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It takes a hundred nights to make a Chancel, and a human death on each one of those nights. That’s the simplest method, anyway — the others cost the Imperator anything from an eye and seven nights in agony to a child of their own blood. No matter how an Imperator goes about it, making a Chancel is a major investment of energy, manipulates an enormous amount of power, and poses possible ethical difficulties.

The effects of the Chancel ritual are also grandiose. Not only does it enable an Imperator to make a matched set of Nobilis, it utterly transforms a piece of the Earth. In a Chancel, the laws of physics are whatever the Ymera who formed the Chancel wanted them to be. The population can be warped in freakish ways, and the very earth can get up and walk. Better yet, the whole Chancel is screened off from the world, so that its environment will bring no ruin to outside human lives — usually only the Hidden Ways lead in and out of the Chancel, and (for someone outside the Chancel it is as if that patch of land never existed. Of course there are -- like most things in the world of the Nobilis -- some notable exceptions.

Chancels are, in a way, personal fortresses and private realities, maintained Microcosms against the larger reality.

• City Back
• Chrysalis Campaign
• Inquisitor Chancel
• Campaign Premise