Nobis: The City-States
Fencing, misfit gnolls, and the Byzantine politics of a democracy slowly collapsing await the brave souls who dare adventure in the world of Nobis. This dangerous place is detailed in the aptly named Nobis: The City-States. An Open Gaming License (OGL) compatible product, Nobis provides over 80 pages of material containing a richly detailed world, complete with over twelve hundred years of history, a beautiful full-color map, a new race to play, several schools of fencing, and a Reputation system where doing legendary things and role playing well all lead to fame, fortune, and higher skills.
Nobis is a book that holds great promise. It is one of the few books that is set during a working fantasy democracy. It attempts to capture the flair and training involved in fencing and does it better than many gaming supplements. Nobis also tries with great effort to evolve a Reputation system which is more than a simple number written down on a blank on the character sheet. In addition, the book introduces Simplecraft, a common form of magic anyone can wield to do simple magic. Nobis does all of this and provides a setting that feels very real. (Perhaps a little too real, but more on that in a bit.)
First, let us examine the setting itself. The city of Nobis did not grow up overnight. Wars had to be fought, heroes lived and died, and were all but forgotten except as a name until King Greger Pretovial IV of Marist succeeded in a war of conquest that put much of the known world under his control. Unwilling to rule over his lands as a tyrant, he and his wife wrote a manifesto which introduced democracy to the world and they taught the world the art of Simplecraft, a system of magic anyone can use for common tasks.
Shortly thereafter, Marist elects a High Council to which Greger peacefully transfers power and disappears from public view. After that, the High Council dissolves the Kingdom of Marist and reorganizes itself into a set of City-States which the Council continues to govern. Sadly, like many governments, eventually the City-States become proud and corrupt to the point that many feel like a restoration of the monarchy is only a few years away.
This is the backdrop for some of Nobis’ mechanics. Of particular interest is Simplecraft, which is magic that is sold on the street corner. Normally it is used for things like cleaning up a room, mending fabric, caring for animals, or for more violent uses. However, it’s not entirely stable. Each time it is used, a D20 is rolled. On a 1, it’s time to roll on the Simplecraft Debacle table. Which means that at some point in the history of Nobis, some kid thought he was going to clean his room with his fancy Simplecraft device and ripped open a hole in the planar fabric. Neat!
Nobis also offers rules for fencing, which gives players a set of fencing Feats with which they can perform amazing acts of sword play. Nobis breaks fencing down into three types of maneuvers (engagement, recoup, and technique) and then gives players Feats for each of the different types of maneuvers. There are also several different schools of fencing, each with their own weapons, special maneuvers, and flair.
This is one the better fencing systems for the D20 system or for any game not specifically designed for fencing. Providing rules for any type of fight in which fighters make multiple flurries of blows and there’s a great deal of back and forth is difficult. However, Nobis’s system should be usable in any D20 game.
Lastly, there’s a Reputation system in Nobis which rewards great deeds and good role play. GMs are given guidelines for giving Reputation points when characters do great things or when players do certain things. These points can then buy levels which grant the character additional class skills, skill bonuses, and other perks. What is interesting about Nobis’ system is that players not only buy levels of Reputation, they buy them in a particular job or skill set. Jobs include Artisan, Clergy, Criminal, or Statesman. This gives the game a greater degree of realism.
The problem with Nobis is that it lacks a central aesthetic. On one hand, there is an incredibly rich history of this democracy that has grown up and is slowly crumbling. Given the amount of detail put into the City-States, I would have liked to see more rules about the democracy. Instead, we’re given three pages of rules on Simplecraft, which is okay since it’s sort of the democratization of magic, but there’s not much of it. Then there are rules for fencing and Reputation, neither of which seem to support what the game has spent the most time describing: the sprawling City-States of Nobis. Even the new character class, the mongrels, a class of outcast gnolls, is interesting, but doesn’t seem to fit.
My one wish for this book was that it had really taken the failing democracy idea and expanded on it more. There are so many parallels between the political events of the City-States and their failing democracy, the demagoguery, and the corruption that mimics the failing democracies, demagoguery, and corruption in much of the Western World. For me, this idea that players can explore a world very much like our own and perhaps learn from the mistakes of their characters and the NPCs in the world is very cool. I just wish there were more rules for it and more ways to interact with that part of the setting.
Still, even without a central aesthetic, Nobis: The City-States presents a lot of useful information that can be used to play a Nobis campaign or be slotted into other campaigns. I would love to see the fencing system tweaked to make it a bit more cinematic, but it is quite usable as is. I think the Simplecraft system is easily adaptable to any high magic setting and even the mongrels are a neat class, even if they do not seem to fit the setting. All in all, this is definitely a game product worth considering.
Want to learn more about Nobis? Read on…
- Atomic Array: Nobis (Atomic Array 024)
- Game Cryer: Nobis Review
- campaign Mastery: Gaming Renaissance and Loving it
- Dice Monkey: Orgs & Sects
- Vulcan Stev: Looking at the Religion
- Unnatural 20: The Magic of Nobis
- Core Mechanic: The City States
- allgeektout: The Play
Drop by Pantheon Press and pre-order Nobis today!