The Marches

[Orlin]

I've had a great deal of fun playing In Nomine with a friend of mine, and in order to make one of the adventures a more well-rounded experience, I've decided to involve the Marches. The only thing is, in spite of having browsed through the EPG, I still feel terribly unfamiliar with the Marches. Most of the adventure will not take place in dreamscapes -- the characters are taking a voyage into the darker landscapes of Beleth's Tower in order to find an Ethereal Relic known as Beleth's Favor.

Beleth grants these Relics exclusively to Lilim, and only then to her favorite. Essentially, if a Lilim has a geas-hook, she can choose to "set" the hook into Beleth's Favor. As a result, the "Geas" is now owed to Beleth's Favor -- the Lilim sets a condition (common conditions include: "If my vessel is destroyed"); if the condition is fulfilled, the mortal must roll against the geas or fall immediately into sleep, with her dreamscape making a beeline for Beleth's Tower, where she'll spend the rest of her short life.

There are probably a host of little loopholes and conditions that I haven't considered, a plethora of various ways to improve the value of the artifact or make it playable in a game of diabolicals, but that's not important.

The important thing is, I now have a suitable quest for the players: find and destroy Beleth's Favor, then murder the Lilim. I may loan one of the player's an amulet of dreamwalking if things get really hairy, but the general goal of the quest is set. Now what?

I need nightmarish elements that the player's can navigate, and the time setting may be important. The story is set during the Salem Witch Trials, so there may be some way for them to discover that the Witchhouse (where women are questioned in the hopes that they will name their co-conspirators) is quickly becoming a Tether for Asmodeus.

Should the Marches be a reflection of the waking world, or something completely different? Should I emphasize the backdrop -- the Volcano in the background, the juxtaposition of the Two Towers? Anything in particular? Should the landscape constantly change?

What have you done with the Marches before?

[Jason]

This is what I read to my players when they first showed up in the Vale, on Blandine's side (in a campaign setting in which Heaven has been closed up for centuries, hence the Tower of Dreams being all boarded up).

It is night. There is no moonlight, and the white dots in the sky probably aren’t really stars. Despite the darkness, a wide, misty valley is perfectly visible before you. The tiniest trickle of a river (or is it just impossibly far away?) divides its two sides, leading off to the mountainous shape of a dormant Volcano in the distance.

Just behind you, rising above you as far as the moon that isn’t there, you see an ancient structure – the Tower of Dreams. It has a soft sheen, like the inside of a seashell, blue like the sky in the hour before sunrise. The structure branches off into smaller towers, and those into even more towers, the higher it gets, each littler tower topped by a conical roof. It is quiet, and if it ever had doors or windows, they have long since been bricked over. Far off, on the other side of the valley, past the river, you see the black silhouette of the Tower’s bent twin. Even at this distance, you can tell that the windows are open and pale lights are on in that tower. There’s always a night watch in the Tether between the Marches and Hell.

As you turn around, you observe that the air around you is thick and moist. Each molecule hanging before you seems distinct from those around it, and if you focus your attention for just a moment on any one, it’s almost like looking through the bottom of a drinking glass at some distorted scene. They’re enchanting, in their own way (and on this side, the kinder side of the Vale of Dreams), but you’re not here to browse through human dreamscapes tonight.

Turning away from the mist, the Towers, and the Volcano, you glance out onto a shadowy, indistinct terrain with no visible horizon. The Border Marches, they call it – and beyond that, the Far Marches.

My players were headed out to a domain in the Far Marches, mind you, so their journey mostly involved wandering along indistinct paths in a void with glimmers of domains along the way. They stopped at a Faerie Marketplace to purchase small reliquaries by taking on Geases (an intrusive domain attunement requiring no Lilim), exchanged stories around a bonfire while taking shelter from a Chaos storm in an Oasis domain, and ultimately came upon a vast, placid lake acting as a dream caul over their destination.

In other words, my version of the Marches had more to do with myth and allegory than a reflection of the real world, but any of the options you mention sound like fair game to me. By definition, we're talking about a realm where anything you can imagine does exist somewhere...

