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Imperators
Aaron's Serpents
Born directly from Yggdrasil, these Imperators usually take the form of humongous snakes. They don't follow any universal creed, preferring to follow their own path, but tend to be concerned with protecting the World Ash.
- Berserk Button: Bringing fire or foresting equipment to the World Ash is a surefire way to piss them off, despite the fact that harming such an entity with mundane means is near impossible.
- Kaiju: They are giant snakes on a scale larger even than mountains.
- Only Sane Man: Aaron's Serpents are the imperators with the most human sense of morality, making them seem much more reasonable when contrasted with the extremity of their colleagues' codes.
- Pacifist: Many of them eschew violence in all its forms. Since there is an ongoing war for reality, this is often a great inconvenience.
The Angels of Heaven
Angels are natives of Heaven, the brightest and most beautiful world on the Ash. The "voice of the creator" in their hearts tells them that their purpose is to cultivate and protect beauty, in all its forms. They count among their number some of the oldest and most important Imperators.
- Have You Seen My God?: None of the Angels know where the creator is, although they aren't too concerned by it. They claim to hear the creator's voice in their hearts, but it's uncertain whether that's true.
- Holy Is Not Safe: To meet one is either to be forcibly aligned with their vision of perfection, or to judged as falling short. Both are fatal.
- Hypocrite: The Angels value beauty over all else, but are vehemently opposed to the Excrucians, which are noted as being more beautiful than anything in Creation.
- Our Angels Are Different: They live in Heaven, seek to protect and preserve beauty, and claim to hear the Creator's guiding voice. They will work with devils, their fallen kin, in order to stop the Excrucians — this is unspeakably abhorrent to them, but the alternative's just worse. Contrary to scripture, they don't really let people into Heaven when they die.
- Principles Zealot: Any human that meets their standards for a good life will enter paradise on death. To date, not a single human has ever done so.
The Devils of Hell
Devils used to be Angels of Heaven, before they fell into Hell, but the precise reason why they fell changed somewhat between Second and Third Edition, alongside their guiding philosophy.
- All-Loving Hero: They were banished to Hell for truly loving everything including every atrocity that has ever existed.
- Broken Angel: Being cast out of Heaven ruined the fallen. Beyond never being able to see such beauty ever again, most of them are horrifically wounded. In fourth edition/Glitch this harm is so severe that some of their heavenly abilites are replaced with the capacity to use their injuries as a metaphysical power source.
- Easy Road to Hell: Heaven has impossibly high standards, but Hell has almost none. Souls usually reincarnate after death, but most will end up falling into damnation eventually.
- Fallen Angel: They are Angels who fell from Heaven.
- Our Demons Are Different: Devils are Angels who were cast down into Hell for believing either that Corruption and Suffering are morally exalted (1e & 2e) or that even the ugliest parts of Creation deserve love (3e). Some Devils have become completely corrupted by their exposure to Hell, while others are as pure as the day they fell.
The Magisters of the Dark
Born when Adam bit into the Apple of Eden, the Magisters of the Dark are manifestations of the human drive toward self destruction, but the exact way that they expressed this principle changed somewhat between the Second and Third Edition of Nobilis.
In the first two editions, the Dark was largely a malevolent force dedicated to pushing people toward suicide and self-destruction in general, both individually and collectively. In third edition, the Dark is instead focused on freedom and self-determination, but sees self-destruction as the ultimate expression of freedom.
In all editions, Magisters of the Dark typically hold Estates tied to the destructive side of human nature, innovations and society.
- Bad Powers, Bad People: It isn't universal, but the estates the Dark rules over tend to reflect the worst parts of humanity, such as Chemical Weapons or Greed.
- The Corruptor: Loves to encourage people to indulge in their vices and petty urges. In second edition this was so that they could get humans to kill themselves, but in third it is moreso that they want humans to be free to make the wrong choices (not that they don't enjoy it when they do).
- Dark Is Evil: In their first and second edition incarnations, at least, there was little about the Dark that could be seen as anything other than evil from a human perspective.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Downplayed in third edition. They're still manifestations of human error and self-destructive behaviors, but they champion the cause of human freedom and self-determination so they can do genuine acts of kindness and liberation.
- Indirect Serial Killer: Exaggerated, they're indirect Omnicidal Maniacs. While the motives change, in all editions their ultimate goal is to convince each and every human to kill themselves.
