evidence), following the unwritten rule: DON’T GET CAUGHT BY LORD ENTROPY. Because if you don’t let HIM catch you doing it, the odds are that the Excrucians will be almost as in the dark... and you can always try to kick THEIR ass if one of them finds out, whereas if Lord Entropy finds out, you’ve got until he actually lays hands on you to clear your name or come up with an alibi or something...)

2. DON’T MESS WITH THE INNOCENT, i.e. those who didn’t mess with you first. Of course, an insult counts as a reason to mess with someone... the rule cares nothing about fucking up the Helpless Before Your Might Who Got Snotty With You, just about the innocent.

3. DON’T TAKE CRAP FROM MANKIND. Just because most are innocent of doing wrong against you doesn’t mean they aren’t still grains of dust descended from 98% animal stock (and maybe a tiny percent of holiness in that one in a millionth person).

4. AIDING AND ABETTING WILL GET YOU IN SHIT. If you help someone the Council of Four ain’t happy with, they ain’t happy with you either (unless it‘s one of those aforementioned servants of Lord Entropy).

5. BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL. Sure, we’re all on the same team against the Excrucians, but, as humans chosen to be elevated to slightly-godlike status, let’s remember who your real loyalty belongs to: the not-slightly-at-all-godish being who elevated you.

Other stuff that you need to know:

Of course, there’s mundane reality and there’s magical reality, we all know that. One has cars, and one has lots of dryads and fairies running around playing tag with car spirits, etc etc. And of course there’s the astral plane, but that’s just kind a big mental/spiritual place with no bodies, so it’s not as much fun.

Here’s the lowdown.

Lord Entropy and many other beings are incarnate manifestations of 3 or 4 cosmic concepts. These guys are called IMPERATORS.

So let’s say I’m Dave, Imperator of Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, and Cleaning Products. Well that’s a lot of hats to wear, and I, Dave, am a very cosmic being who, quite frankly, spends a lot of time thinking big thoughts and hanging out on the astral plane and watching the Wall for any signs of the final battle starting and quite frankly while I know a lot about Drugs and so on, individual humans are weird and don’t make a lot of sense to my big cosmic brain. So I, Dave, want some major-domos to run things for me (particularly as they relate to the peons) while I’m busy being cosmic. Well, if _you’re_ Dave in that kind of situation, what you do is you grab a few humans (or other alternatives from the magical plane, or hell just whip up a being from scratch, but these other options are more trouble) out of the very unwashed crappy masses of humanity that you actually feel have a bit of potential, give ‘em a bit of your truly godish self, and you’ve got some cosmic gofers that might actually stand a small chance of carrying out your awesome will and schleppy tasks you might feel like assigning them on a whim. These are the Nobilis.

So let’s say Dave now has four Nobilis: We’ll call them Alice, Viscountess of Sex, Rick, Marquis of Drugs, Timmy, Duke of Rock, and Louisa, Duchess of Cleaning Products. Actually, in most cases, Dave isn’t just gonna divide up ALL his power amongst these dips, he only wants some grunts to do his leg work after all. So he’s just maybe going to give them more specific roles, like say Alice is in charge of Afterglow, Rick is in charge of Withdrawal, Timmy is in charge of New Wave, and Louisa is in charge of piney-fresh scent. But they’re a tiny part of the cosmic All and so still kick major ass compared to Oscar, the average human guy off the street.

Finally, the power just keeps on flowing downhill as our Nobilis decide that THEY need gofers... depending on what their statistics are, they get 1 to 4 human ‘Anchors’, servants that they don’t empower very much, but that they make a psychic link with...

Let’s say that Alice, Viscountess of afterglow, makes 3 Anchors... that way she can stay at home in Dave’s pocket dimension (also called a Chancel... it’s all the wackiness [or less] of the Dreaming yet the compactness, at times, of a Tardis) and give commands to, say, her banker in Switzerland, her pet ninja in Tokyo, and her agent in L.A., and if she’s got the right statistics, can even take any one of them over for a while and see through their eyes etc.

On the other hand, Rick, Marquis of Withdrawal, has made an Anchor out of someone he likes looking after, has made an Anchor out of Jake, who once turned him down for a job. Jake is now a homeless bum. Instead of getting warm-fuzzy points making sure Jake is well-cared-for like Alice’s banker, Rick gets warm-fuzzy points out of ensuring that Jake is miserable. Every now and then he might choose to take Jake over briefly and use him to spy on someone, etc. Rick is a less nice guy than Alice (and small wonder).

SO HOW DO YOU GET POINTS IN THIS GAME IF YOU DON’T ENGAGE IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT WITH OTHER NOBILIS AND THE EXCRUCIANS DON’T SHOW UP?

You steal their power. Let’s say Louisa, Duchess of Piney Freshness, has a long-standing grudge against the Nobilis Power of Grime and Mold. Her spies find out that the Nobilis of Grime and Mold has a lot of emotional investment tied up in his girlfriend, his pesticide company, and his pet pegasus “Grunge”. She may choose to use her anchors to seduce the girlfriend away, to use the power of Pineyness to ruin his latest pesticide and cause the company to fall into ruin (heck, don‘t ask me how, I‘m not Louisa), or to fill “Grunge’s” nose with a Piney-Fresh scent and nothing else so that he can’t smell his way home from his favorite grazing pastures in the Magical Plane of Reality and accidentally flies into a manticore’s cave to rest (that he can’t smell and gets eaten or whatever (there, a solid example, happy now?). She gets points for such sabotage that she can save up to someday increase her powers, work a super-big miracle when the chips are down someday, and/or so on.

A Nobilis can work toward the ulitmate goal of saving humanity, tempting humans into destruction so as to cut the chaff from the wheat, can work for one of the giant Aaron’s Serpents (hey, they’re miles-long giant wyrms, they like having people to order around too), etc etc. And of course if you like saving humanity, you’ve got both the Excrucians and those wacky fallen angels to foil. And of course there are pet projects you feel like whipping up, like restructuring the world’s ecosystem so that mosquitoes don’t exist or never did, or making communism work, or other big ideas.

Your new mantra: BIG BLACK CAR