[Rocket Man]

When GMing the Marches, I make it an ever-changing landscape. The "base material" always starts as something like gray mist, silver sand or roiling sea, but soon takes on a life of its own, based largely on the mental state of the wanderer. Your mind can literally be your own worst enemy here.

As an example, Kay, Bright of Music, had recently escaped Lust-capture by the skin of her teeth but was Outcast and broken. When she slid into the Marches, she repeatedly heard random accusations about her lack of worth and competence, even as the waters around her grew deep and stormy, and a tentacle began to pull her into the depths. An Infernal Intervention made things even worse and the Marches took on the appearance of a street in Shal-Mari ... with herself back in her old form as a Lilim, left to believe she had fallen.

Likewise, when a Divine Intervention came up in the midst of the nightmare, the setting became pure white light with a mysterious voice offering advice. When it was done, she found herself in a plain room having tea with Yves.

In short, to me, the Marches are Yoda's Cave. You find in them what you bring with you.
***
As far as Dreamscapes, I'm somewhat traditional about their external appearance (crystalline spheres, soap bubbles, etc.) but my co-GM likes to play a little. For her, a Dreamscape seen from the Marches is a door of some sort, floating in mid-air. The type depends on the dream within -- it could be an oaken dungeon door, the screen door of a farmhouse, the entry hatch of a submarine or even the creaking gate of a cemetery.

[Azel]

I cannot add much more than has been said, except recommend some movies that can be inspiration to flesh out your world. Have you watched: Dreamscape (1984) or The Cell (2000)? Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and Return to Oz are all well known, but still great primers on etheric dreamscapes. There's a lot of material to mine there.

If push comes to shove, I'm not above co-opting ideas from other game systems either. My old Changeling material from White Wolf works well. Got the core, Player's Guide, and Land of 8 Million Dreams -- gives a European, Native American, and East Asian motif to dream denizens. Just toss the game rules aside and work with the pictures and descriptions. Dreamlands Call of Cthulhu should work quite handily for Beleth's domain, by the way.

[JCD]

Neil Gaiman's Sandman

[Orlin]

Okay, let me angle this question a little better. I understand that the Marches can be anything you want it to be -- in a way, it's sort of like a cross between the Dreaming, the Umbra and something out of Sandman. There are some constants, but ultimately the Marches are what you make of them. Maybe I'll take some time to flesh out my own unique variant of the Marchlands? Maybe I won't.

My point is, I'm having a hard time presenting challenges. The characters are embarking upon a journey into a land of nightmares. I mostly decided to wing it and I've come up with some fairly decent events so far, but nothing spectacular. I'm starting to feel like I've come to a point where all I've done is toss monsters at the characters while changing up the scenery.

I'm having a very difficult time digesting the EPG. It's not clicking. I'm not "getting it." After viewing the whole, "The universe is a Symphony" perspective, it seems to me like it's extremely difficult to see the world through the eyes of the Ethereals. The major and minor elemental affinities, the aspects, the masks, the rage and fear from that very strange story in one of the opening vignettes...it's all very different, but I seriously need to learn how to make an Ethereal Spirit. I need to figure out what powers they have, how I can use them to make encounters more challenging -- that sort of thing.

As a result, encounters are are currently fairly dry. It feels to me like everything is based off of a variant of Lucid Dreaming, Dreamshaping, Precision or Intelligence -- so it's just a lot of me attempting to be descriptive while I come up with the same numbers over and over again. The encounters are exciting because they're wrapped up in exciting ribbons and set against backdrops of wild scenery, but I feel like there needs to be more.

I'm missing puzzles. Challenges. Riddles. I need the ability to work abstractly -- in text, the beautiful descriptions might be enough to let me skate, but I'm struggling as a narrator.

[JCD]

I'm having a very difficult time digesting the EPG. It's not clicking. I'm not "getting it."

You are not the only one. I read through and frankly, I found the entire book anti-ethical to what IN mechanics seem to be. In fact the connections to IN seem tenuous at best. It has to be my least favorite book so far.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by Orlin

My point is, I'm having a hard time presenting challenges. The characters are embarking upon a journey into a land of nightmares. I mostly decided to wing it and I've come up with some fairly decent events so far, but nothing spectacular. I'm starting to feel like I've come to a point where all I've done is toss monsters at the characters while changing up the scenery.

