Games That Could Have Been Great: Nephilim

The golden age of darker, more mature RPGs in the mid-1990s saw numerous games trying to capture the same audience that Vampire: The Masquerade had tapped into. Among these ambitious titles, Nephilim stands out as a fascinating "what could have been" story – a game bursting with revolutionary ideas that never quite delivered on its enormous potential.

The question is, did it deliver on that potential?  Tune in to find out.

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HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page). 

Transcript

Introduction to Nephilim

Iain 0:08

Welcome to Roll2Save the RPG history podcast Nephilim . Hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save the RPG history podcast . Today we're diving into one of those games that always makes me feel a bit wistful Nephilim , published by KSEM in 1994 . Now , before you start wondering if we're just going to be trying to cram in every obscure RPG from the 90s in our episodes , let me explain why this particular game deserves our attention . Nephilim is what I'd call a game that could have been great , one of those tantalising designs that had genuinely brilliant ideas but never quite managed to deliver on its enormous potential .

Iain 1:06

Back in September 1994 , I picked up issue one of Valkyrie magazine . Now , for those of you too young to remember , valkyrie was one of those ambitious gaming magazines that cropped up in the early 90s full of enthusiasm and dreams of becoming the new white dwarf . Spoiler alert , they didn't , but tucked away in that first issue was a review of something called Nephilim , described rather grandly as occult role-playing . This immediately caught my attention . The mid-90s were absolutely golden age of darker , more mature RPGs . Vampire the Masquerade had shown there was an appetite for games that dealt with weightier themes than kick down the door and kill the orcs . Now , call of Cthulhu had been doing this for years , of course , but White Wolf had really taken this to a much larger market . Everyone was getting into the act . You had Cult , with its genuinely disturbing take on reality in Nominee , with its theological warfare , and dozens of others trying to capture the same lightning in the bottle . And here was Nephilim , promising something different again , a game where you'd play immortal elemental beings reincarnating throughout history , wielding genuine occult power , whilst being hunted by secret societies . On paper , it sounded absolutely brilliant . In practice , well , let's take a look , shall we ?

Iain 2:39

Nephilim had its roots in the French RPG scene , originally published by Multisim in 1992 . I have to admit , the foreign language gaming scene was almost completely unknown to English speakers back then , unlike today , where we're much more connected to international gaming through the internet and its digital distribution . In the early 90s , games published in other languages might as well have been from another planet . The language barrier meant that most of us had no idea just what innovative designs were being developed just across the channel . Kseam , however , saw something special in Nephilim and decided to bring it to the English speaking world in 1994 . They didn't just do a straight translation either , kenneth Hite , who would go on to become one of the most respected gay names in RPG writing was brought in to do additional research and writing for the English edition . At $21.95 for 230 pages . It wasn't cheap , especially by 1994 standards , but KCM clearly had high hopes for it . The timing seemed perfect . This was exactly the sort of thing that should have found an audience in the mid-90s , with all these players who'd cut their teeth on D&D but were looking for something more sophisticated . Vampire had shown there was a market for playing non-human protagonists with complex motivations . Call of Cthulhu had demonstrated that horror could work brilliantly in an RPG content . For years , nephilim seemed positioned to combine the best of both worlds the complexity of playing inhuman beings with the investigation and hidden mysteries of good horror gaming . It was a great concept .

Iain 4:19

You play Nephilim , immortal elemental spirits who've lost their physical forms and must possess human bodies to interact with the world . But this isn't just body snatching for the sake of it . Each Nephilim is composed of five elemental forces called Ka Fire , air , water , earth and moon . Your dominant energy determines your personality and capabilities . Fire Nephilim are aggressive and passionate . Air Nephilim are intellectual . Water Nephilim represent change and movement . Earth Nephilim are healers and caretakers . And Moon Nephilim are surprise , surprise , secretive and manipulative , but here's where it gets really interesting .

Iain 5:00

Your character has lived multiple past lives throughout history . The games provided dozens of historical periods to choose from , everything from pre-dynastic Egypt around 5000 BC right up to Berlin in the 1930s . Each past life gave your character skills and knowledge , but at a cost the more lives you'd live , the more your raw elemental power was diminished . It was a genuine trade-off between experience and supernatural might . Your ultimate goal is achieving Agartha , a state of perfect enlightenment where you no longer need a physical body and can manipulate the elemental forces directly . But standing in your way are secret societies , particularly the Knights Templar . Of course , it was the 90s . Every conspiracy game featured the Knights Templar , and these guys viewed the Nephilim as a threat to be eliminated or enslaved . This was genuinely inspired stuff . The past life system alone was revolutionary for its time . Most RPGs gave you a paragraph or two of background and called it character creation .