- I Just Want to Be Free: In third edition. Note this is that they just want to be free — this is literally their only moral stance. Nothing else matters beyond that you get to decide where your life goes and, ultimately, when it ends.
- Stupid Evil: They get so caught up in human excess that they fail to acknowledge anything else that is going on.
The Magisters of the Light
Born when Eve bit into the Apple of Eden, the Magisters of the Light are manifestations of the human drive toward self preservation and thus seek to protect human life, both individually and collectively, at any cost.
The Magisters of the Light typically hold Estates tied to the constructive side of human nature, innovations and society.
- Fantastic Racism: Their moral world is humans and nothing else. Any other species, no matter how sapient or sentient, is acceptable losses at best.
- Immortality Seeker: They embody the concept. While they're already immortal, they constantly strive to remove death from the rest of humanity. By any means necessary
- Knight Templar: Whilst they do genuinely seem to have good intentions, Lightlords often have starkly utilitarian mindsets. In Second Edition, one of the example lightlords is dedicated to improving people through extensive torture, and another wants to cultivate a plague that will wipe out a large portion of the human race in order to prevent overpopulation.
- Light Is Good: Whether they're this or Light Is Not Good is very much a matter of opinion, and it tends to vary between individual Magisters. The Light is principally concerned with ensuring human survival and prefer to use ethically clean methods, but it believes that humans can be a danger to themselves when left to their own devices and will ultimately do anything to ensure the survival of the species.
- The Evils of Free Will: They want humanity to live forever. They want humanity to reach perfection. They don't care about our opinions on the matter.
- What Measure Is A Nonhuman: The Code of the Light is entirely anthropocentric, meaning that the wellbeing of other sentient races is at best incidental to their cause.
The Magisters of the Wild
The Magisters of the Wild are creatures of self-definition. They understand themselves to be prisoners in Creation, and so they are. They understand themselves to be alien to the world, and so they are. They pursue the freedom to truly be themselves, liberating themselves from sanity and mundanity, and adhering to those laws they find within their own nature. There is nothing they abhor so much as coercion and confinement in any form. And they are fair in their dealings, for they cannot be otherwise.
- Be Yourself: The Wild are pretty much the embodiment of this, discarding all that would restrain them in its pursuit.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Their behavior varies wildly depending on their internal nature.
- Eldritch Abomination: In a setting full to the brim with examples, they still stand out — alien creatures from outside the world who break down reality in pursuit of incomprehensible goals.
- It's All About Me: Oddly downplayed. They sincerely believe themselves to be the only being in creation, with everything else an aspect of themselves. This means they can be surprisingly kind and empathetic. After all, you're them too.
- Liminal Being: The Wild Magisters are connected to fundamental aspects of reality, but are simultaneously foreign to it, and often want nothing more than to return to Ninuan.
- Mad Oracle: Often lean towards this, when they talk to people
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: For whatever reason, many Wildlords take the form of humans with extra arms.
The True Gods of Earth
In the beginning, there were the earliest Gods of Earth, primordial entities who drank down their children. The ones who avoided this fate, the New Gods, learned the idea "cooperation", made alliance, and imprisoned their predecessors within themselves.
The New Gods, or the True Gods, as they're now known, are a tangle of alien sentience at the bottom of the mythic world, a tangle of war and death and sex; things to them are not entirely distinct, in the way they are for entities that came later. They are the baseline for the world, the breath that first gave the Earth life.
- Alien Geometries: They contain worlds inside themselves that they are somehow able to enter.
- Almighty Idiot: Downplayed. They're Imperators and thus if they want to, they can be impossibly intelligent and sophisticated. But this is an affectation. In their truest form, they're essentially cosmically powerful bacteria.
- Eldritch Abomination: Out of all the Imperator types save perhaps the Wildlords, they are the most likely to use this trope.
- The Old Gods: Ironically, given their name, but they were the first deities, the beings worshiped by mold and microbes before the first animals came into existence.
- Interplay of Sex and Violence: Their view of things, pretty much.
- Recursive Reality: As above, they are able to enter the lands that they contain within themselves.
- Sealed in a Person-Shaped Can: The fate of their predecessors, caged within the True Gods.
