The art of the splat

I've been writing an adventure for Steve Jackson Games's out-of-print angel & demon RPG In Nomine called Game of Stones: Everything is Peachy with my friend Traumermachen of the Liber Neglecta blog.  In Nomine is one of my favoritest RPGs ever; no other game has so perfectly and artfully designed its splats as In Nomine has.  Chronicles of Darkness has gotten close, but the z splat is a bit of a jury-rig t cover up some imperfections in how they did it, frankly, even if CofD did a lot of really awesome things with its z splats (Mage, I'm looking at your Legacies, qween).

If an In Nomine player tells you their character is a Seraph of Children or a Calab of Gluttony or what-have-you, you can immediately construct a fairly accurate idea of that character in your head.  However, that idea isn't confining at all; almost any concept can develop out of almost any combination of splats.  I have never seen any game manage to do both of those things so eloquently as In Nomine.

It also taught me that "balance" is mostly a bugaboo in a lot of role-playing games; it's almost entirely unimportant.  As the game mixes concepts as broad as Touched By an Angel, God Friended Me, Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, The Omen, The Seventh Seal, Legion (the movie, not the series, obvi), Lucifer (both the comic and the series, honestly), Good Omens, and much more, the various powers and abilities given to characters can range as wildly as "people cannot refuse the food I cook" and "I always go first in combat" and they're all weighted equally.  Famously, the multi-person-possessing kuriotates are massively more powerful than any other type of angel or demon, and yet they seem to be one of the less commonly played splats, if anything.

In Nomine does this by configuring the stakes of any conflict very carefully.  Ultimately, the goals of the war are simple, with clear but permeable lines of opposition.  But they are also relatively esoteric/mysterious and numinous.  The fight over territory is just a piece of the war for human souls, and what gets an individual into heaven or hell can be VERY surprising (and famously minor and banal sometimes).  The warriors achieve something by fighting off the other side, but the more social/mental characters are the ones who are winning objectives.

And, of course, for many demons, "I got mine" or "I had fun" is a complete and sufficient goal.