I'm having a very difficult time digesting the EPG. It's not clicking. (...) As a result, encounters are are currently fairly dry. It feels to me like everything is based off of a variant of Lucid Dreaming, Dreamshaping, Precision or Intelligence -- so it's just a lot of me attempting to be descriptive while I come up with the same numbers over and over again. The encounters are exciting because they're wrapped up in exciting ribbons and set against backdrops of wild scenery, but I feel like there needs to be more.

I'm missing puzzles. Challenges. Riddles. I need the ability to work abstractly -- in text, the beautiful descriptions might be enough to let me skate, but I'm struggling as a narrator.

On stats:

Corporeal stats are indeed generally meaningless in the Marches. Intelligence does rule the day, but celestial stats are still relevant for celestial combat (always a risk in the Marches), resonances, resisting Songs (Will), and just generally noticing things, like disturbances caused by demons (Perception).

If you feel bad about punishing more corporeally-oriented characters mechanics-wise, though, you could always house rule that Strength and Agility still work, or that they can be rolled against at a penalty. After all, in earlier books, Affinities were not all based on Intelligence, but on a stat that seemed to match the Affinity. "Storms," in Liber Servitorum, was based on Agility, for instance. Personally, I eventually sent my PCs through a dream caul into a domain that was specifically designed to make it feel like they had woken up again, and I let them roll against Strength and Agility there, though I didn't tell them they were actually losing Mind Hits, not Body Hits, when damaged. The challenge there was more to figure out that they WERE still dreaming, and how to wake up.

On interesting encounters:

Consider what kinds of dangers the Marches present besides combat. When my PCs went to the Faerie Marketplace, it wasn't just to buy goods, but to stick them with Geases left in the hands of seemingly innocuous strangers. They were warned not to accept gifts or to eat food or drink, and so had to make sure no one was trying to trick them with this stuff (because, though they were not told this outright, accepting these things imposes disproportionately high Geases throughout tales of faeries).

Along these lines, there is an excellent little vignette called "Ravens" on page 87 in the Ethereal Player's Guide. None of my players have that book, so I'm just waiting for the day I can steal it wholesale. It's a lovely example of how to hit the players with a puzzle rather than just rolling Intelligence over and over to duke it out.

On making ethereal spirit characters:

My advice starting out is to completely ignore Elements. They're nice for PC creation for players who need an alternative starting point, but it's often easier to think of characters in terms of their Image and their powers, which means Affinities and Songs for ethereals. My basic exercise is to think of a character from fables or myth who would fit into my adventure, and then think about what kind of powers it would have...

• The Big Bad Wolf has Affinities for Animals and Air (for huffing and puffing).
• The Boogie Man (or variants thereof) has an Affinity for Fear.
• The Gingerbread Man has an Affinity for Speed.

Assume as a matter of course that any predatory ethereal is going to be well practiced at the dreamscape variant of the Song of Draining, as well, so the PCs will need to be stingy/resourceful with Essence (unless that leaves them with no fun powers at all, of course). Ethereals also have special powers to contend with if you encounter them in a domain of their own creation, like being able to call up dozens of 1-Mind-Hit figments to overwhelm PCs, and possibly unique attunements.

[William]

Originally Posted by Orlin

My point is, I'm having a hard time presenting challenges. The characters are embarking upon a journey into a land of nightmares. I mostly decided to wing it and I've come up with some fairly decent events so far, but nothing spectacular. I'm starting to feel like I've come to a point where all I've done is toss monsters at the characters while changing up the scenery.

Ah... yeah, ethereals can be a lot more than monsters. Even on the Nightmares side of the Marches, there will be some "civilized" Domains. Ethereals have color and life; they're imagination made animate. My characters met pop-culture spirits: The Shadow, Nephrite, and Maureen Birnbaum (Barbarian Swordsperson). They met the fire giant Utgard-Loki, and the sweet old web-weaver Grandmother Spider. My own inclusions were characters like a little talking kachina doll, the axe-wielding post-nuclear road warrior Yazz, and the Queen of Selkirk, a near-zombie of a spirit, held past her rightful dissolution by merciless oaths.

