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Three middle-aged nerds dive deep into the golden age of tabletop RPGs, covering the classics from the 80s and 90s that shaped the hobby we love today. Iain and Jason banter their way through gaming history while Steve desperately tries to keep them on topic—and occasionally succeeds.
Whether you're a grognard who lived through THAC0 or a newcomer curious about what to do with all those lovely polyhederal dice you've aquired, we've got you covered with historical deep-dives, roundtable discussions fueled by questionable nostalgia, and actual play episodes where our players' competence is... variable.
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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).
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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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. 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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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:Despite his commercial failure and make 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: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: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: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 and sophisticated enough to appreciate historical and occult references.
Iain: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: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 exactly what it deserved A devoted following of players who recognised its potential and were willing to overlook its flaws.
Iain: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. 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: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.
