Nobilis Thoughts

In the standard Nobilis chargen rules, the total of the players' Realm scores is the number of Chancel points they have to buy positive properties. Beyond those points, each positive trait must be offset by equal points worth of negative traits.

Monarch (Imperator) design is similar, except you do not get points for your Monarch by totalling the player's scores. It is a very simple thing to do so: add up the domain scores of the characters just as you would their Realm scores. These are Monarch Points, used to buy positive properties.

What can be an Estate?

The Ingenue Law: General concepts have Monarchs. Specific things have spirits. Powers are created by Monarchs, not spirits.

Someone on the Nobilis list (I forget who) pointed out that there is at least one limit on what can and can't be an Estate: specificity. This means that there are no Estates tailored so narrowly that they pertain only to one specific object, person, or place.

Estate ideas like "Pop Singers", "Famous Cities", or "First Cars" are all perfectly valid character concepts. Ideas like "Madonna", "Chicago", or "The Blue AMC Concorde That Was My First Car" are defined by spirits, not Monarchs. So, they don't have Powers.

A player can choose the Power of Light Bulbs, Sauce, or Presidents, but cannot be the Power of Your Living Room Light Bulb, that particular bottle of steak sauce, or George "Dubya" Bush.

The character might also be limited to a particular type or brand of Light Bulb (flourescent, incandescent, G.E.), Sauce (steak, seafood, A1), or President (Dead, Female, U.S.). These are good justifications for taking the limit "Small Estate". However, the boundary between a large and small domain is a bit fuzzy. One does not have to take Small Estate.

And no, I didn't name the Law that for any particular reason. I just happened to see the word in the dictionary at random.

On the subject of Estate interpretations

Cultural Allegory

In general, I feel that the boundaries of a character's Estate should be determined by the player. As long as it makes some form of coherent sense, HHG rulings should only be necessary in extremely dubious cases or blatant attempts at power gaming. Some people are uncomfortable with this, and try to narrow the range extensively. But as someone on the list said, Nobilis' core premise is to hand the players world-shaking powers and see what they do.

However, some Nobilis players and/or Holy Heck Gods have a problem coping with the fact that Estates can be both literal and metaphorical .. even for the same character. For example, the Estate of Flames not only covers both actual fire, but also the "flames of passion" (strong emotions like love, lust, rage, etc.)

Since any given metaphor is usually peculiar to some combination of language and culture, this raises the question of whether characters (or even players) native to certain languages and/or cultures would have an advantage (or at least a difference) compared with those who are not native to the same culture.

As an example of this, the Japanese don't speak of a warm- or cold-hearted person, they speak of someone whose heart is "wet" or "dry". So, a Japanese Power of Moisture should be able to control a person in much the same way that an English Power of Warmth would, whereas an English Power of Moisture wouldn't necessarily think that was possible.

It also matters if the player of the Power is English or Japanese (and thus likely to think in those contexts by default). Finally, it matters if some players/characters do not have the same background as the rest.

Slang and Metaphor

Things get even harder to judge when players start really getting into colloquialism to figure out if their Estate can cover something. Much allegory relies upon such turns of phrase, so the line between "slang that happens to include the name of your estate" and "well-known allegorical interpretations of your Estate" is an exceedingly fuzzy one, even strictly within the same culture and language.

The example brought up on the Nobilis list is "Can the Power of Loss cause you to 'lose your marbles'?" (We of course assume that the question does not refer to literal marbles.)

I would say yes, assuming that the Estate of Loss includes losing things at all (rather than just covering the emotion resulting from loss of a loved one, aka Grief). The colloquialism reduces to the perfectly clear question "Can the Power of Loss cause you to lose your sanity?" Since loss potentially covers any form of loss, the answer is probably yes (dependent, of course, on the character's interpretation of their estate - players are always free to exclude interpretations they feel do not fit).

An example of when a colloquialism might not appropriate for players to use is seen by altering the question slightly. Can the power of Marbles do the same thing?

This is a lot iffier. Some HHGs (like myself) are simply going to be far more comfortable with something like strong emotions being covered under Fire than they are with sanity being covered under Marbles. Marbles barely even qualify as a metaphor for Sanity, and are closer to the realm of "random noun used as a synonym".

Furthermore, this particular phrase is a fairly isolated bit of slang. We don't commonly speak of asylums or psychiatrists in terms of marbles. The same is not true of metaphorical associations like fire and emotional openness. We speak of "burning" love "consuming" us, "warm" people, and so forth all the time.

Potentially worst of all is when a player tries to use a pun or other play on words to expand their Estate. To make up a really bad random example, say you decide to play the "Power of I" (meaning selfhood). Later on, you try to expand this to include people's eyesight, contact lenses, "electric eye" security grids, and so forth. I'd disallow this sort of thing (and probably pelt you with rotten fruit for the bad pun).

The powers of the Powers

Manifest Auctoritas: Limit of Spirit

In Piers' Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality novel On a Pale Horse, the protagonist became Thanatos, the Incarnation of Death. He gained the Grim Reaper's robes as the symbol of his office, and they made him invulnerable to harm, much like Auctoritas. This idea could be borrowed and adapted to Nobilis. Say that whatever estate the character has, they must design a symbol of office. Their Auctorita are invested therein. The Power of Fiction might have a science-fictional shield generator, while the Power of Passions wears a dress made of lovers' tears.

(Yes, I realize that in the novel it actually turned out to work more like Nobilis, but Zane's original conception is what I am trying to show.)

Variations on Nobilis

Applying Realm/Chancel logic to Monarchs