Iain 6:05

Nephilim was asking you to build a character whose personal history spanned millennia . Did you witness the fall of Troy ? Were you there when Rome burned ? Did you whisper in Napoleon's ear ? These meant just colour . Then you had mechanical implications and gave your character genuine depth . The elemental system was equally clever . Instead of the usual fantasy races or character classes , you had these five archetypal forces that shaped both your personality and your magical capabilities . It felt genuinely different from anything else on the market , and the setting itself was fascinating . This wasn't just the modern world , but , with secret magic , this was a conspiracy theorist's dream , where the Illuminati and the Templars and all the other secret societies were real and they were all scheming against each other whilst Nephilim tried to navigate this hidden world . It had that same appeal as the X-Files . The idea was that there was this whole secret history running parallel to the one we thought we knew .

Iain 7:04

So why didn't this brilliant concept translate into gaming success ? Well , as anyone who's actually tried to run Nephilim will tell you , the execution was well . Let's be charitable and call it challenging . The first problem was the sheer complexity of character creation . This wasn't something you could just knock out in 20 minutes before the game started .

Iain 7:27

Creating a Nephilim character was a project . You had to choose your dominant cat element , select your metamorphosis , that's , a symbolic form your Nephilim takes as it grows in power . Pick your Arcanum one of 22 secret mystical organisations , and then work through multiple past lives . Each past life required rolling on tables , making choices about your social status and figuring out what your character was actually doing during that period . Now I'll admit that this was actually a lot of fun . There's something genuinely engaging about building a character with that much history . But it took ages and it front-loaded all the interesting decision-making into character creation rather than actual play .

The Concept and Historical Context

Iain 8:09

We'd spend entire sessions just making characters , and whilst that was enjoyable in its own right , it did rather highlight that the most engaging part of the game might not actually be the game itself .

Iain 8:21

Then there was the magic system . Oh boy , the magic system . Nephilim had what was probably the most complex spellcasting roles I've ever encountered in an RPG . Magic wasn't just about rolling dice and spending points . Every spell was modified by astrological factors the positions of the planets , the month , the day of the week all of it mattered . Working out the appropriate modifier for a spell required consulting charts and doing calculations that could take a long time . Ksam clearly recognised that this was a problem because they'd released the Games Master's Veil Supplement that's a GM screen to you and I . That included something called the Celestial Alignment Wheel . This was an actual physical wheel that you could spin to determine magical modifiers based on celestial conditions . The fact that they felt the need to create a physical device to handle the maths tells you everything you need to know about how complex this system was . Now I can see what they were trying to achieve . Real world occultism does place enormous emphasis on timing , astrological correspondences and getting the conditions just right for magical workings . This system was trying to capture that authentic occult feel , but in practice it meant that every time someone wanted to cast a spell , the game ground to a halt whilst we worked out whether the stars were right or not .

Iain 9:46

The core system was KSM's basic role-playing , the same engine that powered Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest . That part worked fine . It was a solid , proven system that used a percentage system for checking skills . But all the additional complexity layered on top made what should have been straightforward actions into exercises in bookkeeping . To KSM's credit , they clearly recognised some of these problems and tried to address them with a supplement line . The most important of these was the Games Master's Companion released in 1996 . One of the biggest issues with the core rulebook was that it gave you all this wonderful background and these complex character creation roles , but it was surprisingly light on actually how to run a Nephilim campaign . Andy Butcher , writing in Arcane Magazine noted that Nephilim Games Masters have to work very hard to prepare the game for play , since the original rulebook did not contain a lot of information about running adventures . The Games Masters' companion tried to fill that gap , providing advice on campaign structure , sample adventures and guidelines for the kind of stories that worked best in the setting .

