Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers

 I have repeatedly in my personal life and once as a youtube comment referred to Jenna Moran as "the Picasso of rpgs" and Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers is sort of the perfect illustration of what I mean by that. It is sooo good, but if you came to me and said, "What is this? It's too weird. I don't like it at all," I'd understand where you were coming from.

It's a tension that's apparent even in the title. It's "Minibook 1i" and that's weird. The "1i" is bad mathematical notation, a redundant but not technically inaccurate representation of the square root of negative one, but it's not a mistake, because if she called it "Minibook i" you might mistake the "i" for a lowercase roman numeral. It's a bit of disambiguation meant to make clear that the numbering scheme for this (sadly not continued) series will use imaginary numbers because the characters under discussion are not real. (Not just in the sense of being fictional, but also in the sense that they are monsters from the void waging war on reality itself.) She put a thematically on-point joke that relies on a knowledge of college algebra on the cover of the book, in the series numbering and look, I'm not going to pretend that imaginary numbers are some esoteric knowledge that only the elite will recognize, but it is something that not everyone is going to get. It's a little bit alienating, a little bit self-consciously elevated and I think a reaction of "oh, she thinks she's super clever, doesn't she" is entirely justified.

But, actually, yes, she is extremely clever and her work makes you feel clever by proxy. It's fucking great. Nobody else is doing what she's doing. She's a genre unto herself. If she chose the military, she'd be a general. If she chose the priesthood, she'd be the Pope. But she chose rpgs, so she's Jenna Moran.

The best thing about A Diary of Deceivers is the way it deftly wields Nobilis' trademark mood whiplash. There's a character called Iolithae Septimian.

"If you should meet her walking in the world, bow before her for she is sacred; bring her oil and fine cloth; bow before her, three times bow; but she is Iolithae Septimian and you must not let her speak.

I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

It's a chilling bit of horror. Very effective. There's a sacredness that is inimical to life. The cosmic implications are dizzying. There is something that is hateful to us, and rightly so, but we must treat it with respect, because we are not significant enough to be the yardstick by which sacredness is measured. And even so you must not let her speak.

Like I said, sooo good. But what makes it great is the juxtaposition between what came before and what came after.

The setup to this punchline is the story of how the Lies of Iolithae Septimian turned the seas to salt. It's told in this poetic, almost scriptural style, but the story itself is deconstruction of that kind of narrative. There's this ancient stone tablet. The words carved on it are sacred but must not be spoken. Iolithae Septimian is an illiterate temple girl, whose job is to wash the stone. She can't read the words, but she knows them anyway. She confides in the priest and out of fear, he whips her and cuts out her tongue.

But the important thing is that this brutal display of male rage is totally impotent. She doesn't speak the forbidden words out of pain or revenge. She's got her own story going on. The end was always inevitable and his abuse of this girl does absolutely nothing to derail it. He eventually destroys the stone itself, but then that's it. "He goes home and forgets the words of the stone." He doesn't even merit a comeuppance. "He forgets the Lies of Iolithae Septimian," but the implication is that it is safe for us, the readers, to forget him. He's done. What happens next will change the entire world and have ramifications for millennia to come, but he's not part of that. He defiles something sacred and his punishment is that he doesn't get to witness the horror he unleashed. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian will turn the seas to salt.

And there's something sad and beautifully human about this, but also there's feminist subtext and epic grandeur and an invitation to reflect on the idea that maybe even a fact so anodyne as "the ocean is salty" is not inevitable and could have been different. And it's all building up to that absolutely perfect capper. "I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

That's what came before, but what makes Jenna Moran such a singular voice is the absolute audacity of what comes after.

It's cute chibi drawing of this terrifying character, with a speech bubble saying "Nobody can really know whether God exists or not" annotated with the footnote "still not the worst thing she ever caused to be a truth."

Remember that invitation to contemplate a world where the seas were not salt? Take that same mental process and imagine a world where it's possible to know whether God exists or not. What Jenna is saying here is that in the world of Nobilis, that is something that a creature stole from you. That and more. There's some lie, only hinted at, that's worse. 

"I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

Because of the format, and the cuteness, it's presented as a joke and it is a joke. It's really fucking funny (maybe less so, now that I've spent so much time dissecting it, but still). And the joke is a part of it. That's the cosmic horror of it all - that humanity's biggest questions are so small and absurd that they are brushed aside to a joke in the marginalia. And the joke works.

This same character, in the space of a few pages, is played for pathos and spectacle and terror and humor and it all works and the whole would be diminished if any part was lost. The only comparable thing I can think of is Jobu Tupaki from Everything Everywhere All At Once (not coincidentally one of my favorite movies) and this book is a guide to creating rpg antagonists (or even player characters!) in a similar vein.

I think it would be . . . understandable (not right and not fair, but understandable) if you dismissed all of the above as hopelessly tryhard and my opinion as obnoxious fanboy gushing. However, I read a lot of fantasy and I read a lot of rpgs, and there's no author I trust more to show me something new. Even picking up a book from 2012, I can come away with the conviction that the genre could be doing more, that games could be doing more. There's something magical about it. It may not be for everyone, but so far, every Jenna Moran book I've ever read has been a confirmation that I am not yet too jaded to feel surprise and delight.

My overall verdict for A Diary of Deceivers - if you liked Nobilis 3rd Edition, you'll like this. If you didn't, you probably won't. And that's okay, because rpgs are big enough and diverse enough that even after reading 600+ books, there's still room for surprise.

Ukss Contribution: Morrowen Hollow is an infectious sound that spreads through patterns in ambient noise and takes over living victims, stripping them of agency and causing them to endless echo her with their own voices. And the great thing about Nobilis generally and A Diary of Deceivers specifically is that there is a running series of character creation examples that show you how to build her as a PC-legal character. 

There's also this great interstitial fiction that's all about the military trying to quarantine the small town (and surrounding region) where she originated, using massive noise-making machinery to drown her out and stop her spread.

My choice is not Morrowen specifically, but rather the idea of a modern military trying to use technology to outwit a creeping cosmic horror that manifests as an abstract pattern. It's so thematic I could spit.