Ethereals like to indulge their Image. Utgard-Loki appreciated courage, and liked it when the characters brashly challenged him (and a local demon) to various duels; it hardly mattered whether they won or lost. Grandmother Spider approved of people who could think their way patiently past challenges. Having that Image in mind will help you pick Elements and Affinities, and it will be the number one driver of how that Ethereal acts.

It feels to me like everything is based off of a variant of Lucid Dreaming, Dreamshaping, Precision or Intelligence -- so it's just a lot of me attempting to be descriptive while I come up with the same numbers over and over again. The encounters are exciting because they're wrapped up in exciting ribbons and set against backdrops of wild scenery, but I feel like there needs to be more.

I ran a whole Marches campaign and this concentration of abilities was a major problem. The two-fold solution is:

(1) Different Domains have different rules. To provide value to physical statistics, let some of the action take place in Domains where the "physics" allows such statistics to be useful. In In Nomine, your physical Strength isn't just a function of muscle, it's a function of your Forces, and a Domain can respond to that. Ethereals who will eventually want a sturdy body will still need high Strength! A god of battle, or a spirit of Lust, can value physical characteristics and may inhabit a Domain where the rules require using those traits instead of making the usual substitution of mental acumen. Beleth's Tower will probably have places like this just to keep the rules changing. The locals will know where they are -- the invaders won't.

(2) To emphasize Celestial strength, use powers that are resisted by Will, and challenges that require high Perception; think of ways to play up how celestial Resonances are a level above most Affinities. A fairy may be able to take vengeance against an oathbreaker, and may even be able to write a contract similar to a Geas or a Divine Contract, but it's unlikely that their ability will be as effective as either. Most of their mind-reading abilities will require Essence, whereas angels can resonate at will.

I'm missing puzzles. Challenges. Riddles. I need the ability to work abstractly -- in text, the beautiful descriptions might be enough to let me skate, but I'm struggling as a narrator.

I would often hook a Domain on a cultural reference. The American Indian spirits of the Southwest lived in Cebola, a beautiful pueblo city in a cliff. The characters entered a kiva and traversed the inside of the cliff dwelling to meet with Grandmother Spider. The labyrinth within required them to know about Amerind myths: at one point, advancing past a seeming dead end required activating a switch by moving a coal from a nearby lamp to an empty bowl on a spider's back in the decorations (heating up a bimetallic switch, and re-enacting a myth). They never saw Valhalla, but they spent time in a town nearby, and visited Utgard-Loki, a giant with a feasting hall inside his caverns. In that hall, they met several challenges: a riddling, wrestling matches, negotiations with a crafty old Ethereal spirit.

I suggest that in order to get into Beleth's Tower, the characters will need to make contact with some fairly unpleasant spirits who owe Hell Geases and all sorts of favor trading, but are at least willing to do business with others. That's going to mean going somewhere dark but stable enough that there are rules, which means a ruler. Niflheim, perhaps, or Tartarus, ruled by gods under Beleth's thumb.

The Domain of the Mayan spirits might be a miles-high step pyramid, shot through with thousands of passageway and apartments, a highway of a staircase on the outside leading to the vast plaza upon which spirits are sacrificed in agony to the appetites of the dark gods of that place. Surrounded by a caul of Central American jungle, it is patrolled by jaguar spirits and wispy maize spirits. Someone in the lower levels there to do business will be watched, but not bothered; someone who treats a passing, bloody-fanged jaguar as a monster will promptly find himself set upon by the local protectors. This would pose a problem for angels if the locals appear to be harassing a wandering dreamscape, and the angels are undercover. To meet someone willing to aid them here might involve a twin myth, with their descent to the underworld demanding that they obtain the help of a Hunahpu and then a Xbalanque face of the same spirit.

Is any of this useful?

[William]

Oh -- and don't forget humans. They can't be there as frequently, since they have to be awake some time, but both Hell and Ethereals deal with Sorcerers, giving them reason to be active on Beleth's side of the Marches. They may be dupes in over their head, or serious challenges. Lucid Dreamers without Sorcery may be playing real roles, or may be easy meat in the wrong part of town. Dreamshades may be desperately serving Ethereal masters in a bid to stay away from Hell, hoping to worm their way into a chance at reincarnation somehow.