Iain 11:00

Kenneth Haidt contributed two major supplements Secret Societies in 1995 and Major Arcana in 1997 . Both were excellent books that fleshed out the setting considerably . Secret Societies did exactly what it said on the tin , providing detailed information about the various human organisations that the Nephilim had to deal with . Major Arcana expanded on the 22 mystical tribes that the Nephilim could belong to . There was also Liber Kaa in 1997 , which provided alternative magic rules that were supposedly more in keeping with real world ceremonial magical traditions . They never actually used these rules , but they were described as creating subtler effects no Hollywood flashbang magic which suggests they were trying to move away from the overly complex astrological system . The thing is , this system was already very ritualistic , a far cry from D&D's spell slots and flashier effects . The problem was that these supplements , good as they were , felt like patches for a fundamentally flawed system . The core game needed substantial revision , not just additional content , and by the time these books were coming out , nephilim was already struggling commercially .

Iain 12:19

I actually did manage to run Nephilim once , back in the late 90s . I'd been wanting to try it for years , ever since reading that original review in Valkyrie , and I finally convinced my gaming group to give it a go . Character creation took two sessions . That's right , two sessions . Now , as I mentioned earlier , this wasn't entirely unenjoyable . There's something genuinely fascinating about building a character with thousands of years of history . We had lengthy discussions about what our characters might have been doing during various historical periods , how they might have encountered doing during various historical periods , how they might have encountered each other in past lives and what their ultimate goals were . It felt like collaborative world building of the best sort .

Iain 12:59

But when we actually started playing well , that's where things started to fall apart . The game had all the complexity of character creation , but none of the narrative momentum we built up during that process . We spent ages looking up rules , consulting the astrological charts every time someone wanted to cast a spell and generally getting bogged down in the mechanics . More fundamentally , though , basic premise started to feel a bit hollow once we actually started playing it , despite all the wonderful background about secret societies and hidden history . What we ended up with felt like just another game about magical protagonists on the run from a secret group of bad guy magical folks .

Iain 13:41

Now , this might have been down to my execution as a GM . I'll freely admit that I probably didn't give Nephilim the attention it deserved . But by that point we'd already discovered Mage of the Ascension and , frankly , the technocracy made for much more interesting villains than the Templars . White Wolf's take on secret magical societies felt more immediate and relevant to the 90s , whilst Nephilim's conspiracy theories felt that they belonged to an earlier era . The past life system , which had been so engaging during character creation , turned out to be surprisingly irrelevant during actual play . Yes , your character might have been a peasant in pre-dynastic Egypt , but what did that actually mean when you were investigating supernatural hijinks in modern New York ?

Iain 14:27

Looking back now , I think Nephilim fell victim to several classic design problems . The first was what I'd call Complex State for Complexity's sake . The magic system wasn't complex because complexity served the game's themes or made for more interesting play . It was complex because some may thought that real occultism was complex . Therefore the game should be complex too . That's getting the relationship between simulation and fun exactly backward .

Iain 14:56

The second problem was that the game never really figured out what it wanted to be tonally . Was it a serious exploration of occult themes and historical mysteries ? Was it a pulp adventure game about supernatural beings fighting secret societies ? Was it a philosophical game about the nature of enlightenment and transcendence ? Different parts of the game seemed to be pushing in different directions and the result was something that never quite achieved focus . The third issue was market timing . Nephilim came out just as the RPG market was becoming increasingly crowded with games that did similar things but better . Vampire had already sewn up the playing inhuman immortals market , modern occultism with much more streamlined systems . Nephilim was trying to be all these things at once and ended up being none of them particularly well , but perhaps most importantly , the game suffered from what modern designers call the awesome character sheet syndrome . All the cool stuff about your character , the millennia of history , the connection to elemental forces and ancient wisdom was on your character sheet rather than emerging through play . The character creation process was engaging because it was where all the interesting decision making actually happened . Actually , playing the character was less interesting because you'd already made all the important choices .

Iain 16:27

Despite his commercial failure and make

Character Creation and Core Mechanics

Iain 16:29

no mistake , nephilim was a commercial failure for KSEM , the game has maintained a devoted following . Part of this is because the core concept really is quite brilliant . There is something genuinely compelling about playing immortal beings with a vast historical perspective , and the elemental magic system does create a different feel from the usual D&D-der derived fantasy . The past life system in particular has influenced later game design . You can see echoes of it in games like Wraith the Oblivion , which dealt with characters from different historical periods , and more recently in games like Legacy , life Amongst the Ruins , which explicitly deals with characters whose stories span generations . The French editions of the game continued to evolve and improve , with several more editions being released over the years . From what I've heard from people who played the later French versions , many of the system issues were eventually resolved , but by then the English-speaking market had moved on .