Excrucians
Deceivers
Deceivers claim that the world is a lie, alongside all the Estates that comprise it. They claim that underneath the lie of existence is a vaguely defined "True Thing", which they have come to liberate. They may or may not have been part of Creation at some point, but they definitely aren't anymore.
- Affably Evil: While the level of malevolence of Excrucians in general is rather ambiguous, Deceivers are the most genteel of the bunch, which fits with their role as philosophers and teachers. Some of them abandon direct warfare against Creation altogether in lieu of simply spreading their teachings.
- All-Loving Hero: The way they present themselves. Deceivers claim to deeply love everyone in creation. The catch is that the "you" that they love is completely divorced from any creational properties such as matter, life, or even existence.
- Brown Note Being: Of a sort. Their domains affect things that interact with them in certain ways, and in many cases hearing the Deceiver speak, seeing them, or even thinking about them too hard can seal your fate.
- Just Between You and Me: Deceivers have a real problem with this. No matter how much their plan may depend on secrecy, they have a deep-seated need to be understood and can easily be tricked into blabbing about it before it’s been completed.
Mimics
Mimics are almost identical to Imperators: they can speak Imperial miracles, they have Estates, they can create Chancels and Powers. The key difference is that at each Mimic's heart is a secret blasphemy of the void, and because of that their Estates are founded on something unnatural and wrong; in the case of Dahlia Thorn, the example Mimic, this meant she didn't rule the Estates themselves, but false conceptions of what those Estates were. They will do anything to avoid others seeing their inner blasphemy, which is good, because seeing their inner blasphemy never ends well for anyone.
- Brown Note: What at least some blasphemies do, killing anyone who witnesses them.
- Came Back Wrong: Genseric Dace says Mimics are basically what happens when the Excrucians aren't able to "fix" everything when they kill an Imperator — they cobble together pieces of dead Imperators or sacrificed Estates and put a blasphemy of the void at its heart, making a Mimic. (Going by Leonardo de Montreal over in Chuubo's, they may also be able to pour a blasphemy into a living Imperator, converting them that way, but it's as yet unconfirmed in Nobilis itself.)
- The Mole: Imperator-level moles for the Excrucians.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Their inner blasphemy, which is caged in an Imperator-shaped can.
Warmains
Warmains come from the Lands Beyond Creation to test the things of the world, in hopes of finding someone or something worthy of "Tempering", whereby that person or thing is made into a part of the Warmain.
- The Ace: Unlike Strategists Warmains are known for being magnificent and extremely capable.
- The Assimilator: When they find somebody who they deem worthy, they subsume the unlucky person into themselves, sometimes even taking on their appearance. Warmains claim that these people live on within them, but whether this is actually the case is ambiguous.
Strategists
Strategists hate the world, and would see it destroyed as a crime against the void. They are sick, in the same way that those who contend with wrongness are always sick, and they have gone wrong as people go wrong, as the world has gone wrong. They are always dying of something, and when they finally die, no matter the cause, they are consigned to the Not, where they armor themselves in emptiness so they may return. Theirs is the power of the World-Breaker's Hand, to unmake something from existence, no matter what it may be, whether it's a person, an object, a concept or a property.
- Blessed with Suck: The fact that a bane is constantly hunting and hurting a Strategist, even when they're recuperating in the Beyond, gives them plenty of reason to be a little pissed off all the time.
- Brown Note: All of Creation is this to them, since it's hard for them to ignore its fundamental wrongness. This is one of many reasons they are all angry and broken.
- The Power of the Void: The World-Breaker's Hand, which can unmake anything.
- Glitch tones this down a bit. While some Strategists still have access to the World-Breakers Hand, their Wyrd ability normally only allows them to corrode a single aspect of existence.
- Resurrective Immortality: What they all have, in effect.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Some rare few Strategists opt out of actively destroying Creation, though they don't necessarily join Creation's side.
- Villain Has a Point: It's hard to deny that there's something deeply wrong with Creation. Becomes somewhat more ambiguous when you remember that Excrucians stole and corrupted Colbrand, supposedly the essence that justifies existence early on in the war, meaning that Creation might be the fault of the Strategists to begin with.
- Wound That Will Not Heal: The thing they're dying from, although it can be more esoteric than the norm - example Strategists are dying from fire and poison, old age, lost faith, lost empathy, etc.