Iain 17:26

I've always wanted to revisit Nephilim . The core ideas are strong enough that I keep thinking there must be a way to make it work . Maybe with a simpler magic system , Maybe with more focus on what the characters are actually trying to achieve rather than what they've done in the past . Maybe with a clearer sense of what tone the game is trying to achieve , because , despite all of my criticisms , there really is something rather special about Nephilim . It was one of the first RPGs to seriously engage with real world occultism rather than just fantasy magic with different names .

Iain 17:59

The research that went into the background was genuinely impressive . You could tell that the designers had done their homework about hermetic traditions , historical secret societies and the actual practice of western esotericism . The game also had a unique approach to the relationship between power and knowledge . In most RPGs , gaining experience makes you straightforwardly better at everything . In Nephilim , each past life gave you new skills but diminished your raw elemental power . It was a fascinating trade-off that reflected real occult ideas about the relationship between wisdom and transcendence , and the sheer ambition of the thing was admirable .

Iain 18:41

This wasn't a game content to stick to familiar fantasy tropes or obvious horror cliches . It was trying to create something genuinely different or obvious horror cliches . It was trying to create something genuinely different , a game that would make players think about history , consciousness and the nature of reality itself . The fact that it didn't quite succeed doesn't diminish the fact that it tried . In an industry that's often criticised for playing things safe , nephilim was willing to take genuine risks . It assumed its players were intelligent enough to engage with complex ideas

Why Nephilim Failed to Succeed

Iain 19:13

and sophisticated enough to appreciate historical and occult references .

Iain 19:18

Looking back at Nephilim now , it feels like a game that was ahead of its time in some ways and behind it in others . The complexity that made it difficult to play in the 90s would be absolutely unthinkable in today's market where streamlined systems and player accessibility are paramount . But the thematic sophistication and the willingness to engage seriously with occult ideas feels very modern . There's definitely been a resurgence of interest in the occult themes in RPG design . While Unknown Armies and Delta Green were pioneering conspiracy games from the 90s , more recently titles like Monster of the Week , liminal Urban Shadows and Night's Black Agents all deal with conspiracy and hidden realities in ways that Nephilim was exploring back in 1994 . The difference is that these modern games have learned to present complex ideas through simpler mechanics . So that's Nephilim a game that could have been great and in some ways was great .

Iain 20:13

Despite its flaws . It was a genuinely innovative design that tried to do something different with magic at a time when the RPG market saw magic as flashy D&D spells . The fact that it didn't quite work shouldn't overshadow the fact that it tried to work in ways that were genuinely ambitious and creative . Every time I see Nephilim mentioned online or spot a copy in a second-hand game shop , I feel a little pang of wistfulness . This is a game that deserved better than it got Better execution , better timing , maybe just better luck . But in another sense it got

Legacy and Influence on Gaming

Iain 20:46

exactly what it deserved A devoted following of players who recognised its potential and were willing to overlook its flaws .

Iain 20:53

In an industry that's often accused of recycling the same ideas over and over again , nephilim stands as a reminder that there are still some unexplored possibilities , still innovative approaches waiting to be discovered . It might not have been the game it could have been , but it was definitely the game that somebody needed to try to make . And who knows , maybe someday the French that I'm learning in Duolingo will become good enough that I can pick up a copy of the French second edition and actually understand what it's all about . All I need to do is find that Duolingo module about obscure Western , esoteric , occult terms . I wonder if they did that

Closing Thoughts and Episode Wrap-up

Iain 21:49

. And that was our Nephilim episode . I hope you enjoyed that little micro-history of one of those games . That could have been great .

Iain 21:58

We are a semi-regular podcast on the history of RPGs . We have over 70 episodes now , so if you're a new listener , take a look at our back catalogue and you'll find all sorts of history episodes like this , roundtables , interviews , product reviews and actual plays . And if you enjoyed it , please , please , leave us those lovely five stars on your podcast directory of choice . It really helps with our visibility and it gives us a warm , fluffy feeling inside that makes us want to make more episodes . If you want to get in touch with us , maybe to tell us about your experience with Nephilim , you can do so via email on rolltosavepod at gmailcom , or you can find us on Instagram and Facebook by searching for Roll to Save . Thanks again for listening and until next time , may your elemental forces always remain in balance and stay away from those pesky knights templar .